Within the substantial literature on narrative theory, two major approaches are discernible. The first centres on narratives as deliberately produced and consciously apprehended in various forms, including: novels (Rimmon-Kenan, 2002; Chatman, 1978; Herman, 2013; Ricœur, 1985), historical texts (Dray, 1971; White, 1973; Danto, 1985; Ricœur, 1984), life histories produced in the narrative interviewing tradition (Mishler, 1986; Riessman, 1993), and ‘small stories’ of everyday interaction (Georgakopoulou, 2007; Dayter, 2015). The second centres on narrative as intentional in the phenomenological sense but nonetheless not consciously grasped. Examples of this approach can be found in work in psychology (Sarbin, 1986; Bruner, 1986; Polkinghorne, 1988) and philosophy (Taylor, 1989; MacIntyre, 2007; Carr, 1986). Its proponents see latent narratives as central to selfhood and the human experience of time, irrespective of whether these stories are ever materially inscribed or told aloud. Of these orientations, the second has proven more controversial than the first. Few dispute the value and legitimacy of studying novels, historical texts, and myths as narratives. There are anti-narrativist scholars, however, who strongly object to the idea of unconscious storytelling, dismissing it as an absurd metaphorical extension of the kinds of stories studied in the first approach (Strawson, 2004; Lamarque, 2004; Phelan, 2005).

My own stance is largely in alignment with the narrativist camp (Sadler, 2018, 2019, 2021), and it seems indisputable that the narrative approach—in both variants described above—has proven extremely productive over many years and across many different disciplines. Nonetheless, in my view the anti-narrativists have identified important issues with the second approach that deserve to be taken seriously. The vast body of narrative theory leaves little doubt that stories play an important role in understanding the world in general, and particularly in understanding time. It is also difficult to ignore, however, the key anti-narrativist argument that there are obvious differences between the stories we find in history and fiction, and the kind of storied understanding advocated by many narrative theorists; it is likewise problematic to assume that all temporal understanding takes narrative form, as is sometimes implied.

The key question, then, is how these seemingly related phenomena relate to one another. My suggestion is that they do so through a process of translation. To make this argument, I follow the hermeneutic and existentialist approach to narrative I have developed in previous work (Sadler, 2021), situating questions of understanding, storytelling, and translation at the fundamental level of the human way of existing. In so doing, I continue to develop a strand of translation research which deprioritizes interlingual translation (Marais, 2019; Blumczynski, 2016, 2023) and instead views translation from a broadly ontological perspective. My argument runs as follows. First, we can integrate the key insights of the narrativists and anti-narrativists using the distinction between the ‘thematic’ and ‘non-thematic’ and the account of temporality in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1962). I propose that explicit, thematic storytelling is grounded and finds its possibilities in existential temporality. Nonetheless, we should not treat thematic narrative as a visible variant of temporal experience otherwise grasped through non-thematic narrative. Second, I draw on Blumczynski (2016) to argue that storytelling should instead be understood as a process of translation which thematizes certain interpretive possibilities, bringing them into view, while masking others. Third, the narratives produced by this type of translation are, to varying degrees, object-like and therefore separated from their narrators and made amenable to explicit consideration. Drawing on Gadamer and Ricœur, I suggest that this enables the creative play of distanciation, allowing new understandings of specific temporal experiences and temporality more broadly to emerge. It also enables subsequent translation from the thematic to the non-thematic, transforming everyday possibilities of existence.

The thematic/non-thematic distinction

The central argument of Division I of Being and Time (Heidegger, 1962) is that the distinctly human way of existing is as ‘Dasein’—literally ‘being-there’. Dasein’s defining characteristic is its ‘being-in-the-world’: to exist as a human is to find oneself in, among and as part of a meaningful world. One important aspect of being-in-the-world is that the normal and most basic way of encountering things is in terms of their meaningful relationships with other things and activities. For Heidegger, the prototypical examples of this are the ‘equipment’ that we encounter as ‘present-to-hand’—i.e., immediately ready for use—when going about our day-to-day activities. To capture the differences between this everyday way of encountering things and deliberately acting and looking at things, Heidegger refers to ‘comportment’ rather than action and ‘circumspection’ rather than looking. As he puts it,

the view in which the equipmental contexture stands at first, completely unobtrusive and unthought, is the view and sight of practical circumspection, of our practical everyday orientation. ‘Unthought’ means that it is not thematically apprehended for deliberate thinking about things; instead, in circumspection we find our bearings in regard to them. (Heidegger, 1982, p. 163; emphasis in original)

When using a doorknob in the context of opening a door, it is typically to get somewhere, in order to do something. Only infrequently do we stop to ponder doorknobs in and of themselves, taking note of properties such as weight, colour, material, or explicitly thinking about how they relate to other things or activities.

