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The NarrativeQuality of Experience

STEPHENCRITES La narrationest toute l'epopee; elle est toute lhistorie; elle enveloppe le drame et le sous-entend. -Balzac of culturalexpressionare not historicalaccidents. They are not HTHE formsof of individual choice and conmuch less

products products culture, trivance,althoughactualculturalexpressionsare to some extent both. The way people speak,dance,build, dream,embellish,is to be sure alwaysculturally particular:it bearsthe imprint of a time and a place. A people speaksa particular language,not the same as that spoken in anotherland nor quite the same as that spokenby their fathers,and each personadaptsit with some originalityto his own use. But the fact that people speak some language is no historicalaccident. It is a necessarymark of being human, i.e., being capable of having a history. That is also true of other persistentforms of culturalexpression. They are the conditionsof historicalexistence; their expressionsare moulded in the historical process itself into definite productsof particularcultures. I do not know how to go about proving any such grandiosethesis. To me, I confess, it seems self-evident, in the sense that once the appropriatedistinctions are made it becomesobvious. Be that as it may, I proposehere to illustrate the point in relationto storytelling,which I take to be one of the most important cultural expressions. I want to argue that the formal quality of experience throughtime is inherentlynarrative.' I introduce this thesis by briefly posing another, to which it is intimately related: The style of action through time is inherently musical. The relation of the two theses can be stated in an equationof positively luminous simplicity: Narrative quality is to experienceas musical style is to action. And action and Let us see aboutthat. experienceinterpenetrate.
to be phenomenological.It will not, That is to say that I conceivemy undertaking however,be larded with citationsfrom the great Germanand Frenchphenomenologists. The phenomenologywill be homemade.
STEPHENCRITESis Professorof Religion at WesleyanUniversityin Connecticut.He was recentlyappointededitor of the AAR Studiesin Religion series. Among titles forthcoming in this serieswill be his own monograph,In the Twilight of Christendom: Hegel on Faith and History. versusKierkegaard

?( 1971, by AmericanAcademy of Religion

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We speak of the things we do as having a particularstyle. There is a style in the way a person writes and speaks. An artist paints in a certain style. A farmer exhibits a style in the way he plows his field; a dealer, in the way he keeps his store and arrangeshis wares. A man'sstyle is formed by the way he is brought up, by the people among whom he has lived, by his training: by his and experience. Westernershave, collectively,a different style from Easterners Californians.Yet in its details a man's style is idiomorphic-as the ringmaster says,inimitable. What is style? Suppose I walk with unbrokenstride acrossa room. It is a single complex movement. If I were a dancerI could, perhaps,cross the room at a single leap. But even for a dancer the action involves not only a steady change of position in the space of the room, but a divisible duration. There are variationson a joke about a runner so fast that he can turn and see himself still at the startingline. The point of the joke is that however single and swift a movement is there is always before and after.2 An action is altogethertemporal. Yet it has a unity of form through time, a form revealed only in the action as a whole. That temporal form is what we mean by style. My gait has a particularstyle-an ungainly one, as it happens,of a sort developed in walking through cornfields. But you could not detect it in a still photograph,because the style is in the movement. The same is true of gestures,mannerisms,the putting together of words, the modulationsof the voice in speaking the words. All of these are actions, conscious movements in time, and it is appropriatein each case to style. speakof their having a particular Why consciousmovements? Actions are the movementsof bodies,but unlike other movements they are performed by bodies that are both the subjects of experience and purposive agents. It does not occur to us, in common speech, to attributestyle to unconsciousbodies.3 Movementsmust be consciousto have a style. Yet that does not imply that one necessarilyattendsconsciouslyto these movements or to their style. One may do so, and may even attempt to change or to perfect his style. But he has a style, regardlessof whether he ever concerns himself with it. Typically, the style is formed quite unconsciouslyby an agent intent on the various projects to which he directs his action. I cross the room to look out the window or talk to a friend, not in order to perfect my style of
a Though not as if, like Zeno's arrow,one passed througha series of quasi-mathematical points in time. The temporalityof which we speak is constitutedby the movement itself, and not by the (essentiallyspatial) units of its measure. 8However poetically be may express our appreciationfor, say, the revolutions of the moon, we would not normallyattributestyle to it, nor even to the "song"of a bird. And while we do speakof the style of a painting, I take it that that is an oblique way of referringto the style of the artist in his act of painting it: the "painting"and not the artifactas such has style. Again, when people are asleep their style slumbersalso; "What style!" would be a nice comic caption for a cartoonpicturing a woman pointing at her snoringhusband.

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walking. The formation of style is seldom the conscious intent or point of an action, except when someone is deliberatelytraining himself, say, as an artist or an athlete. But it is in any case the inner concomitantof an action, whateverits aim: whateverthe productof the action, its style is a by-product,or, as we may say in anticipatingour commentson its musicality,it is its accompaniment. It is no coincidencethat musical performanceexhibits the formal properties of style generally. The rhythmsand melodic lines of music are inherentlytemporal. We do not hear them all at once, but in a successionof pulsesand pitched vibrations; yet we experience them as a unity, a unity through time. The reality of a musical phrase,being inherentlytemporal,implies the evanescence of all its elements. So it is with style. Its elements, too, are evanescent,yet the style of an action exists in the rhythms and the varying pattern of intensities found in it as a whole. To say that my gait in crossing the room has a style is to say that it expressescertain antic rhythms,that it is a crude kind of dance. Similarly,there is something in the cadences and modulations of a voice in speech that is strugglingto become a song. Even this essay,turbid as it is, does, after all, have a style, and if you would have to say that its style is flat compared to your favorite books of poems, I think that in the end you would be indulging in a kind of musicalcriticism of the two productions. Style is, of course, musical only in a rudimentarysense. It is not yet music, is so to speak below the threshold of music. Yet there is a definite relation between music and style, and not merely a strainedanalogy. If style is the form of conscious movement, music is that form purified: To the extent that it becomes consciousart it is purged of any inherentrelation to a moving body, exThe music itself is pure action, not the movement cept as its mere "instrument." of any thing but simply movement itself: invisible, light as air, freed from the weight of a body and the confinementsof space. It exists in time alone, and is, therefore,experiencedin the only way we could experience an altogethertemporalreality: as somethingheard,as sound. It must, to be sure,be producedby a body, by someone singing or someone beating, strumming,blowing an instrument. So it, too, will have a style. Yet in itself, as it sounds forth, it is the aesthetic idealization of style, it is, so to speak, the style of style. In music, style is no longer ancillaryto an action with some other aim, but is itself the sole aim of the action. But style generally,the form of all action, is the source of music, its basis in ordinarylife. Because it has its source in an ineluctable feature of human existence,music is one of the universalculturalforms of which we spoke at the outset. It is not an arbitrarycontrivance,but is a purified form of the incipient musicality of style itself. People take such satisfactionin music because it answersto a powerful if seldom noticed aspect of everythingthey do, of every gesture,every footstep, every utterance; answersto it and gives it a purified expression. Courtship,worship, even violent conflict, call forth musical expressions in order to give these activities a certain ideality,a specific ideality rooted in the activities themselves. That is why the music of a cultureor subculture has

