Recounting and Forgetting: The Epistemological and Ethical Limits of Narrative

Abstract:The limits of narrative are epistemological and ethical: what can be narrated and what should be narrated? Can we recount everything, and if we could, are there even so some things that we should leave in silence? We hear a lot about the duty to remember and the right to tell one’s story, but are there some stories that cannot and should not be told? Could forgetting play a role in the ethical project of memory? Trauma narratives pose these questions in particularly fraught terms. Survivor-witnesses have a story to tell, but they are also often intensely aware that their story defies narratability and intelligibility. It must be told and cannot be told; it demands and resists understanding. This article explores these questions with reference to a number of case studies: Borges’s short story “Funes the Memorious” (1942), J.M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), and a sequence from Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah (1985). In each case, the right or need to narrate is mitigated by an intense realisation that not everything can or should be told.