To perceive something as an object, on the other hand, means setting it apart from an equipmental contexture. This, Heidegger suggests, requires an act of ‘thematizing’. At its most basic, to thematize something is to stop and actively think about it: to bring it into view as a present-at-hand object rather than as a present-to-hand thing. It is to shift from largely automatic circumspection to careful and deliberate looking. To thematize is to

free the entities we encounter within-the-world, and to free them in such a way that they can ‘throw themselves against’ a pure discovering—that is, they can become ‘Objects’. Thematizing Objectifies. It does not first ‘posit’ the entities, but frees them so that one can interrogate them and determine their character ‘Objectively’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 414)

To thematize, then, is also to objectify—to allow things to come into view as objects while noting that this is neither how things are ordinarily encountered, nor the most basic or fundamental way of encountering them. To objectify things is not to create them but rather to allow another aspect of their being to be disclosed.

For Heidegger, there are multiple ways to thematize. The most significant for present purposes is the specifically linguistic mode he refers to as ‘assertion’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 197). Making a statement about something allows its objective properties to both become apparent and be ‘pointed out’ in such a way that another person can see them with us. At the same time, through making the assertion, our focus is narrowed to certain aspects rather than others: saying that a hammer is heavy allows another person to directly consider its weight along with me, at the same time pushing, for example, its aerodynamic and electromagnetic properties into the background. Assertions also allow for ‘pointing out’ worldly relations between things: I may ordinarily encounter hammers in terms of nails and hammering but typically do so non-thematically. When I make an assertion about the relationship of hammers to nails, on the other hand, the relationship is thematized.

Crucially, non-thematic circumspection is seen as the precondition for thematic looking rather than the other way around: for Heidegger (1962), assertion is a “derivative mode of interpretation” (p. 200; emphasis in original) and one which modifies how we recognize the being of a thing by shifting from everyday circumspective awareness to ‘categorical statements’ concerned with objective properties. He is not arguing against the existence of objects independent of their interpretation or the fact that objects have objective properties. Rather, his point is that recognizing things as objects is not the most basic way for humans to encounter them, and that to view anything as an object is to take up a stance different from that of everyday life, in which we constantly recognize and engage with things as part of going about our daily business without having to pause to consider them as objects or make statements which refer to them as such. As Heidegger (1962) argues,

The ‘as’ makes up the structure of the explicitness of something that is understood […] In dealing with what is environmentally ready-to-hand by interpreting it circumspectively, we ‘see’ it as a table, a door, a carriage, or a bridge; but what we have interpreted [Ausgelegte] need not necessarily be also taken apart [auseinander zu legen] by making an assertion which definitely characterizes it. (p. 189)

I can stop, stare at, and make categorical statements about a doorknob but do not need to do so in order to use it. If I do thematize and objectify it, the understanding thus gained is derivative of my everyday use of it, in the sense that it is only possible to make thematic statements about things that have already been non-thematically recognized.

Kompridis’ (1994, 2006) concepts of first- and second-order disclosure further clarify this idea of derivation. First-order disclosure refers to how the world is initially disclosed as meaningful within non-thematic everyday comportment and is the level within which we remain much of the time. If that were the only type of disclosure, though, the way things are initially encountered would be the only possible way of encountering them and it would be impossible to come to see things in a new way. This is clearly not what happens, which points to the possibility of second-order disclosure in which we can, and do, come to see things in new ways. The primary way to do this is through various kinds of thematizing which take us beyond the way things are initially revealed in first-order disclosure: critique for Kompridis and Habermas, art and poetry for the late Heidegger and art and dialogue for Gadamer. Kompridis (1994) argues, furthermore, that second-order disclosure can follow two possible directions: it can be ‘decentring’, challenging how things were initially disclosed and allowing us to see them in new ways; and ‘unifying-repairing’, in which the way things were initially disclosed in our “taken-for-granted ways of coping and engaging with the world” (Kompridis, 1994, p. 30) are reaffirmed.

A prototypical example of thematizing is the focused gaze of the scholar. Heidegger (1982) argues that “the essential feature in every science, philosophy included, is that it constitutes itself in the objectification of something already in some way unveiled, antecedently given” since it is only possible for things to become objects “if they are unveiled in some way before the objectification and for it” (p. 281; emphasis in original). We see this particularly clearly with scholarly studies of everyday activities such as watching television (Scannell, 2014), using everyday objects (Highmore, 2011), or process research in translation studies (Risku & Windhager, 2013; Olohan, 2021). Studies such as these find their starting point in the way things are already understood in everyday comportment but ultimately produce a very different kind of thematic understanding.

Equally important in the context of this paper, Heidegger emphasizes that to thematize is not simply to make prior understanding explicit. Things themselves do not directly change when thematized—their being does not depend on being observed; rather, it is the manner in which they are disclosed and thus how they can be comprehended that changes. Olohan’s “Knowing in Translation Practice” (2017), for example, does not directly change translation practice, but it does allow some of the intricate interconnectedness of activity, equipment, and material contexts upon which everyday translation practice relies, but is normally unrecognized, to come into view. Revealing something as a present-at-hand object “is at the same time a covering up of readiness-to-hand […] only now are we given any access to properties or the like” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 200; emphasis in original). It means picking out certain aspects of a thing, bringing them into deliberate consideration while at the same time obscuring others. The thematic understanding that Olohan (2021) gives us of the place of machine translation in professional translation practice is radically different from the understanding underpinning the everyday non-thematic use of machine translation by translators (pp. 102–14). To recognize something as an object, then, is to allow it to come into view in a new way but also to obscure how it was previously recognized in everyday circumspection and comportment.

