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transformations that render any and all accounts of human action more sub-
junctive, less certain, and subject withal to doubt about their construal. It is
not simply that “text” becomes dominant but that the world to which it puta-
tively refers is, as it were, the creature of the text (see, for example, (Suleiman
& Crosman 1980)).
The normativeness of narrative, in a word, is not historically or culturally
“once for all.” Its form changes with the preoccupations of the age and the
circumstances surrounding its production. Nor is it required of narrative, by
the way, that the Trouble with which it deals be resolved. Narrative, I believe,
is designed to contain uncanniness rather than to resolve it. It does not have
to come out on the “right side.” What Frank Kermode calls the “consolation
of narrative” is not the comfort of a happy ending, but the comprehension of
plight that, by being made understandable, becomes bearable (Kermode 1981).
9. Context sensitivity and negotiability.
This is a topic whose complexities we
have already visited in an earlier discussion of “hermeneutic composability”
and the interpretability of narrative. In considering context, the familiar issues
of narrative intention and of background knowledge arise again. With respect
to the first of these, much of literary theory has abandoned Coleridge's dictum
that the reader should suspend disbelief and stand, as it were, naked before the
text. Today we have “reader response” theory and topics entitled
The Reader in
the Text
(Iser 1989; Suleiman & Crosman 1980). Indeed, the prevailing view is
that the notion of totally suspending disbelief is at best an idealization of the
reader and, at worst, a distortion of what the process of narrative comprehen-
sion involves. Inevitably, we assimilate narrative on our own terms, however
much (in Wolfgang Iser's account) we treat the occasion of a narrative recital
as a specialized speech act (Iser 1974). We inevitably take the teller's intentions
into account, and do so in terms of our background knowledge (and, indeed,
in the light of our presuppositions about the teller's background knowledge).
I have a strong hunch, which may at first seem counter-intuitive, that it
is this very context sensitivity that makes narrative discourse in everyday life
such a viable instrument for cultural negotiation. You tell your version, I tell
mine, and we rarely need legal confrontation to settle the difference. Princi-
ples of charity and presumptions of relevance are balanced against principles
of sufficient ignorance and sufficient doubt to a degree one would not expect
where criteria of consistency and verification prevailed. We seem to be able to
take competing story versions with a perspectival grain of salt, much more so
than in the case of arguments or proofs. Judy Dunn's remarkable topic on the
beginning of social understanding in children makes it plain that this type of
