Losing the Plot, Finding Time

Abstract

An Outcast of the Islands and The Rescue share a fictional and historical story world. A fundamental difference emerges against the backdrop of this resemblance. Grounded in a conceptualization of time that originates in antiquity, the first novel is obsessed with measurement and accounting. The Rescue is more neatly squared with modern philosophy and its attempt to conceive a time that preexists numerical evaluation. The two ontologies of time find their narrative expression in two distinct plot designs. The first hinges on action, the second, inaction. Deviating from the conventions of emplotting we find in earlier works, the late novel presents a time of suspension and waiting, a time out of joint. For philosophy and narratology both, such a transition marks an attempt to think outside determinism and court the indeterminate—to think the new.