Conflict as text and as narrative universe

1 Introduction

Humanistic reflection has accustomed us to thinking of “great conflicts” as battlefields between “grand narratives.” The Cold War of the twentieth century was a space in which opposing stories clashed – one portraying communism as a threat to individual rights and freedoms, the other depicting capitalism as a system of social inequality and exploitation of some groups by others. The Napoleonic Wars were confrontations between, on the one hand, a narrative of liberty from monarchy and equality before the law, and, on the other, a narrative of the need to protect the old order established by God. The history of the Crusades – as well as other religious wars – represents a collision of two sides, each convinced of the truth of its own mythological narrative and of the necessity of defending the associated nomos (in the sense given to this term by Peter Berger [1967]). These narratives are widely known on a global scale and have been objectified across different discursive domains, including historiography, collective memory, and popular culture.

The concept of “conflict” need not be accompanied by the adjective “great” or even “collective,” since the state conceptualized by this term may arise from antagonism between just two individuals. Such a conflict, too, is linked to narratives – objectified at times in the form of spoken dialogue exchanges, email messages, or court records from divorce proceedings.

Both a film objectifying the “grand narrative” of the Crusade called by Pope Urban II and a divorce petition presenting a narrative of marital betrayal may be assigned the status of a text in semiotic-structural terms (that is, following Lotman, as a structured set of signs somehow delimited from its semiotic environment [1998a, pp. 59–66; 1998b, p. 424; 2010, p. 442]) or even in intertextual terms, that is, as a “tissue” or “mosaic” of earlier quotations, as in the theories of Barthes (1981, p. 39) or Kristeva (1967). Such texts are subject to analysis by means of tools developed within various academic disciplines (film studies, legal linguistics, family law), each tailored to the codes involved (the language of historical cinema, bureaucratic language, legal language). But is the study of such texts necessarily confined to analyzing only the specific textual expressions in which conflicts manifest themselves? After all, cinematic narratives about the defense of the Holy Land are tied to the broader historical conflict between the Latin Christian world and the Islamic world, just as narratives of marital betrayal may be linked to a long conflictual chain within a marriage. Should we not, then, consider whether conflict itself – serving as the organizing principle of these narratives – can also be treated as a text?

In this article, we will attempt to answer this question by applying a semiotic perspective. We will start from the abstract nature of the concept under study, subsequently analyzing its hypothetical concrete occurrences as a network of antagonistic relations in its diachronic dimension. We will also examine the role of pragmatic scripts in the conceptualization of conflict and its semiosis.

2 Indicators of textuality

We will begin our reflections on conflict with a situation in which invoking such a concept would be unwarranted. Imagine the following morning conversation between a married couple. “Honey, what would you like for breakfast? Scrambled eggs or an omelet?” the husband asks. “An omelet,” the wife replies. “We have a conflict,” the husband then concludes. A witness to this exchange would likely interpret it with a grain of salt, recognizing that “we have a conflict” was said humorously, with playful exaggeration. Someone with more advanced rhetorical, linguistic, or semiotic competencies might perceive this “conflict” as a hyperbole, through which the language user (the husband) creates a tension between the meaning conventionally attributed to the lexeme and the state that becomes the object of reference. Explanatory dictionaries, which objectify the meanings assigned to lexical items within a speech community, typically define conflict as something far more serious than a disagreement over the form of coagulated eggs. “Conflict is serious disagreement and argument about something important,” asserts the Collins English Dictionary online (Conflict n.d.). Contemporary Russian-language dictionaries, when describing the lexeme konflikt, first provide the generic abstract meaning of the term but then immediately introduce the adjective serious (Rus. ser’eznyi) in paraphrases or usage examples (Kuznetsov 2004; Morkovkin et al. 2023). The Italian Treccani dictionary, in its primary definition of conflitto, refers to military clashes (which, in colloquial understanding, are undoubtedly serious matters), only later presenting the more general meaning (Conflitto n.d.).

At this point, we shall refer to another dialogue, originating from a well-known Polish joke. In the first part, which exists in dozens of variations, two friends are talking. One of them shares a humorous slip of the tongue. In the English adaptation, let it be a dinner conversation with a partner at a restaurant, where instead of saying “you are my soulmate,” the speaker mistakenly says “you are my saltmate.” In the second part, the other friend responds with his own story. “Now that was nothing compared to my slip of the tongue,” he says. “At dinner at home, I wanted to say, ‘Honey, could you pass me the salt?’ but instead, I said, ‘You bloody whore, you have ruined my life.’”

