"The interpretation I am proposing here of the 'quasi-historical' character of fiction quite clearly overlaps with the interpretation I also proposed of the 'quasi-fictive' character of the historical past. If it is true that one of the functions of fiction bound up with history is to free, retrospectively, certain possibilities that were not actualized in the historical past, it is owing to its quasi-historical character that fiction itself is able, after the fact, to perform its liberating function. The quasi-past of fiction in this way becomes the detector of possibilities buried in the actual past. What 'might have been'—the possible in Aristotle's terms—includes both the potentialities of the 'real'past and the 'unreal' possibilities of pure fiction.

This deep affinity between verisimilitude of pure fiction and the unrealized possibilities of the historical past explains perhaps, in turn, why fiction's freedom in relation to the constraints of history—constraints epitomized by documentary proof —does not constitute, as was stated above, the final word about the freedom of fiction. Free from the external constraint of documentary proof, is not fiction internally bound by its obligation to its quasi-past, which is another name for the constraint of verisimilitude? Free from…, artists must still render themselves free for…. If this were not the case, how could we explain the anguish and the suffering of artistic creation? Does not the quasi-past of the narrative voice exercise an internal constraint on novelistic creation, which is all the more imperious in that it does not coincide with the external constraint of documentary facts? And does not the difficult law of creation, which is to 'render' in the most perfect way the vision of the world that animates the narrative voice, simulate, to the point of being indistinguishable from it, history's debt to the people of the past, to the dead? Debt for debt, who, the historian or the novelist, is the most insolvent?" (Ricoeur 1990:191-192).

Ricoeur, Paul
1990[1985] Time and Narrative: Volume 3. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, trans. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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“This congruence between the representation of time in terms of points and intervals and physical movement gives the instant its rightful place, making it the equal to the living present, with its zones of imminence and recentness. We are thus obliged to leave face-to-face an unrepresented time, one that can only be intended obliquely through the shadings of approximating metaphors, and a time represented by points and lines. The first is lived as centered-decentered around the living present, which, we have said, is a passage as much as an origin; the second is represented as a series of ‘nows.’ The first we call phenomenological time, the second cosmological time. We use these terms inasmuch as the former is reached reflectively, the latter objectively. The time of the soul, if we may still venture to name it so, against the time of the world. The fact that this split cannot be overcome speculatively is confirmed in the following way: we have omitted to say that the experience of the present as a transit, a passage, is an experience of passivity that delivers us over to the force of circumstances, as we feel this in boredom, aging…. And we cannot help representing this force of circumstances to ourselves as the external course of time, punctuated by light and shadows, by day and night, by seasons and years. This is the time with which we must reckon and which is used in our reckoning. It is the time of reading the hour, of telling time. Finally, it is the time of memento mori. In this way, physical time, represented by the line with its points and intervals, makes its mark on the time of the living present in every experience of passivity: it is represented by the present as incidence, pure event, blossoming forth, surprise, sting, disappointment. Not content to bear the scar of the time of the world, in its moment of incidence the living present allows itself to be represented only through the line of presents. This is what we do every day when we represent any past moment to ourselves as a quasi present, with its retentions and protentions. Now it is along the line of instants that we stitch, so to speak, all these quasi presents with their overlapping horizons of past and future that reconstitute the unity of the flux. This unity, however, is conceivable only through the mediation of linear time, along which the instant is but a point. Inversely, physical time is never conceivable by itself, inasmuch as the representation we form of it supposes a soul that distinguishes the instants and counts the intervals, an understanding that performs a synthesis of these, observing coincidences, noting regular sequences, and ordering series. In these many ways the time of the world refers to a lived time, which nevertheless itself can be represented only by being objectified in the former.

Let us therefore take this polarity between the living present, with its retentions and protentions, and the instant, born of the pointlike interruption of motion, to be speculatively insurmountable. If one of the perspectives refers to the other, they can be neither reduced one to the other nor added onto one another to make a global whole; to place oneself in one of these perspectives is to obliterate the other. In this sense, the phenomenology of time has the effect of revealing its own limits, discovering through its own analyses the instant as the other of the present. There are therefore two meanings of the now: the now of the living present, whose occurrence is dialectically related to the imminence of the proximate future and the recentness of the receding past, and the anonymous now, produced by any break in the continuity of change” (Ricoeur 1991:211-212).

Ricoeur, Paul
1991[1986] From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson, trans. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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