Page - 174 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

Confessions, engaged in “emplotment”, or the synthesis of heterogeneous and seemingly discordant elements, incidents, and events into a concordant unity.13 Augustine’s transformation from pagan sinner to Christian convert coincides with the operation to gather the disparate factors of his life into a totality – a story, in other words. The story Augustine tells, Ricoeur says, presents time as characterized by integration, culmination, and closure: integration because, as I have just noted, narrative blends elements and events whose connection may seem accidental or arbitrary into a unified whole; culmination because time, at the conclusion of a given narrative, is revealed to possess meaning and ultimacy in retrospect; and closure in that time is understood to have passed and flowed away, having left an indelible mark on the present. The politics of the narrated story serve to either justify the way things are or point toward some concrete direction the future should take as a result of things having happened the way they have. For Augustine, more often than not the discordance of the past ne- cessitates the concordance that institutions like government and the church bring to bear on human history. As staples of social organization, these institu- tions mitigate the most consequential effects of human sin, so thus promote unity now and in the future. The Emersonian tradition I have been contrasting with that of Augustinian- ism takes a different approach to constructing meaning, at least inasmuch as the Emersonian artistic heritage is taken up in American filmmaking. Narrative is an exclusionary device – “plots”, as Don DeLillo has said, “reduce the world”.14 To emplot a story is to construct an intelligible whole from the innumerable fac- ets of history, highlighting certain elements, incidents, and events and diminish- ing the significance of whatever else. Most films, and nearly all films produced by Hollywood since the middle of the last century, operate in this fashion, em- ploying narrative to make and structure meaning. It is not that Emersonianism jettisons narrative entirely, just that it emplots story in a different way. For Em- erson, time is not the stage upon which story is configured from chronological succession but is rather a series of incidents with no discernible organization. As such, time is open and indefinite. Time, as the avowed Emersonian Henry David Thoreau put it in Walden, “is but the stream I go a-fishing in”.15 With this alternative conception of time, the Emersonian tradition is much less concerned with constructing linear narratives so as to identify meaning in history than with plumbing the possibilities inherent in the present. “With the past I have nothing to do; nor with the future”, Emerson wrote in his journal – “I 13 Ricoeur 1990. 14 DeLillo 2001. 15 Thoreau 2008, 70. 174 | Russell C. Powell www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 167–185