Introduction: Time and Narrative, the Missing Link between the “Narrative Turn” and Postclassical Narratology?

The three volumes of Time and Narrative (1983–85) were published—and soon translated to English (1984–88)—in a pivotal moment for narrative studies and for narratology. In the middle of the eighties, the interest in narratives began to spread beyond the traditional fields of literary studies and linguistics and to influence almost all humanities disciplines. However, this remarkable expansion of narrative studies is disconnected from the evolution of narratology, which at the same time entered a period of “crisis” (Rimmon-Kenan 1989), before its revival under the label of “postclassical narratology” (Herman 1997). Indeed, there is a tension between, on the one side, the proliferation of narrative studies throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and on the other side, the loss of interest in the theorization of narrative forms after its peak in the decades before. At that turning point, most attention was focused on how we use narratives or how they shape reality, and no longer on how narratives are shaped. Yet this introduction intends to show that, unlike many other works that have contributed to what will later be called the “narrative shift” (Kreiswirth 1992), Ricœur's legacy may appear in retrospect to be the missing link between classical and postclassical narratology, and between contemporary narratology and the wider field of narrative studies.

Narrative Shift and Narrative Imperialism

Despite the interest in narrative found in early psychoanalytic works, it is only in 1991 that Jerome Bruner could argue that, during the last decade, “psychologists became alive to the possibility of narrative as a form not only of representing but of constituting reality. . . . At that point cognitively inclined psychologists and anthropologists began to discover that their colleagues in literary theory and historiography were deeply immersed in asking comparable questions about textually situated narrative” (Bruner 1991: 5). Martin Kreiswirth came to a similar but more general conclusion:

With Bruner and many others, Ricœur belonged to those researchers who have popularized the idea that not only is time conceived through narrative structures but also our identities are shaped in a narrative way (Ricœur 1988: 244–49; 1992). This idea became so predominant that it has elicited reactions from some philosophers and narratologists. Among these thinkers, Galen Strawson began to outline what he described as the psychological Narrativity thesis.¹ As he claims, there would be a “widespread agreement that human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories” (Strawson 2004: 428). Against this new doxa, Strawson defended another way of describing our identities and prescribing how they should be shaped: “It's just not true that there is only one good way for human beings to experience their being in time. There are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative” (Strawson 2004: 429). Another reaction came from philosopher Gregory Currie, who has emphasized the need to distinguish between narratives artifacts and the structuring of our lives:

For Currie “no life is a narrative since no life is a representational artifact” (Currie 2010: 23). This need to differentiate narratives from the narrative construction of reality or identities is shared by some narratologists. Among them, James Phelan argues that the annexing of new territories by the narrative turn—celebrated by Bruner, described by Kreiswirth, and denounced by Strawson and Currie—includes a risk of losing sight of what we really mean by narrative and thus, it can be seen as a form of imperialism, with all the bad connotations attached to the term:

It must be added that while one might have expected narratology to become a central resource for accounting more accurately for the different ways in which our life experiences and our identities are intertwined with the narratives we tell ourselves or exchange with others, it seems in fact that the “narrative turn” has spread at a moment when narratology entered in a phase of internal crisis, leading to a rarefication of studies in this field of research. Therefore, we can question Kreiswirth's dubious assertion concerning the explosion of interest in “theorizing narrative” associated to the “narrative shift” that took place in the 1980s.

From the “Standstill” of Narratology to Its Renewal

In the late 1980s, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan expressed a kind of disenchantment about the current state of her own field of research: “How is it that narratology, which was such a flourishing discipline until recently, has come to a kind of standstill? Why is there in recent years a certain lassitude in the discipline, a certain feeling of ‘end-game’?” (Rimmon-Kenan 1989: 157). According to Rimmon-Kenan, the explanation for this crisis comes from the epistemology and methods associated with narratology, which were denounced at that time as leading to blind spots and exclusions:

According to these critics’ view, classical narratology appeared ill-suited to deal with the new issues raised by the extension of narrative studies, where cognition, reading activities, social context, and pragmatism became paramount. Nevertheless, in the late 1990s and in the new millennium, postclassical narratology has developed in several new directions that offer a better view of these phenomena. Rhetorical, feminist, and postcolonial narratologies have made important corrections to many of the exclusions stemming from structuralism, but it is transmedial and cognitive models² that have made possible a reconceptualization of narrativity more in line with the contemporary stakes.

