p.15 Narrative is a "synthesis of the heterogeneous" in which disparate elements of the human world - "agents,
goals, means, interactions, circumstances, unexpected results, etc." - are brought together and harmonized... narrative is
a "semantic innovation" in which something new is brought into the world by means of language. Instead of describing
the world, [narrative] re-describes it... Narrative opens us to "the realm of the 'as if' " ...A story redescribes
the world, that is, it describes it as if it were what, presumably, in fact it is not.
p.16-17 The German philosopher Wilhelm Schapp, a renegade phenomenologist writing in the
1950s, made the idea of being caught up in stories (In Geschichten Verstrickt) the key to
a whole theory of human existence and much more besides.
p.22 Husserl adds a significant dimension to his account of how we experience events by
recognizing that an expectation of the future is as much a part of the experience as a retention of the past...
He speaks of "primary" (as opposed to secondary) expectation which corresponds to primary memory, and calls it "protention"
to correspond to retention.
p.28-29 the protentional horizon... is an extension of the present, opens onto the future, and is
at once limited and open... even in the midst of the most novel and disconcertingly confusing experiences, the protentional
future is still determined to some extent... what we experience temporally are not isolated instants, but configurations
which extend protentionally into the future
p.30 [Husserl] "we have... determinate expectations. We are not and can never be completely
without a forwardly directed grasp. The temporal background also has a future."
p.31 To understand an action is to know not what caused it but rather what justified
it, either in general or in the eyes of the agent.
p.39 In a significant sense, when we are absorbed in an action the focus or direction of
our attention, the center of our concern, lies not in the present but in the future... on
the work to be done.
p.54-55 When the events and actions are longer-term and more complex, it is clear that something
more and different is required. It is not merely that a longer attention-span is required, and that more and more
disparate elements must be held together and related. Nor is it merely that the longer-term leaves open more
opportunity for changing circumstances to intrude and to require revision of plans. Even more important is the fact
that events and actions maintain their identity in integrity for us even though they are interrupted and criss-cross one another.
Our ability to experience events is at this level the ability to follow them through these interruptions, and our
ability to act is that of pursuing and maintaining a course of action while intermittently carrying out other actions which
may be unrelated.
p.57 in a good story, to use Barthes's image, all the extraneous noise or static
is cut out. That is, we the audience are told by the story-teller just what is necessary to "further the plot."
p.58 This knowledge provides the principle for excluding the extraneous.
p.59 Narrative requires narration; and this activity is not just a recounting of events
but a recounting informed by a certain kind of superior knowledge.
p.59 The narrator... in virtue of his retrospective view, picks out the most important events, traces the
causal and motivational connections among them, and gives an organized, coherent account.
p.60 The essence of the reflective and deliberative stance or activity is to anticipate the future
and lay out the whole action as a unified sequence of steps and stages, as required by the envisaged end. This
prospective-retrospective principle of organization, though it does not literally eliminate the
noise or "static", does permit us to distinguish the relevant and useful from the intrusive, and
allows us to push the extraneous into the background. This capacity to attend to what counts is
like the author's principle of selection.
p.60 Our point is simply that action does involve, indeed quite essentially, the adoption of an
anticipated future-retrospective point of view on the present. We know we are in the present and that the unforeseen
can happen; but the very essence of action is to strive to overcome that limitation by foreseeing as much as possible.
p.61 we are constantly striving, with more or less success, to occupy the story-teller's position
with respect to our own actions... we often need to tell such a story even to ourselves, in order to become clear
on what we are about... narrative activity... is often a constitutive part of action, and not just an embellishment, commentary
or other incidental accompaniment.
p.62 what is essential to narration is not that it is a verbal act of telling, as such,
but that it embodies a certain point (or points) of view on a sequence of events.
p.64 Emplotment is a "configurational act"... which transforms the events into a story
by "grasping them together," and directing them toward a conclusion or an ending.
p.65 we have tried to show that narrative is what Barbara Hardy calls a "primary act of
mind." It is our primary way of organizing and giving coherence to our existence.
