What does a classic American novel of the 1920s have to do with a Jamaican cult fi lm of the 1970s? I offer the last page of Gatsby as a vivid exemplifi cation of a particular structure of temporal experience, a structure that I argue is also reproduced in The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell, 1972). This structure can be rendered in terms of the theory of time put forward by the Roman African philosopher Augustine in book 11 of The Confessions and examined at length in the fi rst volume of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative.1 In this model, human intentionality (intentio) is always focused simultaneously in three distinct ways and directions: in expectation toward the future, in attention toward the present, and in memory toward the past. Ricoeur’s analysis shows how this intentional activity necessarily causes the soul or mind to experience an affective distention (distentio animi) as it is torn between the passive openness or receptivity that characterizes its engagements with the past and future, and the active closing down through which the attention engages the present. In addition to this tension between activity and passivity, Ricoeur notes that the soul also suffers (registers as felt emotion) the necessary noncoincidence of past and future.2 In his model, time as the mode of human subjectivity has narratives for its primary object, that is, the causal orderings into events through which we thematize and make sense of experience.3 In this theoretical perspective the most basic sense of Fitzgerald’s “boats against the current” metaphor is the tragic-poignant noncoincidence of the stories we tell ourselves as individuals and the more powerful stories told by life, history, or fate.