Transmedial narratology is a reaction to what was described by Rimmon-Kenan as the “exclusion” of a reflection on the “medium.” As she puts it, “like the properties of other media, those of language both open up possibilities and impose constraints which, I am suggesting, shape the narration, the text, and even the story” (1989: 158). While Rimmon-Kenan, in 1989, still advocated for the centrality of the verbal medium, later models offered more decentralized conceptions for narrativity. As stated by Werner Wolf (2003: 193) and by Mieke Bal (1999), from the standpoint of narratology, the “narrative turn” was seen a “culturalist turn,” since the expansion of narrative studies beyond the scope of literary and verbal narratives had brought to light a wide range of narrative artifacts that had previously been neglected.

A first generation of cognitive narratologists focused on the description of schema presiding over the construction, the interpretation, and the memorization of narratives, which widened the perspective beyond the internal structure of literary works toward the exploration of more general narrative competencies. Yet, because of their disincarnated models of cognition, these approaches did not fully grasp the psychological and the social impacts of narratives, which became paramount in later studies labeled as second-generation. As Karin Kukkonen and Marco Caracciolo explain:

Beginning in the 1990s, several attempts were made to develop a narratology drawing attention to “the embodiment of mental processes and their extension into the world through material artifacts and socio-cultural practices” (Kukkonen and Caracciolo 2014: 261). Among them, Monika Fludernik's natural narratology can be seen as a decisive step leading to a fusion of the perspectives offered by transmedial narratology and the second-generation cognitive approaches. She advanced the theoretical discourse in important ways when she argued that experientiality should be considered as the foundation of narrativity, thus opening a dialogue between narratology, narrative studies, and Ricœurian poetics. As she put it:

Such reconceptualization of narrativity not only extends the applicability of narratological concepts to a wider range of narrative phenomena but also places stronger emphasis on issues that became central in the “culturalist turn” of narrative studies. It explores how narrative artifacts provide experiential frameworks for imitating and/or shaping our representation of the world. Building on this “second-generation” conception and on Bayesian probability designs, Kukkonen recently described narrative fiction as a kind of boot camp which is supposed to help us adapt to an ever-changing world:

So even if narratives should not be confused with the structures of lives or identities, the evolution of narratology toward cognitive and transmedial models³ undoubtedly provides new frameworks for reassessing the importance of theorizing narrativity when discussing the anthropological, cultural, or psychological effects of narrative practices and of narrative forms circulating in societies.

A Missing Link

There are several reasons why Ricœur should be considered as a missing link, first between narrative studies and the evolution of narrative theory in the following decades, and second between classical narratology and its postclassical extensions. First of all, unlike many other actors of the “narrative shift” in the mid-1980s, Ricœur has carefully grounded his reflections on narrative configurations of time in concepts belonging to the tradition of narrative theory, such as actantial roles; Genette's typologies of anachronies, of focalization, and of narrative instances; and, of course, several models of narrative sequence and plot. While Bruner almost never referred to narratological models, whole sections of the first and second volumes of Time and Narrative are devoted to exploring the resources offered by Aristotle's conception of emplotment, Propp's morphology of the folktale, the logic of actions developed by Claude Bremond, Greimasian semiotics, and the analysis of narrative discourse by Gérard Genette, Franz Karl Stanzel, and Wayne C. Booth. Therefore, his trilogy can be seen as an extension of narratology rather than a break with this tradition, and we could add with the words of Phelan that, while “stretching” the concept of emplotment to historiography, Ricœur never got to the point where he would lose sight “of what is distinctive” about this concept when used to discuss the organization of fictional discourse; thus, he avoided an “oversimplification . . . of the phenomena” (Phelan 2005: 206).

Second, the philosophical discussion on how “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative” (Ricœur 1984: 3) is not only grounded in reflections based on metaphysics, phenomenology, and a hermeneutic model of knowledge. As we can see in the first volume of Time and Narrative, and even more clearly in the second, Ricœur anchors his reflections in a detailed discussion concerning the characteristics of historical books, such as Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, and of fictions, such as Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, or Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Through careful analyses of these texts, Ricœur attends to the differences between the mediation of narratives and the unmediated or remediated experiences of time, or in other words, between narrative configurations, which are based on narrative artifacts, and prefiguration/refiguration, which relate to the horizons of the readers. He even comes to recognize, in the second and the third volumes of his trilogy,⁴ the specificities of narrative genres, by explaining how historiographical configuration is designed to build a “third time”—namely a mediation between subjective experience and objective events—while fictions appear as “the irreplaceable instrument for the exploration of the discordant concordance that constitutes the cohesiveness of a life” (1988: 140).

