“Time and Narrative” of Paul Ricoeur and the Russian Humanitarian Tradition

Abstract

In the text, which is a fragment of the book “The Apology of Culture. Three Reading of Paul Ricoeur” the author compares Ricoeur’s poetics with poetics of Bakhtin, mainly from the standpoint of relation between Ricoeur’s theory of “three mimesis” and Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope”. By the opinion of the majority of researchers who consider this problem, the concept of the chronotope, which combines the spatial and temporal organization of a literary work, in the methodological sense, is richer than the concept of mimesis, which deals almost exclusively with the temporal aspect – both of the literary work and the reality itself. Ricoeur believes that the emphasis on” polyphony”, polyphony of voices in the works of Bakhtin, which stems from the predominant attention to the spatial organization of a literary work, can destroy it as an integrity of the plot and to turn the story, which, according to Ricoeur, ultimately is any literary work, in a picture, where everything happens “simultaneously”. Moreover, Bakhtin’s key concept of “dialogue” is in the nearest accordance with the key concept of “event” in the whole philosophy of the narrative of Ricoeur, playing the role of the key moment of the narrative, “transforming” the characters and changing the course of action, i.e. making up the essence of the plot intrigue, in Ricoeur’s interpretation. In addition, the poetics of Bakhtin and Ricoeur are united by the importance attached by both authors to a dialogue of a different kind: between the author and the reader (Ricoeur and Bakhtin devote a significant place to this dialogue in their works). But all these similarities only emphasize significant differences in the interpretation of the literary work by Bakhtin and Ricoeur, which allow us to speak not so much about the comparison, but about the complementarity of both poetics.