Philip Y. Kao PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

organisation of a CCRC for example, we see that they are treated not as persons in time,
but as sites of caregiving where persons wage war against time. Even though time and
space are inextricably bound, Tacoma Pastures manufactures the idea that its separate
spaces, however convenient for the organisation of work for the caregivers as a whole,
are a ‘natural’ function of ageing. Plenty of people grow old and die requiring this kind of
caregiving scheme.
Stephen Crites’s article entitled The Narrative Quality of Experience offers another useful
phenomenological understanding of time. Crites argues that, “the formal quality of
experience through time is inherently narrative” (Crites 1971, 292). In order to set up
his argument, Crites suggests that action is altogether temporal, and that human action,
which is subject to being experienced and produced by a conscious agent, has a unity of
form through time. Like the specious present, which can encapsulate the duration of a
sentence beyond the mere succession of separate words, walking across the room, and
gesturing towards an approaching grandchild is for Crites the unity of form through time
that can be appropriately called style. Crites goes on to say that, “If style is the form of
conscious movement, music is that form purified” (Crites 1971, 293). By treating style in
this way, with its inherent musicality, Crites then offers the following relation:
“Narrative quality is to experience as musical style is to action” (Crites 1971, 292).
Seeing narrative as a cultural form capable of generating experience and meaning, and
expressing a phenomenological coherence through time, Crites argues for the primacy of
the narrative structure in everyday personal and social life. Without getting too side
tracked into a discussion of his ideas of mundane and sacred stories, it is worth noting
that stories are not simply arbitrary or whimsical fictions. The narrative forms
themselves are fundamental to the way humans inhabit time. The sacred story forms our
consciousness, and “[…] projects a total world horizon, and therefore informs the
intentions by which actions are projected into that world” (Crites 1971, 296). Mundane
stories interact and read into sacred stories, because after all, we live in this world and
not another.
Crites introduces another dimension to the drama and asserts that, “Between sacred
story and the mundane stories there is a mediating form: the form of the experiencing
consciousness itself” (Crites 1971, 297). Whether or not one accepts Crites’s version of
consciousness, it does seem that what we are working with is not just how
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