p.144 [Hayden White] "Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories...?"
p.144 Frank Kermode, in his influential study The Sense of an Ending, puts it this way: "In 'making
sense' of the world we... feel a need... to experience that concordance of beginning, middle and end which is the essence
of our explanatory fictions..."
p.145 Barthes says that "art knows no static." In other words, in every story everything has its
place in a structure while the extraneous has been eliminated
p.145 Like metaphor, to which [Paul] Ricoeur has also devoted an important study, narrative is a
"semantic innovation" in which something new is brought into the world by means of language. Instead of describing
the world it redescribes it. Metaphor, he says, is the capacity of "seeing-as." Narrative opens us to "the
realm of the 'as if'."
p.145 If the role of narrative is to introduce something new into the world, and what it introduces is the
synthesis of the heterogeneous, then presumably it attaches to the events of the world a form they do not otherwise have.
A story redescribes the world; in other words, it describes it as if it were what presumably, in
fact, it is not.
p.147 Whatever we encounter... functions as instrument or obstacle to our plans, expectations, and hopes.
p.147 In action we are always in the midst of something
p.147 Thus the events of life are anything but a mere sequence; they constitute
rather a complex structure of temporal configurations that interlock and receive their definition and their meaning from within
action itself. To be sure, the structure of action may not be tidy. Things do not always work out as planned,
but this only adds an element of the same contingency and suspense to life that we find in stories.
p.148 in a good story, to use Barthes's image, all the extraneous noise or static is cut out...
A selection is made of all the events and actions the characters may engage in, and only a small minority finds its way into
the story.
p.149 Not only do our acts and our movements, present and past, derive their sense from the projected end
they serve; our surroundings function as sphere of operations and the objects we encounter figure in our experience
in furtherance of (or hindrance to) our purposes. Indeed, in our active lives it could be said that the focus of
our attention is not on the present but the future... the elements and phases of action, though they unfold in time,
are viewed from the perspective of their having been completed.
If this is true when we are absorbed in action, it is all the more true of the reflective
or deliberative detachment involved - not only in the formulating of projects and plans but also in the constant revision
and reassessment required as we go along and are forced to deal with changing circumstances.
p.149 The essence of deliberative activity is to anticipate the future and lay out the whole action as a
unified sequence of steps and stages, interlocking means and ends.
p.149-150 action seems to 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.150 It is not only novelists and historians who view events in terms [of] their relation to later events...
we do it all the time, in everyday life.
p.150 we are constantly striving, with more or less success, to occupy the story-tellers' position with
respect to our own lives.
p.150 When asked, "What are you doing?" we may be expected to come up with a story,
complete with beginning, middle, and end, an accounting or recounting which is description and justification
all at once.
p.150 narrative activity... is a constitutive part of action
p.150 The actions and sufferings of life can be viewed as a process of telling ourselves stories, listening
to those stories, acting them out, or living them through.... sometimes we change the events, by acting, to accommodate the
story... narration constitutes something, creates meaning rather than just reflecting... narrative activity... is practical
p.152 The temporal sequence must be brought under a prospective-retrospective grasp which gives it its configuration
p.153 Again we say that the narrative function is practical before it is cognitive
or aesthetic; it renders concerted action possible and also works toward the self-preservation of the subject which
acts.
p.155 it is in envisaging new content, new ways of telling and living stories, and new kinds of stories,
that history and fiction can be both truthful and creative in the best sense.[33]
[footnote 33: The themes in this essay are developed at greater length in my Time, Narrative, and History
(Bloominton, 1986).]