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such a vital connection, so revealing yet so hard to define, with its whole style of life. The music of a people, or even a cohesive group, is peculiarlyits own. It is the particularmusical style that permits a group's life style, its incipient musicality,to express itself in full dance and song. The connection is of course reciprocal: The musical style in turn moulds the life style. But it cannot be an altogetheralien mold. There is a beautifulparadoxin the peculiarintensitywith which a person respondsto music which is "his own": Even if he has not heard it before it is familiar,as though something is sounding in it that he has always felt in his bones; and yet it is really new. It is his own style, revealedto him at an otherwise unimaginablelevel of clarity and intensity. Now I want to suggest that stories have a similar resonancefor us. But the commentson the musicalstyle of action are not merely for the sake of establishing an analogywith the narrativequalityof experience.Narrative,after all, is the other cultural form capable of expressing coherence through time, though its temporalityis not so pure as that of music. Particularly importantfor our purthat are the kinds of stories have poses, furthermore, strong musical overtones, for which verse would be the most appropriateform. So let our comments on style sound quietly and perhaps even musically in the backgroundof what follows.
MUNDANESTORIES AND SACRED STORIES

There are powerful groundsfor thinking that narrativeform is artifice; that it is simply one of the ways we organize a life of experience that is in itself inchoate. We are being reminded nowadaysthat stories are fictions after all.4 Of course there have been many forms of narrative,epic, drama,history, the novel, and so on, and our knowledge of the origins and development of such genres has given us a keen impressionof their culturaland historicalrelativity. Furthermore, among some of the most importantmodern writers there has occurreda determinedreaction against all standardnarrativeforms, partly on the grounds that such forms representa subtle falsification of the immediaciesof experience, of the modern experience in particular. Even writers who retain recognizablynarrativeforms have experimentedwith them freely. The great storytellersof our time as well as those who refuse to tell stories have made us awareof how much art is involved in all story telling. It no longer appearsnaturaland innocentin our eyes. The study of traditionalfolk cultures has also made us aware that there is
'The point is brilliantlyarguedand elaboratedin FrankKermode,The Sense of an Ending (Oxford University Press, 1966). ProfessorKermodewarns that "If we forget that fictions are fictive we regressto myth.. ." (p. 41). My argumentmay well illustratewhat he is warningagainst. I do deny that all narratives are merely fictive, and I go

Put it is ungratefulto single out my disagreements with a book from which I have derived uncommonprofit in ponderingmy theme.

on to denythatmyth,or whatI call sacred froma fiction. story,is a mereregression

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more to narrativeform than meets the eye (or the ear), and at least it raises the questionwhether that may also be true even for a cultureas fragmented,sophisas ours. For within the traditionalculturesthere have ticated,and anti-traditional been some stories that were told, especiallyon festal occasions,that had special resonance.Not only told but rituallyre-enacted, these stories seem to be allusive expressionsof stories that cannot be fully and directly told, because they live, so to speak,in the arms and legs and bellies of the celebrants.These stories lie too deep in the consciousnessof a people to be directly told: they form consciousnessratherthan being among the objects of which it is directlyaware. As such they are intimatelyrelated to what we have called "style," and so it is not surprisingthat these stories can hardly be expressed at all without an integral fusion of music with narrative. Every serious attempt to express them creates poetry. The expressionsadmit of great variationin detail, but no variationfully graspsthe storywithin these diversestories. We sometimes apply our ambiguous term myth to this "storywithin the or legends we are able to read in story." But it is not identicalwith the "myths" ancient books, althoughthese give us valuableaccessto those stories which have so powerfullyformeda civilization'ssense of itself and its world. We might also call these stories "religious,"except that this designation implies modern distinctions between religious forms and secular,artistic,political forms, and these distinctions are misleading as applied to traditional cultures. Certainly these mythopoeic stories function quite differently in traditional cultures from the way consciousart does in what we are pleased to call higher cultures. They are anonymousand communal. None of our individualizedconceptions of authorship are appropriateto them, and while rich powers of imaginationmay be expressed in them they are certainly not perceived as conscious fictions. Such stories, and the symbolicworlds they project, are not like monumentsthat men behold, but like dwelling-places.People live in them. Yet even though they are not directly told, even though a culture seems rather to be the telling than the teller of these stories,their form seems to be narrative.They are moving forms, at once musical and narrative, which inform people'ssense of the story of which their own lives are a part, of the moving course of their own action and experience. I propose, with some misgivings, to call these fundamentalnarrativeforms sacredstories, not so much becausegods are commonly celebratedin them, but becausemen's sense of self and world is createdthrough them. For that matter, only the musical stories that form men's living image of themselves and their world have been found fit to celebratethe powers on which their existence depends. For these are stories that orient the life of people through time, their life-time, their individual and corporateexperience and their sense of style, to the great powers that establishthe reality of their world. So I call them sacred written expressionsmay carrythe authorityof stories,which in their secondary, for the who understand their own stories in relation to them. scripture people The stories that are told, all stories directly seen or heard,I propose to call

