Narrative: Event, Temporality, Sequence

Abstract

A narrative is traditionally defined as a sequences of events. While narratologists may disagree on what a relevant narrative event would be, no one argues about what a sequence is. Sequence is taken to be a fundamental notion that is self-explanatory and directly given to our intuition. I suggest, however, that it is interesting to look more closely at sequence in order to understand narrative temporality, because there is a distinct sense that it is somewhere “within” sequence that temporality resides. In order to do this, I first try to isolate the concept of pure sequence with the help of John McTaggart’s analysis of temporal and atemporal series and apply it to narratives. I then take a close look at an experimental film, Happy End by Oldřich Lipský from 1966, that runs backwards and thus reverses the normal sequence. By tracing how moments of confusion and disorientation on the part of the viewers arise in connection to this reversal, I speculate, firstly, that our grasp of sequentiality is deeply embodied, rooted in the phenomenology of movement with its predictive cognitive component; and secondly, that the phenomenological aspect is intrinsically bound up with the symbolic aspect of thinking in patterns, which is also predictive. In the last part of my paper, I introduce the theory of Generative Anthropology, which hypothesizes about the origin of language, and situate the phenomenological and symbolic components of sequentiality in the originary anthropological structure of deferral. Thus I show that sequence is not some a priori mathematical category of pure reason, but a concept that is inherent in language and symbolic thinking.