Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time Review

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(More customer reviews)The thesis of the Book is the title of this Review. I can hardly believe that no one has written a review for this book before this, as it really deserves more notice than it has received. Morson, a leading Slavic scholar has also written on Bakhtin, Dostoevsky and other works on Russian Literature. In this book he uses the expertise of his previous work, and also draws on works by writers as divserse as Cervantes, George Eliot and Stephen Jay Gould, as well as Television and Movies, to try illustrate the complex relationships between literature, philsophy and time, with uneven, yet often fascinating results. I have not read anything this original lately, pertaining in particular to Literature and Time. It somewhow reminds me in tone of Bergson's "Time and Free Will", yet is totally different. There is also, especially in the discussion of the role of the Narrator, a kinship to Umberto Eco, especially: "Six Walks in the fictional Woods". Yet Morson creates his own concepts of which the most fascinating, each receiving a Chapter of their own, are Foreshadowing, Sideshadowing and Backshadowing. It is not always convincing, but when it works it is very good. It incidentally works best when Morson uses examples from Dostoevesky, Tolstoy and Bakhtin. For example, the foreshadowing in "The Idiot" is quite interesting, as is his discussion of the role of the Narrator in "The Demons". The Chapter on "Bakhtin's Indeterminism" may be one of the most original Bakhtin interpretations I have read to date. The main thesis of the Book, on the openness of time, comes appropriately form Bakhtin's: "Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics". - Read the Book.

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In this important and controversial book, one of our leading literary theorists presents a major philosophical statement about the meaning of literature and the shape of literary texts. Drawing on works by the Russian writers Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, by other writers as diverse as Sophocles, Cervantes, and George Eliot, by thinkers as varied as William James, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stephen Jay Gould, and from philosophy, the Bible, television, and much more, Gary Saul Morson examines the relation of time to narrative form and to an ethical dimension of the literary experience.Morson asserts that the way we think about the world and narrate events is often in contradiction to the truly eventful and open nature of daily life. Literature, history, and the sciences frequently present experience as if contingency, chance, and the possibility of diverse futures were all illusory. As a result, people draw conclusions or accept ideologies without sufficiently examining their consequences or alternatives. However, says Morson, there is another way to read and construct texts. He explains that most narratives are developed through foreshadowing and "backshadowing" (foreshadowing ascribed after the fact), which tend to reduce the multiplicity of possibilities in each moment. But other literary works try to convey temporal openness through a device he calls "sideshadowing." Sideshadowing suggests that to understand an event is to grasp what else might have happened. Time is not a line but a shifting set of fields of possibility. Morson argues that this view of time and narrative encourages intellectual pluralism, helps to liberate us from the false certainties of dogmatism, creates a healthy skepticism of present orthodoxies, and makes us aware that there are moral choices available to us.

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