Catholicism and Narrative Time

Abstract

Chapter 3 opens the examination of the trope of temporal disjuncture, which will continue in chapter four. It argues that Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata and Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale manipulate past and present modalities (respectively), to contradict the Enlightenment principle that history moves forward progressively and linearly. However, where most scholarship on these novels links temporal disjuncture to non-Western conceptions of time, this chapter suggests that their alternative temporalities reveal a strange and often disconcerting faithfulness to the theology of time that Augustine of Hippo laid out in some of his most canonical works. Since Augustinian theology has had such formative, lasting consequences for Western Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, the argument uncovers a tension in these novels, both of which very plainly reject Western conceptions of chronological progress. Yet such theological contradictions constitute the revisionary historiographic aims of the genre and establish its importance to our understanding of African American literarature.