Let us now bypass the new definition of “slip of the tongue” and focus on the “marital aspect” of the situation objectified by collective humor. Unlike the dialogue about scrambled eggs and an omelet, the joke does not present a situation that becomes the source of conflict. Proper understanding of the joke is possible only when the audience is familiar with the concept of long-standing tensions in a marriage, which result in a hostile attitude between the spouses and can lead to an argument at any moment. These tensions broadly correspond to the surprisingly long semantic definition of the word konflikt provided by the contemporary online academic Polish-language dictionary:

A long-lasting state in which two people (or groups of people) disagree on some matter, or one strives to achieve a goal unacceptable to the other, with each believing that their views and goals should be considered right and wanting to achieve this by any means, even if the other may suffer harm as a result of this (Konflikt n.d.).

The dictionary indicates that this is the meaning of the word in the personal sense – its first listed meaning in the entry.

Let us notice that the cited definition refers not to the emergence of the subject of the dispute, but to the state in which the dispute persists. In our joke, in turn, we do not know the reasons for the insult the husband directed at his wife. We assume, however, that the spouses have a long history of disagreements and that they remain in a continuum of disputes. We assume that, on both less and more fundamental issues of their shared life, they have differing views and express hostility toward each other in various ways. These assumptions arise immediately when we conceptualize the situation using the figure of “an old married couple,” whose inseparable attribute is bickering. Regardless of whether we use the noun conflict to describe the situation between the husband and wife, the unfortunate “slip of the tongue” will serve as an indicator and trigger for understanding their relationship as a larger diachronic structure.

The husband’s insult and the conflict within the marriage thus remain in a metonymic relationship. The cognitive operation that connects the man’s outburst with the presence of a long-standing marital conflict can, however, be illustrated using the metaphor of the tip of an iceberg (albeit in a sense different from that employed by Fauconnier and Turner [2002, pp. 17–38], who use it to describe the phenomenon of conceptual integration, or blending). As is well known, the part of such an iceberg visible above the water is a tiny portion of its mass, with about 9/10 of its volume being submerged. Anyone with such knowledge, who identifies the large ice mass visible above the ocean’s surface as the tip of an iceberg, automatically assumes that it is part of something much larger, though unseen.

Life experience allows some to infer, while others to take for granted, that what constitutes the “tip of an iceberg” in a marital conflict, when considered in isolation, does not necessarily have to be regarded as “significant,” “serious,” or constitutive for the emergence of a state referred to as conflict. What is constitutive does not “appear on the surface” and, as such, is often the subject of conversations with a psychotherapist or a marriage counselor. In the context of our joke, we may state that the “story about the slip of the tongue,” when considered in terms of the representation of a larger structure, implies a series of other stories that together form a certain narrative universe about the ill-fated married couple.

Let us now briefly return to the case of scrambled eggs and an omelet. As we have previously noted, the essence of the issue under discussion contrasts with the socially shared notion of “significance” or “seriousness” as an attribute of the concept in question. For this reason, the statement “we have a conflict” does not indicate the occurrence of such a state but rather serves as a linguistic (more precisely, metalinguistic in the Jakobsonian sense [1960, pp. 353–357]) marker of its absence. As a result, the morning dialogue (at least when taken out of context) reflects rather a good atmosphere between the spouses and the husband’s sense of humor. However, it is enough to imagine a situation in which the discussion about breakfast takes place not between this happy couple but between the spouses from the Polish joke. Setting aside the aspect of possible invectives, we may confidently assume that in their hypothetical dialogue we would not hear a statement acknowledging the existence of a conflict. Such a statement would simply be unnecessary: the husband and wife are fully aware of the structure of tensions and discrepancies between them. It is precisely this structure that serves as their reference point. From their perspective, there is no “tip of an iceberg.” Current disagreements are automatically inscribed into a familiar network of conflictual relations in both their synchronic and diachronic dimensions.

In this context, let us now examine the utterance: “You bloody whore, you have ruined my life.” We have referred to it as an invective, but this label does not fully capture its structural and functional specificity. The humorous effect of the punchline does not stem from the use of a derogatory word and its accompanying epithet, nor the act of secondary nomination (labeling, evaluative, and offensive) it entails. The analyzed statement retrospectively refers to the man’s life and encapsulates the diachronic dynamics of elements within the conflictual network, as viewed from his perspective. It thus narrates the history of the relationship and summarizes the consequences of remaining in it. Regardless of its blunt nature, it is a carrier of narrative(s).

