The History of Experience, Implicit Narratives, and a Sense of the Possible

This article argues that the history of experience needs to take seriously the narrative mediation of experience, which is an important aspect of the historically mediated nature of experience, and that cultural narratives are not merely retrospective accounts of experiences or events but also function as models of sense-making that shape how things are experienced in the first place. The article suggests that by theorising the (currently undertheorised) concept of experience and its narrative mediation, narrative hermeneutics has much to offer to the field of the history of experience and provides a better fit for it than cognitive narratology. We can distinguish between two levels of the narrative mediation of experience: first, experience is narratively mediated through the constant entanglement of living and telling; second, it is mediated through implicit cultural narratives that shape experiences by functioning as models of sense-making. The article revisits the idea that history deals with the actual and fiction with the possible, and it suggests that this conceptual dichotomy has led to a dismissal of how a sense of the possible constitutes an important aspect of intersubjective reality in every actual, historical world. It proposes that literature can enrich and expand our sense of historical worlds as spaces of possibilities.