Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: What Lies Ahead
- PART I Surprise and the Theory of Narrative
- PART II The Unpredictable and the Future Anterior
- 3 Prediction and the Age of the Unknowable
- 4 What Will Have Happened: Writing and the Future Perfect
- 5 The Untimely and the Messianic
- PART III Time Flow and the Process of Reading
- PART IV The Unforeseeable in Fictional Form
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - What Will Have Happened: Writing and the Future Perfect
from PART II - The Unpredictable and the Future Anterior
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: What Lies Ahead
- PART I Surprise and the Theory of Narrative
- PART II The Unpredictable and the Future Anterior
- 3 Prediction and the Age of the Unknowable
- 4 What Will Have Happened: Writing and the Future Perfect
- 5 The Untimely and the Messianic
- PART III Time Flow and the Process of Reading
- PART IV The Unforeseeable in Fictional Form
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘I cannot predict what is going to happen’, Bergson says, ‘but I foresee that I am going to have known it.’ This empty foresight offers a grammatical form, the future perfect, which links together the structure of an existential moment, the engagement with a fictional plot, and contemporary epochal self-consciousness. In 1977, Robert Champigny published a philosophical study of mystery stories titled What Will Have Happened, a tense form that creates a conjunction between a prospective present and the retrospective future. Speaking of the investigative sequence of a mystery story or detective fiction, what makes aesthetic sense for Champigny ‘is that an investigative sequence can turn the opposition between narrative questions and answers into a tighter tension or complementarity between narrative progression and retrogression’:
This is implied in the phrase ‘what will have happened’. Otherwise, the interplay between prospective and retrospective outlooks, predetermination and postdetermination would concern the reading process only.
(Champigny 1977, 59)This is an intriguing claim, partly because it seems to want to locate the interplay between narrative progression and retrogression not only in the temporality of a reading, but in the investigation itself: the structure of what will have happened is not only the structure of general future orientation, in reading or in life, but a particular kind of narrative – the investigative sequence – capable of binding prospect and retrospect together in an unusual complementarity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The UnexpectedNarrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise, pp. 67 - 77Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013