Abstract
Jukka Mikkonen argues that the cognitive benefits of narrative should be explained in terms of understanding rather than knowledge. An apparent consequence of Mikkonen’s view is that ‘plot-based’ conceptions of narrative are less interesting than has long been supposed. I argue that, although the concept of understanding does indeed outperform the concept of knowledge in this area, it would be a mistake to conclude that knowledge of plots is unimportant. Doing so ignores the distinctive kind of understanding gained from trying to shape events into an orderly plot but failing to do so.
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Notes
The phrasing here might suggest that the organization is imposed on a reality that lacks it. But Ricoeur’s position is more subtle. Time and Narrative argues that true narratives explicate pre-narrative structures that are implicit in events themselves. Mikkonen’s claim that for Ricoeur, ‘self-narration is seen not as reconstruction but construction’ (Mikkonen, 2022, p. 50), should therefore be qualified. It is construction, in that narratives must be written. But it is also reconstruction, in that the writing of a narrative explicates something unconstructed that precedes it.
In the original French, the passage reads: ‘le temps devient temps humain dans la mesure où il est articulé sur un mode narratif’ (Ricoeur, 1983, p. 85).
This is a crucial point, and one that is often missed. As Philosophy, Literature and Understanding documents, critics of narrative conceptions of selfhood often suggest that likening the unity of a life to the unity of a story is bound to bring art and life too close together, suggesting that life is more orderly than it actually is. But it is one thing to claim that we seek to understand our lives in narrative form, and quite another to claim that we succeed in imposing a high degree of narrative coherence on them. As Ricoeur shows, it is possible to accept the first view but reject the second.
A valuable feature of Mikkonen’s view is its insistence that reading is not ‘an isolated and individual process’, but rather ‘something that takes place within the literary practice and includes critical discourse and collective metacognition’ (Mikkonen, 2022, p. 8). This is an especially important point in the current context, since it suggests that the confusion provoked by literary works, and the responses to this confusion, can manifest themselves across entire fields and traditions, not just in individual readers. The failure of established narrative techniques to represent certain contemporary experiences, for example, might lead to the development of new forms of representation, as it presumably did in the development of literary modernism. For a fuller discussion of this point, see White 2001, p. 384.
References
Fludernik, M. (2010). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. Routledge.
Mikkonen, J. (2022). Philosophy, literature and understanding. Bloomsbury.
Ricoeur, P. (1983). Temps et Récit I. Éditions du Seuil.
Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative, Vol. 1. (K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1988). Time and narrative, Vol. 3. (K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
White, H. (2001 [1992]). Historical emplotment and the problem of truth. In G. Roberts (Ed.), The history and narrative reader (pp. 375–389). Routledge.
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Piercey, R. Confusing Narratives. Philosophia 52, 21–28 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00685-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00685-2