Untitled - witz cultural

233RECONFIGURINGNARRATIVEbeing identified as parts ofan integrated whole" (9). Ricoeur similarlydefinesplot, "on the mostformollevel, as an integrating dynamism that draws a unifiedand complete story from a variety of incidents, in otherwords, thattransformsthis variety into a unified and complete story. This formal definitionopens a field of rule-governed transformations worthy of being called plotsso long as we can discern temporal wholes bringing about a synthesis of theheterogeneous between circumstances, goals, means, interactions, and intendedand unintended results" (2: 8). According to Ricoeur, the metaphoricalimagination produces narrative by a process of what he terms "predicativeassimilation," which "'grasps together' and integrates into one whole andcomplete story multiple and scattered events, thereby schematizing the illegiblesignification attached to the narrative taken as a whole" (1: x). To thisobsewation I would add, with Miller, that as readers we find ourselves forcedto fabricate a whole or, as he puts it, integrate "into one whole and completestory multiple and scattered events, separate partsJ'In his chapter on Heinrich von Kleist in Versions of fugmalion, Miller providesus with an unexpectedly related model for this kind of extemporizedconstruction of meaning-on-the-run. He quotes Kleist's claim that Mirabeauwas "unsure of what he was about to say" (104) when he began his famousspeech that ended "by creating the new French nation and a new parliamentaryassembly" (105). The speaker posits a "syntactically incomplete fragment,says Kleist, without any idea . . . of where the sentence is going to end,[and] the thought is gradually 'fabricated"'; and Kleist daims that the speaker'sfeelings and general situation in some way produce his proposals. Disagreeingwith him, Miller argues in the manner of Barthes that Mirabeau's revo-Iutionary "thought is gradually fabricated not so much by the situation or bythe speaker's feelings," as Kleist suggests, "but by his need to complete thegrammar and syntax of the sentence he has blindly begun" (104). Stnrcturalistsand poststructuralists have long described thinking and writing in termsof this extemporized, in-process generation of meaning, the belief in whichdoes so much to weaken traditional conceptions of self and author. Hypertextfiction forces us to extend this description of meaning-generation to thereader's construction of narrative. It forces us to recognize that the activereader fabricates text and meaning from "another's" text in the same way thateach speaker constructs individual sentences and entire discourses from"another's" grammar, vocabulary and syntax.Vladimir Propp, following Veselovsky, long ago founded the "structuraliststudy of p1ot" and with it modern narratology applyrng notions of linguisticcombination to the study of folk tales.6 Miller, who draws upon this tradition,