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SIRI HUSTVEDT, Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction

variation in affectionate social exchange must create in the infant a
sense — perhaps still hazy — of passing time, a sense that her own
experience of exchanging with her mother are organized into a ‘be-
fore,’ a ‘during,’ and an ‘after.’” They argue that especially the into-
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nations of voice organize “a sense of ‘narrativity.’” Narrativity is put
in quotation marks to demonstrate that this form of “narrativity” be
understood as distinct from narrativity in symbolic form. Later in their
text they write, “The concept of narrative (or proto-narrative, our vo-
cabulary is sometimes not precise enough) has thus taken on broader
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meaning.” Does this lack of precision ma er?
Colwyn Trevarthen and Jonathan Delafield-But define narrative
as: “the creation of imaginative projects in expressions of movement
and voice.” This is vague and leaves out visual narratives, but they
are hardly alone in a mushy definition of narrative. It is extremely
hard to delimit. What does “imaginative” mean here? They clarify:
“Human understanding places the character and qualities of objects
and events of interest within stories that portray intentions, feelings,
and ambitions and how one feels about them.” (my italics) The authors
further claim: “Through every stage, in simple intentions of fetal
movement, in social imitations of the neonate, in early proto-conver-
sations and collaborative play of infants and talk of children and
adults, the narrative form of creative agency with its four-part struc-
ture of ‘introduction,’ ‘development,’ ‘climax’ and ‘resolution’ is pres-
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ent.” They contend that the structure is rigid, repetitive, universal,
and begins before birth. The authors are proposing an inborn seman-
tics of action that underlies all human narrative exchange, one that
strikingly suggests the movements of sexual intercourse, although this
is never mentioned. Is mammalian copulation (or that of other crea-
tures) a natural narrative? Many sophisticated human narratives do

45 Michel Imberty and Maya Gratier, “Narrative in Music and Interaction,”
Musicae Scientiae 12 (2008): 5-6.
46 Ibid., 7.
47 Jonathan Delafield-But and Colwyn Trevarthen, “The Ontogenesis of Nar-
rative: From Moving to Meaning,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1-57, doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.001157,1.

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