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and forgive children and neophytes their incomplete knowledge, “filling in” for
them as necessary. Or Sperber and Wilson, in their well known discussion of
“relevance,” argue that in dialogue we typically presuppose that what an inter-
locutor says in replying to us is topic-relevant and that we most often assign
an interpretation to it accordingly in order to make it so, thereby easing our
task in understanding Other Minds (Sperber & Wilson 1986). We also take for
granted, indeed we institutionalize situations in which it is taken for granted
that the “knowledge register” in which a story is told is different from the one
in which it is taken up, as when the client tells the lawyer his story in “life talk”
and is listened to in “law talk” so that the lawyer can advise about litigation
(rather than life). The analyst and the analysand in therapy are comparable to
the lawyer and client in legal consultation.
2
Both these contextual domains, intention attribution and background
knowledge, provide not only bases for interpretation but, of course, important
grounds for negotiating how a story shall be taken - or, indeed, how it should
be told, a matter better reserved for later.
5. Canonicality and breach.
To begin with, not every sequence of events re-
counted constitutes a narrative, even when it is diachronic, particular, and or-
ganized around intentional states. Some happenings do not warrant telling
about and accounts of them are said to be “pointless” rather than story-like.
A Schank-Abelson script is one such case: it is a prescription for canonical be-
havior in a culturally defined situation - how to behave in a restaurant, say
(Schank & Abelson 1977). Narratives require such scripts as necessary back-
ground, but they do not constitute narrativity itself. For to be worth telling, a
tale must be about how an implicit canonical script has been breached, violated
or deviated from in a manner to do violence to what Hayden White calls the
“legitimacy” of the canonical script (White 1981). This usually involves what
Labov calls a “precipitating event,” a concept that Barbara Herrnstein-Smith
puts to good use in her exploration of literary narrative (Labov 1967, 1981;
Herrnstein-Smith 1978).
Breaches of the canonical, like the scripts breached, are often highly con-
ventional and are strongly influenced by narrative traditions. Such breaches are
readily recognizable as familiar human plights - the betrayed wife, the cuck-
olded husband, the fleeced innocent, etc. Again, they are conventional plights
of “readerly” narratives. But both scripts and their breaches also provide rich
grounds for innovation - as witness the contemporary literary-journalistic in-
vention of the “yuppy” script or the formulation of the white-collar criminal's
breach. And this is, perhaps, what makes the innovative story teller such a pow-
