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

consciousness mediates between the sacred and the mundane, but how the form of
human experiencing is narrative. For Crites, “The stories give qualitative substance to
the form of experience because it is itself an incipient story” (Crites 1971, 297). Indeed
Crites demonstrates that the primary ways and forms of experience are narrative.
Because we are temporal beings, time can be understood as the way we reconcile in the
present the tensed modalities of the past, present and future. This distinction between
the past, present and future lends itself to a tension in human life, so that experience is
always unfolding. We may recollect the past in a variety of ways, but the successive
nature of temporality means that ‘forms’, like consciousness, are taken up and
understood by us in temporal ways. This is what provides the dramatic tension in
human life. For Crites, the mundane and sacred stories are necessary for the expression
of the tensed modalities of time, and their own sense of meaning and coherence. One can
see how personal identity depends on a continuity of experience through time, and what
underscores this is the fact that, “Narrative alone can contain the full temporality of
experience in a unity of form” (Crites 1971, 303). The narrative quality of experience
thus grips the conscious present in a moment of existential predicament between a past
remembered and a future anticipated, but still undetermined. Crites draws our attention
to this critical modality, which “[…] gives the story a dramatic character as a whole. And
since action and experience join precisely at this decisive and critical juncture in the
drama, the whole drama vibrates with the musicality of personal style” (Crites 1971,
303).
Although the narrative is a cultural form that expresses, reflects and encapsulates our
existence as temporal creatures, Crites warns that the (post)modern condition is a new
form of consciousness, trying to break the sense of narrative time. He cites abstraction
and contraction as two examples of strategies that are intended to arrest experience,
giving it a new atemporal coherence. The abstraction Crites talks about reminds one of
the Frankfurt School critique of instrumental rationality and the technocrats’ use of
population statistics. Contraction, on the other hand, seeks “[…] the particular image
isolated from the image stream, to isolated sensation, feeling. The flash of the
overpowering moment in which the temporal context of that moment is eclipsed and
past and future are deliberatively blocked out of consciousness” (Crites 1971, 309).
These (post)modern strategies announce an alienation from the narrative form.
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