The argument about the relationship between time and narrative is now coming into focus. It begins in the Kantian notion that we have no access to things in themselves, but only, as phenomenology holds, to things as they are experienced, apprehended in consciousness, thought about, or understood. But the concept of consciousness cannot be taken for granted. Philosophy in general, both in the phenomenological and in the Anglo-American analytical traditions, has turned to language in order to investigate the realms of experience, perception, thought and understanding. If consciousness is fundamentally linguistic, it follows that we ought to be able to study what we think of as phenomena, or the only reality to which we have access, through linguistic forms. There are philosophers and linguists who have taken this approach to the relationship between linguistic forms and metaphysics: that some understanding of reality can be reached through the analysis of linguistic forms, and even that some understanding of what time is can be reached through an analysis of temporal reference in language, and particularly through the understanding of tense. What has not really been done is to apply this argument specifically to narrative, and therefore to move not only between linguistics and metaphysics, but to infer from the tense structure of narrative a metaphysics of time.

Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends and after-life. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no longer resistant to Theory but a significant consensus has been established and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves so-called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures of autocritique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a more-than-critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which thinks thought's own limits?

‘Theory’ is a name that traps by an aberrant nomial effect the transformative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a ‘name’, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprises such thinking. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it-is-necessary of Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds).

My title both chastises me for the tardiness and congratulates me for the timeliness of my book. In 1989, David Wood predicted that ‘our centurylong “linguistic turn” will be followed by a spiralling return to time as the focus and horizon of all our thought and experience’ (David Wood 2001: xxxv), and it is about time that this prediction about time came true. The need as I see it is partly as Wood described it: the need for a ‘programme for the analysis of temporal structures and representations of time’ (xxxvi). Alongside such a programme, there is also a need for a theoretical account of time which might rescue the analysis of temporal structures from some of the vagueness of new historicism, cultural history, Derridean hauntology, the uncanny and the cultural theory of postmodernism. It is particularly in relation to fiction, to the strange temporal structures that have developed in the novel in recent decades, that a clear framework for the analysis of time seems necessary. But there is also a need to revisit the relation of fiction and philosophy because of these strange temporal structures, to ask what domain of understanding or knowledge might be occupied by the contemporary novel on the subject of time, or what effects these structures might exert in the world.

The word about has turned out to have a resonance for my topic that I didn't fully anticipate. If primarily it means ‘on the subject of’, it carries within it a set of general problems about the content of language and, for my purposes, a specific question about fiction: what does it mean to say that a fictional narrative is ‘on the subject of’ time? Many who have written on this topic have chosen to focus on novels which are manifestly, perhaps intentionally, about time.

In March of 1807 Thomas Jefferson wrote to the comte de Diodati-Tronchin, an old friend from his days among the diplomats at Versailles. Reminiscing about ‘the many happy hours’ he had spent with the comte and Madame Diodati on the banks of the Seine, Jefferson recalled, ‘those were indeed days of tranquility & happiness’. Jefferson then shifted his focus from personal matters to the geopolitical situation. Writing from the comfort of his home at Monticello, he drew an unfavorable contrast between the tumult to be seen in Napoleonic Europe and the supposed tranquility of Jeffersonian America.

Jefferson boasted of the peace enjoyed by the United States when he was halfway through his difficult second presidential term. As he wrote to Diodati his former vice president, Aaron Burr, was awaiting trial in Richmond, Virginia on charges of treason for allegedly attempting to detach the western states from the American union. American commerce was beset by trade restrictions imposed by France and Britain. Within two months the British warship Leopard would fire on the USS Chesapeake, threatening to start a war between Britain and the United States. Given such turmoil, how could Jefferson justify his optimistic view of recent American history?

Thomas Jefferson died at Monticello on 4 July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. In the months before his death, Jefferson prepared for the posthumous struggle over his place in history. As we have seen, he filed and organized his papers, which he left to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, anticipating their future publication. He also designed his tombstone. He left specific instructions that his grave should be marked by a six-foot obelisk set atop a three foot square cube, of ‘coarse stone’. Jefferson composed a simple epitaph that he wanted inscribed on the monument, ‘& not a word more’. It read:

Jefferson explained that he had chosen these three actions from his myriad accomplishments ‘because by these, as testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered’. He sketched the monument and wrote out his instructions and folded the paper with a copy of the epitaph he had composed for his wife, Martha, when she had died forty-four years earlier, in 1782. The instructions were discovered among his papers after his death and the tombstone was erected according to Jefferson's wishes.

