Factual Narrative

By the concept of 'natural' narrative, Monika Fludernik brought a new perspective for narratology in the late '90s. In her narrative theory, narrativity starts with the human experience rather than the plot. Fludernik's approach may provide an insight into understanding ḥadīth. Each ḥadīth account is a report of a saying, an event, or an experience about the Prophet Muhammad from the perspective of companion narrators. Ḥadīth also asserts the Prophet's life experience by telling how he acted in his life and reacted to people's attitudes. Ḥadīth transmission is also an experience referring to narration of prophetic knowledge from one generation to the next. In this article, I try to discuss to what extent ḥadīth can be considered 'natural' narrative in the framework of Fludernik's theory.

Monika Fludernik, ‘doğal’ anlatı kavramı ile 90’lı yılların sonunda anlatıbilime yeni bir
perspektif getirmiştir. Bu teoriye göre anlatıyı oluşturan esas unsur olayların belirli bir
mantıkla art arda sıralanması değil, onun bir tecrübenin ifadesi olmasıdır. Fludernik’in
yaklaşımı, hadisi anlamak noktasında ışık tutabilir. Zira hadisler, Hz. Muhammed’e ait ya da onunla ilgili bir söz, olay ya da yaşanmış bir tecrübenin sahabi ravi perspektifinden naklidir. Hadisler aynı zamanda Hz. Peygamber’in hayatı boyunca nasıl davrandığını ve insanların tutum ve davranışlarına nasıl tepki verdiğini bize anlatarak onun hayat tecrübesini ortaya koyar. Öte yandan hadis rivayeti, Hz. Peygamber’den edinilen bilginin bir nesilden diğerine anlatımını konu edinen bir tecrübedir. Bu makalede, Fludernik’in teorisi çerçevesinde hadisin ne ölçüde ‘doğal’ anlatı olarak ele alınabileceği tartışılmaktadır.

Rousseau's writings present a wealth of material for the topic of social minds in factual and fictional narration, not only because they were enormously influential in political as well as intellectual and literary history (e.g. Hunt); but especially because he wrote so successfully in so many genres, factual, fictional, and hybrid. Moreover, his work was fundamental to the development of three ideas relevant to narrating social minds:

1. The social contract: the “conjectural history” of “The Social Pact” (Social Contract book 2, ch. 6) that forms a society (body politic) out of a collection of separate individuals by an act of mutual agreement.

2. Individualism: the modern valuing of solitude, withdrawal from society, in order to find moral, aesthetic and spiritual truth by listening to the voice of nature within the heart.

3. Sentimentality: the valuing of authentic close personal relationships between individuals, based on mutual exposure and sharing the feelings of the heart.

Clearly, there are tensions if not contradictions among these ideas. Rousseau despises society as corrupting the original purity and self-sufficiency of the individual. In primitive society, this process results from the individual's weakness, which leads to social cooperation, specialization of tasks and inequality. In advanced society, it intensifies into the desire for the admiration of others, which is particularly associated with urban centres, and the arts and sciences. Yet he also despises individualism, insisting that whoever does not conform to the “general will” of society will be “forced to be free” (Social Contract 20).

I compare the (quasi-)factual narrative of the social contract story with the fictional narrative of sentimental love in the novel Julie, focusing on events of transition from individual to social minds, and on the role of metaphor and metonymy as narrative techniques. These tropes arguably straddle the border between linguistic and conceptual structure, so the details of texts reveal both linguistic and conceptual patterning. I examine Rousseau's underlying conceptual model of psychosocial dynamics. The model is structured by basic concepts of space, force, and substance (Johnson, Talmy, Kövecses, Hampe). To sketch this briefly, individuals must be open and transmit their inner feelings (regarded as forces) to establish connections with others. Emotional connections can be moving and agitating and transporting; and can develop into attachments, which can have varying degrees of closeness and strength. But attachments are highly ambivalent: they can be the best or the worst possible things. They can fill voids in hearts and unite souls; but they can also lead to dependence on others (framed as “slavery,” symbolized by unbreakable bonds such as chains) and thus loss of strength of will and liberty (often symbolized as movement), and dispersion of self. This model is partly conventional, but Rousseau restructured it in a new way.


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Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

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---. Discourse on Inequality. The Essential Rousseau. Trans. Lowell Bair. New York: Penguin Books, 1975 [1754]. 125-201.
---. Julie, or the New Heloise. 1761.
---. The Social Contract. The Essential Rousseau. Trans. Lowell Bair. New York: Penguin Books, 1975 [1762]. 1-124.

Talmy, Leonard. “Fictive Motion in Language and ‘Ception’.” Language and Space. Ed. Paul Bloom, Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel, and Merrill F. Garrett. Language, Speech, and Communication. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996. 211-76.
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