Antinarrativist ethics in the postwar context
pp. 86-118
in: , The narrative turn in fiction and theory, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
Contemporary scholars have drawn attention to the importance of differentiating between the descriptive and the normative when discussing the relation between narrative and human experience. Strawson (2004: 428), in particular, proposes to attack on strictly separate fronts the descriptive "psychological Narrativity thesis', according to which "human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort', and the "ethical Narrativity thesis', according to which "experiencing or conceiving one's life as a narrative is a good thing; […] essential to a well-lived life'. It is evident, however, that his own normative condemnation of narrative is based on strong, and largely unexamined, ontological presuppositions according to which only that which is non-narrative is real, and hence narrativization is necessarily, for him, a process of distortion. Similarly, White (1981: 4) moves swiftly from the ontological assertion that the logic of reality is non-narrative to the normative claim that "real events should simply be; […] they should not pose as the tellers of a narrative'. It seems to me that more attention should be paid to the complex interrelation between the ontological and the ethical in arguments both for and against narrativity. As far as the postwar suspicion towards narrative is concerned, it clearly has both epistemological-ontological and ethico-political grounds, which are closely related.