During his retirement Thomas Jefferson was increasingly preoccupied with the history of the American Revolution and its aftermath. As the years passed and the number of men and women who had lived through the struggle for independence dwindled, Jefferson despaired of preserving the history of the Revolution. In 1815 he wrote to John Adams, ‘On the subject of the history of the American Revolution, you ask who shall write it? Who can write it? And who will ever be able to write it? Nobody; except merely its external facts.’ This was because ‘all it's councils, designs and discussions, having been conducted by Congress with closed doors, and no member, as far as I know, having made notes of them, these which are the soul and life of history must forever be unknown’. A true history of the Revolution would have to be written by a participant or someone with a close knowledge of the major events and people.

For Jefferson, the question of who would write the history of the American Revolution was of more than academic interest. In his mind the fate of the American experiment with republican government was closely linked with the history of its birth. The whiggish interpretation of British history to which Jefferson subscribed taught him that the forces of tyranny constantly sought to subvert liberty. If, as Jefferson believed, David Hume's Tory History of England threatened liberty in Britain, what might happen if the Federalists, whom Jefferson often derided as American Tories, wrote the history of the American Revolution? They would appropriate and pervert its legacy and threaten its achievements. Throughout his retirement Jefferson worried that this was occurring.

Throughout his adult life Thomas Jefferson dispensed academic and educational advice to younger relatives, friends and protégés. For fifty years he based his ideas on a ‘course of reading’ that he had developed during the 1760s after he completed his own studies at William and Mary. Jefferson recommended that students should read across a range of subjects because ‘Variety relieves the mind, as well as the eye, palled with too long attention to a single object.’ According to Jefferson's plan, the period from sunrise until eight o'clock in the morning should be devoted to the study of the natural sciences, ethics and religion. From eight o'clock until noon, students should read law. The hour from noon to one in the afternoon should be given over to politics. ‘In the Afternoon’, Jefferson counseled, ‘Read History’. From sunset until bedtime the followers of this ambitious program could relax with belles-lettres, criticism, rhetoric and oratory. Students who followed Jefferson's program would devote most of their time to two subjects – the law and history.

Jefferson read widely in history throughout his life, believing that it was an essential subject. In his retirement he professed to be disgusted with current affairs and claimed a preference for history.

During the summer of 1809, several months after Thomas Jefferson had left the presidency and retired permanently to Monticello, John W. Campbell, a bookseller and printer from Petersburg, Virginia, wrote to him proposing to publish ‘a complete edition of your different writings, as far as they may be designed for the public; including the “Notes on Virginia”’. Jefferson was not especially encouraging in his reply to Campbell. He wrote that he intended to revise and enlarge his Notes on Virginia before it could be republished. With regard to the large body of official papers he had generated as a congressman, governor, diplomat, secretary of state, vice president and president, he dismissed interest in these, noting, ‘Many of these would be like old newspapers, materials for future historians, but no longer interesting to the readers of the day.’ He concluded:

On 17 February 1826, Thomas Jefferson, who was then eighty-two years old and in declining health, wrote a letter to his old friend and political ally James Madison. He wrote at length about securing funding, qualified faculty and books for the new University of Virginia. He expressed particular concern that he and Madison should be ‘rigorously attentive’ to political principles when appointing the university's law professor. Jefferson felt that legal education in the United States was dominated by conservative counter-revolutionaries imbued with ‘toryism’, as he termed it. The new lawyers, complained Jefferson, ‘no longer know what whigism or republicanism means’. By hiring the right law professor, Jefferson believed, the University of Virginia might initiate a revival of republican principles. ‘It is in our seminary’, he wrote, ‘that the vestal flame is to be kept alive; it is thence it is to spread anew over our own and the sister States. If we are true and vigilant in our trust, within a dozen or twenty years a majority of our legislature will be from one school, and many disciples will have carried its doctrines home with them to their several States, and will have leavened thus the whole mass.’ Jefferson then complained about the crippling debts that threatened his legacy and his scheme for a lottery of his lands to solve the problem and save his home, Monticello.

