Narrativeness

"Narrativeness" may be defined as the quality that makes narrative not merely present but essential. It comes in degrees, and there are narratives without narrativeness. Since the time of Leibniz, Western thought has favored models in which abstract scientific laws would ideally account for everything in nature and society (the ideal of a social science) and in which narrative would therefore be, at best, merely illustrative. But a number of thinkers have presented forceful arguments that such an ideal of knowledge is a chimera. Darwin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and others have insisted in the ineluctable need for narrative because genuine contingency exists and time is open. In literature, "the concept of narrativeness can help us to understand works that do away with what I call the literature of process, works that maximize narrativeness in a peculiar way that does away with structure and closure.