Ricoeur

Journal of Literature & Theology, Vol. j , No.
_j, November 19S0
RICOEUR'S THEORY OF MIMESIS: IMPLICATIONS FOR LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY

Loretta Dornisch
breaks new ground through the insights provided for the narrative process, and through the questions it raises about discourse other than narrative, including theological discourse. It is the aim of this essay to explore Ricoeur's theory of mimesis and then to point the way toward some of the implications for literature and theology.
RJCOEUR'S THEORY OF MIMESIS A THEORY OF MIMESIS
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At the beginning of his career, Ricoeur found Aristotle's Poetics important for his own philosophic development. The foundational questions led to his studies of the will, of human action, and of language, metaphor, and narrative, including the concepts of mimesis and the problems of representation. As he taught in turn each of the major western philosophers, whether he was engaged in a study of Augustine, Kant, Hegel, or Heidegger, he continued the dialectic. At an early point, he chose a poetics as the third part of his project of a Philosophy of the Will. Later in The Symbolism of Evil he found it necessary to graft a hermeneutics on to his developing philosophy of language. Then, as the hermeneutics assumed a central place, his work with symbol moved to a study of metaphor and eventually to a study of time and narrative. Mimesis, then, is not new to Ricoeur's thinking, but in his more recent three volume Time and Narrative,1 it assumes a central place and new dimensions. Although he borrows from Aristotle the concepts of emplotment (muthos) and mimetic activity (mimesis) (TN i, 31-2), Ricoeur does not confine himself to the parameters involved in the primacy of drama and epic in Aristotle's Poetics. On the contrary, Ricoeur's project is to reorganize the whole narrative field (32). In asking the overriding question of how narrative is related to time, Ricoeur raises the problem of an interweaving reference (rkjhence croiste) (32) of fictional and historical narrative which he takes as focus or horizon for his three volume work. In Volume 1, after a detailed examination of mimesis praxeos, muthos, ethics.and poetics, Ricoeur concludes that mimesis must also refer
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to the first side of poetic composition. I call this reference mimesiSj to distinguish it from mimesis2the mimesis of creationwhich remains the pivot point. I hope to show that even in Aristotle's text there are scattered references to this prior side of poetic composition. This is not all. Mimesis ... does not reach its intended term through the dynamism of the poetic text alone. It also requires a spectator or reader. So there is another side of poetic composition as well, which I call mimesis3 (46).
As he develops the idea of this triple mimesis, he sees the relationship between the three mimetic modes as mediation between time and narrative. In other words, there are three stages: that of practical experience, that of the mediating role of emplotment, and that of the process of reading. 'A prefigured time ... becomes a refigured time through the mediation of configured time' (54). What are some of the implications for literature and theology? Within the parameters of this article it is only possible to point some directions. In his own analyses, Ricoeur develops an extensive analysis of narrative and time with examples from literature, especially in Volume 2. His comments on plot, semiotic constraints on narrativity, games with time, and the fictive experience of time not only draw on classic western literature but make special application to three works about time: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Der Zauberberg by Thomas Mann, and A la recherche du temps perdu
by Marcel Proust. Ricoeur raises questions which the literary critic should not ignore. Although Ricoeur makes few references in this three volume work to theological matters, the implications are extensive. Insofar as Christian theology is founded on biblical interpretation, theology is founded on work which is largely narrative. Only recently have authors begun to realize the importance of narrative theory for biblical studies. Many of these, however, proceed from a structuralist methodology or from a literary point of view and, while they contribute much from this perspective, they often lack the larger view, including the referential, which Ricoeur explores. The American theologian, David Tracy, although he has not yet developed extensively the concept of narrative as it may relate to theology, has nevertheless begun the conversation in books such as Blessed Rage for Order
and Plurality and Ambiguity.