On the narrative level, the protagonist’s utterance in our joke thus manifested the presence of an entire system of conflictual relations. It must be assumed that, in the protagonist’s memory, individual elements of this structure function as self-referential narratives, which, at any given moment, can be recounted and thereby transformed into typical ones. Their number does not appear to be finite. After all, the mind continuously processes incoming information. The way it is processed is influenced by the content of memory. Consequently, memory itself undergoes transformations under the influence of new data. For instance, upon reading a book about the harmful effects of cholesterol, the husband might conclude that his wife’s recent question about his gastronomic preferences was a deliberate attempt to push him toward coronary artery disease (no healthy alternative to eggs!) and hasten his demise. In this way, a criminal narrative will emerge in his memory.

It is now time to emphasize that everything we have said here about conflict in its personal dimension also applies to conflicts that constitute collective experience. If, following Bartos and Wehr’s general theory of conflict, we accept that this concept describes “a situation in which actors use conflict behavior against each other to attain incompatible goals and/or to express their hostility” (Bartos and Wehr 2002, pp. 12–28; let’s ignore the unfortunate circular aspect of the definition), then nothing prevents the variable “conflict behavior” from being represented at one moment by a spouse’s invective and at another by a military invasion. Similarly, the variable “incompatible goals” may sometimes be exemplified by different forms of coagulated egg protein and, at other times, by competing claims to military control over the same territory. In all cases, these variables can be transformed into narratives. The crucial difference, however, is that in the case of individual memory, such narratives may (though do not necessarily have to) manifest exclusively within its domain. Narratives of collective memory, in turn (regardless of its feedback relationship with individual memories of the community members), must be objectified in discourse.

The metaphor of the “tip of an iceberg” also applies to conflicts in both personal and collective dimensions. This “tip” is also a variable, whose value determines the perception of a given fact, phenomenon, or artifact as part of a conflict – or, put differently, as a trigger for the semiosis of a conflict text. “Conflict” (like “hostility” or even “war”) is, in a semiotic sense, an abstract category that lacks a concrete referent, even though certain facts, phenomena, or artifacts may be conceptualized as its manifestations. When such conceptualizations take on a narrative character, the set of such narratives becomes a dynamic textual universe. It is textual because its units constitute repeatable, structured sequences recognizable both within the domain of individual memory and in discourse; it is dynamic because narratives related to ongoing conflicts continue to accumulate and change with the inflow of new data, while those linked to past conflicts undergo cognitive processing in individual memory and various transformations in discourse. It should also be noted that the textuality of conceptualization is to be understood here in line with Petöfi’s view, i.e. “not [as] an inherent property of certain objects, but […] rather [as] a property assigned by those producing or analyzing them” (1986, p. 1080).

The values of the variable “tip of an iceberg” can be represented by various signs and texts. Notably, the signs identified as “tips” undergo textualization themselves, acquiring a narrative character. While a “salt shaker” – both as an artifact and as the noun compound referring to it – holds the status of a (compound) sign, “the damned salt shaker over which my husband started a row, claiming it was too expensive” already represents a narrativized text. For the message addressee to decode such a text, it is sometimes sufficient to be presented with a sign (or a set of signs) that effectively evokes meanings associated with it (or inscribed onto it) in a certain context – provided, of course, that such a context has occurred. The prerequisite for accessing such meanings inscribed onto a sign is an appropriate pragmatic script. Contrary to a well-established cognitive-science tradition, which – following Roger Schank and Robert Abelson (1977) – relates this concept to a stereotypical, structured cognitive scenario activated in a given typical social situation, we will understand the term more broadly. We will have in mind a specific, recognizable, and repeatable configuration of context and other perceptual factors, and we will also relate it to the memory of individual experience – for example, when the sight of the salt shaker at home immediately follows an argument with one’s husband. Recognized in this way, the salt shaker may refer to an entire universe of narratives, conceptualized – depending on the context – as “the history of my life,” “the history of my marriage,” or even “the history of my suffering with my husband.”

