Abstract
The relationship between the Storyrealm and the Taleworld is commonly presumed to be referential. The presumption of referentiality is enhanced in anecdotes whose Taleworlds can easily be supposed to be real. The story is then understood to be shaped by, and in turn to direct attention to, aspects of reality. The fallacy of this presumption can be brought out by examining the relationship between Storyrealm and Taleworld where the Taleworld is not real but fictive. The sense in which fictions refer to anything at all is unclear. In considering the relationship between the Storyrealm and the Taleworld, then, it will be revealing to see whether the constitution of the Taleworld, the relationship between the Taleworld and the Storyrealm, and the relationship between the Taleworld and the real are the same or different for fictions and true stories. The traditional move in narrative theory has been to locate the difference between the fictive and the real in the constitution of the Taleworld: imaginary realms yield fictions; real ones yield true stories. This move is confounded by two difficulties: one, the sense in which realities do not yield true stories; and the other, the sense in which imaginary realms do not yield fictions.
A story is made out of events to the extent that plot makes events into a story. Paul Ricoeur
The argument for stories as reconstitutions was first given as a paper called “Against Referentiality in Storytelling” at the 1977 California Folklore Society Meetings, Pitzer College, California. This became part of a later version called “Storyability and Eventfulness,” given at the 1981 American Folklore Society Meetings, San Antonio, Texas.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time”, Critical Inquiry 7, #1, (Autumn 1980), pp. 169–190, p. 171.
Marie-Laure Ryan, “Fiction, Non-factuals, and the Principle of Minimal Departure,” Poetics 9 (1980) pp. 403–422, p. 406.
Schutz, p. 253.
Jason, p. 210.
Goffran, p. 256.
The notion of interstitial categories has been extended from Arnold Van Gennep’s work by such practicioners as Mary Douglas and Victor Turner. Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960);
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (Middlesex, England: Pelican, 1970);
Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1970).
See Jason, p. 208 and elsewhere.
Natanson, The Journeying Self (Reading, Massachusetts; Menlo Park, California; London; Don Mills, Ontario: Addison-Wesley, 1970), p. 37.
Alfred Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations, Helmut R. Wagner, Tr. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973) p. 254.
See also Nelson Goodnan, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: 1978) p. x, on the general intellectual movement away from assumptions of “a world fixed and found” to the recognition of “a diversity of…. versions or worlds in the making.”
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, On the Margins of Discourse (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 11.
Smith, p. 84.
Smith, p. 30.
Smith, p. 29. Another and powerful readering of this argument is Ryan’s, adapted from John Searle: people telling fictious are people pretending to be people telling true stories, in what Searle distinguishes as pretending to refer as opposed to referring seriously. Both intend to move away from supposing that fictions refer to imaginery events and both run into similar difficulties with, among other things, the proliferation of theoretical entities and the ontological ambiguity of anecdotes. They make a move toward the theory I propose, though, in shifting the locus of the distinction between the fictive and the real from the Storyrealm to the intentionality of the tellers or hearers: the notion of pretending to be somebody else, or what Ryan calls substitute speakers. Ryan, pp. 412–413; John Searle, “The Logical/Status of Fictions,” New Literal History 6 (1975). pp. 319–332.
See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1977), pp. 147–148: “there was a falsification--a false distancing--of ‘fictional’ or the ‘imaginary’ (and connected with these the ‘subjective’). And there was a related suppression of the fact of writing--active signifying composition--in what was distinguished as the ‘practica,’ the ‘factual’ or the ‘discoursive.’ These consequences are profoundly related. To move, by defintion, from the ‘creative’ to the ‘fictional’, or from the ‘imaginative’ to the ‘imaginary’, is to deform the real practices of writing under the pressure of the interpretation of certain specific forms. The extreme negative definition of ‘fiction’ (or of ‘myth’)--an account of ‘what did not (really) happen’--depends, evidently, on a pseudo-positive isolation of the contrasting definition, ‘fact.’”
Roger Abrahams, “The Play of Worlds in Story and Storytelling”, chapter of unpublished work-in-progress tentatively titled Goings On: Between Acts and Enactments (university of Texas, Austin), p. 41
Maurice Natanson, Literature. Philosophy and the Social Sciences (The Hague: Mouton, 1962), p. 193.
Samuel Butler is supposed to have remarked that God can’t change history, historians can.
Contrast John Austin, How to do Things with Words (New York: Oxford Uuniversity Press, 1965), p. 22 on etiolations of language.
See Jonathan Culler, “Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative”, Poetics Today 1 #3 (1980), pp. 27–37, p.33, on the recurrent opposition between “the priority and determining power of events and the determination of events by structures of significantion”.
William Labov and Joshua Waletzky, “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience: in June Helm, ed., Essays in the Verbal and Visual Arts (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1967).
See Goffman, pp. 156–157.
Labov has been exploring the legal notions of eye-witness and hearsay evidence with respect to narrative. unpublished Lectures (University of Pennsylvania: 1979).
Labov, “The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax” in his Language in the Inner City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), p. 371.
Harvey Sacks, Upublished Lecture Notes (University of California, Irvine: 1970), Lecture III, p. 12.
Sacks (1970), I, p. 3.
See Natanson, The Journeying Self, p. 25.
Natanson, The Journeying Self, p. 27.
Natanson, The Journeying Self, p. 16.
Sacks (1970) I, p. 8.
Sacks (1970) III, p. 12.
See Sacks (1970) III, p. 20.
Labov, Language in the Inner City, p. 359.
Goffman, pp. 506–507.
Sacks (1971) VI, p. 5: “So in a way a present is designedly isolated. By ‘designedly’ again, I mean to point up that the pasts before that present are set up to arrive at that as a present, and that present is used, then, to project futures. So it has this fine temporal organization to it, in which a range of tenses are manipulated to isolate a present. The present that’s isolated is itself used as a platform for projecting futures.”
Sacks (1968) Topic, p. 2.
Sacks (1970) III, p. 11.
Hayden White, “The Value of ISferrativity in the Representation of Reality”, Critical Inquiry 7, #1 (Autumn 1980), p. 14.
See Amy Shuman, “Retellings: Storytelling and Writing among Urban Adolescents” (Philadelphia: Ph.D. Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1981), p. 246. She distinguishes between events and experiences, arguing that “events are categories of experience, not to be confused with the experiences themselves.”
See White, p. 26, on closure.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge and Paul, 1933).
Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry (San Francisco: Chandler, 1964), p. 265.
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), p. 180.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G.E.M. Anscombe, tr. (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1969), p. 214: “We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.”
Ryan, “The Pragmatics of Personal and Imperrsonal Fiction,” Poetics 10 (1981), pp. 517–531, p. 530.
Ricoeur, p. 169.
White, p. 9.
Sacks (1971) IX, p. 5.
Goffman, pp. 550 and 557.
Goffman, unpublished Lecture (University of Pennsylvania, 1973).
Dell Hymes and Courtney Cazden, “Narrative Thinking and Storytelling Rights: A Folklorist1s Clue to a Critique of Education”, Keystone Folklore 22 #1 and 2 (1978), p. 26.
White, pp. 8 and 27.
Ricoeur, p. 184.
Victor Turner, “Social Dramas and Stories about them,” Critical Inquiry 7 #1 (1980), p. 161.
Ricoeur, p. 178.
Richard Vfollheim, Art and Its Objects (New York, Evanston, London: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 75.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Young, K.G. (1987). Storyability and Eventfulness. In: Taleworlds and Storyrealms. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3511-2_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3511-2_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-247-3456-6
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-3511-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive