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WHATIS A NARRATIVEFACT?
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baseball
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back roads. The resources of an annale are used after some questions
are developed, for questions seem to
make facts as well as being answered
by them.
Plots and hypotheses lurk in those
chroniques and histoires, prescribing
WHATIS A NARRATIVEFACT?
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WHATIS A NARRATIVEFACT?
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though he did send his agent to London looking for someone in the India
Office or the Royal Household who
might help out. Perhaps his donor,
inadvertently, was the mindless
Mini6 who designed the ill-fated rifle
requiring the tainted cartridges!
Note that Propp's morphology requires an "arrow of time," a rather
fixed sequence unrolling over time. If
the sequence is broken, the tale is
destroyed-though functions can be
deleted with impunity. There need
not be an actual donor of the gift, for
example, so long as the gift comes to
the hero's hand at the prescribed
point in the story.Propp'sexploration
of the Helsinki archive variorum
texts revealed, by the way, that some
deletion is almost always the rule. A
student of mine, Walter Zaharodny,
even found that people forget folktales they have heard by leaving out,
deleting, but hardly ever by mixing
up the order of things.
My purpose here is not to discuss
folktales for their own sake. In fact,
Vladimir Propphas a very great deal
to teach us about facts. But he is not
concerned with the verifiability or
truth about facts but with their
factlikeness, truthlikeness, or verisimilitude. What makes something
seem like a fact when one encounters
it? That is no trivial question. Verisimilitude does for narrative what
verification and verifiability do
for science and logic. Something's
verisimilitude is the mark of whether
the illusion of reality is working.
Now, few topics in the history of philosophy have been flogged into more
abject correctness than verification
and verifiability, and some philoso-
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young mathematical
genius. Com-
WHATIS A NARRATIVEFACT?
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References
Blackburn,Simon. 1994. OxfordDictionary ofPhilosophy. Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press.
WHATIS A NARRATIVEFACT?
Gentner, Derdre and A. Markman. 1997.
Structure Mapping in Analogy and
Similarity. American Psychologist
52(1):45-56.
Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1962. Navaho Witchcraft. Boston: Beacon Press.
Propp, Vladimir. 1968. Morphology of the
Folktale. 2d ed. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Michael. 1990. Fictional
Riffaterre,
RTuth.Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
27
Sperber, Dan. 1996. Learning to Pay Attention. Times Literary Supplement,
27 Dec., 14-15.
Taylor, PJ.O., ed. 1995. A Companion to
the "Indian Mutiny" of 1857. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Tomasello, M., A. Kruger, and H. Ratner.
1993. Cultural Learning. Behavioral &
Brain Sciences 16(3):495-552.
Ward, Andrew. 1996. Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and
the Indian Mutiny of 1857. London:
John Murray.