Original scientific paper Izvirni znanstveni članek
DOI: 10.32022/PHI31.2022.120-121.17 UDC: 165.62:111
Hermeneutics within the Temporal Horizon
The Problem of Time in Narrative Fiction
Sazan Kryeziu
University of Gjakova "Fehmi Agani," Faculty of Philology, Ismail Qemali St., n.n., 50 000, Gjakovë, Kosovo Republic
sazan.kryeziu@uni-gjk.org
Abstract
The paper discusses the problem of time as one of the most fundamental aspects of narrative fiction. If a narrative is defined as a series of events moving in a sequential relation, then time is a matter of linearity. The chronological progression becomes the standard pattern for time and narrative alike. But if a narrative is defined instead according to the relationship between the sequence of events in a story and the representation of those events to be told—between story and discourse—, then time
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becomes a more complex hermeneutic and phenomenological framework. Within this framework, I take a brief glance at the accounts of the relationship between time and narrative by attempting to elucidate the complex dimension of narrative temporality. My thesis assumes that if narrative time is meaningful to the extent that it becomes a condition of temporal experience (Ricoeur), then this synthesizing activity is a temporal process, which reveals the paradox of human time.
Keywords: narrative temporality, human time, hermeneutics, phenomenology, structuralism.
Hermenevtika znotraj temporalnega horizonta. Problem časa v narativni fikciji
Povzetek
Članek obravnava problem časa kot enega izmed najbolj temeljnih vidikov narativne fikcije. Če narativ ali pripoved definiramo kot niz dogodkov, ki se gibljejo znotraj zaporednega razmerja, potem je čas zadeva linearnosti. Kronološko napredovanje 382 postane standardni vzorec tako za čas kot za pripoved. Toda: če pripoved ali narativ definiramo glede na odnos med sekvenco dogodkov znotraj zgodbe in re-prezentacijo takšnih dogodkov, ki jih je potrebno upovedati - med zgodbo in diskurzom -, potem čas postane kompleksnejši hermenevtični in fenomenološki okvir. Znotraj tega okvira se na kratko ozrem po obravnavah odnosa med časom in pripovedjo in skušam tako razgrniti kompleksno razsežnost narativne temporalnosti. Moja teza predpostavlja, da je, če je pripovedni čas tako pomenljiv, da postane pogoj temporalnega izkustva (Ricoeur), tovrstna sintetizirajoča aktivnost temporalni proces, ki razkriva paradoks človeškega časa.
Ključne besede: narativna temporalnost, človeški čas, hermenevtika, fenomenologija, strukturalizem.
Sazan Kryeziu
In recent years, the systematic study of the function of time in and by the narrative has developed into one of the most exciting new models in narrative theory. A new generation of established theorists who have become increasingly interested in developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) frameworks (Mani 2011; Meister 2011), as well as theoretical conceptualizations of unnatural temporalities in the narrative (Richardson 2002; Alber 2012; Makela 2013), provide even more complex and sophisticated concepts of the narrative in examining how the narrative plays with the brain. Yet, while these new approaches have produced numerous important insights, my fear is that, in many cases, these insights, despite the distance they have traversed from what had been set out in the past, may risk losing sight of the basic characteristics of narratives: that they function according to a different logic, as in fiction, for instance, in which case the literary text depends on the intimate, yet indefinable experience of the reader. In this instance, unnatural narratology fails to do justice to the reader's right to fill in the blanks of the text, while AI frameworks reduce the reader's aesthetic experience to a brain-computer interface by overlooking his experiential world.	383
I begin with the analysis of narrative temporality as one of the key aspects of the narrative by applying an interdisciplinary approach including structuralism (Genette), hermeneutics (Ricoeur; Jauss) and phenomenology (Husserl; Heidegger). Furthermore, I point out the main concepts, identify the most prominent constructions of time and temporality found in their texts, and use the concepts derived from this analysis to elucidate the relationship between time and narrative noting how imaginative variations on life in fact become fused into the way, in which readers come to experience fictional time. The time of reading and the time of life share the same structure: meaning in both domains has a temporal character. In my view, this synthesizing activity is a temporal process, which reveals the paradox of human time. My guiding hypothesis is that the character of narrative temporality and human time become fused into a correlate of consciousness, which is fictive and which corresponds to the current of life-world. Finally, I conclude by pointing out the relevance of hermeneutics and phenomenology in elucidating aspects of narrative temporalities that are in need of theoretical reconceptualization.
