Narrative Temporality

Narrative Temporality, as coined in Kornbluh's reading of Great Expectations, designates the specific temporal architecture of a fictional text insofar as that architecture carries ideological and psychic consequences that exceed purely formal description. In Kornbluh's argument, narrative temporality is not simply the sequence of events in a story but the structural relationship between the time of the narrating (enunciation) and the time of the narrated (story)—and crucially, the political and libidinal economy that relationship enforces or subverts. When Great Expectations deploys a "total analepsis"—a retrospective, first-person narration that never returns to anchor itself in a stable present of enunciation—it dismantles the teleological arrow of time on which both conventional narrative closure (redemption, reconciliation, the Bildungsroman's telos) and speculative finance (the futures contract, the proleptic logic of the Stock Exchange) depend. Narrative temporality thus becomes the site where novelistic form, psychic economy, and financial speculation converge or collide.

The concept further implies that narrative time is not neutral but productive: it generates or forecloses particular subject-positions and affective dispositions. By voiding "the very chronos of speculative expectation," Dickens's analeptic structure simultaneously refuses the prospective logic of capital (which monetizes the future as calculable return) and the consolatory retrospection of Victorian moralism (which redeems the past through the present). The "curiously disjointed temporality" is thereby theorized not as a flaw but as a formal symptom—in the Lacanian sense—of the irreconcilable tensions between psychic economy (surplus discharge, affective equilibrium) and financial economy (accumulation, expectation, deferral).

This concept appears exclusively in kornbluh-anna-realizing-capital-financial-and-psychic-economies-in-victorian-for (p. 54), where it serves as the pivot between Kornbluh's literary-formal analysis and her broader argument about the homology between Victorian psychic economy and capitalist financial logic. It is positioned as an extension and re-application of several Lacanian and Freudian canonical concepts. Displacement and metonymy are its most immediate structural analogues: just as metonymy names desire's endless lateral slide along the signifying chain (never arriving at a satisfying present), the analeptic narrative temporality of Great Expectations refuses any anchoring "now," enacting the same structural deferral at the level of novelistic form. The "void" at the site of enunciation mirrors the constitutive lack that keeps desire metonymically in motion, and the analepsis that "contravenes prolepsis" performs, on the axis of time, the same operation that displacement performs on the axis of psychic intensity—relocating the charge away from a threatening or impossible site.

Narrative temporality is also implicitly in dialogue with the concepts of Symptom and Psychic Economy cross-referenced on this page. The "disjointed temporality" functions as a textual symptom—an overdetermined formal choice that speaks the novel's contradictions without resolving them—while the Victorian theory of psychic economy (surplus discharge, affective counteraction) provides the novel's own internal rationale for why narrative production takes the shape it does. Condensation is likewise operative: the analeptic structure gathers multiple irreconcilable temporalities (the moralistic past, the speculative future, the psychic present of writing) into a single formal knot. Narrative temporality as a concept thus sits at the intersection of Lacanian structural analysis, Freudian economic metapsychology, and Victorian literary form, functioning neither as a purely rhetorical category nor as a purely economic one, but as the formal mediator between the two.

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian FormAnna Kornbluh · 2014 (p.54)

the novel's curiously disjointed temporality... the analepsis of Great Expectations contravenes the prolepsis of the Stock Exchange; the refusal of any definite time of enunciation... voids the very chronos of speculative expectation.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it pairs two opposed temporal figures—"analepsis" (retrospection) and "prolepsis" (anticipation/the futures-oriented logic of the Stock Exchange)—placing literary form in structural antagonism to financial form, and then names their battlefield as "chronos": not mere clock-time but the ordered, purposive temporality that makes both narrative closure and speculative return possible. The phrase "voids the very chronos" signals that the novel's formal refusal is not incidental but a constitutive negation, evacuating the temporal ground on which both capitalist expectation and conventional narrative redemption depend.