Temporal experience and the need for narrative

The account of thematic and non-thematic understanding in the previous section was largely synchronic. I now turn to the temporal dimensions of this understanding. My primary reference point is once again Heidegger’s Being and Time, with the emphasis this time on the account of existential temporality in its second division. Given the centrality of temporality to narrative, this also brings our attention back to storytelling. Heidegger himself makes almost no reference to narrative. Nonetheless, I argue—agreeing in different ways with Ricœur (1984, 1988) and Roth (2018)—that his account of temporality can very usefully contribute to a discussion of the relationship between narrative and time.

The most basic thrust of Heidegger’s intricate account of temporality is that to exist as a human is to exist temporally. We see this expressed most succinctly in his definition of Dasein’s way of being as ‘thrown projection’: Dasein is always thrown into an already-meaningful world that it did not create and simultaneously always has an intrinsically futural orientation in projecting forward to its own possibilities of being. As Heidegger (1962) puts it:

Dasein is [always] ahead of itself […] in its Being. Dasein is always ‘beyond itself’ […] not as a way of behaving towards other entities which it is not, but as Being towards the potentiality-for-being which it is itself. (p. 236; emphasis in original)

Each Dasein, then, is the possibilities of Being towards which it projects and in relation to which it understands itself. At the same time, Dasein is the world into which it is thrown. The world is always already meaningful prior to any Dasein’s entry into it because, as revealed in first-order disclosure, it has already been interpreted by the ‘they’—the generic, average way in which things are understood:

As something factical, Dasein’s projection of itself understandingly is in each case already alongside a world that has been discovered. From this world it takes its possibilities, and it does so first in accordance with the way things have been interpreted in the ‘they’. (Heidegger, 1962, p. 239)

This embeddedness in past and future is not grafted onto a being which initially exists in the present but is rather a fundamental and irreducible element of the human way of existing.

Heidegger emphasizes, furthermore, that each aspect of being-in-the-world is primordially temporal. Everyday understanding, for instance, has a basic orientation towards the future, relying on first-order disclosure of future possibilities (Heidegger, 1962, p. 386). If I sit down to write an academic paper, I do so with a prior understanding of what a paper is, how to use a computer to write it, the possible outcomes of writing it, and a broader sense of how writing a paper fits in with what it means to be a good academic. As outlined in the first section of this paper, I ordinarily understand these temporal relations non-thematically and do not need to stop and thematically ponder them to find my bearings in relation to them.

Equipment, meanwhile, is temporally ‘towards’ the contexture of involvements which make it the equipment that it is. As Heidegger argues, the understanding we have of this being ‘towards’ is characterized by equipment “awaiting” that to which it relates and at the same time “retaining” the contexture in which it is involved. Once again, Heidegger is emphatic that this temporality is both fundamental and not ordinarily grasped thematically:

The awaiting of the ‘towards which’ is neither a considering of a ‘goal’ nor an expectation of the impendent finishing of the work to be produced. It has by no means the character of getting something thematically into one’s grasp. Neither does the retaining of that which has an involvement signify holding it fast thematically. (Heidegger, 1962, p. 405)

The tools used in translation as traditionally conceived—dictionaries, computer assisted translation tools, machine translation engines and so on—are disclosed to the translator in a temporally structured way, oriented towards the work they are to be used to carry out. At the same time, this ‘awaiting’ requires that they also ‘retain’ their involvements from before they were taken up in the context of this particular task. It is possible to spell out these temporal relations thematically through making assertions about them, but not necessary to do so in the ordinary course of things.

Where, then, does narrative fit in? If we accept Heidegger’s argument that existence has an intrinsic temporal organization, the key question for our present purposes is whether existential temporality is narratively structured, and narrative therefore an intrinsic part of everyday, non-thematic circumspection, comportment, and existence more broadly, or whether narrative is an optional mode of thematizing temporality. The latter view entails that temporality, in itself, is not narratively organized. Notions of temporality and change over time are central to almost all scholarly work on narrative, and many narrativists argue strongly that narrative is an aspect of the non-thematic everyday. Opinions on where exactly narrative comes into play, nonetheless, are divided.1

The moral philosophers Macintyre (2007) and Taylor (1989) see narrative as an inescapable means of making sense of our whole lives in order to situate them in relation to a conception of the good. As Taylor (1989) has it, a “sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story. But this is to state another basic condition of making sense of ourselves, that we grasp our lives in a narrative” (1989, p. 47; emphasis in original). On this view, narrative may not be necessary when wondering “where I shall go in the next five minutes”, but it is when it comes to “the issue of my place relative to the good” (Taylor, 1989, p. 48). MacIntyre (2007), meanwhile, sees narrative as even more fundamental and is emphatic that it operates at the most basic level of human existence:

It is because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others. Stories are lived before they are told. (p. 212)

From this perspective, narrative is not one particular way of relating to human experience but rather the most basic way that life itself is lived: for MacIntyre, there is no separation between narrative and living in time.

