6 - Conclusion

Summary

Story, performance, and event: These are the cornerstones on which I have endeavored to construct a framework tying together narrated events, narrative texts, and narrative events, as part of a larger concern with the constitutive role of discourse in social life. As I have noted in the Introduction, however, the double grounding of narrative in human events that has concerned me here is no new discovery. It is certainly not my discovery; I have cited Walter Benjamin's felicitously economical statement of the interrelationship and have adopted Roman Jakobson's terms, “narrated event” and “narrative event” for the twin social anchor points of narrative discourse. And, to carry my argument still further, I offer still another formulation of the crucial nexus that occupies us here, this one by Mikhail Bakhtin:

before us are two events – the event that is narrated in the work and the event of narration itself (we ourselves participate in the latter, as listeners or readers); these events take place in different times (which are marked by different durations as well) and in different places, but at the same time these two events are indissolubly united in a single but complex event that we might call the work in the totality of all its events, including the external material givenness of the work, and its text, and the world represented in the text, and the author-creator and the listener or reader; thus we perceive the fullness of the work in all its wholeness and indivisibility, but at the same time we understand the diversity of the elements that constitute it.

(Bakhtin 1981:255)