What is figuration?
What’s in a story?
Although the study of narrative began in earnest in the middle of the Twentieth Century, the last three or four decades has seen a significant surge in academic interest in narrative. Much of the work on narrative in recent years has seen exciting interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation and the vocabulary of narrative criticism is of such common currency for scholars across the spectrum today in a way that would have been almost unthinkable just a couple of decades ago.
For example, cognitive science has used narrative criticism as an important tool in the development of the discipline. Since the the 1970s there has been burgeoning and fruitful multidisciplinary research into the mind and cognition, collectively referred to as the cognitive sciences, and in 1999 a landmark guide to the cognitive sciences was published, The MIT Encyclopaedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS).¹ The six introductory essays in MITECS serve as a roadmap to the major disciplines of cognitive science: philosophy; psychology; neurosciences; computational intelligence; linguistics and language; and culture, cognition, and evolution.
By way of a definition, cognitive theory ‘investigates the relations between perception, language, knowledge, memory, and the world; cognitive narratology is interested in the roles of stories within the ranges and intersections of these phenomena.’² In particular, cognitive narratology focusses on ‘the mental states, capacities and dispositions that provide grounds for — or, conversely, are grounded in — narrative experiences.’³
Biblical Studies, my field of particular interest, has benefitted from fresh examinations of familiar problems by applying narrative critical techniques.
Between the reader and the text
This has coincided with a growing interest in what happens ‘in front of the text’, the dynamics of the interactions between the reader and the text. Historical criticism has not gone away in any sense, but the dominance of both the world ‘behind the text’ and the qualities of the texts themselves has diminished as the reader has steadily come more into focus.
Narrative analysis engages with texts in a different manner from historical-critical approaches. Literary textual studies are not so concerned with the history or redaction of a text, or the settings of the authors or audiences of the text. Rather, they look to engage with the text as a text, in the form we have it. By working with the literary aspects of a text fresh engagements with familiar problems are possible.
Indeed, Paul Ricoeur suggests even more strongly that literary engagements with a text can form an ‘important corrective’ to historical-critical readings, ‘insofar as it dynamizes the text, makes meaning move, and gives rise to extensions and transgressions.’⁴ This does not usurp or negate historical approaches at all. In fact by approaching the text from a different direction it may, in the long run, actually benefit historical-critical studies.
Narrative and figuration
My particular interest in narrative studies has been Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, set out largely in his seminal work, Time and Narrative.⁵ Time and Narrative is Ricoeur’s investigation of the philosophical ‘problem’ of time — what actually is it, and how do we human beings come to terms with it? — and he argues that stories are the things that we use to understand time.
In order to do this, though, he critiques existing notions of narrative, which at the time largely meant structuralist narratology, indicating the limitations he observes with structuralist approaches within the larger task of describing what is perhaps the most comprehensive philosophical theory of narrativity.
Ricoeur recognises that structural and semiotic analysis has its uses but it is severely limited in its value and applicability and, in a hypothetical Venn diagram of narrative criticism, should be seen as a small element wholly subsumed within a much larger perspective.
Ricoeur’s theory of narrative is sufficiently thoroughgoing and longsighted that it bears striking resemblance to many of the concerns of the current themes in narrative research.
Ricoeur argues that the human urge to construct plots from disjointed events is a privileged way of coming to terms with lived experience. It is the mimetic quality of the plot that is the key factor in this reconciliation. Ricoeur’s understanding of the term ‘mimesis’ — a term critics use in substantially different ways, which essentially means imitating but which Ricouer uses in a more thoroughgoing way— is essential to his understanding of narrative. It’s a technical term, of course, and I’ll explore it, and especially Ricoeur’s use of it, in detail and in less technical language in future posts.
Prefiguration, configuration, refiguration
This site is a detailed examination and exploration of Ricoeur’s understanding of mimetic narrative, so a full explanation is not needed at this point.
For now, it is enough to say that Ricoeur notes three mimetic moments in the process of interpreting narratives, which he refers to in shorthand as mimesis1, mimesis2 and mimesis3 in order to indicate their distinctive-yet-mutual identity, but describes rather more poetically as prefiguration, configuration and refiguration respectively.⁶
Prefiguration has to do with the narrative competence we develop through our exposure to stories. We bring that pre-existing experience and expectation with us to each story we encounter.
Configuration corresponds to narrative in its most commonly-understood sense: that act of telling or receiving a story, the actual configuration of a given plot, the story as told, or as read. It has to do with emplotment, the active and dynamic quality of putting events into an order. Emplotment mediates between the reader’s ‘pre-understanding’ of narratives and the ‘post-understanding’ they have after reading a given story.
Refiguration is the stage in which narrative is restored to the real world of action and suffering; it is in the hearer or reader that the mimetic arc of a narrative reaches its conclusion. Ricoeur is insistent that in order for a story to become intelligible there is a requirement for this third stage to complete the cycle of mimesis.
This site is a thorough examination of figuration, Ricoeur’s mimetic theory of narrative, and an exploration of practical applications of this thesis to real-world narrative studies.
It is based on work from my PhD in Biblical Studies at Bristol University, Narrative, Sin and Forgiveness: An Assessment of N T Wright’s Narrative Criticism Through the Hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, completed in 2017.
I write more about stories, writing, narratology and narrative figuration over on Mastodon:
Photo credits
Footnotes
¹ Robert A Wilson and Frank C Keil, eds., The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 1999).
² Manfred Jahn, ‘Cognitive Narratology’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan; Abingdon, Oxon/New York: Routlege, 2005), 67 [67–71].
³ David Herman, ‘Cognitive Narratology’ in Peter Hühn et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Online: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/cognitive-narratology-revised-version-uploaded-22-september-2013#p1.
⁴ Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Bible and the Imagination’ in Paul Ricoeur Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (ed. Mark I Wallace; trans. David Pellauer; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 148 (144–66), referring specifically to intertextuality as an instance of literary criticism.
⁵ Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (trans. of Temps et Recit; 3 vols.; Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983–85; trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer; 3 vols.; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984–88).
⁶ Cf. S H Clark, Paul Ricoeur (London: Routledge, 1990), 167–79; Boyd Blundell, Paul Ricoeur Between Philosophy and Theology: Detour and Return (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2, 8; Karl Simms, Paul Ricoeur (Routledge Critical Thinkers. London: Routledge, 2003), 83–86.