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mundanestories. I am uneasy about that term also, although it is not meant to be in the least depreciatory. It simply implies a theory about the objectified images that fully articulatedstories must employ, i.e., about words, scenes,roles, sequencesof events within a plot, and other narrativedevices: that such images must be placed within to be capableof being plausibleobjects of consciousness, that world, that phenomenologicalmundus,which defines the objective horizon of a particularform of consciousness. In order to be told, a story must be set within a world. It may not be an everydayworld, i.e., it may be an imaginatively augmentedworld. But even the most fanciful storieshave their proprieties. We speak of a universe of discourse,and this too has its limiting firmamentabove and below, beyond which nothing can be conceived to happen. Historically there have been a variety of such worlds, correlativeto the historical forms of consciousness. The stories of an age or a culture take place within its world. Only in that sense are they necessarilymundane. Here, in some world of consciousness,we find stories composed as works of art as well as the much more that pass between people in explaining where modest narrativecommunications they have been, why things are as they are, and so on. Set within a world of the mundanestoriesare also among the most importantmeans by consciousness, which people articulateand clarify their sense of that world. In order to initiate their childrenin "the ways of the world,"parentstell them stories-although in the problem has arisen that the children find themrecent times, particularly, selves having to make their way in quite a different world, for which they have to devise quite different kinds of stories than those their parents taught them. Sacred stories, too, are subject to change, but not by conscious reflection. People do not sit down on a cool afternoon and think themselvesup a sacred story. They awakento a sacredstory,and their most significantmundanestories are told in the effort, never fully successful,to articulateit. For the sacredstory does not transpirewithin a conscious world. It forms the very consciousness that projects a total world horizon, and therefore informs the intentions by which actions are projectedinto that world. The style of these actions dance to its music. One may attempt to name a sacredstory,as we shall try to do in our conclusion. But such naming misleadsas much as it illuminates,since its meaning is contained-and concealed-in the unutterablecadencesand revelationsof the storyitself. Yet every sacredstory is creationstory: not merely that one may name creation of world and self as its "theme"but also that the story itself createsa world of consciousnessand the self that is oriented to it. Between sacredand mundanestories there is distinction without separation. From the sublime to the ridiculous,all a people's mundane stories are implicit in its sacredstory,and every mundanestory takes soundingsin the sacredstory. But some mundanestories sound out greaterdepths than others. Even the myths and epics, even the scriptures,are mundanestories. But in these, as well as in some works of literary art, and perhaps even in some merry little tales that seem quite content to play on the surface, the sacred stories resonate. People

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are able to feel this resonance,because the unutterablestories are those they know best of all. It is possible for such resonancesto sound in poetic productionsthat seem to defy all traditionalforms of story telling. For the surfaceof conventionalnarrative forms may have become so smooth and hard that it is necessaryto break it in order to let a sacredstory sound at all. Such a necessitymay signalize that the sacredstory is altogetheralive, transformingitself in the depths. Break the story to tell a truerstory! But there are also darkerpossibilitiesin this situation, as we shall see.
THE INNER FORM OF EXPERIENCE: 1. THE CHRONICLE OF MEMORY

Between sacred story and the mundane stories there is a mediating form: the form of the experiencingconsciousnessitself. For consciousnessis moulded by the sacredstory to which it awakens,and in turn it finds expression in the mundane stories that articulateits sense of reality. But consciousnessitself is not a blank. Consciousness has a form of its own, without which no coherentexperience at all would be possible.5 Aside from that formidableinconvenience,it is difficult to see how a consciousness,itself entirely formless,could be the fulcrum that I have suggestedit is between sacredand mundanestories. I want further to propose that the form of active consciousness, i.e., the form of its experisense narrative. That is why consciousencing, is in at least some rudimentary ness is able to mediate between the sacredand mundanestoriesthroughwhich it orients itself in a world.6 A squarepeg would not fit into a round hole. The stories give qualitativesubstanceto the form of experiencebecauseit is itself an incipient story. That is the central thesis of this essay. Of all the unlikely things that have been said thus far, it perhaps seems the least plausible. In attempting to exAs Kant arguedin The Critiqueof Pure Reason, though of course reachingquite different conclusionsabout the constitutionof this necessary form. To make at the level of strenge Wissenschaft my case that the primaryforms of possible experienceare narrative, I should also have to follow Kant's lead by providing a transcendental deductionof these incipient narrativeforms. But I content myself with the gesturesin that direction containedin this and the followingsection. 6There is an implicit circularity here that may as well be made explicit, since I am sure to be found out anyway: I appeal to the form of sacredand mundanestory to sugof experienceinformedby such storiesmust itself be in some sense gest that the structure narrative.But I have not really proven that what I have called sacredstory is in any acceptablesense narrativeitself, and among the reasonsthat make me think it is, the most importantis that experiencehas at root a narrative form: Experience can derivea specific sense of its own temporalcoursein a coherentworld only by being informedby a qualifythat gives definite contoursto its own form. Very well. The points are muing structure tually supportive,i.e., the argumentis in the end circular,as any good philosophical argumentis. And in the end it has only the explanatory circle to power of this particular commendit.

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plain and support it I want to do the usual thing in such straits,and appeal for the help of a favorite teacher. The teacheris Augustine of Hippo. Not that he would necessarily subscribeto my thesis. But being a good teacher,he has helped me find my way to my own notions, and even when I have pursued my own follies he has only given me help when I knew I needed it. The help in this case is offered in his brooding reflections on memory and time in the tenth and eleventh books of the Confessions.Whether or not he succeeded in establishingthe subjectivityof time in that famous discussion,whether indeed that is what he was trying to do, I want to invert the problemand suggest that he did succeedin establishingthe temporalityof the subject. Consciousness grasps its objects in an inherentlytemporalway, and that temporalityis retained in the unity of its experienceas a whole. Augustine ponders the paradox that the future, which does not yet exist, should pass into the past which no longer exists, through a present that is difficult to conceptualizeas more than a vanishing quasi-mathematical point. The paradox is resolved when past, present, and future are considered to be not necessarilyindependentmetaphysicalmodalities,but unavoidablemodalities of experience in the mind or experiencingconsciousness(anima). For consciousness "anticipatesand attends and remembers,so that what it anticipatespasses through what it attends into what it remembers"(XI:xxviii).7 We will consider in the next section the highly developed temporalityimplicit in this threefold function of consciousness.But alreadyin memoryalone there is the simpler of sequence,of beforeand after. temporality Without memory, in fact, experiencewould have no coherenceat all. Consciousnesswould be locked in a bare, momentarypresent,i.e., in a disconnected successionof perceptionswhich it would have no power to relate to one another. It might be argued that that would already imply a temporalityof the most elemental sort. It is alreadysignificant that experiencehas, in its present, this sheer momentaryquality. But it is memory that bestows the sense of temporal successionas well as the power to abstractcoherentunities from this succession of momentary percepts. In Book X Augustine singles out this capacityof memory for analysis,and also for a kind of awe-Augustine is a thinkerfor whom awe and close analysis are intensifiedtogether: Greatis this powerof memory, excessively great,my God,a vastand infinite interior it to the depths?Yet this is a powerof my space: who hasplumbed mindand pertains to my nature, so that I myselfdo not graspall that I am. (X:viii) Yet, Augustine muses, people take this prodigy within themselves for granted. Ignoring this interior space, they are amazedby the great dimensionsof mountains, oceans,rivers,the orbits of the stars. But greaterthan the wonder of these
for the translation I7 take responsibility of extractsfrom The Confessions quotedhere.

