Some Antinomies of Narrative Temporality: A Response to Dan Shen

Abstract

I admire Dan Shen's work very much, in particular the analytical precision with which she reexamines issues that many earlier scholars had assumed to be unobjec tionable; we find these qualities once again in her article Defense and Challenge: Reflections on the Relation between Story and Discourse, in the October 2002 issue of Narrative. I would now like to offer a few clarifications and restatements concern ing the positions that I have advanced on the topic of time that are dis cussed in her essay. For me, the most significant example analyzed by Shen is the contradictory chronology of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In play, two inter nally consistent yet mutually incompatible chronologies are set forth. Shen is correct in asserting that this does not seem to present any real problem for the story-dis course distinction (229). The point I am trying to make here is not that we cannot reconstitute a story (histoire) from the text (r?cit), but that such an operation pro duces a story with two different chronologies, and thus a dual story. This is most ev ident when we ask precisely what happened on the day before the Duke's wedding. There will be different answers depending on which timeline is traced backward. The same is true of novels in which time elapses differently for the protagonist than for the other characters, such as Virginia Woolf 's Orlando. Again, problematizes or compromises Genette's conception of temporal order, the study of which is to compare the of succession of events of the story and the . . . order of their arrangement in the narrative (35). Sometimes, there is more than one such order.