MIMESISj
Before there is emplotment, there is human action with its symbolic constructs, communication of meaning, and interpretation within the temporal situation. Basic to such communication is a semantics of action. To imitate is to extract the symbolic structures and then to construct the
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R I C O E U R ' S T H E O R Y OF MIMESIS
signifying action which includes the temporal elements. It is for this reason that action not only can be narrated but, in fact, probably requires narrative. Ricoeur develops each of the three features of structure, symbol, and time. Structurally, action is distinguished from physical movement by the conceptual network which incorporates what a person does within the whole network of meaning. 'Actions imply goals' (55) and include motives, which allow us to distinguish actions from physical events. From actions we can deduce the one who acts, the agent of the work or the deed, and thereby the one responsible for the action. Within time, historical agents interact with physical events in ways that establish the perception of what the agent can or cannot do. To act always involves the other, whether through co-operating, competing, or struggling, helping or hindering, eventuating in happiness or misfortune. If we ask what, who, why, how, with whom, or against whom, we enter into a set of intersignifications which implies practical understanding. How does practical understanding relate to narrative understanding? Ricoeur posits a relationship of presupposition and of transformation. Presupposition includes familiarity with such concepts, for example, as doer, goal, means, co-operation, conflict, success and failure, on the part of both the narrator and the hearer. Minimal narrative appears most simply in a sentence indicating the action of a subject in a particular situation. In fact, all structural narrative depends on this basic positing of doing. Nevertheless, there are syntactic aspects necessary before we recognize that kind of discourse which we call narrative. In addition, by using semiotics we can distinguish paradigmatic from syntagmatic order, the former involving reversible relationships such as agents and circumstances, which are essentially synchronic, while on the other hand, the syntagmatic 'implies the irreducibly diachronic character of every narrated story' (56). Whether we tell the story forwards or backwards, there is an essential diachrony involved. Thus it may be said that in a narrative there is not only integration of the elements but an actualizing of the meaning through the cultural understanding of how kinds of plot develop. In dialogue with Heidegger's analyses in Being and Time, Ricoeur finds that the concept of within-time-ness (Innerzeitigkeit) best characterizes the temporality of action within his phenomenology (61). However, in Ricoeur's view, Heidegger leaves no place for narrative but links history and time in the relationship of historicality. What Ricoeur finds valuable is that the analysis of within-time-ness breaks the simple linear representation of time as equi-distant moments or nows. There is, then, a semantics, a symbolic system, and a temporality from which is created a figure in human action. It is from this network of
LORETTA DORNISCH 3" resources that human beings create a pre-understanding of the world. Literature can then provide a configuration (64). From an understanding of mimesis v what are some of the implications for literature and theology? First, we can say that both literature and theology are predicated on the same pre-understanding of human action. With the help of Ricoeur's general theory of interpretation, we can now see that Literature and theological discourse are indeed discourse with commonalities and differences. The cultural codes, symbolic systems, and received paradigms which underlie a particular example of literature or theology may partake of or differ in regard to the same horizons and world views. Biblical studies which today are profiting so much from structural and rhetorical analyses have yet to develop the larger picture of the preunderstanding of action which is foundational for narrative. For example, while it may be helpful for the American Jesus seminar to determine which words of the 'Our Father' may or may not be attributable to Jesus, this tends to be fragmented and fragmenting in respect to the unfolding of human action which lies behind the overriding narrative of the gospel form. hi what ways is theological discourse narrative? Whether it be The Confessions of Augustine, the discourses of Paul Tillich, or the systematic essays of John Macquarrie, does not each imply a situation of pre-understanding for which the theologian provides a narrative of configuration? Much current literature both reflects the pre-understanding of a particular society and affects that society's constructs, whether the form be the science fiction of a Star Trek variety, the fantasies of a C. S. Lewis, or film in the mode of Apocalypse Now. The classic examples which Ricoeur selects reflect the pre-understanding of the received paradigms of their traditions. In his comments on the interrelationship between clock, time and internal time as narrated in Mrs. Dalloway, Ricoeur describes the narrative, but one can deduce the pre-understanding on which it rides: The day advances, pulled ahead by the arrow of desire and expectation shot off at the beginning of the narrative (this evening's party to be given by Mrs. Dalloway) and pulled back by the incessant retreat into memory that, paradoxically, punctuates the inexorable advance of the dying day (TN 11,
p. 108). MIMESIS 2
There are aspects of literary criticism which ignore any differences between fictional narrative and historical narrative. In his first discussions of narrative configuration or mimesis2, Ricoeur sets aside until later the problem of what he considers referential function, and proceeds with the activity which organizes the events in what is usually referred to as fiction or emplotment.