Sociologically informed approaches such as those of Somers and Gibson (1994) and Ewick and Silbey (1995) are largely concerned with how individuals situate themselves in relation to large-scale public narratives of various kinds. Somers (1997, p. 87), for instance, sees narrativity as a constitutive condition of social being, consciousness, action, institutions, and structures. Social classes are understood as constituted by historical narratives in relation to which individual identities are derived on an ontological level. Ewick and Silbey (1995), meanwhile, study the careful and deliberate acts of storytelling in legal contexts while recognizing that stories are constructed around the “rules, expectations, and conventions of particular situations” which are handed down and precede any individual act of storytelling (p. 208). Both Somers and Ewick and Silbey suggest that narrative need not always be thematic—most of the class narratives studied by Somers have no clear material inscription, while Ewick and Silbey (1995) explicitly argue that it is “possible to be using or doing ‘narrative’ without necessarily being self-conscious or explicit about it” (p. 201).

The psychologists Bruner (1986), Sarbin (1986, 1998) and Polkinghorne (1988) also emphasize narrative in relation to whole lives, linking it to the concept of the self. In comparison to Taylor and MacIntyre, however, there is less concern with projecting onto individual capabilities and more on making sense of individual identity. But they also allow for narrative to function on a less grand level, in that it is assumed to be concerned with sequences of events which are contained within and given meaning by narrative emplotment. Sarbin (1986, p. 8), for instance, argues that if pictures or descriptive phrases are handed to a person with no additional context, they will connect them in a story; similarly, he argues that narrativity inheres within human action and decision making (Sarbin, 1990).2 Narrative, then, is seen as a critical and irreducible means for understanding the kinds of small-scale happenings in time with which we are confronted on a daily basis. At this level, they shift from the ontological focus seen in MacIntyre and Taylor, among others, and place a new emphasis on the position of narrative in the perception of events happening in time.

The philosophers Walter Fisher and David Carr, meanwhile, advance even stronger positions. Fisher (1987) argues that narrative is “not a mode of discourse laid on by a creator’s deliberate choice but the shape of knowledge as we first apprehend it” (p. 193), with storied form understood as the fundamental “perceptual framework” underpinning all understanding, precisely because “ideas and feelings will always be sensed in and through time” (p. 193). Carr (1986) likewise argues forcefully that “no elements enter our experience […] unstoried or unnarativized. They can emerge as such only under a special analytical view” (p. 68). Both Fisher and Carr suggest, therefore, that humans can have no experience of temporality at all that is not initially and fundamentally structured narratively.

These perspectives differ in important ways, but all allow for and require people to make sense of their experiences and lives through narrative without necessarily having to tell those stories out loud, write them down or directly reflect on them. They typically make few distinctions between narrative as a mode of thought or being and the kinds of written or oral narratives we find in literature or history. When speaking about specific narratives, they are rarely concerned with whether we are talking about stories with some kind of material inscription or not. Using the terminology adopted here, they therefore advocate for the existence of both thematic and non-thematic narratives and narration, seeing little difference between them.

Others take a different stance. Mink (2001) and White (1980) argue that narrative is absolutely a mechanism of making sense of temporal experience but without embracing the idea that we constantly do this without realizing it. Mink (2001) argues that “Aristotle’s notion that all stories have a beginning, middle, and end tells us that our experience of life does not itself necessarily have the form of narrative, except as we give it that form by making it the subject of stories” (p. 214), also arguing elsewhere that “stories are not lived but told” (Mink, 1970, p. 557). White (1987, 1973, 1978) argues strongly for the essential constructedness of historical narrative, presenting it as a fundamentally literary practice. For White and Mink, narrative is not an intrinsic part of experience itself but nonetheless essential if we are to reflect on the meaning of experience. To narrate is to give meaning to events or happenings that, in and of themselves, do not have any specific meaning or demand any single interpretation: the stories that can be told about a specific event are only limited if “we suppose that the events themselves have a ‘story’ kind of form and a ‘plot’ kind of meaning” (White, 2001, p. 377). Narrative is therefore not presented as necessarily optional, but nonetheless as coming into play at a higher and more abstract level than the stances previously discussed.

Others express stronger views, explicitly rejecting the idea that narrative is a basic element of experience or selfhood. Comparing lived experience with literary narratives, Vice (2003) argues that they are radically different: “we are clearly not characters and our lives are not stories and it is blatant category mistake to think so” (p. 101). Lamarque (2014, pp. 67–82) lists a series of characteristics central to literary narrative—for example, that characters are defined only by how they are described and a need for teleology—before going on to argue that our lives, as lived, clearly do not have these characteristics. Both argue in different ways that to live as if our lives were like literary narratives would be deeply harmful: “to the extent that literary features are brought to bear on real-life narratives, they have a distorting and pernicious effect on the self-understanding that such narratives are supposed to yield” (Lamarque, 2014, p. 69). In perhaps the best known anti-narrative polemic, Strawson (2004) directly attacks what he calls ‘psychological narrativity’. As he argues,

Being Diachronic [i.e., there being an intrinsically temporal dimension to existence] doesn’t already entail being Narrative. There must be something more to experiencing one’s life as a narrative than simply being Diachronic. For one can be Diachronic, naturally experiencing oneself […] as something existing in the past and future without any particular sense of one’s life as constituting a narrative. (p. 439)

On this view, some people may feel the need to comprehend their lives in terms of narrative, but this is by no means universal. Indeed, for Strawson (2004) this need should be deemed a narcissistic character flaw rather than an essential element of human temporality (p. 436).