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The classic account of the formal dynamics of narrative temporality—still dominant today—has been investigated by the structuralist theorist Gérard Genette. His work Narrative Discourse (1980 [1972]) gives a full scope of diverse temporalities generated by the difference between story and discourse. Genette's influential work is not merely a discourse on the narrative and a detailed study of the narrative theory, but it is also a complex analysis of Marcel Proust's novel cycle In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) and the ways it exemplifies and transforms narrative categories. Genette identifies three relevant components of narrative discourse: tense (temporal relations between story and discourse); mood ("forms and degrees of narrative 'representation'"); and voice (the way in which narrating is involved in the narrative). For Genette, the "narrative exists in space and as space, and the time needed for 'consuming' it, is the time needed for crossing or traversing it, like a road or a field" (Genette 1980, 34). In narrative theory, space is to be understood as a kind of "description" that interrupts the flow of temporality or as the "setting" that functions as the "scene," in which narrative events unfold in time.
384 If story is represented by discourse in such a way as to bring the narrative to its linear sequence, this transformation occurs in three dimensions of temporality in narration: order, duration, and frequency. Order deals with the relation between the chronological events in a story and their actual arrangement in the narrative; duration or "speed" is related to the pace of events in a narrative, that is, the relationship between the duration of events in a story and the length of text designated to narrating these events; frequency pertains to the verbal aspects or the relationship between the number of times an event occurs in a story and the number of times this event is narrated in the text. Genette claims:
To study the temporal order of a narrative is to compare the order in which events or temporal sections are arranged in the narrative discourse with the order of succession these same events or temporal segments have in the story, to the extent that story order is explicitly indicated by the narrative itself or inferable from one or another indirect clue. (Ibid., 35.)
Sazan Kryeziu
To reinforce this definition, an example is given, according to which the events in a story and the narration of these events can always be ordered in a temporal continuum. In Genette's account, the linearity of time is undone when sequence gives way to different ordering arrangements. Story moves chronologically, but discourse has its anachronies. For example, if the order of narration deviates from the temporal order of events, the next step, once anachrony is defined, is to distinguish the two opposite directions: forward or backward. The forward and backward deviations, which in Genette's terms are called prolepsis and analepsis, designate a leap (backward or forward) in the temporal order of events. Analepsis is the narration of an event at a point in a story after recent events have already been recounted; prolepsis leaps forward, that is, at a point in the text prior to the narration of earlier events. Variations determine the way, in which forward and backward discourse moves, and the duration of its new time frame. Flashbacks add further complexity, by means of which narrative discourse becomes anything but linear progress, and frequency reverses the linearity of events in a story, which may occur more than once—and which can be narrated many times.	385
Given the focus on the Proustian narrative, Genette's account questions all levels of the normative structure, becoming thus a proponent for the nonlinearity model of narrative temporality. Proust's narrative, indeed, breaks all temporal dynamics, and Genette uses these exceptions to prove his method of analysis. Genette, in fact, emphasizes in the "Preface" of his study that in analyzing Proust's novel, he uses an analytic method, through which one could proceed "not from the general to the particular, but indeed from the particular to the general: from that incomparable being that is the Recherche to those extremely ordinary elements, figures, and techniques of general use" (ibid., 23). One of the difficulties of Proust's text, in Genette's estimation, comes from the way the author eliminates temporal indicators ("once," "now"), so that the reader must provide them himself, in order to know where he is. In Genette's analysis, Proust's narrative demonstrates that discourse can lose the sense of temporal indicators necessary to determine the points of departure, becoming thus an example of achrony "deprived of every temporal connection" (ibid., 84).