Let us note in passing that in English (as in other languages in which definite and indefinite articles exist), thse appearance of “the” (and its equivalents in other languages) before a noun serves as a grammatical marker, which signals the beginning of the process of superimposing meanings. This applies to both common nouns and abstract concepts. In the sentence “I saw a cat today,” the phrase “a cat” designates an unspecified referent of the sign. In contrast, in the sentence “That’s the cat!” the article may, in fact, signal the presence of multiple superimposed meanings (e.g., “that damned aggressive cat that scratched my leg last week”). Similarly, the lexeme “conflict,” which evokes a general and abstract concept, when preceded by a definite article (as in “the Korean conflict”), may represent an entire assemblage of narratives. For instance, in the phrase “the damned Korean conflict, in which tens of thousands of American soldiers lost their lives,” it becomes an explicit narrative vehicle. Let us also note that, outside specific analytical uses, “conflict” (alongside terms such as “war,” “battle,” or even “struggle”) belongs to a group of concepts which, by referring to antagonistic actions, inherently call for further specification or contextualization. Regardless of grammatical marking, such concepts possess a significant potential for textualization and narrativization.

In the above context, several additional observations should be made. When seeing a small, sealable container that fits in the hand and has several tiny holes, most English language speakers will conceptualize it as “a salt shaker” – they will associate the visual image with a compound lexeme functioning as a common noun. Among them, however, there may be someone for whom this very same item triggers a narrative conceptualization and is interpreted as “the damned salt shaker over which my husband started a row, claiming it was too expensive.” Thus, one and the same artifact becomes the object of two distinct conceptualizations and carries two unequal semantic loads. But while “salt shaker” is the standard way of conceptualizing the item in question among English speakers, the narrative cited above appears to be highly individual. At the same time, multiple narratives may emerge in relation to the same item, each constructed from an individual perspective. These narratives can form a network in which one and the same sign may function as their nexus.

Let us consider two further hypothetical utterances: on the one hand, “the damned expensive and unnecessary salt shaker my wife absolutely had to buy, even though we were running out of money, and it was only halfway through our trip,” and on the other, “the damned expensive salt shaker my husband still insists was unnecessary.” What we are dealing with here is a network composed of two distinct narratives, each featuring a different narrator. These are not, however, “the same story” told by two different voices. Rather, they are two separate stories, told from different psychological and emotional perspectives, embedded within distinct systems of reference. Although Algirdas Greimas (1984) would certainly see in this juxtaposition competing narrative programs and counterprograms referring to a single event – the wife’s and the husband’s – further connected in various ways to the narrative program concerning their shared finances, in Mieke Bal’s narratological terms (2017, pp. 132–153) we are dealing instead with two narratives, each told from a different narrator’s perspective and differently focalized. If these two narratives were to encounter one another in a hypothetical dialogue between their respective narrators, neither storyteller would identify with the protagonist of the other’s story – even though each speaker would implicitly cast their interlocutor in that very role. Nevertheless, such narratives could stand in a feedback relationship with one another: Party A, without identifying with Party B’s version of events, may still transform it and incorporate selected elements into their own. Indeed, the wife’s hypothetical sentence cited above contains a transformed trace of the husband’s narrative (“still insists was unnecessary”.) Thus, we encounter a phenomenon that Franciscu Sedda (2024), in analyzing and extending Lotman’s thought, interprets in terms of dialogue as a form of coexistence of conflicting narratives within the semiosphere (in this case, within a hypothetical micro-semiosphere of a particular marriage).

3 Levels of meaning in the reading of conflict

The denotative meaning of the compound noun “salt shaker,” as objectified within a community of language users, and the narrative-based meaning inscribed onto it represent two semantic loads that differ not only in the amount of information they convey. They are two meanings of entirely different types or, rather, distinct levels. A typology of such levels was proposed by Roy Rappaport (2010, pp. 70–74), who analyzed the specificity of meanings that are aroused in rituals. The scholar also calls his classification “a hierarchy of subjectivity.” Among the three levels he distinguished, the denotative level is identified as the lowest and most fundamental for language; the medium level is based on similarity and generated through metaphor. The highest level of meaning, in Rappaport’s concept, “is grounded in identity or unity, the radical identification or unification of self with other” (2010, p. 71). It is at this level, according to Rappaport, that meanings appear in ritual, as it constitutes a way of identifying participants with the universe of content that manifests within it. It is precisely participation in ritual that largely determines the pragmatic script for a range of contents that serve as a semiotic gateway to the narrative universe. It is the factor that enables the participant to interpret the narratives inscribed onto its elements, which, after all, have their own denotative meanings. Robert McCauley and Thomas Lawson (2002, p. 10) captured this aspect in their now-classic phrase: “Ritual drummers ritually beating ritual drums are still drummers beating drums.”

