Abstract

Narratives forge a temporal understanding of things temporal, including our lives, but in a way more complex than that described by Ricoeur, Brooks, and others. It is not only by plot or emplotment but also by generating "surface tension" that narratives enact a human time, a counter-pressure against the pressure of unhuman time. ;Narratives are central to the human project of constructing and maintaining a nomos, an ordered, meaningful world. For example, a narrative theodicy "justifies" disorders by explaining them or by integrating them within a larger, more encompassing order. If a narrative like Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" attacks a culture's dominant narrative theodicy, such an attack will be strongly resisted because of the threat of anomie. ;A more complex analysis of the relations between narratives, time, and nomos calls for a model of time more complex than the linear and objective/subjective models. The phenomenlogical model envisions human time or temporality as a complex "field" organized around "poles "--mundane temporality, historicality, and radical temporality--each with characteristic ways of configuring or shaping temporal experience. ;An examination of the various representations and enactments of temporal experience in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury supports this model, and also reveals a further complexity due to the interaction of temporal operations on the "levels" of character, narrator, and implied author. The investigation discloses that a narrative's "time" is irreducibly multiple, a complex snarl of temporal configurations . "Plot" cannot reduce this multiplicity to a unity nor account for all the meaning of a narrative. ;The study concludes that not one but two principles hold a narrative "together," generate the intelligibility of a narrative as a whole, and shape a narrative's time. Complementing the arche of "plot" is the anarche of "surface tension." The very heterogeneity of temporal configurations that resists subsumption under a singular plot, generates a tension that keeps the various elements of the narrative "in contact" with each other, in a unity like a soap bubble's elastic, eccentric unity