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external,naturalwonders is the simple fact that he himself can speak of these things even though he does not at the moment see them. That is possible because he sees "inwardlyin my memory"these things he had once seen outwardly with his eyes-yet it is not the very things themselvesthat appear in this inner vision: For
still I did not absorb these things [into myself] in seeing them . . . nor are they themselvesattachedto me, but their imagesonly, and I know by what sense of the bodyeachwas impressed upon me. (X:viii)

Detached from things and lodged in memory, along with inner impressionsof feeling and mood, these images are susceptibleto the uses of thought and the play of imagination. Called up by the activities of the mind, they can be dismantledand reassembled or combined in original ways. When we do not attend to them they are "submerged and they slide down, as it were, into the remote interior spaces" of memory. But from this "dispersion"they can always be "collected"again by our thought, i.e., literally, by our cogitations. Augustine likes to play on the etymological connection between cogo-collect-and
cogito. (X:xi)

So there is an importantdistinction between memory and recollection that goes back at least to Augustine. All the sophisticatedactivities of consciousness reorderliterallyre-collectthe images lodged in memoryinto new configurations, ing past experience. But that would be impossiblewere it not for the much more naive functioning of memory itself, preserving the images drawn from experience. But I venture to suggest that memorydoes not contain its images quite so and confusedly"as Augustine suggests in the passage cited above. "scatteredly The memoryalso has its order,not the recollectedorder formed by thought and imagination,but a simple order of succession. This succession is the order in which the images of actual experiencethrough time have been impressedupon the memory. It constitutesa kind of lasting chronicle,fixed in my memory,of the temporalcourseof my experience. This chronicledoes not need to be recollected strictly,but merely to be recalled: I need only call up again the succession of images which stand waiting in memory in the order in which I experienced them. Of course the recall is not total, the chronicleis not without lacunae. In fact, it is for great stretches quite fragmentary. But what we do succeed in calling up we find differentiatedinto fairly clear sequence. We are aware of what comes before and what comes after. When we are uncertain,or feel that a crucial scene is missing, we have the sense of "consulting" our memory. The recall is not infallible, but we have the sense that this "consultation" is possible, that the chronicleis "there," in memory,to be consulted,that if we concentrate intensely on our rememberingwe will be able to recall a sequence of events accurately. I consult my memory in this way, for example, when I mentally retracemy steps in the effort to recall where I may have lost something. Yet that odd consultation is not strictly an act of recollection. We must

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consult our memory in order to recollect its images, to reorganizethem for the more sophisticatedpurposesof the mind. But rememberingis not yet knowing. Its chronicleis too elemental,too fixed, to be illuminating. Experienceis illuminated only by the more subtle processesof recollection. At least in this sense, all knowledge is recollection! So is all art, including the art of storytelling. It is an act. It has style. But mere rememberingas such has no style, if we could isolate it from the processof recollectionthat in practicegenerallyaccompanies it. Yet storytelling is not an arbitraryimposition upon rememberedexperience, altogether alien to its own much simpler form. Images do not exist in memoryas atomic units, like photographsin an album,but as transientepisodes in an image-stream, cinematic,which I must suspendand from which I must abstract in order to isolate a particularimage. The most direct and obvious way of recollectingit is by telling a story,though the story is never simply the tedious and unilluminatingrecital of the chronicle of memory itself. And, of course, I can manipulatethe image-streamin other ways. I can abstractgeneral features and formal elements of it for purposesof theory,or suspendit in order to draw a picture, or splice episodes from it in a way that gives them new significance. I can contemplatea whole segment of the image-streamin a single glance of inner vision, then fragmentit so that its elements are left twinkling in isolation like stars-yet even then memory is not shattered. Indeed, I can do such things becausethe original chronicle,the image stream,is alwaysat hand, needing only to be recalled. I can even measureout its segments into long times and short times, recalling some episodes as having occurreda long time ago, others more recently (a phenomenon that Augustine ponders with great care in XI:xvxxviii) .8 I recall, for example, a sequence from my own memory. In telling it, of course, recollection already intervenes,but I recollect in a way as faithful as possible to the memory itself. I measure out "a long time" and recall an episode from my childhood. I have not thought about it for many years,and yet I find its chronicle in good condition, extremelydetailed and in clear sequence. In an impetuous fit of bravado I threw a rock through a garage window. I recall the exact spot on the ground from which I picked up the rock, I recall the wind-up, the pitch, the rock in mid-air, the explosive sound of the impact, the shining spray of glass, the tinkling hail of shards falling on the cement below, the rough, stony texture of the cement. I recall also my inner glee at that moment, and my triumphwhen a playmate,uncertainat first how to react, looked to me for his cue and then broke into a grin. Now I could cut and splice a bit, passing over hours not so clearlyrecalled anyway,except that my mood underwent drastic change. Then I recall that moment in the evening when I
8 In recognizingthe importance of this strangemeasurement of what no longer exists, Augustinedoes implicitly acknowledgethe primitive order of successionwithin memory. Memoryis not simply a vast interiorspace in which images tumble at random.

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heardmy father'sreturningfootsteps on the porch and my guilty terrorreached a visceralmaximum the very memory of which wrenchesa fat adult belly-for rememberingis not simply a process in the head! The details of the scene that ensuedare likewise very vivid in my memory. Now it would be quite possible for me to tell this story very differently. My perspectiveon it has been changed, partly by the death of my father and the fact that I am now myself the father of children,partly,too, by my reading in the Confessionsa storyabout a wanton theft of pears and by some reading in Freud on the rivalryof fathersand sons, and so forth. So I have many insights into this chronicle that I could not have had at the time its events occurred. Yet the sophisticatednew story I might tell about it would be superimposedon the image-streamof the original chronicle. It could not replace the original without obliterating the very materials to be recollected in the new story. Embedded in every sophisticated retelling of such a story is this primitive chronicle preservedin memory. Even conscious fictions presupposeits successive form,even when they artfullyreorderit.
THE INNER FORM OF EXPERIENCE:2. A DRAMATIC TENSION