To see how and why Genette's method stands, it is necessary that we turn now to the hermeneutic theorist Paul Ricoeur, whose illuminating study on
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time and narrative may help us answer the question about the way, in which linear and subversive time share a relation of mutual presupposition. Ricoeur's monumental work Time and Narrative (1984-1988 [1983-1985]) does offer a hermeneutic sense of how narrative temporality is at once a linear sequence and a diverse structure. Ricoeur sets out to combine Aristotle's concept of plot with Augustine's conception of time, suggesting that "time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience" (Ricoeur 1984, 3). Ricoeur's narrative theory holds that linear configuration is part of a larger process, through which time and narrative build a dialectic relationship.
Works of literature, according to Ricoeur, allow us to project "fictive" experiences of time—an important element in understanding human temporality. Fiction explores the internal limits of the narrative in different ways. The range of the limit-experiences, the imaginary variations, is made possible by the fact that every work constructs a world of its own. That is to say, 386 the lived experience of the characters in a book of fiction provides a number of imaginative variations on the aporias of time, which resolve the lived experience of "discordance" within a "concordant" verbal construction, and through which the reader refigures his ordinary temporal experience. Hence, every narrative is related to time, and at the center of every work of fiction there is human existence. Moreover, a narrative is meaningful to the extent that it becomes a condition of temporal experience.
By the same token, Ricoeur explores the distinction between the imaginative variations of fiction and its relation to historical time. Fictive time relates in its own way the lived time perceived as a dimension of the world. Augustine's dialectic of intention and distention and Heidegger's notion of repetition (which to a certain degree is comparable to Augustine's) served as a guideline for Ricoeur's interpretation of the distinction between historical time and fictional narrative: by fusing the making-present, having-been, and coming-towards, repetition joins together the level of authentic temporality and the level of within-time-ness (Innerzeitigkeit). Repetition brings the character of having-been into the present-at-hand, and the completed character of the past opens the possible nature of the future (coming-towards). This structure of
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time has already been applicable, in many different ways, by the imaginative variations of fiction.1
History and fiction create a common space for exchange in a relationship that is circular: history resembles the fictive by placing the presence of events before the eyes of the reader through its character of the past, and fiction resembles the historical to the extent that the irreal events presented in a work of fiction are past facts for the narrator who addresses those facts to the reader. Further, this common space for exchange between history and fiction in the refiguration of time lies precisely in this exchanging of places originating in human time, where, to speak with Ricoeur, "the standing-for the past in history is united with the imaginative variations of fiction, against the backdrop of the aporias of the phenomenology of time" (Ricoeur 1988, 192). This suggests that through its quasi-historical character fiction is sometimes able to fill out the gaps that were not actualized in the real historical past. In this sense, the function of fictional narrative time is to reveal both the possibilities of the real historical past and the irreal possibilities of fiction.2	387
1	David Carr, for instance, defends narration both ontologically and methodologically by arguing that history is itself narrative. Since the object of history and historical reflection has the structure of a narrative, it is, therefore, appropriate, according to Carr, that the effects of such reflection should be narrative in character. Carr holds that our everyday actions have an intrinsic, temporal structure: action being not merely a disorganized sequence of phases, but an organized model of activity. However, it is evident that Carr only uses a different vocabulary to make the same point as Heidegger did. Cf. Carr 1986.
2	In his analysis of free (imaginative) variation, Husserl makes a clear distinction between the "phenomena of consciousness" (inner-time consciousness) and the phenomena that constitute "objects in immanent time": "[...] immanent objects are themselves appearances, and yet appearances in an entirely different sense—in some cases, for example, they are appearances of external objects. The best we could do would be to say 'running-off phenomena and, with respect to the immanent objects themselves, to speak of their "running-off characters" (e.g., now, past). We know that the running-off phenomenon is a continuity of continuous changes. This continuity forms an inseparable unity, indivisible into concrete parts that could exist by themselves and indivisible into phases that could exist by themselves, into points of the continuity. The parts that we single out by abstraction can exist only in the whole running-off, and this is equally true of the phases (the points belonging to the running-off continuity).