Despite the diversity of their views, Mink, White, Vice, Lamarque and Strawson all broadly reject the idea of non-thematic narrative. Instead, they reserve the label of ‘narration’ for thematic and deliberate acts of storytelling— such as those found in historiography or literature— and ‘narrative’ for phenomena which are in some way object-like and separate from the flux of ordinary experience. None denies the basic idea that existence is temporally structured. They nonetheless argue that narratives are the result of the imposition of narrative structure on experience, which does not intrinsically have this structure.

The great value of the first perspective is its recognition of the fact that stories seem to somehow pre-exist our telling them; that we are thrown into a world saturated with stories in relation to which we understand who we are. It also recognizes that just about all temporal experience can be explicitly grasped and thematized through storytelling and that it frequently resists being explicitly grasped through other means. Nonetheless, the recurring weakness in this body of literature, in my view, is a tendency to infer from the fact that temporal experience can be thematized through narrative that it must therefore itself already be narratively structured. In other words, they mistake the inherent narrativisability of temporal experience (T. Fisher, 2010) for non-thematic narrative. This repeats the traditional error against which Heidegger argued so forcefully of overemphasizing the explicit and thematic over the everyday and non-thematic; it is a narratively-flavoured version of the Platonic attitude that the basic way that human beings relate to things and practices is having an implicit theory about them (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 5).

The great value of the second perspective lies in recognizing that there are important differences between literary narratives and everyday temporality. Carr (1986) argues against Hayden White’s stance that history only gains a narrative structure when stories are told about it by saying “the present is only possible for us if it is framed and set off against a retained past and a protentionally envisaged future” (p. 61). This may be true but nonetheless slides past the question of whether retention and protention specifically demand narrative. I can tell my life story, and to do so is to thematize an understanding of myself. Yet as Vice (2003) neatly puts it, “how often, in fact, do we tell our autobiographies?” (p. 105). The anti-narrativists, then, emphasize two key points. The first is that we do not need to tell explicit or implicit stories in order to project forward into the future and orient our actions towards it. I can use a doorknob on the basis that it will allow me to enter the classroom, where I will set up my laptop and then teach the class without having to directly stop and consider this set of temporal relations. The fact that I can produce a narrative describing this sequence of events either before or after the fact does not require me to have non-thematically comprehended it narratively in the first place. The second key point is emphasizing that literary and historical narratives involve quite a different relationship to temporality than everyday comportment. They explicitly reflect on and thematize temporal relations and are inscribed as objects— whether textual or otherwise— that are clearly distinct from their tellers. Nonetheless, in my view, the weakness of the anti-narrativist approach is that it infers from these two important points that narrative and temporality therefore need not entail one another at all and consequently denies that narrative is ontologically significant.

I suggest, then, that we take the idea from the narrativists that there is an intimate connection between temporal experience and narrative. From the anti-narrativists, we should take the idea that human temporality should nonetheless not be conflated with narrative. This view is largely in agreement with Ricœur (1984, pp. 52–90) although, as will be discussed below, my approach is broader than his emphasis on materially inscribed works of history and fiction. Ricœur (1984) summarizes his view by saying that “between the activity of narrating a story and the temporal character of human experience there exists a correlation that is not merely accidental but that presents a transcultural form of necessity” (p. 52). In another text, he says “I take temporality to be that structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity and narrativity to be the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent” (Ricœur, 1980, p. 169). This view recognizes that narrative is not simply one way among others of grasping the human experience of time but rather occupies a special position in this respect. At the same time, it avoids collapsing the distinction between temporal experience and narrative altogether. The tendency to collapse that distinction is at the crux of the disagreements between narrativists and non-narrativists. If we cease to consider temporal experience as non-thematic narration, many of these disagreements dissolve since few (if any) non-narrativists reject the basic insights of temporal existence or the possibility of grasping temporality through narrative; likewise, I suspect that most narrativists, if pushed, would recognize important differences between the experience of temporality (even if conceptualized as non-thematic narrative) and explicit acts of storytelling.

Thinking in terms of the thematic/non-thematic distinction, furthermore, leads to the idea that all explicit acts of storytelling— whether we are talking about oral narrative, literature, myth, history, or something else— involve some degree of reflection on everyday non-thematic temporal relations. As a consequence, I propose that to deliberately tell a story is an act of translation that thematizes and objectifies. This has two major implications. The first is that narration, understood as translation, transforms our understanding of that which is thematized along similar lines to that discussed in the first section. The second is that narration produces a kind of object from a starting point of non-thematic and non-object-like understanding. This, I propose, allows new meanings and interpretations to be revealed which remain hidden so long as we remain within the limits of everyday, unreflective, and non-thematic comportment.

