TIME, NARRATIVE, AND FICTION: THE UNEASY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RICOEUR AND A HETEROGENEOUS TEMPORALITY

In Time and Narrative , Paul Ricoeur confirms the relationship between time experience and how it is epitomized in a narrative by investigating historiography and fiction. Regarding fiction, he explores temporality in three “novels of time” [ Zeitromane ]: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Ricoeur perceives the temporalities as homogeneous; however, in my view, the novels contain at least three different temporalities. Mann seeks a new temporality by ironizing a romantic time of rise and fall and Woolf configures a time we can call the simultaneity of the dissimultaneous. In his analysis of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu , Ricoeur explicitly dismisses a Bergsonian approach to temporality. In my opinion, Bergson defends a heterogeneous time that is apparent in Proust's novel.