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- Title
Recounting and Forgetting: The Epistemological and Ethical Limits of Narrative.
- Authors
Davis, Colin
- Abstract
The limits of narrative are epistemological and ethical: what can be narrated and what should be narrated? Can we recount everything , and if we could, are there even so some things that we should leave in silence? We hear a lot about the duty to remember and the right to tell one's story, but are there some stories that cannot and should not be told? Could forgetting play a role in the ethical project of memory? Trauma narratives pose these questions in particularly fraught terms. Survivor-witnesses have a story to tell, but they are also often intensely aware that their story defies narratability and intelligibility. It must be told and cannot be told; it demands and resists understanding. This article explores these questions with reference to a number of case studies: Borges's short story "Funes the Memorious" (1942), J.M. Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), and a sequence from Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah (1985). In each case, the right or need to narrate is mitigated by an intense realisation that not everything can or should be told.
- Publication
Partial Answers, 2022, Vol 20, Issue 2, p321
- ISSN
1565-3668
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/pan.2022.0018