• DOI:10.1086/448086
• Corpus ID: 162223840

The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

@article{White1980TheVO,
  title={The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality},
  author={Hayden V. White},
  journal={Critical Inquiry},
  year={1980},
  volume={7},
  pages={5 - 27}
}

• H. White
• Published 1 October 1980
• Art
• Critical Inquiry

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that