Time, Historicity, Narration. Intersection of Referential Levels of Historiographical and Fictional Narrative in Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics
Abstract
What is time, what is narration, and where the "lived time" ends and the "narrated time" begins? Those are some essential questions that Paul Ricoeur outlines and tries to answer in his monumental trilogy Time and Narrative. The article focuses on his hermeneutical exploration of temporal relations as elaborated in phenomenology, contemporary theories of "metahistory" and literary studies, in relation to the issue of metatextual reference in historical and fictional narrative.
Ricoeur's approach is understood as dialectical search for certain dynamic "middle way" between various contrasting views on epistemology of historiography and examinations of ontological layers and possibilities of cognition in literary discourse. He uses two triadic concepts - fictional mimesis (consisting of pre-figurative, configurative and re-figurative stages) and historical modes of Identical, Different and Analogous - to draw his hermeneutic circle and gain deeper insight into the fictitious nature of History as a science dealing with historical facts, as well as to the aspects of factuality (or, rather, actuality) in fictional Literature.