Narration as translation

My starting point in this section is that narrative is a kind of ‘assertion’ in Heidegger’s sense described above. As with all assertions, it is a linguistic— or perhaps more accurately, semiotic— act that involves explicitly picking out certain interpretive possibilities that are pre-given in the non-thematic understanding of everyday comportment. Narrative is nonetheless a special type of assertion because it specifically allows temporal relations to be thematized. Making assertions about the physical properties of a hammer as present-at-hand brings an understanding of the hammer which remains undisclosed while it is encountered as present-to-hand in the context of hammering. Telling stories about happenings reveals an understanding of temporal experience that remains undisclosed in everyday comportment. As with all assertion, it brings about a “modification” in the “as-structure of interpretation” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 200)—to be non-thematically aware of temporal relations as part of everyday existence is not the same as telling a story about a given set of relationships. The ease with which temporal experience can be thematized through narrative—compared with the difficulty of thematizing it through other means—points, nonetheless, to the very close relationship between existential temporality and storytelling. It can be true that “we seem to have no other way of describing ‘lived time’ save in the form of a narrative” (Bruner, 1987, p. 12) without that having to entail that temporality is always lived in terms of narrative.

The process of narration, I suggest, can be usefully thought of as translation. On one level, then, I am in agreement with White (1980) when he argues that “narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely the problem of how to translate knowing into telling” (p. 5). Yet White’s emphasis on ‘knowing’ here suggests a wholly epistemological operation. My own stance is closer to Ricœur’s in the three volumes of Time and Narrative, where he shows that the translation involved is more fundamental still—from the ontological level of Dasein’s everyday temporality to the epistemological level of communicating and thematizing through narrative.

To explore the type of translation involved, I refer principally in the sections that follow to the work of Piotr Blumczynski and, to a lesser extent, Yuri Lotman, both of whom argue in different ways for situating translation at a level much more fundamental than that of rendering a text originally written in one language using another language, a level more fundamental even than intercultural mediation.

Blumczynski’s (2016) starting point is to view translation through a lens which is “not preoccupied with sameness; rather it finds the concepts of similarity, affinity, and proximity much more useful and convincing” (p. 4). The terms in any translation may be similar or dissimilar from one another, related through affinity (or perhaps antipathy), or close or distant from one another, but they can never be the same. We can characterize the relationship between temporality and narrative using the same set of terms. The experience of time and storytelling are similar without being either identical or wholly separate. The relationship between them is characterized by ‘asymmetry’ (see Lotman, 1990) in that they are not entirely commensurable with one another. Nonetheless, there is affinity between them insofar as they mutually entail one another, and they are proximate in the sense that they are layered on top of one another at the existential level. Consequently, their asymmetrical relationship does not preclude, or even impede translation between them; indeed, were there to be no asymmetry, there would be no need to speak of translation at all. Similarity, affinity, and proximity are also all ambivalent with regard to direction, avoid establishing a clear hierarchy, and offer an alternative to the traditional translation studies language of ‘sources’ and ‘targets’. The experience of temporality may be more primordial than narrative and one of its preconditions, but that does not mean that it is more important or universal than storytelling.

Blumczynski (2016) also sees translation, understood as a basic hermeneutical operation, as “part of the art of thinking; perhaps even an indispensable part” which need not serve any specific purpose any more than “thinking, becoming aware, reasoning, or understanding” must (p. 35–36). On this view, translation clearly can be understood as a purposeful activity as suggested, for instance, in the functionalist tradition which sees it as explicitly goal oriented. But translation can also be purposive and mundane, something we all do as part of everyday life without stopping to think about it or having an explicit or implicit goal when translating. This is not, however, to collapse the distinction between thinking and translation altogether. Rather, this perspective seeks to retain their specificity while exploring and acknowledging the extent to which they entail one another. Storytelling can be explicitly goal oriented— as when politicians produce narratives for strategic purposes or historians attempt to influence broader understandings of the past. Yet storytelling can also be purposive and lack explicit goal orientation. Vice (2003) is surely right to suggest that few of us produce grand autobiographical narratives to make sense of our entire lives. Yet this does not preclude everyday, largely but not wholly unreflective narrative practices to consider and assess fragments of experience or for the maintenance of social bonds (Georgakopoulou, 2007).

No translation, meanwhile, can ever be understood as wholly determined by the source from which it begins: “translation always involves exegesis (reading out) as well as eisegesis (reading in)” (Blumczynski, 2016, p. 80). This perspective captures an important aspect of the relationship between narrative and time and reaffirms that to tell a narrative is not to simply make the experience of time explicit. Translation is functioning here as what Lotman terms ‘I-I’ communication, in which a person is effectively communicating with themself but in a way which involves the addition of a “supplementary code, of purely formal organization” which is “either totally without a semantic value or tending to be without it” (Lotman, 1990, p. 28). The code in this case is narrative structure, understood in Ricœur’s sense of established narrative paradigms which provide patterns for storytelling, giving them structure without themselves holding (much) meaning (Ricœur, 1984, p. 77). This addition constitutes the ‘eisegetical’ component of translation mentioned by Blumczynski as we both ‘read out’ interpretive possibilities initially given in first-order disclosure as well as ‘reading in’ narrative structure which does not inhere in temporal experience itself. In different ways, Mink, White and Lamarque all demonstrate this need for translation when they show that writing both historical and literary narratives requires a supplement of structure and closure absent in everyday temporality.