On 12 April 2001, President George W. Bush welcomed several dozen descendants of Thomas Jefferson to the White House to commemorate the 258th birthday of his predecessor. The gathering included persons descended from Jefferson and his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, as well as those descended from Jefferson and one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. ‘I want to thank all the descendants of Thomas Jefferson who are here,’ declared Bush. The president added, surveying the mixed-race gathering, ‘No wonder America sees itself in Thomas Jefferson.’ In so doing Bush entered into a two-hundred-year-old controversy concerning Jefferson's paternity of Sally Hemings's children. In the autumn of 1802 James Callender, a disgruntled officer-seeker and muckraking journalist with whom Jefferson had dealt in the past, reported in the pages of the Richmond Recorder rumors he had heard in the Charlottesville area about Jefferson and Hemings. The original charges were politically motivated, and Jefferson's Federalist opponents repeated and elaborated upon them throughout the remainder of his presidency. Rumors and allegations about the nature of Jefferson's relationship with Hemings persisted after his death. In 1873 an Ohio newspaper published a memoir of Madison Hemings, Sally Hemings's son and a former Monticello slave. Madison Hemings asserted that he was the son of Thomas Jefferson. Despite Madison Hemings's memoir and circumstantial evidence that lent credence to James Callender's reports, most historians and biographers either ignored or dismissed the claim that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had had a sexual relationship.

It is impossible to study the development of Thomas Jefferson's reputation since World War II without reference to the two institutions that have shaped and continue to dominate our understanding of Jefferson: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Under the direction of Julian P. Boyd and his successors, the Princeton edition of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson has evolved into a sizeable, long-lived and immensely important entity. The Papers, along with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, have been the driving forces behind the study of Jefferson since the mid-twentieth century. While the Papers have transformed Jefferson scholarship, presenting, albeit slowly, definitive texts of all Jefferson and Jefferson-related documents, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns Jefferson's home at Monticello, has been at the forefront of interpreting and presenting Jefferson to the public, while also engaging in and promoting the scholarly study of Jefferson. Either directly or indirectly these two institutions have contributed most to the burgeoning of Jefferson scholarship over the past half-century.

In 2004 and 2005 the United States Mint unveiled four new five-cent coins. Since 1938 the nickel featured a profile of Thomas Jefferson on its front and an image of his home, Monticello, on its reverse side. To mark the bicentenary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Congress authorized the Mint to issue commemorative nickels. In March 2004 the Mint issued new coins that feature the traditional, left-facing profile of Jefferson on their obverse side.

In April 1809, one month into his retirement, Jefferson wrote to his friend and successor in the White House, James Madison, concerning the international situation. Despite wartime restrictions on American trade imposed by the major European belligerents, Britain and France, Jefferson was fairly sanguine about the state of affairs. He felt that the United States was in an especially strong position vis-à-vis Napoleon. Believing that the French emperor depended on American trade, Jefferson wrote:

In 2003 several teachers at the Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Berkeley, California, wrote to the parent-teacher association to propose changing the name of the school. The teachers appealed to the parents because, ‘For some of our staff, it has become increasingly uncomfortable to work at a site whose name honors a slaveholder.’ After a lengthy consultation, the students, staff and parents at the school submitted a petition to the Berkeley school board requesting that the school be renamed Sequoia, after California's giant redwood tree. For proponents of the name change, Jefferson's association with slavery outweighed his various achievements. ‘Thomas Jefferson is revered as the primary author of one of the world's most respected and beloved documents,’ read the petition. ‘Jefferson is also a man who held as many as 150 African and African-American men, women and children in bondage, denying them the very rights which he asserted for all in the Declaration of Independence.’ The petition continued, ‘A school name which fails to acknowledge or respect the depth and importance of their people's collective sorrow is personally offensive … It is time to consider a name which unites us as a community.’

The staff and students at the school strongly favored the name change. ‘It's an awkward position to ask African-American children and African-American teachers to celebrate a historical figure who was a slave owner,’ said teacher Marguerite Talley-Hughes. For Talley-Hughes, Jefferson's ownership of slaves made it difficult to teach children the moral lessons that Jefferson felt should be at the heart of education.