I'm reading Paul Ricoeur. I'm not supposed to read it straight through. I'm totally reading it straight through. I keep finding too many pieces missing when I skip around.
I'm not very interested in History, except as it relates to autobiography (which must be memory, or a different kind of emplotted history), but I am also doing some personal, genealogical research. I get a lot of my information from my mother's cousin Gerry, but when I ask him for his sources and documentation, his answer is "well, I talked to so-and-so, and that's the story they tell." It's information from memory - gossip. My scholarly brain just screams. It's the documentation that's lacking, and that's where I come in. It's my job to find the paperwork to back up the family gossip.
There's a subtle difference between this Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) emplotment and Ricoeur's account of historical emplotment. He describes it as a focus on events, on a way of stringing events into a causal chain (I am not at all sure that he means to imply a post hoc fallacy, though clearly narrative tends that direction. If he doesn't, I'm certain he'll point it out soon). While LDS Family History research is always interested in the stories of our forebears, we link our stories generationally. Firmly anchored in measured time, we focus on births, deaths, and marriages; mostly because these are the documented events, but also because these are the events that create a "generational" model of time, which is largely temporally illusive. We "emplot" our generations into a family tree, or neat fan graph, but time shifts underneath it. A "generation" is closer to Ricoeur's Augustinian experienced time than Mrs. Dalloway's bells.
In a way, it's more like parallax in Ulysses, or like two asynchronous sine waves; one organic (generational) and one mechanical (measured). And I'm mixing metaphors again.