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Insofar as it integrates the events, mimesis2 provides a mediating function in three ways. The first mediation is between the separate events and the narrative taken as a whole. Narrative changes isolate incidents into a story. But, in the second mediation, simple succession acquires an integrity of relationships of goals, means, results, and other factors in such a way that, as Aristotle says, these factors are incorporated within incidents, reversals, recognitions, and effects to create a concordant discordance. Ricoeur sees this creation as the mediating function of the plot. Although Ricoeur finds the third aspect of mediation implicit in Aristotle, he develops more fully the relationship of the temporal quahties of emplotment. Elements or events which are dissimilar are brought together in ways not unlike the temporal paradoxes which Augustine strove to resolve, and which Ricoeur studies at great length under the aspects of distention and intention. Plot combines two dimensions of time, the one chronological, the other not. Typically the events are chronological, whereas the story configures the events in such a way as to transcend the assumed chronological time, and, in fact, to posit a new meaning for time. It is this latter which is the poetic act. 'To follow a story is to move forward in the midst of contingencies and peripeteia under the guidance of an expectation that finds its fulfilment in the "conclusion" of the story' (66). The paradox is transformed into a dialogue between narrator and listener or reader, as they follow the unfolding of the story. The episodic has its own clues of the temporal: 'then ... then'; 'and then what?' Based on the human and physical events described, there is an irreversible order which is taken for granted. On the other hand, the coniigurational dimension has its own set of time clues. The idea of an ending, the expectations related to the cultural codes, the presumption of certain procedures in assumed genre or founding eventsall create a new tension of time, which supersedes that of the individual events. In terms of the reader, or the act of mimesis3, understanding and intuition interact within the productive imagination to synthesize new meaning. The imaginative acts of both the narrator and the listener or reader are within a tradition which has its own assumptions and expectations, but which nevertheless is involved in the process of sedimentation of its symbols and processes, and which is at the same time engaged in a process of innovation. Such traditions of narrative, whether Hebrew or Christian, Celtic or Slavic, Hindu or Sioux, provide the paradigms, but the production of a new work is poiesis, a new existence. Folktales and myths are presumed to be close to the traditional paradigm, although even here, the creative storyteller
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reworks the traditional. But in the production of a new genre, such as the novel, the paradigm is reworked or even overturned or reversed. What effect does this have on the expectation of discordant concordance? Along with a number of modern critics, Ricoeur raises the question of the reversal or overturning of narrative itself. In human experience, can the narrative form itself die, or is it integral to the human experience? Narrative provides a testcase for asking what the relationship of human being is to the creation of modes of time. Ricoeur's development of mimesis2 interacts extensively with the western tradition of literary criticism from the work of Aristotle to the work of Frank Kermode. Nevertheless, although his is a respectful and appreciative dialectic, it is at the same time a dialectic from the point of view of the phenomenologist of language. From such a point of view he raises questions and supplies insights not always found in the work of the literary critic. Ricoeur recognizes the mediating quality of narrative configuration. While a similar recognition may be implicit in the work of the literary writer or the literary critic, it is often limited by a lack of recognition of the assumptions involved. For example, while he appreciates and makes use of the insights of Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, Ricoeur nevertheless finds Booth severe in his somewhat one-sided view of the lack of truth and responsibility in many modern authors: In this regard, I do not share Wayne Booth's severity concerning the equivocal narrator cultivated by contemporary literature. Does not an entirely reliable narrator, such as the eighteenth-century novelist, so quick to intervene and lead the reader by the hand, thereby dispense the reader from taking any emotional distance from the characters and their adventures? (77V 11, p. 163). In fact, he goes on to say, the reader of The Magic Mountain is deliberately led astray and disoriented in order to provoke greater reflection. What are possible implications of Ricoeur's development of mimesis2 for theological discourse? Again, since Judaeo-Christian theology is founded on what is largely biblical narrative, scripture can be recognized as a configuration of human action. The questions raised are not new to the biblical scholar, but at the same time, they are posed in new ways, and call for larger dimensions of analysis. For example, Ricoeur acknowledges that G. von Rad, using not only his tradition but also his innovation in method, developed in his Theology of the Old Testament a structure not unlike that which a structuralist might evince. Nevertheless, Ricoeur's structural analysis of Genesis 1 2 surfaces relationships perhaps not as clear or as demonstrable in von Rad. 2 Historical and systematic theology, as well, partake of the structure of configuration as developed in Ricoeur's theory. The similarities and differences of the work of H. Richard Niebuhr and that
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of Reinhold Niebuhr reflect both differences of the pre-understanding of mimesiSj and the configurating dynamics of mimesis2. Similar types of comparison might be made of the works of Metz and Pannenberg, or of Aquinas and Luther for that matter. MIMESIS3 In his explication of mimesis3, Ricoeur reiterates that his interest is not in mimesis as an end in itself, but in the opening it provides to his study of the relationship of narrative and time. In his analysis of the ability of the hearer to receive the message, Aristotle showed interest in a similar concept, as did H.-G. Gadamer in his study of application (70). Although the context was
different, in The Symbolism of Evil and in Freud and Philosophy Ricoeur