By linking narrative functions to narrative forms, and the existential dimension of narrativity to narratological concepts, even as he limits the discussion to printed texts, Ricœur succeeds in tracing an approach that prefigures many recent developments in contextual, cognitive, or transmedial narratology. For instance, the distinction introduced in the first volume of Time and Narrative between prefiguration (referring to the narrative competencies), configuration (referring to the sequential organization of narrative texts), and refiguration (referring to the reading experience reconfigured by narratives) sheds light on a possible articulation between cognitive models, the study of narrative structures, and the way the reading activity can reshape the experience of the audience. By linking this hermeneutic approach with semiotic models developed by narratologists, Ricœur opened a way for a cognitive reconceptualization of those models, as exemplified by the early contribution of Bertrand Gervais (1990). In his book, Gervais not only is a precursor of many later cognitive approaches in narratology—for instance, he introduced concepts such as scripts and planned actions, borrowed from AI studies, that would become the core of David Herman's definition of “postclassical narratology” (1997)—but he explicitly grounds his model on the distinction introduced by Ricœur between prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration. Later in the French-speaking tradition,⁵ many theoretical models of narrativity have developed on the same assumption that a semantics of actions, explicitly attached to Ricœurian prefiguration, could be used to describe the sequential organization of texts (Adam 1997), their degree of narrativity (Revaz 1997), or the textual dynamics leading to the building of narrative tension (Baroni 2007).

Time and Narrative can also be seen as a bridge between classical and postclassical narratology because it remains anchored in structuralist and formalist conceptions of narrativity, while at the same time pointing toward a reflection on how narrative structures, through the reading process, transform the way we experience the real events of our life. As explained by Fludernik:

As Fludernik explains, Ricœur may have neglected the distinctive way historiography deals with experientiality, because in the 1980s, the concepts he borrowed from narratology were limited to intentionality, or the fulfillment of goals, and these parameters were not able to fully grasp the specific way fictions offers an exploration of human experiences. Yet, despite this limitation, Fludernik acknowledges that Ricœur was able to uncover the fundamental interconnection between emplotment and the “concept of temporality, both in its sequential and experiential nature.” While keeping a foot in the past by relying on structuralist concepts that prevented him from fully grasping the importance of narrative “dynamics” and the specificities of the “experience” shaped by fictions, Ricœur can be nevertheless seen as pointing toward the future, because he was among the first to recognize the fundamental importance that should be given to experientiality when mediated, or remediated, by narrative forms. As Fludernik points out, experientiality can thus be considered both as the basis of Ricœur's reflection and as its main blind spot.⁶ Or more precisely, it became a crossroads, for Ricœur showed how experientiality related to old models of narrativity, but he also highlighted, through the exploratory nature of his reflection, unrealized potentialities inherent to these models, which opened up the possibility of further researches.

In the context of the narrative shift that began in the 1980s, Ricœur has become an important reference for several narratological studies developed in the following decade, in particular in the French-speaking tradition. Among other examples, Time and Narrative appears as a central reference in Fludernik's influential Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996), and it is fundamental in many French-speaking studies, for instance, in books such as Récit et actions (Gervais 1990), La Narrativité (Bres 1994), Les Textes d'action (Revaz 1997), Les Textes: Types et prototypes (Adam 1997), La Tension narrative (Baroni 2007), or L’Œuvre du temps (Baroni 2009). Not surprisingly, in 1988, Ricœur wrote the foreword to a very influential essay for the development of a filmic narratology: Du littéraire au filmique (Gaudreault 1999).⁷ In this book André Gaudreault found in the Aristotelian foundation of Time and Narrative a way to overcome the Genettian limitation of the scope of narratology to stories told verbally by narrators. A few years ago, Marc Lits has also acknowledged the importance of Ricœur's work for the development of his research group on “media narratives”:

Even though Ricœur appears as a mandatory reference in many narrative studies developed in the French-speaking community during the 1990s and 2000s, Jonas Grethlein explains in his contribution to this issue of Poetics Today that the influence of Ricœur's thinking has remained somewhat limited in the English-speaking community. Thus, the time has come to reevaluate the legacy of Ricœur's trilogy for contemporary research in narratology, either to acknowledge our debt to his contribution to the narrative shift of the 1980s, or to become aware of how far we have come in the last few decades since that pivotal moment.

Renewing the Discussion on Plot and Experientiality

As we have seen, to envisage Ricœur's approach through “plot” and “experientiality” serves to highlight the importance of the legacy of Time and Narrative for contemporary debates in narratology. This issue of Poetics Today thus offers a series of case studies whose purpose is to put in perspective—or to question—Ricœur's approach to fiction and nonfiction, an approach which is far from being dogmatic (Baroni 2010: 377–79), showing itself at any rate as a pensée en mouvement.

