ABSTRACT
Ricoeur’s monumental meditation upon time and narrative ends where Proust’s even more monumental novel begins: with the word ‘recherche’.1 It is the keyword of Proust’s title, A la recherche du temps perdu, and the keyword of Ricoeur’s penultimate sentence in Temps et récit. There it opens up new perspectives at the very moment when-given the title of the last of Ricoeur’s three volumes, Le Temps raconté-we had expected completion. The title of Proust’s last volume, Le Temps retrouvé, suggests, too, the conclusion of his hero’s search. But both titles have in common a deceptive simplicity and a deceptive conclusiveness. Their simplicity is deceptive because both are ambiguous (and therefore untranslatable). Is Le Temps raconté time narrated (whether fictionally or historically), time recounted, or time told? Does the noun designate a single, specific time or the plurality implicit in a collective singular? Is Le Temps retrouvé to be understood as time, once lost or wasted, now recovered, or does it imply the loss of the intuition of eternity with the reinstatement of time? Each title is deceptively conclusive because both volumes imply the absence of any transcendent vantage-point from which time could be definitively told. Ricoeur’s search implies, but does not yet take, a step beyond the limits of narrative; Proust’s novel ends, when his hero Marcel has reached the limits of his provisional narrative, with the tentative promise, in the conditional tense, of a future work.2 Further, Ricoeur’s inconclusiveness depends in large measure on his having taken Proust’s as a test-case: Proust the novelist falsifies the philosopher’s hypothesis, stimulating a new search and new hypotheses. But Proust, whether knowingly or not, falsifies his own. He does so not simply and explicitly in the linear movement of the narrative, in which reinstated time follows the
hero’s intuitions of the extra-temporal. He does so (or time-‘l’Artiste, le temps’—does so) at the very moment when those intuitions seem to confirm the hypothesis that time can be transcended. I propose to consider those moments of selfsubverting confirmation in relation to the hypotheses both of Proust (or of his hero-narrator), and of Ricoeur.