In the chronicleof memorythere is the simple temporalityof succession,of duration,of before and after, but not yet the decisive distinction between past, present, and future, that provides the tension of experience and therefore demands the tenses of language. Memory,containing the past, is only one modality of experience,that never exists in isolation from those that are oriented to the presentand the future. To understand the relationof the three we may again referto Augustine. He points out that past, present,and future cannot be three distinct realities or spheresof being that somehowcoexist. Only the presentexists.
But perhapsit might properlybe said: there are three times, a presentof things past,a presentof thingspresent,a presentof things future. (XI:xx)

Only the present exists, but it exists only in these tensed modalities. They are inseparablyjoined in the present itself. Only from the standpoint of present experiencecould one speak of past and future. The three modalitiesare correlative to one another,in every moment of experience.
For these are in the mind as a certaintriadicform, and elsewhereI do not see them: the present of things past is memory, the present of things present is directattention,the presentof things futureis anticipation. (XI:xx)

I want to suggest that the inner form of any possible experience is determined by the union of these three distinct modalities in every moment of experience. I want furtherto suggest that the tensed unity of these modalities requiresnarrative forms both for its expression (mundane stories) and for its own sense of

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the meaning of its internal coherence (sacred stories). For this tensed unity has alreadyan incipientnarrative form. The chronicle of memory, with its simple successiveness,its before and after, is in actualexperiencealwaysalreadytaken up into the more sophisticated temporalityof tense. If we would attemptto isolate anticipationas we did memory we would again discover a very elementalnarrativeform. We might call it the scenarioof anticipation.9I have in mind our guesses and predictionsabout what may happen,hunchesgenerallyformulatedin the attempt to lay some plans about our own projected courses of action. Projected action often dominates this modality of experience,though one may simply worry about the future or indulge in euphoricdreamsabout it. But whether anticipationtakes the passive form of dreams,worries,and wishes, or is instrumental in laying plans or making resolutionsfor projectedactions, it seems intuitively clear that we anticipateby framing little stories about how things may fall out. As the term scenarioimplies, these anticipatorystories are very thin and vague as comparedwith the dense, sharp detail of the chronicle of memory. It is also clear that the course of events generally turns out quite differently from what we had anticipated. But the experienceof thwartedexpectations,or the comic situationwhen parties to an encountercome to it with very different scenariosin mind-e.g., she prepared for political discussion, he for romantic rendezvous-simply serve to show that we do orient ourselves to the future by means of such scenarios. Though they are generally vague they are not altogether formless. However freely our action may improviseupon the scenario,it is never simply random. Now it is not as though the scenarioof anticipationwere set alongside the chronicle of memory, as two quite separate stories. Our sense of personal identity depends upon the continuity of experience through time, a continuity bridging even the cleft between rememberedpast and projected future. Even when it is largely implicit, not vividly self-conscious,our sense of ourselves is at every moment to some extent integratedinto a single story. That on the one hand. On the other hand, the distinction between memory and anticipation is absolute. The present is not merely an indifferent point moving along a single unbrokenand undifferentiatedline, nor is the temporalityof experiencesuch a line. Nor do past and future simply "meet"in the present. Memoryand anticipation, the present of things past and the present of things future, are tensed modalitiesof the presentitself. They are the tension of every moment of experience, both united in that present and qualitatively differentiated by it. For precisely in this momentarypresent which embracesmy whole experience,the past rememberedis fixed, a chroniclethat I can radicallyreinterpretbut cannot reverse or displace: what is done cannot be undone! And within this same
I have discussedsuch anticipatory scenariosin some detail in an essay to which the presentone is in many ways a sequel: "Myth,Story,History,"publishedin a symposium entitled Parable,Myth and Language(Cambridge, Mass.: The ChurchSocietyfor College Work, 1968), p. 68.

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present the future is, on the contrary,still fluid, awaiting determination,subject to alternativescenarios.10Precisely as modalities of the present of experience, the past rememberedis determinate,the future anticipatedis indeterminate, and the distinctionbetweenthem is intuitivelyclearand absolute. But how can the present contain such tension, on the one hand unifying, on the other hand absolutely distinguishing its tensed modalities? It can do so becausethe whole experience,as it is concentratedin a consciouspresent,has a narrativeform. Narrative alone can contain the full temporalityof experience in a unity of form. But this incipient story, implicit in the very possibility of experience,must be such that it can absorbboth the chronicle of memory and the scenarioof anticipation,absorbthem within a richer narrativeform without effacing the difference between the determinacyof the one and the indeterminacyof the other. We can define such a narrativeform a little more fully by reminding ourselves that the conscious present has a third modality: the present of things present. This praesens de praesentibus Augustine designates as contuitusdirect attention. True enough, but there is something more. If discussion of the aetherial-seeming objects of memory and anticipationmay have tempted us to speak of consciousnessitself as if it were an invisibility suspendedin a void, mention of its direct present must sharply remind us that consciousnessis a function of an altogetherbodily life. The conscious present is that of a body impacted in a world and moving, in process,in that world. In this present action and experience meet. Memory is its depth, the depth of its experience in the trajectory of its action in particular. particular;anticipationis its trajectory, The praesensde praesentibus is its full bodily reality. It is, moreover,the moment of decision within the story as a whole. It is always the decisive episode in the story, its moment of crisis between the past rememberedand the future anticipated but still undetermined. The critical position of this modality gives the story a dramaticcharacteras a whole. And since action and experience join precisely at this decisive and critical juncture in the drama,the whole dramavibrateswith the musicalityof personalstyle. sort. Life is not, after all, a work of art. Still, it is a dramaof a rudimentary An artistic dramahas a coherenceand a fullness of articulationthat are never reachedby our rudimentarydrama. But the drama of experience is the crude original of all high drama. High drama can only contrive the appearanceof that crisis which the conscious present actually is. The difference between a fixed past and a future still to be resolved,which in experience is an absolute difference, must be artfully contrived on a stage by actors who know the outcome as well as they know the beginning. The art of drama imitates the life of experience,which is the truedrama.
10The fluidity of the future from the standpoint of consciousness has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of deterministic theories. The point is phenomenological, not metaphysical.

