The narrative construction of reality - Narrative Intelligence - page 47

4. Hermeneutic composability. A preliminary word of explanation is needed
here. The word hermeneutic implies that there is a text or a text analogue
through which somebody has been trying to express a meaning and from which
somebody is trying to extract a meaning. This in turn implies that there is a
difference between what is expressed in the text and what the text might mean ,
and furthermore that there is no unique solution to the task of determining
the meaning for this expression. Such hermeneutic interpretation is required
when there is neither a rational method of assuring the “truth” of a meaning
assigned to the text as a whole, nor an empirical method for determining the
verifiability of the constituent elements that make up the text. In effect, the best
hope of hermeneutic analysis is to provide an intuitively convincing account of
the meaning of the text as a whole in the light of the constituent parts that
make it up. This leads to the dilemma of the so-called “hermeneutic circle” -
in which we try to justify the “rightness” of one reading of a text in terms of
other readings rather than by, say, rational deduction or empirical proof. The
most concrete way of explicating this dilemma or “circle” is by reference to
the relations between the meanings assigned the whole of a text (say a story)
and its constituent parts. As Charles Taylor puts it, “we are trying to establish
a reading for the whole text, and for this we appeal to readings of its partial
expressions; and yet because we are dealing with meaning, with making sense,
where expressions only make sense or not in relation to others, the readings
of partial expressions depend on those of others, and ultimately of the whole”
(Taylor 1979: 28).
This is probably nowhere better illustrated than in narrative. The accounts
of protagonists and events that constitute a narrative are selected and shaped
in terms of a putative story or plot that then “contains” them. At the same
time, the “whole” (the mentally represented putative story) is dependent for
its formation upon a supply of constituent candidate parts. In this sense, as we
have already noted, parts and wholes in a narrative rely upon each other for
their viability (Ricoeur 1984). In Vladimir Propp's terms, the parts of a nar-
rative serve as “functions” of the narrative structure as a whole (Propp 1968;
Propp 1984). But that whole cannot be constructed without reference to such
appropriate parts. This puzzling part-whole textual interdependence in nar-
rative is, of course, an illustration of the defining property of what is called
the “hermeneutic circle.” For a story can only be “realized” when its parts and
whole can, as it were, be made to live together.
This hermeneutic property marks narrative both in its construction and in
its comprehension. For narratives do not exist, as it were, in some real world,
waiting there patiently and eternally to be veridically mirrored in a text. The act