p.65 What we have been arguing... is that narrative form is... the structure inherent in human experience
and action.
p.71 If we think of narrative as "organizing," "making sense of," and rendering "coherent" our action and
experience... narrative organization of action may be considered cognitive in the sense that the action's implicit
"story" is nothing but our knowledge of what we are about or what we are doing.
p.71 such narratives may serve to organize and make sense of the experience
and action of their authors and their readers, focusing their attention in certain directions and orienting their
actions toward certain goals.
p.76 For Dilthey, understanding as a cognitive endeavor is always correlated with coherence.
p.83 Schapp's graphic and striking term Verstricktsein, to be caught up or entangled in,
expresses the most intimate possible relation between the self and the various stories of which human reality is made up,
including even one's own life story.
p.84 the concept of narrative involves not only a series of (human) events unfolding in time, according
to a structure, but also a prospective-retrospective grasp which holds together that unfolding and constitutes its structure.
p.84 narration requires not only a story but also a story-teller.
p.88 We have argued... that narrative coherence belongs to even the most elementary experience
or action, that it is an essential structural feature of the very fact of having an experience or performing
an action.
p.89 Human existence and action as we have described them consist not in overcoming
time, not in escaping it or arresting its flow, but in shaping and forming it.
p.90 Despite all the impediments thrown up by our incapacities and the infuriating obstructions of outside
circumstances and other people, we manage. Our lives may not be works of art or things of beauty, but we muddle through nevertheless
and actually get things done.
p.90 narrative coherence is the norm or rule in the second sense that it is the standard which
determines even that which deviates from it. When plans go awry, when things fall apart, it is by reference to or
by contrast with story-like projections, "scenarios," that they do so. What occurs... "one thing after another,"
etc., is, in terms of human reality, the privation precisely of narrative coherence... Narrative coherence is what
we find or effect in much of our experience and action, and to the extent that we do not, we aim for it, try to produce it,
and try to restore it when it goes missing for whatever reason.
p.91 everyday reality is permeated with narrative... That the imagination
is involved there is no doubt... this is a practical and not an aesthetic affair, a matter of coping with
reality... It is our practical imagination that is involved.
p.91 Life can be regarded as a constant effort, even a struggle, to maintain
or restore narrative coherence in the face of an ever-threatening, impending chaos at all levels
p.92 Schapp and MacIntyre use it ["story"] at the level of everyday action and self-awareness,
rather than merely to describe the historian's backward look at past events.
p.94 The story which knits together and renders coherent and whole the loose strands of my life,
whether it is new and original or has been told and lived many times before me, is ultimately my responsibility,
whether I consciously choose it or assume it by default or inadvertence.
p.95 To exist humanly is not merely to be in time but to encompass it or "take it in" as our gaze takes
in our surroundings. It is not that I exist in the present and then happen to have the capacity to envisage the future and
remember the past: rather, human reality is a kind of temporal "reach" or "stretch"
p.97 Coherence seems to be a need imposed on us whether we seek it or not. Things need
to make sense. We feel the lack of sense when it goes missing.
p.110 To speak of an endeavor is to speak of a process ongoing in time
p.163 Every such community is likewise faced with the constant possibility of its own "death"... As we have
said before, whatever else a group may be about, it must see to its own self-maintenance
p.164-165 Changing external circumstances or internal crises may be the occasion for a sort of collective
Besinnung [JLJ - reflection] in which participants are reminded of their past, formulate or reformulate
present problems and projects, and orient themselves toward the future.
p.172-173 Our point is merely that viewing events and actions in light of what follows them, and
of what follows from them, is not something exclusive to the historian's point of view nor even to the consideration
of the past; it is our way of viewing the present as well. More generally, it is our way of viewing
time and living and acting in it.
p.185 We argue... that action, life, and historical existence are themselves structured narratively,
independently of their presentation in literary form, and that this structure is practical before it is aesthetic
or cognitive... What we have tried to describe here, with the help of the concept of narrative, is our way of experiencing,
of acting, and of living both as individuals and as communities. It is our way of being in and dealing with time.