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Life also imitates art. The stories people hear and tell, the dramasthey see performed,not to speak of the sacred stories that are absorbedwithout being directlyheardor seen, shape in the most profoundway the inner story of experience. We imbibe a sense of the meaning of our own baffling dramasfrom these stories,and this sense of its meaning in turn affects the form of a man's experience and the style of his action. Such culturalforms, both sacredand mundane, are of course socially sharedin varying degrees,and so help to link men's inner lives as well as orienting them to a common public world. Both the content and the form of experienceare mediatedby symbolic systemswhich we are able to culturein which those employ simply by virtue of awakeningwithin a particular common are the symbolic systems currency. Prevailing narrative forms are most such the of among important symbolic systems. It is not as though a man as a individual consciousness with the incipient story and musicalbegins purely of his and then casts about for a satisfying tale to lend it ity private experience, some higher significance. People awakento consciousnessin a society, with the inner story of experience and its enveloping musicality already infused with culturalforms. The vitalities of experience itself may in turn make a man feel that some of the old stories have a hollow ring and may be the source of originality in the formationof new stories,or even new kinds of stories. But the way we remember,anticipate,and even directly perceive, is largely social. A sacred story in particularinfuses experienceat its root, linking a man's individualconsciousness with ultimate powers and also with the inner lives of those with whom he sharesa commonsoil. There is an entrancinghalf-truththat has gained wide currency,particularly among American undergraduates.It is that time itself is a cultural product, we could be rid of forms.l Presumably e.g., the creationof certaingrammatical
' This view is usually linked with a loveable primitivism now in vogue. Students who make this link often seize upon the theoriesof BenjaminLee Whorf, who had obwesternnotions of time could not be expressed served,for example,that characteristically at all in the languageof the Hopi Indians. See "An AmericanIndian Model of the Universe," in the collection of Whorf's writings entitled Language,Thought, and Reality (Cambridge,Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1956). Cf. RichardM. Gale, The Languageof Time (London: Routlage& Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 45-48, for a critiqueof some of the general claims Whorf's observations led him to make. Those who cite Whorf are often less cautiousthan he is claiming that time is the productof a particular culture,and therefore holding out the possibility that there are or might be peoples blessedly free of the conflicts and traumasof temporalexistence. Among some of my favorite studentsit comes out like this:

O happyhippy Hopis of pyotebudsand herbs: No tensionsin theirteepees, no tensesin theirverbs. Far removedfrom this idyllic vision is the fine work of GeorgesPoulet, Studies in

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it if we played our cards right, say, with a non-westerndeck. The kernal of truth in this idyllic vision is that particularconceptions of time are indeed imbibed from cultural forms, not only from the structuresof a language but from the kinds of stories being told. For the temporalitythat I have argued is necessaryfor the very possibility of experience does not of itself imply any particularconception of time. The connectionsamong its episodes or moments is not necessarily,for example, either magical, causal, logical, or teleological. Least of all does it imply any theory regardingthe metaphysicalstatus of time. The temporality of lived experience as such, with its inherent tensions and crises, can only, so to speak, raise questions about the reality and meaning of time. For the answers to these questions it must, as it were, turn to the sacred and mundane cultural forms lying at hand. In fact, the answers precede and sometimes preclude the questions! Stories, in particular,infuse the incipient dramaof experience with a definite sense of the way its scenes are connected. They reveal to people the kind of dramain which they are engaged,and perhaps its larger meaning. So the fact that there are very different notions of time implicit in the cultural forms of different historical traditions does not contradict the inherent temporalityof all possible experience. There is only one absolute limit to that diversity: It is impossible that a culture could offer no of this temporality at all. interpretation In principle,we can distinguishbetween the inner dramaof experienceand the stories throughwhich it achieves coherence. But in any actualcase the two so interpenetrate that they form a virtual identity,which, if we may pun a little, is in fact a man's very sense of his own personal identity. The sacredstory in particular,with its musical vitality, enables him to give the incipient dramaof his experience full dramaticdimensions and allows the incipient musicality of his style to break forth into real dance and song. Hence the powerful inner need for expressive forms, the music played and sung and danced, the stories told and acted,projectedwithin the world of which men are conscious. So the narrativequality of experiencehas three dimensions,the sacredstory, the mundanestories,and the temporalform of experienceitself: three narrative tracks,each constantlyreflecting and affecting the courseof the others. And sometimesthe trackscross,causinga burstof light like a comet entering our atmosphere.Such a luminous moment, in which sacred,mundane,and personal are inseparablyconjoined,we call symbolic in a special sense. Of course, there is a more general sense in which every element in a story is a symbol,an imaginative representationconveying a meaning; but even in that sense the symbol is partly constitutedby its position in the story. A story is not a mere assemblyof independentlydefined symbols. Still less is a symbol in the more pregnantsense, e.g., a religious symbol,an atomic capsuleof meaning that drops HumanTime (trans.by Elliott Coleman,(Baltimore:Johns HopkinsPress,1956).
Poulet points up the radicaldevelopments and the subtle modulationsin the sense of time within westerncultureitself, particularly in the worksof a successionof importantFrench writers. and American

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from the heavens or springs from the unconsciousin isolated splendor.12The cross, or a holy mountain,receive their meaning from the stories in which they appear. Such a symbol imports into any icon or life situation or new story in which it appears,the significance given it in a cycle of mundane stories, and also the resonancesof a sacred story. The shock of its appearanceis like the recurrencein daylight of an episode recalled from dreams. For a religious insymbol becomes fully alive to consciousnesswhen sacred story dramatically tersectsboth an explicit narrativeand the courseof a man's personalexperience. The symbol is preciselythat double intersection. Narrativeform, and not the symbol as such, is primitive in experience. But narrativeform is by no means innocent. It acknowledgesand informsonly what is contained in its own ordering of events. Even the most naive tale begins "once upon a time"-a time prior to which there is only darkness,no time so far as the temporalityconstitutedby the story is concerned. That time begins with this "once . .." and when the tale has run its course there is nothing left. Its charactersdisappearinto a timeless "happilyever after." It is meaningless to ask whether they really do. For they live only within the tensions and crises which constitute the significant time of the story, the narrative"tick-tock,"13 between the tick of "once upon a time" and the tock of happy resolution. Of course, the resolution may not be happy. We may leave our charactersin a state of horroralso outside all time and, therefore,pure and unambiguous.This happiness,this horror,are both beyond the possibilities of recognizablehuman experience. Only narrativeform can contain the tensions, the surprises,the disappointments and reversals and achievements of actual, temporal experience. The vague yet unambiguous,uncannyhappiness and horrorare "beyond."The story itself may, to be sure,contain symbolicaccentsthat refer to such a beyond, e.g., the resurrection,or images of eternal blessednessor torment, or descents into a nether region that is strangely familiar. Such symbolic accents are not necessarilyintimationsof immortality.Imaginationis projectedby them beyond any possible experience, and yet the projection itself takes place within the contingencies of experience. It belongs to the story. However deep into the bowels of hell Dante leadsus, howeverhigh into heaven,it is remarkable how he and his sinners and saints keep our attention fixed on the little disk of earth, that stage on which the dramaof men's moral strugglesin time is enacted. Far 1 It hasbeenwidelyassumed thatsymbols arein somesenseprimitive in experience, and thatmythsand othernarrative formsare secondary that assemble constructions the material into stories.Thatview,for example, in a highlysophisticated primalsymbolic of PaulRicoeur's fine studies form,seemsto be an important in this field,e.g., premise TheSymbolism of Evil,trans. & Row,1967). byEmerson (NewYork: Harper Buchanan, But sucha view seemsto presuppose an atomism of experience thatI thinkis quiteimpossible. Frank Kermode treats"tick-tock" as a modelof plot, contrasting the ingeniosuly duration the "humble between of tick and the "feeble organized genesis" of apocalypse" tockwith the "emptiness," the unorganized blankthatexistsbetween our perception of "tock" andthenext"tick." TheSense of anEnding, pp.44-46.