In the context of our inquiry, we are interested in rituals only as a gateway to the “higher” meanings superimposed upon the sign – and only insofar as the meanings are linked to a set of conflictual narratives. Within this framework, collective rituals and narratives seem easier to cite (as we shall do shortly). However, one can also point to individual ritual practices – including those performed in the context of marital conflict. These include, for instance, prayer practices in which the sender of the message invokes appropriate narratives in an explicit manner (by presenting them to an imagined transcendent addressee), in an implicit manner (by self-referentially activating these narratives during the recitation of traditional prayers), or in a hybrid fashion (e.g., by linking them to the declared intention behind traditional prayers). Narratives related to conflict may also be invoked through individual magical practices. In contemporary Russian guides to oral magic, one can readily find, for example, incantations meant to protect wives from their husbands’ aggression. In the introduction to one such incantation, the female reader is advised to ask her husband – under some pretext – to hammer a nail into the wall. As he begins to do so, the woman is instructed to quietly utter the following words: “Strike the iron, not me. As you would never hit your own head with this hammer, so may you never strike me, God’s servant (name), now and forever. Amen” (Stepanova 2011, pp. 152–153). In this example, the image of the husband wielding the hammer becomes a carrier of autobiographical narratives of domestic violence.

The above examples, though centered on individual practices, nonetheless fulfill Rappaport’s criterion of a “radical identification of self with other” by virtue of the presence of a deity – either as the transcendent addressee (as in prayer) or as the transcendent guarantor of magical efficacy (as in an incantation). Let us now turn to contemporary examples of ritual as immersion in a collective narrative universe, where the identification of the “other” poses little difficulty. Thus, for instance, the roll calls of the fallen that accompany Poland’s Independence Day immerse participants in stories of the heroism of Polish arms from the Middle Ages to the present. The commemoration of the outbreak of World War II on the Westerplatte Peninsula in Gdańsk, where a Polish military unit resisted the German Kriegsmarine from the early hours of September 1, 1939, serves not only as an occasion to recall the universe of Polish narratives about World War II but also as a means of creating a time-space in which participants identify with these narratives. The fact that the defense of Westerplatte was, in the grand scale of the war, merely a week-long episode does not diminish its significance. By marking the symbolic beginning of the war in the collective memory of Poles, it serves as a gateway to the web of narratives it contains.

During a state-military ritual, such a gateway may be provided not only by explicit narrative (e.g., recalling the history of the peninsula’s defense) but also by narrative elements transformed in accordance with the poetics of the ritual form (e.g., “I call upon the soldiers of Westerplatte. Fall in for roll call!”) and other ritual elements that become carriers of narrative (e.g., the sound of an alarm siren). Moreover, in such a ceremony, the “ritual drummers” in the uniforms of the Polish Navy also serve as an element activating the superimposed meanings. In their image and in the sound of their drums, Roland Barthes would likely recognize such a Saussurean sign, whose signifié at the basic linguistic level (i.e., the lowest in Rappaport’s typology) becomes the signifiant of a meaning on the mythological level. The sound of the drums in a military ritual is one of the elements that link the collective Polish universe of narratives about World War II with the universe of narratives about the Polish state.

We can easily imagine a TV news package, starting with a shot of a military drum, with drumsticks striking it and the sound produced by many such instruments. The context of the anniversary day and the awareness of the ritual’s nature would then contribute to the creation of the pragmatic script, enabling the viewer to immerse themselves in the world of narratives without even having to participate in the ritual. In such a case, the drum would thus perform a function similar to that of the French soldier observed by Barthes on the cover of Paris-Match. “A young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted,” wrote the scholar, before concluding:

All this is the meaning of the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving so-called oppressors. I am therefore […] faced with a greater semiological system […]. (Barthes 1972, pp. 113–115).

The semiological system to which the scholar referred is that of 1950s French political mythology. Although political mythologies differ in many ways from those typical of traditional cultures, like their ancestors, they constitute narrative universes objectified in discourse. They are, therefore, sets of relatively coherent narratives that together present a relatively stable system of references and a reservoir of content. A gateway (or “the tip of an iceberg”) to the semiosis involving these contents is any trigger that effectively activates the pragmatic script typical for a participant in the community of myth believers. In Rappaport’s terms, it is the moment of identification and participation in the universe of content at the highest level. In Barthes’ self-reflection, it is the passage: “I see very well what it signifies to me.”

We know, therefore, that the concept of “narrative universe” can refer both to those elements that represent mythology and to those that relate to conflict. But what makes our collection of stories about long-lasting and intense tensions in marriage, at work, or on the international stage resemble the tales of Odysseus and Penelope or the tribal stories collected by James Frazer?