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The mediation between time and narrative, according to Ricoeur's thesis, is accomplished through three moments of a process of mimesis. Mimesis I refers to the "prefiguration" or to the pre-understanding of the temporal character of the everyday. In other words, the narrative representation of our experience of time is a preunderstanding built into the world as we know it, because our life is already modelled according to some narrative time, and it exists as "a semantics of action." This moment is followed by a configurational dimension, through which the plot transforms the events into a story. The configurational act "grasps together" the detailed actions, or "the story's incidents," and draws from them the unity of one temporal whole (Ricoeur 1984, 66). Nevertheless, this act does not end with the actual narrative figuration (the making of a plot), for it still has to be concretized by readers. The concretization of the narrative by readers, however, is part of mimesis III, the "refiguration" moment, in which a narrative truly takes shape, but which also reshapes the world. Thus, the time of action is refigured by the configurational act as long as the world of action changes with narrative engagement.
388 Mimesis II refers to the "configuration" or "emplotment" of literary and historical narratives. "Emplotment" operates between our everyday interpretation of actions and the configured understanding of a re-ordered temporality, which is realized in our reading of the literary work. "Emplotment" has a threefold function: it mediates between plot and story taken as a whole; it incorporates various elements such as situations, actions, interactions, ends, means; and it resolves, in its temporal structure, the problem of temporality by combining the chronological order of elements with a totality, whereby the natural flow of time is reversed, and which results, in retrospect, in an ordered relation of those events and episodes.
Mimesis III or the process of "refiguration" is the moment, in which the world of the text and the world of the reader meet. It is the level, in which readers, in the act of reading, reinterpret their own experiences of time and reality. Literature becomes practical life through our engagement with it. Ricoeur maintains that the subsequent reconfigured moment becomes part
We can also say of this continuity, with evidence, that in a certain sense it is immutable; that is, with regard to its form." (Husserl 1991, 375.)
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of our figuration of time, part of the "semantics of action" that guides the temporal horizon and its activity. Reading of narrative texts—both literary and historical—is a hermeneutic operation, in which the text and the reader coexist in a dialectic relation. But Ricoeur does not provide any new explanations as to how, for instance, this refiguration of time would be applied to our implicit sense of time, in order to accomplish the potential for the meaning that is embedded in a work?
Such an explanation can perhaps be elucidated, if we go back to Heidegger's formulation of the temporalization of Dasein, which may also hold true for the relationship between reader and reading as a temporalizing act. In Being and Time (section 304), Heidegger writes: "Temporality has different possibilities and different ways of temporalizing itself. The basic possibilities of existence, the authenticity and inauthenticity of Dasein, are grounded ontologically on possible temporalizations of temporality." (Heidegger 1962, 351-352.) In this formulation, Heidegger provides the differences related to the past, present, and future, and to the ways of connecting the existential to the existentiell. What does this mean? Dasein is hidden in the process of projection. This 389 projection is an ek-stasis (i.e., a being-out-of-self); thus, in order to be able to project itself into something that can be standing-out-of-itself (since it is not yet there), it must not confine itself to a realm of factual realizations. Rather, such a projection is possible only if Dasein temporalizes itself in the future. Yet, this anticipation of itself towards the future, according to Heidegger, does not happen in an empty space. More precisely, Dasein can do this because of its having-been character. Through its having-been character Dasein will also be possible to understand how the temporality of authentic and inauthentic being differs. The characteristic ek-stasis of inauthentic being is only present. The past for the inauthentic Dasein is forgetting or making-present the gone actual presents, and future only waiting of not-yet-now-presents. Authentic Dasein, on the other hand, is ek-static and temporal in a genuine way, past and future for Dasein being full of possibilities; thus, this not-fallenness to constant now-present and the fallenness to having present as the chief modes of being constitute different temporalities.
