Retropost (2007): Abstract

 

Y nunca mejor dicho lo de abstract. Esta abstracción la he escrito hoy, estilo César, en tercera persona, tras releer mi artículo "Narrating Narrating: Twisting the Twice-Told Tale". Que aparecerá en la serie "Narratologia" de Walter de Gruyter este año, espero. Conforme a mi teoría, la autorelectura me ha aportado ciertas cosas que no sabía que había dicho en mi artículo. Si es que las había dicho. Bueno, en todo caso, ahora leídas están, y el abstract escrito, post hoc et propter hoc: José Ángel García Landa approaches narrativity from the vantage point of narrativization and narrative doubling, understood as interactional communicative phenomena. Narrative, as a dialogic phenomenon, is a rearrangement of previous narratives in order to articulate a new one, more complex or more to the point in a given interactional exchange. Effects of doubling ('narrated narratings', stories within the story, etc.) add semiotic intensity, and suggest that repetition and retelling are basic to narrativity. Narrativization is therefore a remaking of previously narrativized events. Notions like "tellability", "point of view" and "event" need to be redefined in view of this interactional situatedness of narratives. Discursive phenomena involving the response to narratives, their use in conversation or criticism, or their theoretical analysis, also partake of this interactional situatedness. The connectedness between events characteristic of narratives (and which is subject to reinterpretation and retelling) is shown to be relative to the communicative dynamics of discourse interaction. Some definitions of narrativity are examined and criticised in order to emphasize the configurational dynamics of narrativity—a dynamics of constant remaking through communicative interaction. In this light, García Landa addresses the retrospective dimension of narrative, in particular the "narrative fallacy" and its diverse aspects, such as the post hoc/propter hocconfusion, hindsight bias, foreshadowing, sideshadowing, the double logic of narrative, simulated contingency, etc. His narratological analysis extends into intertextuality, cognitive theory and hermeneutics, and ends by retaking the question of narratives which retell or represent narrative acts. Literary works which narrate acts of narrating keep us aware of the continuity between everyday conversation and elaborate literary genres, and build bridges between them, re-appropriating orality for literature and constructing complex interactional forms precisely through a return, with a difference, to the source of narrative interaction. Emergent Narrativity —oOo—