These narrative paradigms are nonetheless inevitably shaped by wider dimensions of the world such as race, gender, and class. We see this, for instance, in the influence of recurrent ‘master’ narratives for thinking about aging and late life in how both medical professionals and individuals think and talk about their own and others’ experiences (de Medeiros, 2016; Smith and Dougherty, 2012). This highlights the fact that that the eisegetical component is never a self-contained, hermetic operation even in ‘I-I’ communication and reaffirms Blumczynski’s (2016) call for “abandoning substance metaphysics” (p. 82) and its more or less explicit adoption of a self-contained and straightforwardly autonomous subject. This way of thinking leads instead towards a view which not only decisively rejects the idea of translation as a simple textual operation between a source and target text, but also recognizes the impossibility of unravelling the entanglement of the interpreting Dasein with the world, even in communication with themselves.

If we accept that narrative as translation is eisegetical, it is also important to emphasize that it produces lasting effects. As Blumczynski (2016) has it:

Understanding is not really reversible— and nor is translation. Once you have understood, seen, or heard something, you cannot un-understand, un-see, or un-hear it […] Once something has been translated, it cannot be untranslated. The flash of understanding released by translation cannot be undone. (p. 42)

Translation is only possible as a worldly activity but it does not leave the world unchanged. As I have argued throughout, we do not need to tell stories about time in order to understand it— the human way of existing is always in-time. To narrate is to supplement temporality, but this process of supplementation can also alter non-thematic existential temporality. Once a story of any kind is told, it inevitably brings about second-order disclosure. Narrative as translation reveals anew the already-understood temporal experience upon which the narrative was grounded as well as allowing a further questioning (or reaffirming) of Dasein’s distinctive way of being-in-time as thrown projection. Being-in-time is a process or event that can be altered via its own thematization through narrative.

This can happen on two levels. The first— and the level with which Heidegger was primarily concerned —is the existential level. At this level, narrative is a technique for thematizing temporality as it is common to all human existence. Ricœur (1988) illustrates this through reference to great works of literature by writers such as Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf, showing how, through the stories they tell, they reveal essential but normally unthematized aspects of temporality (pp. 127–41). What they reveal may in turn bring about a decentring of second-order disclosure which redefines the contours of the interpretive horizon in relation to which being-in-the-world happens. The thematic meditations on eternity and death in Mann’s The Magic Mountain may disclose new possibilities for being-in-time which then seep into everyday undifferentiated being, even if what is specifically disclosed depends on the hermeneutic activity of the interpreter (see Jansen, 2015). That Thomas Mann could thematize existential temporality through narrative but most of us cannot lends support, nonetheless, to Heidegger’s (1962) claim that “the laying-bare of Dasein’s primordial Being must […] be wrested from Dasein” (p. 359) with great effort. Thematizing existential temporality through narrative remains a type of translation but one that, as Blumczynski (2016) notes, seems to be beyond most of us, most of the time (pp. 54–55).

The second level is that of factical temporal experience. At this level, narrative is not throwing light on the existential structures of temporality itself but rather allowing specific temporally structured comportments to be thematized. On the morning of writing, I poured water over ground coffee, in my kitchen, with a Hario gooseneck kettle, in order to make black coffee, for the sake of starting my day. This set of involvements was temporally structured but, insofar as I lived it at the time, understood as a purposive comportment and not thematized through narrative. Thematizing them by telling a story about them—as I just have—reveals something about them and brings about second-order disclosure; perhaps it leads me to realize that I only drink black coffee in the morning as part of appropriating an established idea of who lecturers are and how they start their day. This either decentres or unifies and repairs the interpretive horizon within which I non-thematically make future cups of morning coffee.

This type of factical thematizing, in contrast to the existential thematizing of the previous paragraph, seems to be universal. We all tell stories to one another and stop and think about actions and involvements at least some of the time. As such, we all thematically disclose specific temporal relations to a greater or lesser extent. Thematizing is therefore precisely translation understood as a basic mode of thought—as proposed by Blumczynski—rather than as an activity that some people do and others do not. This idea also sets me in alignment with Brandom (2002) in suggesting that translation understood as thematizing is itself an ‘existentiale’—something characteristic of the distinctly human mode of being rather than limited to some factical beings and not others. From this it follows that the thematizing of temporality and temporal relations, at least on the factical level, is something that we all do at least some of the time and not restricted to great philosophers, historians, novelists, and scientists as, at times, Heidegger and Ricœur seem to imply.

Narratives as objects

In the previous section, I explored the idea that narrative is a translational thematizing process which modifies and supplements its source. In this section I suggest that this translational process is objectifying and produces narratives which function as objects. The most significant implication that follows is that narration introduces a subject-object distinction between the teller and the story which is absent in everyday temporality. Everyday temporality is not thing-like; Dasein simply is the past into which it is thrown and the possibilities towards which it projects. Temporality, for Heidegger, is characterized by ‘ecstatical unity’ while the separation of past, present, and future is understood as derivative of this unity. Insofar as we routinely exist in the unreflective manner of the everyday, there cannot be distance between Dasein and thrownness and projection if Dasein is thrown projection. With narrative, on the other hand, past, present, and future are overtly separated from one another and from Dasein itself. This is because all thematizing assertions establish a degree of distance— or “remoteness” (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 208)—from that to which the assertion relates. Narrative therefore lets us bring temporality explicitly into view but at the price of moving away from how it is ordinarily experienced on the ontological level.

