J. T. Fraser and the Temporal Texture of Narrative, an Intersection of Disciplines

This paper tracks the intersection of three disciplinary areas: J. T. Fraser's theory of time as nested temporalities, M. A. K. Halliday's systemic functional linguistics, and English literary history. Narrative theorists claim that narrative is a use of language that organizes the human understanding of time. However, narrative is not limited to only one temporality but can include the multiple temporalities that appear in Fraser's model. This approach repudiates studies of narrative, such as those in the structural-ist tradition of dual discourse and story, which assume "time" has a singular meaning equivalent to Fraser's "biotemporality." Each temporality can be associated with a dif-ferent type of coherent story, and thus the one narrative can weave together stories with different temporalities, its "temporal texture." Fraser and Halliday both recognize Gerald Edelman's dual model of the brain and the emergence of language through the evolution of the human brain from "primary consciousness" to "higher-order conscious-ness." Language evolves in the "human umwelt" of everyday experience of material, mental and social worlds in the gravitational context of this earth. Thus pre-twentieth century narratives, with various textures, tell stories of Fraser's temporalities of human earthly experience. Fraser's model also describes the "unearthly temporalities" that, from the twentieth century, modern science and technology have added to human understanding, producing what he calls the "extended human umwelt." The twentieth century narratives of modernism and postmodernism may include these temporali-ties in their texture. However, the digital culture of the twenty-first century already reshapes the human umwelt; the paper ends with some speculation on changes in organization of temporal meaning in the evolving context.