What has all of this to do with reading as a temporalizing act? On first glance, nothing much, but in reality, it does pertain to it. The first utterance
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of a text constructs a horizon of the running-ahead-of-itself, of anticipations that also include a horizon of the past. Whatever comes up from the future is made possible only through our knowledge of the thing narrated. Walter Biemel notes: "Without the interplay of the future and events gone by, there cannot be any horizon of acquaintance. But the latter is always surrounded by what is known or familiar and, therefore, by what can dissolve and always threatens it." (Biemel 1991, 36.)
For Husserl, on the other hand, any moment is characterized by a horizon "with two differently structured sides, known in intentional language as a continuum of retentions and protentions" (Husserl 1970, 168). Like a horizon, the present provides a perspective pointing beyond its boundaries (though limited in its view) towards the past of what has been (the retentional horizon) and towards what is expected in the future (the protentional horizon). The world appears to us incompletely in a series of profiles that vary as our experience unfolds. If we follow Bergson's theory of the tensions of consciousness adopted by Schutz, according to which "our conscious life shows an indefinite 390 number of different planes, ranging from the plane of action on one extreme to the plane of dream at the other" (Schutz 1962, 212), where "each of these planes is characterized by a specific tension consciousness," that is, it consists of systems of relevance— for instance, thematic/topical—, then, by relevancy, the text imposes itself upon the reader (to whom the text becomes a guide). The open field of the text, however, is structured by the reader's retentions and protentions, and the field of the text changes in its texture as the relevancy and knowledge of the reader changes through reading.
The act of reading occurs within an intersection of world time and inner time, and it is in this intersection of the two times that a unity of meaning can be accomplished. This unity is a temporal unity. World time is the immutable form of time, within which a text has its own existence. The temporal structure or reading time consists of a time that can be controlled by the reader. Depending on the reader's relevance, this time can be skimmed, halted, repeated, or slowed down. In inner time, however, what matters is not the individuated existence of the text, but its meaning. Inner time serves as a condition for the possibility of the accomplishment of meaning. As Schutz asserts, "it is in the inner time of durée within which
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our actual experiences are connected with the past by recollections and retentions and with the future by protentions and anticipations" (ibid., 215-216).
The problem of relevance is also an important problem for the accomplishment of meaning. Worthy of mentioning is here the crucial implication of the relationship between inner time and relevance. Since any text presents itself to us through different temporal perspectives, a re-reading of the same text will have a different effect upon us each time we read it. No one can step twice into the same book, just as no one can step twice into the same river. We may feel surprised to discover a stock of new meanings and knowledge in the re-reading of the same text, especially if we read that text for the first time early in our youth, or we may feel frustrated that a second reading of the text may not leave any impression upon us or does not even challenge or provoke our imagination. In real life, as in reading, we experience each present moment differently, although we can remember it, yet the present moment that we remember alters each time we try to recollect it.
To place the reader's impact within the temporal horizon, we may do well to 391 explore the reception theory of H. R. Jauss. Jauss combines both hermeneutical theory and literary poetics by drawing both upon Gadamerian historical hermeneutics and upon literary theory of Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Lotman, and Wolfgang Iser, in order to develop his own position. Yet, unlike Iser's reader-response theory, which is based on the activity of reading as an intrinsic part of the aesthetic process, Jauss applies such an aesthetics within the framework of numerous literary works, that is, on the level of its collective expectations, and, thus, tends towards an engagement with historicity. And, like Gadamer, Jauss renders literary history as a story and its effects in succession. These successive effects or impressions present provocations, challenges, differences, disturbances that "hit" readers between successive generations in such a way that the history of the impact of texts transcends any insipid collection of growing continuities of reading. For Jauss, as for Gadamer, this tension between past and present, or between successive re-actualizations, is essential for the process of text's understanding. Each new actualization of understanding and interpretation within the horizon of the history of receptions of a text produces, in turn, new effects.