We see this most clearly where narratives are embodied in some material way that makes them clearly amenable to interpretation as a kind of ‘text’, obviously separate from their teller. As Ricœur (1976, 1981, 2013) has repeatedly argued, a defining characteristic of texts is their semantic autonomy. This autonomy, he argues, has at least three aspects: “with respect to the intention of the author; with respect to the cultural situation and all the sociological conditions of the production of the text; and finally, with respect to the original addressee” (Ricœur, 1981, p. 51). The act of writing—broadly understood—produces a degree of ‘alienating distanciation’ which separates what is told from who tells it and what is being written about. This, in turn, enables the possibility of what Gadamer (1989) calls ‘play’, which, in a discussion of art, he understands as “the mode of being of the work itself” (p. 101). In playing, “all those purposive relations that determine active and caring existence [including everyday circumspection and comportment] have not simply disappeared, but are curiously suspended” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 102). The play we find in narratives recognized as objects, then, is a precondition for the possibility of second-order disclosure in relation to temporality which remains impossible so long as we remain within everyday first-order disclosure.

As Gadamer suggests, play and the possibilities of second-order disclosure that it brings with it are characteristic of art and, in terms of narrative, most apparent in works of literature such as those discussed earlier. We also see a degree of objectification and play, though, in more mundane storytelling and even with narratives that are never told out loud or materially inscribed. Any act of stopping and deliberately thinking, even if the reflection is never given any material inscription, is translational and sets the narrative apart from the experience of the events narrated, establishing at least some degree of distance. To be sure, there are important differences between these narratives and traditional texts; a purely mental narrative is not a ‘text’ in any meaningful sense and cannot, for instance, be “addressed to an unknown reader and potentially to whoever knows how to read” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 31). Nonetheless, the translation required to produce such a narrative still forces the relationships between different events to be thematized and the teller to explicitly consider, to at least some degree, which events are relevant and which not, how exactly they connect to one another, and where beginnings and ends are to be set.

We also see the importance of thematizing and distance to this kind of mental narrative when we consider the circumstances in which we do it: typically, it is because we are unable to understand something (Sarbin, 1986). Something has prevented the functioning of our everyday circumspective capacity for understanding and interpretation, demanding deliberate translation. Imagine, for example, that I have been knocked off my bike by a car—deliberately thinking it through after the fact in terms of a narrative allows me to make sense of an event which my everyday unthought patterns of interpretation cannot cope with. The distance produced by even this mental act of storytelling opens a space of play for me to consider what might have caused the incident, what its possible implications might have been, why I was cycling in the first place, what safety precautions I had taken and what (if anything) I might be able to do to prevent something similar from happening again in the future. This emphasizes that “to narrate is already to explain” (Ricœur, 1984, p. 178), something that is not required when everything is running smoothly and there is no need to depart from absorbed everyday comportment. Storytelling as translation is absolutely a means of making sense—as Bruner, White, Taylor and others argue in their own ways. It is also something that we all do at least some of the time. Nonetheless, we need not do it insofar as we ordinarily live within a world which is already meaningful and therefore does not, in the first instance, require translation or explanation to be comprehensible in the context of our everyday engagements with and within it.

Conclusion

My goal has been to explore the relationship between the temporality intrinsic to the distinctly human mode of existence and the act of storytelling. My principal argument has been that we should keep some daylight between them and avoid collapsing them into one another. At the same time, I have followed Ricœur in suggesting that we should recognize that they are nonetheless very intimately connected: narrative finds its ground in existential temporality but can also, in turn, disclose new possibilities of being through its capacity for thematizing and objectifying temporality and temporal relations. I have proposed, furthermore, drawing on Blumczynski (2016), that moving between temporality and narrative can be usefully understood as translation. To thematize temporal experience through narrative is to transform it by picking out and giving definite shape to certain aspects and not others. It is a creative process but not an unfettered one—the possible stories that can be legitimately told are never simply the invention of the narrator. This is true even of overtly fictional narratives which remain grounded in, and comprehensible only in relation to, the human experience of temporality, even if the specific factical happenings to which they refer are not understood to have actually taken place.

There are clear parallels between the approach to translation discussed here and more traditional accounts which posit that there are always multiple but not infinite ways to translate any text. Nonetheless, the broader understanding of translation I have in mind is not metaphorical. In a move parallel to Blumczynski’s (2023) insistence on the primordiality and non-metaphorical nature of material translation, I have sought to outline a fundamental kind of translation which is inherent to the human mode of existence. Rather than thinking in terms of movement from one language or culture to another, this view conceives of translation in terms of a more basic movement between the non-thematic and the thematic. I have still relied in places on the language of the text, notably when drawing on Ricœur’s thought. Yet I have also sought to extend Ricœur’s thinking to conceive of thematic narratives as a kind of object which includes, but is not limited to, the concept of the text.