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Chapter 2. Narrative
- State University of New York Press
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47 C H A P T E R 2 NARRATIVE O ne of the central themes in Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy is the creative capacity of language, especially metaphoric and narrative language . Creative language expresses aspects of reality that would otherwise remain hidden from ordinary language. By describing the world in new ways metaphors and narratives creates new interpretations and experiences of the world. Creative language broadens the scope of hermeneutics. With the publication of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur’s work shifts away from questions of textual interpretation to questions of human action, in particular human temporal and historic experience. He maintains the thesis that written works mediate interpretation but now he reformulates the hermeneutic circle in terms of the circularity of narrative prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration. Our lives are inchoate stories with a prenarrative structure that only becomes fully intelligible when transformed into a narrative. Reading completes the course of a narrative. It is the final act of the activity of narration. Narrative discourse configures human actions, already prefigured like a narrative, into a coherent whole that is then refigured by the reader. The most important insight of Time and Narrative for hermeneutic philosophy is that the narrative function is indispensable in articulating the intelligibility of human action. Anything that is recounted unfolds in time, and anything that occurs in time can be recounted. To describe and to explain the genesis and development of an event or object is to narrate. One of the vexing problems for a critical theory, however, results from the internal connection between creative, narrative discourses and ideology, utopia, and other distortions of reality. The same medium that configures human action also distorts it. How can we tell the difference between an ideological and nonideological narrative? Another vexing problem for narrative theory is how to distinguish between fiction and history if they share a common narrative structure . And if there is no certain way to distinguish between the two, what are the prospects for a critical theory that depends on our ability to distinguish between true and false consciousness, genuine and false communication? I believe Ricoeur has answers for both problems. METAPHOR AND NARRATIVE The problem of metaphor is to describe and explain how creative and imaginative uses of language refer to reality in such a way that produces new interpretations of the world. In The Rule of Metaphor Ricoeur develops his thesis that the split-reference of creative discourse discloses a possible way of being-in-theworld that remains hidden from ordinary language and first-order reference. The world of the work that unfolds in reading opens up nonsituational references revealing new possibilities of existence. A metaphor is a “heuristic fiction” that “redescribes” reality by referring to it in terms of something imaginative or fictional , allowing us to learn something about reality from fiction. Heuristic fictions help us to perceive new relations and new connections among things, broadening our ability to express ourselves, interpret ourselves, and transform ourselves. The “strategy of discourse” in metaphorical language is not necessarily to improve communication or argumentation but “to shatter and to increase our sense of reality by shattering and increasing our language.”1 Like any form of discourse, a metaphor communicates something to someone about something—produced as event, understood as meaning. Only “living metaphors” are at the same time both event and meaning. A “dead metaphor” has lost its event character when it becomes sedimented into a traditional stock of expressions adopted by a community, like, for example, to call a left-handed person a “southpaw,” or to describe someone who is nervous as having “butterflies in his stomach.” A live metaphor, on the other hand, is a truly novel expression in the sense of a “metaphorical twist” that produces a new, surprising meaning.2 In a live metaphor there is tension in the way something is described metaphorically and how we normally understand it to be. In order to grasp the differences and resemblance that constitute a metaphor we must see-through the first-order, ostensive reference to the second-order, creative reference to understand how it redescribes the world. To understand what a metaphor means is to see that it is similar to and different from an ordinary description. For example, when I read in the sports page that “Patrick Ewing is a warrior” I understand that he is still a basketball player and not literally a warrior but somehow like a warrior, and, in some sense, he truly is both a warrior and...