The Eucharist of Reading

I suggest to a friend exploring questions of time and identity that they might find this brief summary of Ricoeur by Caroline Bassett useful

Ricoeur's narrative dialectics, in which narrative is at once read as an active and ongoing emplotment (narrative as a dynamic becoming), and as a form that offers resolution (narrative as interpretation), develops out of these meditations. The narrative model emerging out of this dialectic is extensive, and is organised into three moments, or horizons: mimesis1, 2, and 3. The first moment of mimesis reaches backwards towards the horizon of event and experience. The second is the moment of poesis relating to that referent and breaking with it. The third moment of mimesis occurs when the configured text is reconstituted within the horizon of the reader. This is the arc of narrative. It extends across these horizons and is traversed by the reader, who takes from the work its sense of reference and who opens this same work into her or her own horizons.

Bassett goes on in The Arc and the Machine: narrative and new media to supplement the limitations of Ricoeur's model with some consideration of Fredric Jameson's work on narrative and ideology. Before she moves on to Jameson she does expose the heart of Ricoeur:

His conception of narrative, as an interpretation of events in the world, locates narrative within the frame of history, memory and futurity. On the other hand, the formal structures of narrative are understood within a wider framework, a metaphysics of temporality that treats the subjective human experience of time within a broader conception of time as infinity or eternity. It is in this way that this is perhaps a theological framework. For Ricoeur [...] narrative is more than socially symbolic — and the exceeding of this limit marks the limitations of Ricoeur's analysis as a historical analysis.

And so I am led to believe that the moves from prefiguration to configuration and refiguration are the steps of a eucharist (ingesting) model of text handling. But how else are we to figure that intuition that stories become parts of ourselves? By remembering that they are not all part of others. For these we are grateful.

And so for day 862
23.04.2009