himself began exploring such an act under the concept of appropriation. In fact, Aristotle even says that mimesis reaches its fulfilment in the hearer or the reader (71). For Ricoeur in his new study, mimesis3 'marks the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the hearer or reader'. The world configured by the poem unfolds in real action in time. Ricoeur pursues the argument in four steps. First, he responds to the objection of circularity. He admits that the movement within mimesis is circular, but denies that it is vicious. He sees the movement more as a spiral that carries the mediation from one mimesis to the other at different levels or heights. The problems associated with circularity err on one side or the other. The first involves an interpretation which is violent. In other words, mimesis2 may do violence to mimesiSj, or mimesis3 may corrupt t or 2 in such a way that concordance is imposed on the discordant, or vice versa. On the other hand, circularity may be redundant, in that mimesis1 or 2 is seen already as the work of mimesis3. Ricoeur here posits the concept of the 'prenarrative quality of experience' (74). The episodes of our lives provide 'as yet untold stories'. As examples, Ricoeur offers the work of the person in psychoanalysis who with the help of the therapist pulls out events of his experience which he configures into a meaningful narrative. There is a similarity too in the work of the judge who analyzes the events in the case, the testimony, the perceptions and creates a narrative on which the judgement is based. In dialogue with Wilhelm Schapp, Ricoeur recognizes a prehistory of a story which emerges out of a background of stories. With the emergence of a new story there is the emergence of a new subject. Stories then are in continuity with and interconnected with each other. We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated. This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to
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save the history of the defeated and the lost. The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative (75). So the problem of circularity is not insurmountable. On the contrary, the interactions can be productive.
THE ACT OF READING The transition between mimesis2 and mimesis3 is brought about by the act of reading. The writer provides a schema and a tradition, an emplotment, a structure, a text. These are the categories for the interaction between the work of writing and the work of reading. The reader has received a set of paradigms from the tradition so that there are certain expectations of form, genre, or type which engender the possibility of the following of the story. The act of reading follows the process of the configuration and actualizes it. It is an act of judgement and of the productive imagination. The receiver or reader plays with the parameters of the narrative, making judgements and creating images about the new and older aspects of the emplotment, 'the innovation and sedimentation of paradigms' (77). Such is the 'pleasure of the text' in Roland Barthes' words. The reader's responsibility can be seen even more dramatically in the case of the antinovel where the burden lies on the reader to supply what the writer only provokes.
THE PROBLEM OF REFERENCE
In The Rule of Metaphor Ricoeur argued at length his position on the reality of the reference of discourse. With Benveniste and in contrast to Saussure, Ricoeur posits the sentence as the basic unit of discourse so that language reaches beyond itself to speak about something. Such intending of a referent is simultaneous with the speaking event and is integral to the nature of language. Over the years Ricoeur has argued this point, first with LeviStrauss, then with various structuralists and language analysts. He has continued to affirm that language as a system of signs is closed, but that it nevertheless refers to a world which it implicitly postulates. Our experience of being in the world and of time is an ontological condition, from which we move to express ourselves in language. He also differs from those literary critics who set aside all reference as illusion. Whatever the modes of truth are saying, such modes are against the background of an implied world. 'For me the world is the whole set of references opened by every sort of descriptive or poetic text I have read, interpreted, and loved' (80). Just as poetry redescribes the world and thereby makes it new, so to make a narrative 'resignifies the world in its temporal dimension' and thereby remakes action or makes it new (81). A special problem is proposed by the recognition of the similarities and
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differences of narrative as history and narrative as fiction. Ricoeur feels that history borrows from fiction and fiction from history, creating the new problem of the interweaving references involved. The interweaving is precisely through the shared relationship with the time-ness of human action. The temporal dimension of the world refigured has a number of aspects which Ricoeur highlights. Among other characteristics is that of iconic augmentation. In other words, the iconic structures drawn from the tradition or innovated by the author are intensified or augmented in the narrative. Correlative with the characteristics of the preunderstanding of action are those of the act of reading. These are three. The first is 'the network of intersignifications between practical categories' (83). The reader follows the unfolding of project, action, circumstances, reversal, and transformation, but brings the new quality of the interaction of the world of the reader's experience. Secondly, the sets of symbols which are integral to the unfolding through characterization, action, or other aspects of the cultural structures implied are actualized by the reader who shares the tradition but brings also the additional elements of the reader's world. In fact, there is a constant process of resymbolizing and desymbolizing in the interaction between reader and writer. But thirdly, it is the time of action which primarily is refigured. Here, Ricoeur sees the necessity of a conversation among not only those historians who address the problems of time and those literary critics who analyze narrative, but also those who pursue a phenomenology of time. Founded on the interaction of these three points of view is Ricoeur's thesis of the aporetics of temporality and the poetics of narrativity. Having examined Aristotle's Poetics and Augustine's Confessions, Ricoeur also recognizes the contributions which Heidegger makes in his analysis of Being and Time. Nevertheless, in Ricoeur's view, Heidegger's accomplishments at the same time make more problematic the conversation among historians, literary critics, and phenomenologists. Even more of a hindrance is the radical importance which Heidegger gives to the singular and private qualities of being-towards-death. Ricoeur's dialectic with Heidegger is a way of showing the limitations of Heidegger, but also of showing the essential interaction between narrative and time. What is the relationship between mortal time and public time? What are the hierarchies involved in time and narrative and their interrelationships? What is the upper limit to the process of ordering temporality? 'The most serious question this work may be able to pose is to what degree a philosophical reflection on narrativity and time may aid us in thinking about eternity and death at the same time' (87).3 What are possible implications of mimesis3 for literature and theology?