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from reducing the significance of this time-bound story in which we are embroiled, such visions of happiness and horror make it all the more portentous. Even in secularized projections beyond the ambiguity of history into social utopia or doomsday,a particularsense of the historical dramaitself is implicit. For the meaning of both happinessand horroris derived,even in the uttermost leap of the imagination beyond our story, from our conception of the story itself. If experience has the narrativequality attributed to it here, not only our self-identitybut the empirical and moral cosmos in which we are conscious of living is implicit in our multidimensionalstory. It therefore becomes evident that a conversion or a social revolution that actually transformsconsciousness requiresa traumaticchange in a man's story. The stories within which he has awakenedto consciousnessmust be undermined,and in the identificationof his personal story through a new story both the drama of his experience and his a secondawakenstyle of action must be reoriented. Conversionis reawakening, ing of consciousness. His style must change steps, he must dance to a new rhythm. Not only his past and future,but the very cosmos in which he lives is strungin a new way. The point is beautifullymade in a passagefrom the Protreptikosof Clement of Alexandria,selections from which, in verse translation,are among the last things we have from the pen of Thomas Merton. Clement, himself a convert to Christianity,is writing at the time Christianityfirst emerged in a serious way into a classicalculturealreadybecome decadent. In a passageentitled "The New Song,"he retells an old Greek legend but glosses it in a way that gives it a radicalnew turn. A bard named Eunomoswas singing, to his own accompaniment on the lyre, a hymn to the death of the Pythian dragon. Meanwhile,unnoticed by the pagan assembly,anotherperformanceis under way.
Cricketswere singing among the leaves all up the mountainside, burningin the sun. They weresinging,not indeedfor the deathof the dragon, the deadPythian,but They hymned the all-wise God, in their own mode, far superior to that of Eunomos. A harpstringbreakson the Locrian. A cricketflies down on top of the lyre. She sings on the instrumentas though on a branch. The singer,harmonizing with the cricket's tune, goes on without the lost string. Not by the song of Eunomosis the cricketmoved, as the myth supposes,or as is shownby the bronzestatuethe Delphianserected,showing Eunomos with his harpand his companion in the contest! The cricketflies on her own and sings on her own.

The subversivecricket sings the new song, to Clement old as creationyet newly come to human lips, of the Christianlogos.

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STEPHEN CRITES See what powerthe new song has! Fromstones,men, Frombeastsit has mademen. Those otherwisedead,thosewithouta sharein life that is reallylife At the mere soundof this song Have comebackto life.... Moreover He has structured the whole universemusically And the discordof elements He has broughttogether in an orderedsymphony So thatthe whole Cosmosis for Him in harmony.1" MODERNITY AND REVOLUTION: AN INTEMPERATE CONCLUSION

The form of consciousness to which we apply the name modernity seems to represent a transformation as radical, though of a different sort, as that celebrated by Clement. Some have even suggested the emergence of a yet newer sensibility, so new and inchoate that it can only be designated "post-modern." All this is too close to us to speak of it with much assurance, but I yield to the temptation to offer some suggestions that bear on our theme. I have argued that experience is moulded, root and branch, by narrative forms, that its narrative quality is altogether primitive. At the same time, expression is obviously not limited to story telling. Mind and imagination are capable of recollecting the narrative materials of experience into essentially nonnarrative forms. Indeed there seems to be a powerful inner drive of thought and imagination to overcome the relentless temporality of experience. One needs more clarity than stories can give us, and also a little rest. The kind of pure spatial articulation we find in painting and sculpture, with all movement suspended, gratifies this deep need. Also in meditation and in theoretical endeavors we are a little less completely at the mercy of our own temporality. Traditional myths, stories dominated by timeless archetypes, have functioned in this way: by taking personal and historical time up into the archetypal story, they give it a meaning which in the end is timeless, cosmic, absolute. But an important feature of the modern situation is the employment of quite different strategies for breaking the sense of narrative time. At a very general level, these strategies fall into two opposite and indeed mutually antagonistic types: One is the strategy of abstraction, in which images and qualities are detached from experience to become data for the formation of generalized principles and techniques. Such abstraction enables us to give experience a new, non-narrative and atemporal coherence. It is an indispensable strategy for conducting many of the practical affairs of life in our society; we are all technicians, like it or not. In its more elaborated forms, the strategy of abstraction is the basis for all science. Its importance in the formation of modern institutions can hardly be exaggerated. But strategies of the other type seem almost equally important in the forma1' Clement of Alexandria,Selectionsfrom The Protreptikos, an essay and translation by ThomasMerton, (New York: New Directions,1962), pp. 15-16, 17. It is significant that the early Christianpreachingwas largely a story-tellingmission, offering people a new story,the Christiankerygma,to reorienttheir sense of the meaning both of historical time and of theirown personallife-time.