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For Jauss, each work of art constitutes and leaves behind a "solution," producing an effect as a kind of horizon. If Iser emphasizes the intersubjective character of the horizon of expectations that founds the act of reading, Jauss, on the other hand, stresses that such a horizon of expectation can be reconstituted objectively. Jauss argues that the history of the reception of a literary text is a misreading, behind which, however, there lies a true meaning that can be constituted by the individual consciousness by way of concrete readings. In his important work Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (1982 [1978]), Jauss distinguishes at least three various horizons of reading: "a first, aesthetically perceptual reading [as] distinguished from that of a second, retrospectively interpretive reading [...] [and] a third, historical reading that begins with the reconstruction of the horizon of expectations [...]" (Jauss 1982, 139).
Taking his cue from Gadamer's theory of the hermeneutic process conceived as a unity of the three moments: understanding (intelligere), interpretation (interpretare), and application (applicare), Jauss contends that each further reading is an overcoming of what the previous reading had missed, but which 392 can lead to a proper reading, through a process of repeated readings. The first condition of a text's aesthetic effect, according to Jauss, is its reception by understanding its narration, verses, or its dramatic unfolding. With regard to the act of interpretation, Jauss writes:
The explicit interpretation in the second and in each further reading also remains related to the horizon of expectations of the first, i.e., perceptual reading—as long as the interpreter claims to make concrete a specific coherence of significance from out of the horizon of meaning of this text, and would not, for example, exercise the license of allegoresis to translate the meaning of the text into a foreign context, that is, to give it a significance transcending the horizon of meaning and thereby the intentionality of the text. (Ibid., 142.)
Interpretation as the concretization of a particular significance among other possible significances previously interpreted always remains bound to the horizon of the first reading, aesthetically perceived and understood; next, it has the task of elucidating the verbal and poetic conditions, which orient
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the primary act of understanding. Application includes both understanding and interpretation acts as it transports the text out of its past and into the interpreter's present. In this respect, if the interpretation of a text becomes the foundation for an application, "not only in reference to its primary context," but also "to disclose a possible significance for the contemporary situation," then the unity of the three moments (understanding, interpretation, and application), "corresponds to the three horizons of relevance—thematic, interpretive, and motivational—the mutual relation of which [...] determines the constitution of the subjective experience of the life-world [Lebenswelt]" (ibid., 143).
Jauss emphasizes the active role of readers in changing their horizons within formative processes of historical tradition. Thus, he puts greater emphasis on the constraints of an intersubjective world. He suggests an excess of meaning that may exceed previous interpretations in a "new production." For Jauss, it would be a mistake to think that each new interpretation begins at the point of departure of an earlier interpretation. Instead, the first effect is combined with the work in "co-producing" a second effect interactively.
Jauss's key thesis is that:	393
[.] the meaning of a literary work lies on the dialogical [dialogisch] relationship of the present to the past, according to which the past work can answer and "say something" to us only when the present observer has posed the question that draws it back out of its seclusion. (Ibid., 32.)
This approach was explored previously by Gadamer, as we have observed, except that Jauss sees "innovation" and "recognition" of the text as complementary, and uses the reader as the one "who performs the 'score' of the text" in the course of reception, and who is led towards the ending "in a perceptual act of anticipation," from the particular towards the possible whole of form and meaning.
The meaning of a literary text is not indeterminate, unless we speak of a clearly "open" genre or code of "productive" fiction (in the sense expounded by Eco and Lotman). Jauss's thesis on the meaning of a work and its reception fits ideally with Ricoeur's analysis of the phenomenon of reading. As we have noticed, the reading of a literary text modifies the reader's horizon of expectations. But
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what does this horizon of expectations consist of, if not a system of references already established by earlier traditions, which the new work puts back into question? As Ricoeur notes, it is precisely the task of hermeneutics to discern changes of horizons that produce changes of reader effects: "The critical factor for establishing a literary history is the identification of successive aesthetic distances between the preexisting horizon of expectation and the new work, distances that mark out the work's reception." (Ricoeur 1988, 172.) Each work has a history, because it is made of a series of events, by means of which its meaning changes along with the context of its interpretation. This runs very close to our argument on time and temporality. Jauss rejects the abstraction of a classic text from temporal processes: the text's meaning consists in its performance of the temporal action of opening up a new horizon. A literary text has an effect: it invites new questions by reshaping the reader's horizon of expectations, sometimes within the larger horizon of life experience and sometimes within a narrower horizon of literary expectations.
