Thoughts on

Narrative

Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011

Thoughts on Narrative

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or
imaginary, do and think and feel, or have done and thought and felt;
or might do and think and feel, is an essential guide to our
understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. A person
who had never known another human being could not be
introspective any more than a terrier can, or a horse; he might
(improbably) keep himself alive, but he could not know anything about
himself, no matter how long he lived with himself. And a person who
had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story,
would remain ignorant of his emotional and spiritual heights and
depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the
story from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace is one of the basic tools
invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining
understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the
wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Language of the Night
Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011

Thoughts on Narrative

Storytelling reveals meaning without

committing the error of defining it. . . . it
brings about consent and reconciliation with
things as they are, and . . . we may even
trust it to contain eventually by implication
that last word which we expect from the day
of judgment.
Hannah Arendt

Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011

Thoughts on Narrative

I owe my first precise contact with the notion of infinity to a box

of cocoa of Dutch manufacture, raw material for my
breakfasts. One side of this box was decorated with an image
representing a peasant girl with a lace headdress who held in
her left hand an identical box decorated with the same image
and, pink and fresh, offered it with a smile. I remained seized
with a sort of vertigo in imagining that infinite series of an
identical image reproducing a limitless number of times the
same young Dutch girl, who, theoretically getting smaller and
smaller without ever disappearing, looked at me with a
mocking air and showed me her effigy painted on a cocoa box
identical to the one on which she herself was painted.
Michel Leiris, "L'age d'homme"

Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011

Thoughts on Narrative

The storytelling side of science is not just peripheral, and not

just pedagogy, but the very point of it all. Science properly
done is one of the humanities, as a fine physics teacher once
said. The point of science is to help us to understand what we
are and how we got here, and for this we need the great
stories: the tale of how, once upon a time, there was a Big
Bang, the Darwinian epic of the evolution of life on Earth and
now the story we are just beginning to learn to tell: the
amazing adventure of the primate autobiographers who finally
taught themselves how to tell the story of the amazing
adventure of the primate autobiographers.
Daniel Dennett, The Mind's "I"

Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011

Thoughts on Narrative

There is an Indian storyat least I heard it as an

Indian storyabout an Englishman who, having
been told that the world rested on a platform which
rested on the back of an elephant which rested in
turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was
an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what
did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle?
Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.
Clifford Geertz

Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011

Thoughts on Narrative

I found by pretending that things had

happened which in fact had not, and that
people existed who didn't, I could achieve a
lovely truth which actuality obscures
especially when I learned to abandon myth
and pattern my fabrications on actual people
and events.
John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011

Thoughts on Narrative

In the vacuum arising after he has left behind his animal life he
devotes himself to a series of non-biological occupations
which are not imposed by nature but invented by himself. This
invented life, invented as a novel or a play is invented, man
calls "human life," well being. Human life transcends the reality
of nature. It is not given to man as its fall is given to a stone or
the stock of its organic acts, eating, flying, nesting, to an
animal. He makes it himself, beginning by inventing it. Have
we heard right? Is human life in its most human dimension, a
work of fiction? Is man a sort of novelist of himself who
conceived the fanciful figure of a personage with its unreal
occupations and then, for the sake of converting it into reality,
does all the things he does and becomes an engineer?
Jose Ortega y Gasset, History as a System
Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011

Thoughts on Narrative

Why does it make us uneasy to know that the map is within

the map and the thousand and one nights are within the book
of A Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disquiet us to
know that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, and Hamlet
is a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the answer:
those inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can
be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators,
can be fictitious. In 1833 Carlyle observed that universal
history is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read
and try to understand, and in which they too are written.
Jorge Luis Borges, "Partial Enchantments of the Quixote"

Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011

Thoughts on Narrative

[The Cabalists] thought that a work dictated by the Holy Spirit

was an absolute text: in other words, a text in which the
collaboration of chance was calculable as zero. This
portentous premise of a book impenetrable to contingency, of
a book which is a mechanism of infinite purposes, moved
them to dispute the scriptural words, add up the numerical
value of the letters, consider their form, observe the small
letters and the capitals, seek acrostics and anagrams, and
perform other exegetical rigors which it is not difficult to
ridicule. Their excuse is that nothing can be contingent in the
work of an infinite mind. Leon Bloy postulates this
hieroglyphical character, this character of a divine writing this
character of a divine mystery, of an angelic cryptography at all
moments and in all beings on earth.
Jorge Luis Borges
Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011

Thoughts on Narrative

The final belief is to believe in a fiction,

which you know to be a fiction, there being
nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know
that it is a fiction and that you believe in it
willingly.
Wallace Stevens, "Adagia"

Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011

Thoughts on Narrative

Parmenides said, "one cannot think of what

is not"; we are at the other extreme, and say
what can be thought of must certainly be a
fiction.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Studies in Narratology,
Summer 2011