The Place of a Story: How the Mimetic Character of Narrative Helps Create a Place

Paul Ricoeur argues that there is a certain reciprocal relation between our experiences of lived time and of narrative, writing “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” (p. 52). In this essay, I draw on Ricoeur’s analysis of the relation between time and narrative in order to discover the way in which our lived experiences of place can affect our narratives of place, and vice versa. I conclude by drawing on Scott McClannahan’s Crappalachia, in order to see how the narrative of a place grows out of experiences of that place across time. Although, Ricoeur argues, there is a pre-narrative quality to human life itself, a narrative is required to synthesize these many different heterogeneous elements into a coherent whole. As narratives are created, we draw not only on the pre-narrative character of life, but also on larger social and historical narratives. Just as it is true that it is through the historical, fictional, sociological, and artistic stories we tell about Appalachia that we understand the character of the place, it is through our lived experiences of this place that we gain these narratives. And just as the narrative draws on our lived experiences to be created, there is a sort of pseudo-experience which takes place whenever one understands and interprets a narrative