However, in the case of modern or contemporary fiction, for instance, 394 present-day readers are burdened to put much more effort in configuring the text than readers of classic texts. "What develops in the great novels of the twentieth century," as Italo Calvino observes, "is the idea of an open encyclopedia [...] which derives etymologically from the presumption that all the world's knowledge could be gathered and enclosed in a circle." (Calvino 2016, 142.) Unlike the classic novel, which "tended toward works that assimilated human knowledge into stable, compact, ordered forms" (ibid.), the modern novel, by contrast, tends towards the multiplicity of possibilities. In the case of systematic encyclopedic works, such as Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the reader cannot read the text all at once, but interrupts his reading constantly, not merely to take a break from reading, but also to suspend belief in ordinary contexts as they emerge in the course of reading. Through recollecting what he has already read he is able (i.e., as soon as he starts to read the book again) to respond to it, and thus constitutes not only the temporal and the aesthetic objectivity, but, most importantly, rediscovers the irreality of fiction as the essence of the world (the world as meant). The peculiar temporality of In Search of Lost Time, for instance, is not time in the sense of chronology, but the temporality of the experience of ordinary time
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in its essential strangeness. The reader, then, serves as a mediator between the fictive world and the real world.
The time of reading is repeatedly interrupted by the time of life. The thing-as-read has placed the thing-in-the-world between transcendental brackets. In the act of reading, the temporal horizon of the reader's consciousness is not linear, but it travels through past and future times constantly, turning the possibility of strangeness into ordinary time, and vice-versa. The fictive world does not deny the reality of the real world, nor does it escape the world; instead, it irrealizes the world. For Husserl, an intentional object is neither real nor unreal, it is irreal or ideal. In this regard, as Maurice Natanson observes, "the irreal signifies a turn away from the given fact or event in a situation of any kind to, instead, the possibility of that fact or event" (Natanson 1998, 45). Temporal irrealization, according to Natanson, means that "the noetic roots of the dimensions of time are altered in such a way that the intentional 'rays' of consciousness fall short of their correlates" (ibid., 67). The fictive world and the life-world are instants in the stream of intentionality. Temporality as the texture of intentionality, therefore, "is not only the negation of 395 chronology but inherently similar to the result of irrealization: the creation of a 'correlate' of consciousness which is fictive and which corresponds to the current of existence" (ibid., 39). In the act of reading, the reader's memory fills in indeterminacies based on past experiences with literature and life. The durational time of the temporal horizon of the reader's consciousness is made up of a series of acts, which characterize both the time of reading and the time of life. If, to speak with Iser, reading and experience share the same structure, namely that meaning in both domains "has a temporal character" (Iser 1978, 148), then this synthesizing activity, which Iser calls consistency-building, is a temporal process, which reveals the paradox of human time.
By way of conclusion, it should be emphasized that any further account of the relationship between time and narrative should be focused on the way this reciprocity constantly changes the character of narrative temporality. Such inquiries will guide us towards projects different from those of theorists of narratology who seek to explore any unnatural temporalities in the relationship between time and narrative. Instead of trying to apply a Newtonian concept of time to the study of all narrative texts, the alternative option for narratological
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research would be to explore further: a.) the concepts of time beyond linear and homogeneous narrated time, which can be applied to contemporary and/ or postmodern fictional narratives; b.) the phenomenological theories of time and temporality; c.) the comparative approaches exploring transhistorical and transcultural similarities and differences in the representation of time. In this respect, hermeneutics and phenomenology as special disciplines will no doubt be instrumental in elucidating temporalities not yet explored by narrative theory. Within the framework of hermeneutics and phenomenology, narrative theorists and scholars of literature may seek to unfold innovative temporalities that confront narrative coherence. But these inquiries should include nonlinear concepts of time, by means of which a narrative becomes the ground for the refiguration of human time.
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