The Tide Rises

Notes Toward a Narrative Future II

The question then is whether a narrative can be true--or in what sense or to what degree or in what way a narrative can be true. Narratives work. Most human work is done through the complicity of narrative.. But what makes a narrative useful does not make it true (the essential fact upon which is built Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation).

True is different from accurate, though they share in the same problematic of a lack of wholeness. But if a narrative can be accurate as far as it goes without being true. In fact a true narrative might not even have to be accurate, that is if the true is the object of fiction and the accurate the object of history. One might posit degrees of truth, but that is really degrees of accuracy. True, unqualified, admits of no ommission or excess.

Notes toward a Narrative Future I

Humans sense the world via story. It would be accurate to say that in addition to our physical senses we possess a narrative sense. As our sight and hearing and smell, touch and taste make sense of physical stimuli, our narrative sense connects these and all other impressions into story. Stories, like houses, are both "made" or constructed and "found" or discovered. The house can be built a number of ways. But these ways are not infinite. They are bounded by the nature of the material out of which the house is made and the physical constraints of the environment, from gravity to hurricanes. The house is a negotiation of the imagination, history, material, and materiality. The story too is so constrained. Neither true nor false, and yet both.

Paul Ricoeur will barely be discernible in these notes, and yet he will be part of the negotiation at every step.