A Joke On his first day of prison, a man joins a group of long-term prisoners talking in the mess. One of them says, 'tell us a joke, somebody'. There is silence for a second, and then another prisoner says, '17!'. All of the long-term prisoners instantly burst out laughing. The new prisoner is confused by this, but pretends to laugh anyway. Suddenly, another prisoner calls out '29!'. This is greeted by floods of laughter. The new prisoner turns to a short man in spectacles standing next to him and, discretely, asks why everyone is laughing at mere numbers. 'Well', is the reply, 'we've all been here so long that we have given numbers to all the jokes we know. Now we only have to call out the number.' 'Oh', says the new prisoner. When the laughter has quieted a little, he blurts out '21!' picking a number at random. The whole cafeteria is dead silent, not even a chuckle. The short man in spectacles turns to him woefully and says, 'Sorry, mate, but it's how you tell them'. The 'how you tell them' signals the irreducibly temporal aspect of joke-telling or, more generally, of any affective speech. A comedian has 'good timing', or is not a comedian. The joke never coincides with the punch line, or with a summary of whatever logical twists it 'consists' of, and certainly not with a numerical marker. Analogous, then, to Levinas's famous distinction between the saying and the said is, perhaps, telling and told. This is still more the case in that most obviously temporal of discourses, narrative. (And of course many jokes, like the one above, are miniature narratives.) I wish to investigate the experience of narrative with respect to the specific question of its relation to some form or other of understanding. My thesis is that such experience necessarily (although most often obscurely) reveals an openness which is genuinely transcendent with respect to understanding. The various sections of this paper will break down into three parts: first, a critical discussion of the phenomenon of narration as a type of understand-ing; the second part, relating the problem of narration to the ethical idea of 'virtue', including a discussion of the revealing notion of 'surprise'; finally, a corresponding reading of Shakespeare's King Lear. Narrative as understanding At minimum, a narrative is a sequence of events which forms a 'figure', or at least an abstract pattern. This figure has at least three varieties. First, the narrative as a whole can provide a concept of a type or genre of character or adventure. The story can be a detective story, a bitter-sweet romance, a tragedy, a bawdy comedy, and so on, and the character can be a heroine, a rogue, a tempter, a sacrifice-maker, and so on. In such cases, the type of figure dominates the narrative. In the second variety, the narrative figure (again, as a whole) has no sense on its own, but refers to something beyond itself which is its proper meaning: the moral of the fable, the real in realism. This meaning, however, is transportable. The moral fable, or the realistic fiction, does not need this particular narrative to explicate its ultimate referents. For these two, as each event is narrated, a fuller and fuller picture of, say, a character and of that character's world is revealed. The more details we have, the more we can anticipate with confidence what will happen next. The narrative thus functions as a device for understanding, for describing the unity of a multiplicity. In the third variety, the narrative provides a unity to events simply by their being a part of that narrative. This happens even if (perhaps especially if) it breaks down genres and character patterns in some new way, or contains deep thematic or moral ambiguities. Such a narrative simply brings things together as things which ipso facto belong together. The figure itself, and such as it is, dominates, and for the first time is unique, rather than being one of many possible instances of a type, or one of many possible vehicles of a meaning. …