The answer seems simple when approached from the structuralist perspective. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, mythological universes are spaces in which a system of meanings describing the functioning principles of the social world is contained. Such meanings are represented by binary oppositions (such as good–evil, life–death, or order–chaos). The function of a single mythological narrative is to present a fragment of this system; meanwhile, the entire system manifests itself in a (not necessarily countable) collection of such stories (Lévi-Strauss 1963). Adopting Lévi-Strauss’s general thesis allows us to assume that not only a single mythological story, but even its fragment or attribute that enables its identification, serves as a gateway to the world of meanings at Rappaport’s highest level.

If we now examine the narratives accompanying conflicts, we see that – when their nature is not purely referential (as in informational TV reports about battles taking place in distant, unfamiliar countries) but rather engaged, emic, and immersed in the “world of meanings at the highest level” – they resemble myths, representing systems of meaning through binary oppositions. Even dictionary definitions of the lexeme “conflict” and the definition provided by Bartos and Wehr highlight polarization as a semantic attribute, evident in statements about the “incompatibility” or “unacceptability of goals” of participants in an antagonistic system. At the same time, the “significance” and “seriousness” of the disputed subject, as attributes of the concept present in dictionaries, correspond to the fundamentality of the world order encoded in binary pairs. This is why individual narratives (including self-referential ones) often contain references to one party’s diligence and the other’s laziness, to effort and indifference, to knowledge and ignorance, and so on. In collective stories about conflicts in which a community itself participates, the stakes typically involve abstract categories with an axiological charge (“freedom,” “independence,” “dignity,” “existence of the nation”), while the descriptive parameters are elemental axiological categories (“good” and “evil”). Moreover, mythological narratives and those of conflict participation frequently “meet” and merge into a single story, or a family of stories. Countless historical and contemporary examples attest to this – from the Crusades to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A canonical example of such a fusion can be found in the lyrics of one of the most iconic songs of World War II – the Soviet march “The Sacred War”: “Like two opposing poles,/We are hostile in everything:/We fight for light and peace,/And they – for the reign of darkness” (Russian: Kak dva razlichnykh poliusa,/Vo vsem vrazhdebny my:/Za svet i mir my boremsia,/Oni – za tsarstvo t’my; Lebedev-Kumach 1950, pp. 33–34).

4 Conclusions: dynamic (inter)textuality

The entire preceding discussion was an analysis of the concept of conflict as a network of antagonistic relations in its diachronic dimension, whose elements are expressed in narratives. These narratives, in turn, create a universe of interconnected components. We have referred to this universe in terms of a text precisely because of its internal, systemic nature. However, it must be acknowledged that it cannot be regarded as a textual artifact, that is, something possessing a fixed structure along with markers of its boundaries (beginning, end, scope), which would fulfill Lotman’s criterion of separation from “non-text” or “another text” at the level of intuitive reception (Lotman 1998a, pp. 59–66; 1998b, p. 424; 2010, p. 442). Our universe behaves more like a street performance: it unfolds in time and space, allows for participation, yet it is impossible to determine where it begins and where it ends. At the same time, the presence of each spectator of such a happening remains in a feedback loop with the performance’s content and influences its shape. Even if the street spectacle is, in its essential framework, repetitive, the stability of its content arrangement always remains relative. This is because it depends on external determinants. The narratives of the conflict universe exhibit a similar nature: they change with the influx of new data, undergoing transformations in individual memories and in the discourse of collective memory. They remain relatively coherent, presenting a relatively stable system of references. However, ongoing processes continuously transform the elements of the memory continuum and the continuum of discourse.

Our narrative universe is, of course, intertextual. However, even though its elements remain within a network of mutual connections, they do not “sum up” to a single narrative. This is because the number of individual stories is neither finite nor countable. New ones may always emerge under the influence of various factors, reshaping and reconfiguring the old ones. For this reason, Julia Kristeva’s (1967) metaphor of “mosaic” is not applicable here. A more suitable alternative might be the metaphor of a slowly simmering soup, whose ingredients change their shape and texture under the influence of heat while also interacting in terms of flavor – both with one another and with the new elements constantly being added to the pot. To make the most of this metaphor, let us add that the universe of narratives tastes different to everyone. Naturally, each person has a distinct palate. However, some palates are more or less refined, more or less accustomed to a specific culinary tradition. There are also those whose owners particularly appreciate the art of plating and the atmosphere of the meal. Pragmatic scripts, playing the role of the palate in this analogy, determine what we perceive and whether, while eating, we experience something significant and solemn; whether we remain within the realm of denotative meanings or ascend to a much higher level.