Volume 65, Issue 4

Man/woman has been described as the meaning-generating, story-telling animal (‘ homo narrans ’). In developing narratives, we continuously (and communally) attempt to make sense of life: to turn the contingent into some common coherent form, apt to bring order into the indiscrete flow of events and to (meaningfully) explain to us the ‘world.’ This has been addressed under the concept of ‘tellability.’ Tellability seems to transform something that can be told into something that is worth telling – that has some hermeneutical or cognitive or even only phatic value in that it invites us to understand (again and again) what (and why it) ‘happened.’ The article traces this process of creating community through telling first diatopically, by exploring forms and practices of narrating in different contexts and cultures, and then diachronically, by focusing on what makes a story a ‘good’ story in different periods of time. Drawing on pragmatic and functionalist theories of language and literature, it attempts to show that the idea of a story that is ‘worth it’ – or, as for that, ‘relatable’ – is largely dependent precisely upon the story’s ‘relation’ to its users and, by extension, to its embedding culture as well as to its point in time.

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s tales set in the fictional region of Beleriand, the paradox of a union between immortal and mortal beings, and all that this dichotomy implies, is consistently reflected in wooded settings. At the same time, we can also discern a general direction, which will eventually bring both Elves and Men out of the dark woods and into the light in a symbolical process of enlightenment. However, the woods in the tales reflect both pitfalls and promises, making it impossible to interpret this natural environment as unequivocally positive or negative, but a mixture of both. Tolkien’s stance towards trees and forests can thus be seen as realistic rather than escapist in these tales.

My essay interprets Toni Morrison’s works as ‘timeless,’ not so much from the perspective of their presumable universal appeal, but from that of their narrative composition, which denies established forms of temporal arrangement and facilitates new ways of textual experience. Focusing on Morrison’s Trilogy ( Beloved , Jazz , and Paradise ), I will argue that the three novels challenge conventional ideas of history and time to create a narrative space situated in the living present. While filled with numerous references to concrete timelines, Morrison’s writings also insist on a quasi-universal ‘truth’ that takes the reader beyond the boundaries of objective history. Beloved first limits the narrative perspective to the year 1873, but then invites its readers to embark on a virtual ‘time travel’ through various periods of the protagonist’s life. Memories and subjective lapses back into the past dominate the narration, thus focusing on experience and imaginary time. Jazz and Paradise both situate literary ‘truth’ in the sentient dynamic of the reading experience. Following the claim of phenomenological theory that perception is always a kind of action in which the world appears “afresh from the perspective of […] ‘lived’ experience” (Chaplin, A.D. [2002]. “Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.” B. Gaut and D.M. Lopes, eds. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics . London and New York, NY: Routledge, 159), I will examine Morrison’s novels as ‘living events’ that reconstruct the narrated occurrences as haptic experiences. Through mnemonic elements within the esthetics of her texts, Morrison transforms the novels’ story time into a very subjective discourse time that engages readers immediately. In the phenomenological sense, these strategies enable us to lose ourselves in Morrison’s novels and, instead of perceiving them as mere textual constructions, indulge in the illusion of “re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world” (Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1996 [1945]). Phenomenology of Perception . Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York, NY: Routledge, vii).

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood exposes a dangerous protagonist, Zenia, who is metaphorically introduced through images of drinking blood and eating raw meat. Her victims, Tony, Charis, and Roz, are associated with nurturing and nourishing foods: they eat together to comfort each other. Sarah Sceats’s, Fiona Tolan’s, and Jean Wyatt’s studies on feminism and female bonding in the novel have influenced this article, though it also questions the established opposition between the villainess Zenia and her victims: Zenia’s dark appetites are their own tastes for blood, revenge, and power. Zenia acts as a liberating and empowering ingredient. This article discusses the link between storytelling and cooking. I suggest that Zenia’s creative story-telling forces the women to acknowledge the darker dimension of their repressed fragments and past. Thus, they become independent and creative storytellers and cooks, just like Zenia.

The critical discussion of Alice Munro’s short stories began under the heading of realism but has moved on to recognize her combination of the ordinary with the amazing. This has continued to move towards the exploration of ‘alternate realities’ in human life which may lead to double or multiple lives of originally single characters in the same story. This division does not happen in Gothic fantasy but in Munro’s ordinary and commonplace (fictional) reality.