Ricoeur’s is a decidedly uncorporea

Ricoeur’s is a decidedly uncorporeal theory of plot and human time, andwe can see his approach to narrative as an attempt to describe distention without reference to the bodies that we have emphasized in the first part of this chapter. In doing so, Ricoeur exemplifies what we can call the sublimation of the body within modern ways of thinking about plot. As Ricoeur suggests, what makes the distention of the soul the center of a theory of time is precisely Augustine’s attempt to escape from external regulation (the movement of the planets, e.g.) as the definition of time. Augustine attempts, in other words, to move out of the world and into the mind as the basis of what has seemed to others before him to be either a cosmological or a material issue. In focusing on the mind, Augustine locates narrative in the perception of several “nows.” This mental model of narrative departs rather explicitly from the chronological one described by White. Temporality here is more complex, as will be the body’s role in organizing the relation between unifying whole and a resistant part.