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Modern Fiction and Human Time: A Study in Narrative and Belief
By Wesley A. Kort
Gainesville, University of South Florida Press, 1986. 227 pp. $20.00.

Wesley Kort, professor of religion at Duke University, reads novels as kerygmatic texts, texts that declare something gracious but not obvious in our world, and invite a decision from the reader. He reads these novels not as entertainment but as ways of dealing with the reality of the age in order to bring readers into a confrontation with truths not assumed by

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the age. The truth at issue is time. The age, in the author's judgment, views time as basically meaningless-without value and without character. Two factors, the world wars and rapid urbanization, have contributed to this sense of the meaninglessness of time. The wars, with their totalitarian violence, shattered time so that it has no character in itself, only what we make happen in it. Urbanization, by thoroughly regulating people, putting them into artificial schedules of clock-measured workdays, convinces us that the only meaning time has comes from our measurement of it.

Against this cultural view that time has no nature of its own but only imposed journalistic and metronomic qualities, Kort sets six novelists who present the view that time has meaning in itself, and in three ways: it is primary in our experience, complex in its qualities, and trustworthy in its effects. Alongside the novelists are placed three philosophers. The novelists and philosophers are arranged in triads-two novelists plus a philosopher-to provide converging approaches to support the conviction that time is meaningful. The novelists create their own view of time, as novelists are free to do. The philosophers discipline their thought to what is actually before us in life. The fictive reality of the novelists is thus tested against the search-for-truth-reality of the philosopher. In each case, they are found to be congruent. The novelists are not making anything up but providing an exposition of what is. They are not

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fantasizing but bringing into visibility what is obscured by the wardisrupted and urban-organized spirit of the age.

Ernest Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence are set alongside Mircea Eliade to show "rhythmic time." These writers recover a sense of sacred time that is embedded in the natural rhythms of life. They return us to our origins out of which we realize our wholeness and are enabled to live in creative newness. Their work counters the exclusive emphasis on "the latest" which puts a premium on novelty and provides an antidote to our obsession with speed that wrenches us out of natural cycles, alienating us from our natural context and from our own selves. They show how the unity and meaning of life are restored by periodic returns to beginnings: "time that is fresh, whole, and meaningful."

Thomas Mann and William Faulkner are placed in company with Alfred North Whitehead to bring out "polyphonic time"-the diverse interactions of time in the present. Against the view that time is random moments, without inner connection, these writers show that time, while various and complex, is characterized by deep unities. Human conflicts and cultural contraries, looked at deeply and long enough, are seen to be intersecting and harmonizing continuities. The movement of time does not fall apart into discord but develops into polyphony.

Virginia Woolf and Herman Hesse are joined with Martin Heidegger to demonstrate "melodic time"-time directed into the future. Like the note of music that anticipates melodic completion by notes yet to come, so time has this element of futurity always in it, pulling us to the region of completion. The future is not a dread blank, but a source of illumination that we await and receive. "I recognize my life as still outstanding. My existence is first of all a going out beyond what I am to what I will or can be, to what may or could happen to me.... I do not understand myself exclusively by what I have been or now am; I understand myself in terms of possibilities that have yet to be realized."

These juxtapositions of novelists with philosophers are hermeneutically accurate, and the presentation of their views of time as antidotes to the negativism of our age is useful. But the book finally disappoints. The subtitle is "A Study in Narrative and Belief." The book is excellent on narrative but disappointing on belief. Belief, for Kort, is not much more than a vague tilt toward meaning, a kind of "wishing upwards." It carries neither content nor commitment. In contrast to the novelists he presents so well, with their sharply etched narrative clarities on time, his treatment of belief is abstract and woolly. He posits the Old Testament wisdom literature as a biblical background for the understanding of time that is reinforced by his novelists and philosophers. This seems a poor choice. The dominant sense of time in both Scripture and the act of belief is surely the eschatological. Kort's study is innocent of any reference to or conversation with anything even marginally eschatological in either Scripture or theology. In a work that is so successful in searching out the meaning of time in these nine modern writers, it is

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disappointing to have the sense of time that infuses Scripture and shapes belief treated so superficially if not outright mistakenly.

Eugene H. Peterson

Christ Our King Presbyterian Church
Bel Air, Maryland