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tion of "modern"consciousness. This other type we may call the strategy of contraction. Here narrativetemporalityis again fragmented,not by abstraction to systemsof generality,but by the constrictionof attention to dissociatedimmediacies: to the particularimage isolated from the image stream,to isolated sensation,feeling, the flash of the overpoweringmoment in which the temporal context of that moment is eclipsed and past and future are deliberatelyblocked out of consciousness.It is commonlyassumedthat this dissociatedimmediacyis what is concreteand irreducible in experience. But the sweat and grit of the moment, which some so highly prize, is in fact a contractionof the narrativemovement that is really concrete in experifrom it. The point can perhapsbest be made ence, as generalityis the abstraction that these two indirectly,by noticing time-defying strategies have projected a modern version of a in the idea of the self: the dualismof dualism distinctively mind and body. We state the matterbackwards if we say that something called mind abstractsfrom experience to produce generality, or if we say that "the body"has feelings and sensations. It is the activity of abstractingfrom the narrative concretenessof experience that leads us to posit the idea of mind as a distinct faculty. And it is the concentrationof consciousnessinto feeling and sensation that gives rise to the idea of body. Both mind and body are reifications of particularfunctionsthat have been wrenchedfrom the concretetemporality of the conscious self. The self is not a composite of mind and body. The self in its concretenessis indivisible, temporal,and whole, as it is revealed to be in the narrativequality of its experience. Neither disembodiedminds nor mindless bodies can appear in stories. There the self is given whole, as an activityin time. Yet criticism alone cannot dissolve this mind-body dualism. The very fact of its stubbornpersistencein our ordinarysense of ourselves,even though we know better (in theory!), testifies to the very great importancein the modern world of the two strategieson which it is based. The power to abstractmakes explanation,manipulation,control possible. On the other hand we seek relief and release in the capacityto contractthe flow of time, to dwell in feeling and sensation, in taste, in touch, in the delicious sexual viscosities. So "the mind" dwells in the light, clear, dry, transparent, unmessy. "The body" dwells in the damp privacy of a friendly darknesscreated by feeling and sensation. In printo abstractand to contractneed no more be in ciple, the powers of consciousness conflict than day and night. But day and night form a rhythm within the continuum of time. If the abstraction and contractionof consciousnesswere merely temporarysuspensionsof the narrativequality of experience there would be no crisis. But the modern world has seen these two strategiesplayed off ever more violently against one another. One could show how the reification of mind and body has killed modernmetaphysicsby leading it into arid controversies among dualistic, materialistic,and idealistic theories. But this comparativelyharmless is only a symptomof the modern wrangle among post-Cartesian metaphysicians

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bifurcationof experience. Its more sinister expression is practical: the entrapment of educatedsubcultures in their own abstractconstructions, and the violent reaction against this entrapment,a reaction that takes the form of an equally encapsulatingconstrictionof experience into those warm, dark,humid immediacies. One thinks of Faust in his study where everythingis so dry that a spark would produce an explosion, and then Faust slavering and mucking about on the brocken. Against the inhumanlydry and abstracthabitationsof the spirit that have been erectedby technologicalreason,the cry goes up, born of desperation, to drop out and sink into the warm stream of immediacy. Within the have been especially violent in the university the reaction and counterreaction humanities. And that is ironical. For the material with which the humanities have traditionallydealt is predominantlynarrative. There have been deep conflicts among different kinds of stories and divergent interpretations.Still, the humanities have kept the story alive in the university; and it is precisely the story, with its underlying musicality, that provides generality and immediacy their humanlyfruitful functions. So long as the story retains its primaryhold on the imagination,the play of immediacyand the illuminating power of abstraction remain in productivetension. But when immediacyand abstractgeneralityare wrenched out of the story altogether, drained of all musicality, the result is somethingI can only call, with strict theologicalprecision,demonic. Experience becomes demonicallypossessedby its own abstractingand contractingpossibilities, turnedalien and hostile to experienceitself. When the humanitiesgive up the story, they become alternatelyseized by desiccatedabstractionsand scatological immediacies,the light of the mind becoming a blinding and withering glare, the friendly darknessdeepening into the chaotic night of nililism. Ethical authority,which is always a function of a common narrativecoherenceof life, is overthrownby a naked show of force exercisedeither in the name of reason or in the name of glandularvitality. Contraryto the cynical theory that violent force is the secret basis of authority,it is in fact always the sign that authority has dissolved. So much for modernity.Now one speaks,perhapswistfully,of the emergence of a "post-modern" sensibility. This new sensibilityis sometimescalled "revolubut is still obscure tionary,"a term that sounds less empty than "post-modern," enough. Certainly it is often discussed in terms of the same dualisms and wearisome strategies of abstraction and contraction that have plagued the "modern" that would consist in extending period. Some envision a "revolution" the control of abstract,technologicalreason to the whole life of society; maximum manipulationjustified on the high moral ground that it would improve behavior-down to the least flicker of an eyelash. Others appearto hope for a society perpetually turned on and flowing with animal juices. The utopia schemed in the crystal palace, or that plotted in the cellar of the underground man: the lure of either of these utopias or any all-purposecombinationof them

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can lead one to nothing more than a variation on an all too familiar refrain. Neither appearsto catch the cadencesof the new song that I think is struggling to be heardwhen people speak seriouslyof revolution. I think that "revolution" is the name that a post-modernconsciousnessgives to a new sacredstory. I realize that if this essay has ever strayedinto the sphere of sober theory, it has with this suggestion abandonedit altogetherin favor of testimony. But if we reallyare talking about a sacredstory,what can we do but testify? Certainlythe sacredstory to which we give this name cannotbe directly told. But its resonancescan be felt in many of the stories that are being told, in songs being sung, in a renewed resolution to act. The stories being told do not necessarily speak of gods in any traditionalsense,yet there seem to be living continuities in this unutterablestory with some of the sacredstories of the past. Certainly,too, revolution is more than the name for an idea or a program, though it is giving rise to many ideas and programs,some no doubt half-baked and quixotic-anything radicallyseriousseems to gathera penumbraof lunacybut also some that actively express the most intense needs of our times.15 This revolutionarystory has united the angry children of poverty and the alienated childrenof abundancein a common moral passion and a common sense of the meaning of their experience. Among those for whom the story is alive there is a revival of ethical authority otherwise almost effaced in our society. For it establisheson a new basis the coherencyof social and personaltime. It makes it possible to recovera living past, to believe again in the future,to performacts that have significancefor the person who acts. By so doing it restoresa human form of experience.
' Thereare also, of course,theoriesof revolutionitself. For a dialectical theoryis that most important theories of revolution are dialectical. For a dialectical theory is that form of generalitythat preserves in itself the vital pulse of temporalmovement. A dialectical theoryof revolutionis not an alternativeto a story of revolution,but is its exegesis.