Starting, Stopping, Continuing:
On Storytelling  

Habilitation project by Dr Christian Jany

In my habilitation, I return to the old question of what characterises stories in terms of content and how they are formally told. Against the generalising tendency of narratology to grasp storytelling in the abstract singular and to insert the no less uniform content of "story" (story, fable, histoire, etc.), I put forward a less general concept, namely this: Stories are specific concatenations of beginnings, middles and ends, whereby the unity resulting from their concatenation does not denote a wholeness at rest in itself, nor a mere linear sequence, but rather an interaction of discrete operations. These operations are carried out narratively and are called—terminologically consistent—"beginning", "ending" and "mediating" or "continuing". The fact that these are verbs, or rather words of time, is the crux of the matter. For stories, by being told, become forms of the course and execution of time and, by being objectified in writing, they are, as it were, memories of time. My main point of departure and application is therefore to temporalise the concept of history on the one hand and to pluralise it on the other.
This approach has models: Marcel Proust, for example, wrote a seven-volume novel on the connection between time and narrative; Paul Ricoeur then theoretically illuminated their interaction in three groundbreaking volumes. And recently, too, we have heard more often that we should return "to time as the focus and horizon of all our thinking" (David Wood and Mark Currie), as has happened in literary studies, where there is now an increasing tendency to consider the interplay of time and representation, for example in the sign of an "aesthetic proper time". First and last, however, the approach of understanding stories as an interplay of beginning, ending and continuing goes back to Aristotle's Poetics, where, apart from a few brittle formal-logical indications, it is hardly explained and, moreover, teleologically charged.

More important than the proof of models, however, are undoubtedly the consequences that result from the chosen approach. Of these, I see two, two working hypotheses that have not yet been consistently tested in narratology:

(1) There can be no general theory of narrative, but only diverse constructions of history, at best a typology of them.

(2) The literary genre and also quality of a story depends decisively on how, from where, with what and for what purpose it is respectively begun, ended and continued.

Since the two hypotheses focus on the respective specificity of narrative beginning, ending and continuing, their testing requires above all practical explication. The diversity of (literary) narration is to be demonstrated in different kinds of stories and developed from them by way of example. Covering as broad a spectrum as possible without getting lost in the material is the essential challenge of the work.
The stories I would like to approach in this way mainly include works by Goethe, Novalis and Richard Wagner as well as texts by Flaubert, Melville, Kafka, Proust, Max Frisch, Ingeborg Bachmann, Italo Calvino and Julian Barnes. In addition, there are myths of creation and the origin of the world as well as old and new apocalypses. Theoretically, my readings are based on Fichte, Hegel, Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White and, of course, on recent contributions to literary and narrative theory (Greg Currie, Albrecht Koschorke, Guido Mazzoni, Andrea Polaschegg, Brian Richardson, Richard Walsh).