Organic and Mechanistic Time and the Limits of Narrative

Abstract

This essay examines the narratalogical presuppositions of organic and mechanistic accounts of the world. If our hypothesis about the respective alliances between organic and mechanistic explanatory modes on the one hand and the narrative poles of sjuzhet and fabula on the other is correct, and if it is true, moreover, that narrative is necessarily constituted in the field of tension between these two narrative poles, then it is no wonder that natural-historical accounts of the world must fail to remain consistently organic or mechanistic.