Temporality and translation: Thematic and non-thematic narrative

Abstract

Narrative theorists broadly agree that stories are important to both being and knowing. There is less agreement, however, as to exactly how deep narrative goes. The strongest narrativists—such as David Carr and Alisdair MacIntyre—argue that story is so fundamental that human existence itself has an intrinsic narrative structure. The strongest anti-narrativists—such as Galen Strawson and Peter Lamarque—suggest that narrative is merely one way of knowing among others and enjoys no privileged ontological or epistemological status. A closely related question concerns how seemingly diverse forms of narration such as fiction, history, the small stories of daily interaction and storied (or story-like) modes of cognition relate to one another. The crux of the issue, I suggest, lies in the relationship between narrative and the human experience of time. The central argument, drawing on the existential hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricœur, is that narrative and the human experience of time are non-identical but intimately connected through a continuous process of existential translation. It proceeds in four stages: (1) we should distinguish between explicit, thematic storytelling and the everyday, non-thematic experience of time; (2) narration is a type of translation which thematizes and allows some interpretive possibilities to be recognized while masking others; (3) this type of translation produces narratives which are, to some extent, object-like; (4) this allows the operation of distanciation, opening the possibility of new understanding through ‘second-order disclosure’. I suggest that this existential approach can usefully inform and expand our understanding of both narrative and translation. A synopsis of this article can be found here.