‘What Would Happen If We Were No Longer Able to Narrate?’ Dystopian Speculations and Other Reflections on the Relevance of Narratives for Human Life

Abstract

The contribution highlights the overwhelming importance of narrative for human life. It takes its point of departure from a hypothetically negative assumption: the fiction of an anti-utopian island ‘Udiegesia’, whose inhabitants have lost the ability to narrate. A scenario detailing what would presumably happen in such a case leads on to a (positive) survey of the manifold fields in which narrative is in fact used as a cognitive frame to make sense of, provide orientation in, and a ‘fitness training’ for, life and human societies, a survey which is - in part - inspired by Brian Boyd’s propagation of ‘evocriticism’.2 In the concluding section the claim that all human knowledge is “based on stories”3 will receive brief critical attention. It will be argued that such an exclusive stance is as problematical as the idea that the complexities of narrative’s forms and its various functions for human life can be fully explained by evolutionary theory alone.