“Because you cannot act, you find yourself unable to think,” says Anna Blume in Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things. This idea is discussed in connection with thinkers who connect action and narrative, such as Arendt, Ricoueur and Fludernik. If narrative indeed is a way to perceive and interpret action, a world reduced to hazard and behavior seems to leave neither space nor frameworks for thinking.  Looking from this perspective, the narrative way of thinking is a prerequisite for other modes of thinking as well. The discussion of the extreme situation of no narrative and no thinking is related to Dominick LaCapra’s work on trauma and narration.

The relationship between a critic and a living writer, these "opposite shareholders" of the same art, can lead to scenarios of all sorts. In her introduction to A Glance beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan states that she “endeavor(s) to theorize through literature, to use the novels as, in some sense, the source of theory,” and that this process “can be seen as a fruitful dialogue or interaction between literature and theory.” My long friendship with Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan was indeed such a privileged, on-going interaction.

In the core of our multi-layered relationship lies the shared belief in narrative structures as an unveiling of consciousness and as a powerful means of its shaping. The tumultuous Israeli reality, the loaded Jewish legacy, and not least the changing circumstances of life and disease all kept challenging our notion of narrative. In the intimacy of our “laboratory” I would bring my novels and my writing-dialogue with literary genres, with sacred texts, or with CNN snapshots, and she would be the ideal performative reader. At the same time, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s deep theoretical considerations culminating in her revelatory exposure of illness narratives were for me a constant source of artistic inspiration, and a stirring reminder of the responsibility of narratives as an access to a changing self and world.

The celebrated ubiquity of “narrative” in culture is both a fecund premise and the bane of narrative studies today. While not outright against narrative, nor narrative studies, the present paper aims to remain skeptical towards broad, overly enthusiastic uses of the notion: not necessarily the most promising stance in a narratological conference. What is more, and no less ominously, the paper might just as well be subtitled “A Boring Story” – though this is in fact the title of the Chekhov text (“Skuchnaia istoriia” 1889) using as an illustration.

The articles surveys some exemplars of the broad usage – albeit briefly: this has been done before – with special regard for repercussions on the domain of literary narratology. This is where the skepticism comes in: either (1) the notion of narrative is stretched disproportionately (“it is simply there, like life itself,” Barthes), becoming synonymous, say, with fiction (e.g. Palmer 2004: “in a sense we are all novelists,” an empty phrase); or (2), conversely, the expansion of narratological approaches to domains such as cultural studies or social sciences may lead to a narrow privileging of the “natural” or quotidian, linear, causal, realistic type of narrative (a bias discerned by Rimmon-Kenan 2002 in her work on illness narratives).

This may be all right for cultural studies. But for literary narratology the way to go seems to be in the opposite direction. Is not it the role of literary narratives to subvert, transgress, make problematic in a thousand and one ways the generalizations thought up by theorists? Chekhov’s “A Boring Story,” an illness narrative in its own right, displaying precisely those anti-linear, anti-causal, iterative features that are ignored by more sweeping definitions. Aside from being a poignant tale of a burnt-out professor, Chekhov’s story also emerges as a meditation on narrative and, if you will, narratology itself. Such subversive narrative tactics add up to what has been termed “weak” narrativity (by McHale 2001, 2004, with regard to a very different set of texts), narrativity sous rature. Possibly, this tendency is always already there, underlying not only post-modernist texts, but seemingly realistic, linear fiction.