Introduction

1 ‘Wirklichkeitserzählungen’

Transdisciplinary narratology is booming. It expands widely beyond the philologies, into fields and disciplines such as theology, philosophy, law, economics, politics, and pedagogics; and of course also in everyday communication and everyday culture, in journalism, and marketing.1 There is rising interest in storytelling and narrative structures, in grand narratives and small narratives, master narratives and meta narratives, model stories and cases, narrative cognition and narrative frames, all emerging from non-literary fields and non-literary communication. This all means that there is a deepened interest in factual narration in general; or better put as “Wirklichkeitserzählungen” [reality narratives], a term coined by Christian Klein and Matías Martínez (2009a). We prefer this term here since we want to exclude those narratives that are non-fictional but part of literary communication, such as autobiography, biography, letters, published diaries, travelogues etc. If we deal with ‘Wirklichkeitserzählungen’, as Martínez uses it, we have to ask, on the one hand, if they share the same structural principles with fictional narration. Is it justified to apply categories of classical, structuralist, and post-classical narratology here? Hence, we have to focus on mood, voice, and tense, on internal focalization, anachrony, eventfulness, and reduced distance/showing. Does the distinction between story and discourse make sense, for example in clinical case reports or in accounts of natural history? Are those elements that some scholars reserve for fictional storytelling (see Fludernik 2020, 54–58) restricted to certain historical epochs or genres?

On the other hand, there are intriguing questions about factual, non-literary storytelling that essentially concern what has been called the ‘factual pact’. The assumption is that factual narratives, at least in the context of expert communication, make true statements about the real world; therefore, they are defined by functionality (Klein and Martínez 2009a, 3; Fludernik 2020, 62).2 The functions attributed to storytelling within such contexts range from witnessing, persuasion, ordering, sense-making, and causal explanation to illustration, convincing, communication, and education. More precise distinctions would certainly be helpful; and one should, with regards to storytelling, distinguish between everyday communication in colloquial language and expert communication within expert fields. This volume consciously narrows the field of investigation down to storytelling in science and medicine – thus providing a lens on the connection between expert semantics, codes, discursive rules on the one hand and narrativity on the other hand.

2 Epistemic storytelling: Science and medicine

Over the recent years, several pioneering volumes and handbooks on factual narration have been published by leading scholars, such as Monika Fludernik’s and Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative Factuality (2020), Klein’s and Martínez’ Wirklichkeitserzählungen (2009b), Martínez’ ‘interdisciplinary handbook’ Erzählen (2017), and finally the section “Erzählen jenseits der Literatur” in Huber’s and Schmid’s Grundthemen der Literaturwissenschaft: Erzählen (2017, 433–569). They all aim to frame the field and give overviews over the broad spectrum of transdisciplinary storytelling; they also reveal promising areas of scholarship. If one skims through these volumes, it becomes clear that two expert fields are especially intriguing for the exploration of epistemic functions of storytelling – the natural sciences and medicine. Both serve functions such as witnessing, ordering, causal explanation, education, and communication. And both present, systematically and historically, a wide range of genres, media, codes, and discourses which are either narrative as a whole or contain small narrative chunks or larger passages of narrative. Many of them embed proper narratives in a dominant mode of argumentation and description (see Fludernik 2015, 118–119); for example Emil Du Bois Reymond’s groundbreaking treatise Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur allgemeinen Muskel- und Nervenphysik (1875). Here, highly perspectival first-person accounts about the author’s experiments are embedded in lengthy descriptions of general physiological laws. Against this background, we follow Aura Heydenreich who claims that narrative in science (one can add ‘narrative in medicine’) should certainly not be seen as something that is expectable, necessarily there, and unavoidable. Heydenreich conceives it rather as something incidental and gradual that comes in varying degrees (Heydenreich 2021, 60). Hence, criteria for describing higher and lower degrees of narrativeness are crucial, especially if one looks at diachronic changes; eventfulness, homodiegesis, verbs of action, focalization, and tellability could be such criteria.

However, this incidental, varying and yet very basic narrativity of science and medicine has not yet become consensus among scholars. It has been questioned in the sense that people wonder if there is any narrativity at all or if there are just other, non-narrative forms of representation such as description, list, mathematical formula, graphic depiction, and such like (Walsh 2020, 419; see also Plotnitsky 2005). In fact, knowledge in both natural sciences and in clinical medicine is – at least in modern contexts – propositional and deals with universals. It remains questionable to what end narrative, which is about particulars and bound to time, may serve. Can it be more than illustrative or educative, can it reach from the particular to the universal and provide explanation and hence argument? To put it in the words of Heydenreich, we have to ask if and how “scientific texts functionalize narrativity epistemically, and still argue theoretically” (Heydenreich 2021, 60).

Keeping the longstanding debate about the possible “incompatibility between narrative and scientific knowledge” in mind (Walsh 2020, 419), we think that both fields are especially promising. They require not only meticulous narratological analysis but also historicizing and contextualizing. One can see diachronic developments, historical changes and shifts, processes of cultural differentiation (e.g. between science and popular science), and varying and changing functions of storytelling. The spectrum is broad and ranges from the medical case report, its characteristic narrativity and the fundamental changes it undergoes with the advent of scientific medicine in the nineteenth century (see King 2016) to highly abstract subjects such as quantum physics or molecular biology (see below). It ranges from textual genres such as scientific articles, medical textbooks, and popular essays to audiovisual media such as film or video tape. This broad and yet concrete spectrum allows to combine two aspects of postclassical narratology that have been both declared as desiderata, however sparsely combined: transdisciplinary narratology and historical, contextualist narratology.

The latter seems all the more important since the widely discussed process of deagentivization and objectivation of scientific language in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been identified by historians of science as a major feature of technical modernization. This claim of deagentivization, based on linguistic elements such as verbs of action and their mode of conjugation, is also crucial for the degree and elaborateness of narrativity in science and medicine.3 Therefore, it should be used and reworked in close correlation with narratological investigation. Combining the analysis of syntax with oppositional narratological categories such as eventfulness/protocol-style, anachrony/fundamental linearity, internal focalization/external focalization could provide a more precise toolbox for factual expert texts (see Brandt 2017, 215–216).

But as promising as medicine and science might be for transdisciplinary narratology, there are blind spots and profound gaps on both sides: one-sidedness, a lack of historicity, a lack of exemplary studies. So far, there is no systematic investigation into which genres and historical epochs are relevant, and to what ends narrative may serve. This is another aspect that becomes clear if one has a closer look at the volumes and handbooks mentioned above, all edited by leading narratologists and scholars of literature. It is apparently not easy to fill the gap of science and medicine, as opposed to law, economics, theology, social sciences, and historiography. ‘Science’ is in two handbooks covered by the same author, Christina Brandt (2009, 2017); ‘medicine’ meanwhile tends to be metonymically represented by psychiatry and psychotherapy, also covered twice by the same pair of authors, clinician Carl Eduard Scheidt and linguist Anja Stukenbrock (2017, 2020). However, the difficulties of dealing with medicine and science from a narratological point of view seem different in both fields. Against this background, we will try to...