Understanding Narrative Theory

Abstract

Narrative theories emerge from inquiries just as surely as do historical investigations. Therefore, understanding a particular theory requires that we attend to questions it puts to narrative. Expressed another way, we cannot fully appreciate terms of a narrative theory unless we also appreciate its purpose. Hempel's covering-law models provided history with a singular function: to serve as explanations (or explanation sketches) of crucial events. Hayden White's pivotal studies of historical narrative as a literary entity support values (and dangers) of history's creative functions. Ricoeur's mimetic dialectic develops narrative's function to configure time in human experience. However, all of these (and other) theories are incomplete in some cases, justifiably so. For example, in interests of literary criticism, White would leave to epistemologists the question of veracity of a given kind of discourse, with respect to 'object-world' of which it speaks.' Likewise, in their concentration upon history's explanatory function, Hempelians largely ignored everything in historical narrative that they could not translate with ease or by force into causal statements. We have made some recent inroads into connecting ground between these seemingly polar perspectives. Nonetheless, we must also record two major difficulties that remain: denigration of epistemology and its interests and failure to develop a comprehensive view of what a theory of narrative should contain in its finished state. Although White's remark on epistemology's task seems innocent enough, it reflects a more general view that epistemology deserves little place within contemporary narrative theory. Ricoeur echoes this idea, despite his appreciative critique of Anglo-American analyses of narrative. In characterizing such work as epistemology of historical sciences, he absorbs what he calls White's first presupposition, setting aside of methods in which objectivity and proof determine criteria for classifying modes of discourse. White and Ricoeur fall into this shared view by equating questions of objectivity and proof with ques-