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The intersection of mimesis2 and mimesis3 is the act which makes the literature or the theology live. This is the process which is the constant challenge for those who wish literature, scripture, or theology to be other than dead letters or sedimented paradigms. How is it possible for the hearer or the reader to actualize what is only potential in the text? In Gadamer's language, what makes possible a fusion of horizons? In Ricoeur's early terminology, how can one appropriate the world of a text? How can the world of the narrative unfold anew in the act of reading or hearing? This is the challenge of theories of reading, or of mimesis3. Critics through the ages have been aware of the problem of reading into the text, or of skewing or falsifying the meaning of the text. As Ricoeur has pointed out again and again, interpretation is not reading into the text. Neither is it attempting to go behind the text in order to determine the mind of the author. On the contrary, interpretation is using the appropriate tools to let the world of the text unfold in front of the text and when that happens through the work and the interaction of the reader, then the intersection of the two worlds is actualized. As a hearer or reader of a parable of Jesus follows the narrative, a process is set in motion which is parallel to the telling of the narrative. The same is true of the telling of a gospel. To follow the telling of the gospel is to follow the process of becoming a disciple. It is the process of conversion. In a similar way, one may follow the process of the unfolding of Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi. At the conclusion of the book, the reader has undergone a process which follows the process of the telling. This following of a narrative is what accounts for the impact the reading of a book, the hearing of a story, or the following of a film can have on the one who enters into the process. If appropriate safeguards are taken of avoiding reading into the text or falsifying the text, then the problems of circularity are also avoided. One neither does violence to the text, nor misses the point through redundancy. On the contrary, the interactions of the processes of mimesis3,2, and j generate a life-giving judgement and productive imagining which is precisely what gives life both to the text and to the reader. The traditions of literature, scripture, and theology have received the various sets of paradigms. To read or to hear is to follow the process of configuration in such a way as to actualize it. This is a process both of sedimentation and of innovation. David Tracy writes: The modern paradigm shift... is both new and momentous. But... this modem shift is not radically discontinuous with the great and implicitly hermeneurical tradition of Christian theology. Indeed, without a common commitment to the new general paradigm in spite of our other real differences, we may well find ourselves divorced from both that tradition and from one another.4
RICOEUR'S THEORY OF MIMESIS In a time of anti-meaning, of trivialization, of escapism and privatism, Ricoeur's ontology of reference and of being in the world and in time can provide a restorative hermeneutic which is healthful for the study of literature, the study of theology, and for the individuals and communities who strive to hear and to read, to resymbolize and to desymbolize, both for their own life processes and for that of the communities which they form.
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REFERENCES
' Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volumes 1-2, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer; Volume 3, trans. K. Blarney and D. Pellauer (Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1984, 1985, 1988). Unless otherwise indicated, references are to Volume 1. 2 Ricoeur, 'Sur l'exegesc de Genese 1, 12, 4a,1, in Extgese et hermeneutique (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1971), p. 67. 3 One may ask of Ricoeur: is he referring here only to Heidegger's 'being towards death'? Are eternity and death the proper poles? Where is the element of the continuity of history? Do some of the insights of process thought offer alternative paradigms? * David Tracy, 'Theological Method', in Christian Theology: An Introduction to its Traditions and Tasks, edj. P. Hodgson and R. King (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1988), p. 58.

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Journal of Literature & Theology, Vol. j , No.

_j, November 19S0

RICOEUR'S THEORY OF MIMESIS: IMPLICATIONS FOR LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY

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