Tuesday, August 3, 2010

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.

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