Beyond sameness and difference: Narrative sense-making in life and literature

Abstract

This article analyses two major problems in the dichotomous framing of the question of whether narratives in fiction and “real life” are the same or different. The dichotomy prevents us from seeing, first, that there are both crucial similarities and differences between them and, second, that there are important similarities between variants of the “similarity approach” and the “difference approach”, both of which tend to rely on ahistorical, universalizing and empiricist-positivistic assumptions concerning factuality, raw experience and the non-referentiality of narrative fiction. The article presents as an alternative to both approaches narrative hermeneutics, which sees all narratives as culturally mediated and historically changing interpretative practices but approaches literary narratives as specific modes of making sense of the world – as ones that have truth-value on a different level than non-literary narratives. Narrative hermeneutics shares with (at least some forms of) unnatural narratology and the Örebro School a passion for the uniqueness of literary narratives, but it places the emphasis on the ability of literature to disclose the world to us in existentially charged ways that would not be otherwise culturally available – in ways that open up new possibilities of thought, action and affect.