The chronicle: an everyday narrative form?

Can a chronicle function as narrative of the everyday, as an ‘everyday narrative’ form? The historiographer Hayden White has argued that chronicles are not of themselves narratives but rather await the historian to emploit the events and actions they register into a meaningful [hi]story. To emphasise his point, he asserted that journalism, despite its details and informative reporting, ‘remains locked within the confines of the purview of the chronicle’ lacking retrospective reflection: the ‘aura of historicality’ (White, 1987). In Paul Ricoeur’s tripartite conception of narrative mimesis, he also foregrounds the significance of configuration in the creation and constitution of narratives. Nevertheless, for Ricoeur the chronicle functioned as a ‘proto-narrative’, a ‘symbolic mode in which human experience of ‘within-time-ness’ achieves expression in discourse (Ricoeur, 1988).

This paper will explore the chronicle and its related expressions the timetable and the calendar. It will propose these as forms that not only document the everyday, but have the capacity to project an ‘aura of historicality’ and narrative reconfiguration that engenders social connectedness across and within time making distinct the meaning of the ‘everyday’.