Time, Narrative, and History (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), by David Carr (original) (raw)

1988, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Consequent upon his outstanding account of Husserl's views on temporality and history (Phenomenology and the Problem of History, Northwestern, 1974), David Carr has now given us his own reflections upon historical existence and narrative meaning. Recent discussions of narrative by authors like Hayden White, Louis Mink, and Paul Ricoeur have examined principally the relation between literary and historical texts. Carr views this discussion as important but abstract because restricted to the formal level of textual discourse. Marshalling the descriptions of temporality and historicity worked out by Husserl, Dilthey, and Heidegger, Carr defends the thesis that pre-theoretical and pre-thematic human experience, action, and life themselve~ exhibit a narrative configuration. Narrative is the tissue of life itself, not a form of reflection that distorts our living in order to organize it for cognitive or aesthetic purposes. Among those who, like himself, construe human life as story, Carr names literary critic Barbara Hardy, historian Peter Munz, a "renegade phenomenologist" Wilhelm Schapp, as well as Alasdair Macintyre and Frederick Olafson. Time, Narrative, and History unfolds in six chapters after the Introduction, and is followed by a useful Index. The book proceeds from an examination of the narrative configuration of individual experience, action, and life, which culminates in a very fine chapter on 'The Self and the Coherence of Life," to rewrite what is learned at the individual level on to group and community actions and projects. Moving from description of the retentive-protentive character of short-term passive experiences like listening to a melody and the means-ends character of short-term actions like serving in tennis, Carr quickly establishes the temporal configuration of everyday experience and action. But what does this have to do with its narrative configuration? Without a great deal of preparation, Carr says that a literary narrative is marked by temporal closure with a beginning, middle, and end, by temporal sequence, and by the intersecting temporal perspectives of author, characters, and reader. Here one could wish for a fuller discussion of narrative structure in a wider range of fiction. Carr does refer to Kafka's The Trial (85), and he does display in individual experience and action a pleasingly broad range of the temporal closures and sequences typical of narrative: departure and arrival, departure and return, means and end, suspension and resolution, problem and solution (49). Throughout, Carr stresses the "preeminently practical character of narrative structure" (70): these configurations are found originally in our experiences and actions, not only at the level of reflective attention where Alfred Schutz, for example, exclusively located them (37-38). Narrative configuration occurs in two registers, that of experience as it is undergone or action as it is performed and that of reflectively "taking stock" or Besinnung (91). What about the third feature Carr attributes to narrative, the requirement that there be authorship, characters, and audience? Here Carr's discussion is at its most original and valuable. I know of no other theorist who has faced this