Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

1. Thoughts on Narrative Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

2. 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 Thoughts on Narrative Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

3. 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 Thoughts on Narrative Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

4. 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'aged'homme" Thoughts on Narrative Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

5. 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" Thoughts on Narrative Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

6. There is an Indian story—at least I heard it as an Indian story—about 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 Thoughts on Narrative Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

7. 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 Thoughts on Narrative Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

8. 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 Thoughts on Narrative Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

9. 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 AThousand 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" Thoughts on Narrative Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

10. [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 Thoughts on Narrative Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

11. 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" Thoughts on Narrative Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

12. 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 Thoughts on Narrative Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011