TIME AND ITS INDETERMINACY IN ROMAN INGARDEN’S CONCEPT OF THE LITERARY WORK OF ART

Abstract

The time of the literary work of art is a schematized aspect of the represented objectivities of the literary work. Roman Ingarden’s analysis of the time of the literary work extends upon Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness but nevertheless remains consistent with it, insofar as within a literary work as well as actuality, an objective time or literary objective time is constituted from an experience of temporal objects (or in the case of the work of art, represented objectivities). The time of the literary work of art is experienced through its represented objectivities and depends on an already existent concept of objective time. (We conceive of the time of the literary work of art as a variant of actual time.) The time of the literary work, however, gains an indeterminacy, as the author of the literary work is able to manipulate our experience of time within the literary work by predicting how the reader will concretize its events, characters, and objects with respect to time. I use Alain Robbe-Grillet’s representation of the centipede in La Jalousie as an example of the possible manipulations of time, explicable through Ingarden’s analysis of time in the literary work of art.