There is a great deal of literature on the role of narrative in ontology and epistemology, produced in numerous disciplines over many decades. If there is broad agreement that narrative is important to both being and knowing, there is less agreement as to the precise role that it plays. The most fundamental points of contention revolve around how deep narrative goes: do humans first exist and then become storytellers to interpret their own lives and the world around them or are we “storytelling animal[s]” (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 216) on such a basic level that human existence itself is intrinsically narrative? Is narrative a genuine human universal, rendering it uniquely amenable to translation? Do the historical past and lived present exist in and of themselves or are they created through narrative? Is narrative one way among several of coming to know or “the shape of knowledge as we first apprehend it” (Fisher, 1987, p. 193)? If we accept that narrative is an epistemological mode, we must account for its diversity of forms: the overtly discursive and deliberate practices of historiography, the textual and poetically-oriented artefacts of literature, the “recapitulation of past experience” (Labov, 1972, p. 359) in everyday dialogue and cognitive processes where narrative is understood as a mode of thought. How do these types of narration relate to one another? Are they all examples of the same basic phenomenon, subsumable within a single overarching category, or do they exhibit essential differences? Are some more fundamental than others or are they equally primordial?
The common element in these otherwise diverse approaches to narrative, I suggest, is temporality–all see storytelling as having something important to do with time. It is nonetheless striking that, with some notable exceptions, detailed reflection on temporality itself and the relationship of narrative to time is relatively infrequent. This results in a situation where temporality is often taken as central to storytelling while its complexity remains largely unrecognized. This, I propose, is the source of much of the confusion about what narratives are and do. From this starting point, this article focuses on the knotty relationship between temporality as an inherent part of human ontology, narrative as a more or less explicit response to that intrinsic temporality, and translation’s role in mediating between temporality and narrative.
My argument moves through four stages.
First, I introduce Martin Heidegger’s account of the temporality of human existence as presented in Being and Time (1962) and his distinction between ‘thematic’ and ‘non-thematic’ understanding, where the former is understood as conscious and explicit and the latter as the kind of unreflective understanding that underpins everyday activity. These ideas, I suggest, provide a useful lens for theorizing the fundamental disagreements between the ‘narrativist’ and ‘anti-narrativist’ camps. These disagreements, I propose, boil down to whether there can be such a thing as non-thematic narrative or whether it is possible to exist in a temporally structured way without that requiring constant storytelling. This, in turn, raises the question of the extent to which we should distinguish between the central importance of temporality to human existence and explicitly epistemological operations such as telling oral narratives, writing histories or crafting novels.
Second, I follow Ricœur in arguing that the starting point for all narrative–and for our capacity to tell and understand stories–lies in the temporality of human existence. I suggest, nonetheless, that there are good reasons to avoid collapsing the distinction between narrative and temporality altogether. Storytelling may be a universal human impulse, and temporality may only be thematically grasped through narrative, but this does not require that all temporal experience take narrative structure per se.
Third, I argue that the movement from non-thematic temporality to thematic narrative can be usefully conceptualized as existential translation. Like any act of translating, it activates and brings to the fore some potential interpretations of the happenings narrated while covering over others. It must be understood as a specific act of transformation, in which a new type of understanding is produced rather than a simple making explicit of pre-existing meaning. It is bidirectional, in that it is possible to translate in both directions between the non-thematic and the thematic. Nonetheless, the relationship between the thematic and non-thematic is ‘asymmetrical’ (Lotman, 1990), making total commensurability impossible and rendering the creation of new meaning inevitable every time translation takes place in either direction. Thematic reflection can bring non-thematic experience of time to language but transforms that experience in the process; thematic reflection, in turn, has the capacity to influence the non-thematic experience of time. Fourth, I suggest that the process of thematizing involved in all narration is inevitably objectifying. To tell a story opens the possibility of considering temporal relations as objects, distinct from a perceiving subject. In bringing about a separation between the experience of temporality itself and thematic reflection on those experiences, it enables the operation of ‘distanciation’ (Ricœur, 1976). The interpretive space that this distance opens can account for narrative’s capacity to bring about new understanding of both specific sets of events and of human temporality itself.
My goal throughout is to clarify the relationship between narrative and time, the type of understanding that storytelling can produce, and to position translation at the fundamental, existential level.
The full article of this synopsis can be found here.
