Canada vs. USA Who's More Joyful?

Perhaps the most profound aspects of temporality facing individual people are causality and mortality. While nations and cultural collectives are inevitably temporary entities subject to the apparent one-way trip along time’s arrow, the constraints of time upon individuals tend to be more immediate and visible.14 For a living being, time is always bound up with mortality, not only in the sense that all people live for a period of time and then die, but also in the sense that all change, all movement through time, is both birth and death; every moment in time brings about the demise of certain circumstances that held true in the previous moment along with the creation of new circumstances. 

Articulating Subjective Temporality

 

The card depicts the skeletal personified figure of Death amidst dying people from all levels of social status; the significance of the card for divination, though, has less to do with literal death than with the imminence of change, with transition and transformation. Even a change for the better involves a kind of death. As Margaret Atwood’s sardonic oracle study of literature requires justification from other disciplines – the indispensability of literature for understanding time becomes clear when discussed independently from science – but as an example of the necessity of multidisciplinary approaches to any broad question of human meaning, and also to indicate how the vocabulary of literary criticism can be of use not only in reading fiction, but in reading our own everyday, psychological, or philosophical experiences of time. For instance, in his study of how fiction teaches us in particular about our everyday awareness of the future as a time that will later become the past, Mark Currie notes that “the reading of fictional narratives is a kind of preparation for and repetition of the continuous anticipation that takes place in non- fictional life” (6).  Narratology, then, equips us to understand the “anticipation of retrospection” as a temporal structure “at the heart of narrative, both in its mode of fictional storytelling and as a more general mode of making sense of the world” (29). 

The Death card in a Tarot deck emphasizes this association.

While literary analysis has its limits in that it is unlikely to produce controlled, easily quantifiable data separating the experience of duration from other variables, it offers complementary, and in some cases unparalleled insight into the inherently temporal nature of subjectivity, and makes visible the powerful links between temporality and other domains of human concern. Paul Ricoeur writes that “[t]he modern novel […] has constituted for at least three centuries now a prodigious workshop for experiments in the domains of composition and the expression of time” (2: 8), and that, going beyond chronological time, “fiction has its own resources for inventing temporal measurements proper to it” (2: 25). These resources, which I will examine in more detail soon, Ricoeur sees as necessary in order to “encounter expectations in the reader concerning time that are infinitely more subtle than rectilinear succession” (2: 25). While the limitations that I see in psychological research have mainly to do with the inability of science to articulate some of the more personal and imaginative aspects of lived experiences of time, Ricoeur believes that the central aporia of a purely psychological or phenomenological approach – he groups the two together since they both approach time “by way of the mind” (3: 14) – is its failure to take into account those aspects of time revealed by cosmological inquiry. 

At the same time, a purely physical or cosmological approach is blind to the psychological realities of time experience. 

Inevitably, Ricoeur writes, “we cannot think about cosmological time (the instant) without surreptitiously appealing to phenomenological time and vice versa” (3: 96). The resulting impasse, “that a psychological theory and a cosmological theory mutually occlude each other to the very extent they imply each other” (3: 14), can be responded to only through narrative, which contains the means to complete “a refiguration of temporal experience” (3: 3). The central thesis of Ricoeur’s seminal three- volume work, Time and Narrative, is that “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative” (1: 3). Whether we find psychological research to be limited because it is too human- centred (unable to account for cosmological time), or not human-centred enough (unable to account for individual or imaginative experiences), narrative appears necessary to give voice to the complexities of human temporal experience. “That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it,” asks Yann Martel; “the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?” (Life vi). With reference to certain Canadian literary texts, I would like to discuss how literature can work to articulate and interrogate personal experiences of time, first by highlighting some of the important issues at stake in understanding the subjectivity of temporality, and the temporality of subjectivity.