The first section tackles the Ricœurian notions of “plot” and “narrative identity.” Marco Caracciolo's article proceeds by contrast: it confronts Ricœur's argument precisely with what it tends to discard. The purpose is to explore narrative genres of devices that Ricœur minimizes, omits, or sometimes excludes. Caracciolo shows that Ricœur's analysis on “cosmic” or “monumental” time in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) does not capture the notion of “deep time” (in other word nonanthropological time): a group of hypercontemporary novels and short stories explore biological, geological, or astronomic time with fictional devices which rely on nonlinear patterns (which the article defines as the “discontinuous line,” the “loop,” the “network,” and the “rhizome”). Thus the fictional narratives considered here jeopardize the “creative imitation” that is at the core of Ricœur's conception of mimesis, a discursive phenomenon that reduplicates (or requalifies) human experience of time (Ricœur 1984: 45). These fictional narratives are therefore to be seen as competing, parallel, or alternative models. Above all, they contest the scope of narrativity, denying it a privileged access to the knowledge of the self.

Grethlein's article also aims to investigate some of Time and Narrative's theoretical blind spots. Following Ricœur's method of developing his approach in an intense dialogue with ancient philosophy, this article uses Plato's idea of mimesis to establish a bridge between Ricœur's phenomenology and cognitive approaches. Plato's ban on the poets has been vehemently criticized by literary scholars, and yet his psychological focus on audiences complements Ricœur's Aristotelian idea of mimesis by adding the significance of consciousness to the reconfiguration of time.

The second part of this issue deals with emplotment in non-fiction in the wake of volumes 1 and 3 of Time and Narrative. Although their scales of analysis may vary, the articles gathered here share a focus on the effects produced by the narrative reconfiguration of real events. They also redraw the contours and stakes of the Ricœurian opposition between the configuration of historical narratives and the emplotment of fictions. In his article on the historiography of World War II, Philippe Carrard examines how certain narratives aim to arouse “curiosity” and “surprise” by summoning possible narratives in the form of counterfactual statements (“what if . . . ”), or by using prolepses. Historiography can then lean toward a very high narrative density, whose purpose is to offer a reenactment of the past to make the reader “experience” it. Historiographical narrations thus model their own reception; they also look through the discipline itself as they engage in a constant and often polemical rewriting of other sources.

The way in which narrative configurations condition the interpretation of a past event is also at the core of Marie Vanoost's article, which deals with journalistic writing and, more precisely, with the “immersive” techniques used in literary journalism. This genre is based on strategies that aim to literally (and literarily) incorporate the reader in the event: writing testimony, exemplarity, pathos, and so forth. The article then offers a new insight on the use and ethical value of non-fictional “immersive” narratives.

Finally, Raphaël Baroni's article explores different modalities of narrativity found in non-fiction, structuring the discussion around a comparison between the media treatment of two air crashes. The aim is to highlight the existence of two prototypes of narrativity similar to the distinction outlined by Ricœur between configuration found in historiography and emplotment found in fiction. Yet, in distinction from Ricœur's approach, Baroni's comparison is remodeled so as not to refer to specific genres such as historiography and fiction, but rather to invoke prototypes of informative versus mimetic narratives. This latter mode of comparison is designed to transcend media realizations and the opposition between fiction and non-fiction. While the former prototype refers to narratives offering a report from events disincarnated to increase intelligibility, the latter tends to plunge the reader back into the heart of a simulated event, so that a more existential understanding becomes possible. He also mentions the specific ways serialized information about an ongoing investigation seem to give birth to a kind of “natural” form of emplotment, a case of inchoative narrativity embedded in the flow of time that Ricœur had neglected.

Beyond their differences, these various contributions show that Ricœur's work, by situating itself at a historical turning point marked by the explosion of narrative studies and the transition to postclassical narratology, remains an interesting starting point for thinking about the connections between temporal experience and its emplotment, as well as for considering the way in which nonfictional genres shape the narrated events. But these different approaches also show that this legacy needs to be reconsidered today. On the one hand, it is a question of highlighting the paradigms forgotten or neglected by Ricœur, whether they be the Platonic poetics or the nonanthropomorphic temporality of “deep time.” On the other hand, in contrast to Hayden White, Ricœur insisted on the specificity of the narrative configuration in historiography, opening the way to a narratology aware of the specificities inherent to factual narratives, but there is a need to consider more precisely the way (or ways) historians and journalists narrate the events of the past. These various extensions thus invite us to rethink the meaning and scope of the notion of emplotment, which is at the heart of the three volumes of Time and Narrative.

The articles gathered in this issue of Poetics Today follow a workshop organized at the University of Basel in 2018 which focused on Ricœur's Time and Narrative, with a special insistence on plot and experientiality. This special issue is coordinated with a similar issue published in the electronic journal Les Cahiers de narratologie, which includes a translation of Philippe Carrard's article, and several original papers written in French. We would like to express our deep gratitude to the University of Basel, the University of Lausanne, and the Swiss National Science Foundation (FNS) for their financial support.

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