Nacherzählen. Versuch über eine Kulturtechnik
Authors: Schäfer Armin 
Published: July 2023

The article discusses the position of retelling in literary studies. Retelling does neither play a role in narratology, nor raises further questions for text theory. In the focus of literary didactics retelling is often limited to the pragmatics of use. ›Retelling‹, however, is not a term used in literary studies. Although the term denotes a widespread cultural technique, which is used in schools and is accordingly also discussed in the didactics of literature, it has not yet been able to be acknowledged in the discipline. The greatest obstacle standing in the way of a conceptual version of retelling probably lies in its distinction from narrative. Narratology has not found any specifics in retelling that fundamentally distinguish it from narration. And the tools of trans-textuality and intertextuality developed especially in structuralism to describe textual relations are available for narrative texts anyway. Thus, literary studies already apply theories and tools that are useful for analyses of retelling: narratology, text theory and classification of a second-order literature, the theory of trans-textuality and intertextuality, and material history, as well as research on media transposition and adaptation. Defining retelling as a second-order narrative, or meta-narrative, inevitably raises the question of what is being repeated at all, and how, by means of narrative. Medieval studies particularly emphasize the aspect of repetition (›re-telling‹), which precedes a specific mediality of narration. Retelling as a variety of repetition neither presupposes a pre-text nor requires that a narrative be repeated. Rather, in retelling, the narrative procedure enters into the service of repetition. On the one hand, it is a variety of repetition, but not every repetition is also a narrative. On the other hand, one and the same text can be described from the point of view of narration or that of repetition.

Literary studies that focus on the uses of retelling will pay attention to the varieties of repetition and should look at the relationship between the act of narration and repetition. Obviously, in retelling, the modes and ways, but also the degrees of reference to the pre-text can vary, so that it remains to be discussed which varieties of reference count as valid repetitions. In addition, there is the fundamental question of what falls under the concept of narrative and what components constitute it. Is narrative to be understood as a turning back with linguistic means? As an organization of events, which in turn are to be understood as displacements of actors across semantic or even physical boundaries? As little as a repetition by means of narration is linked to a preceding narrative text, it is equally questionable where and how a boundary between narrative and non-narrative representation could be drawn. In this respect, the following discussion of retelling touches, on the one hand, on the distinction between describing and narrating, which itself required its own discussion in literary theory and history. On the other hand, the distinction between retelling and paraphrasing raises the question of the suitability of linguistic and rhetorical categories of analysis for an analysis of narrative. The article will not address such fundamental questions, but only selected examples will be presented to discuss ways of retelling. The article shifts the broad question of what a retelling is into a smaller, more manageable question of how retelling is done. This shift in the problem leads to specific examples and puts the spotlight on the uses of retelling. The selection of examples presents extreme cases that lie at the edges of a normal range where research has mostly focused its attention. The discussion of examples, which comes from Thomas Bernhard/Peter Handke, Wilhelm Termeer/Herman Melville and Clemens J. Setz, is intended to show that retelling allows both an integration, appropriation or fusion of narrative voices as well as an entanglement of narrative discourse and narrative histoire. The ambiguity of the retelling, which, by retelling a histoire, always carries its own discours, contrasts with forms of use such as summary. Although content summary and retelling can be distinguished as text types according to pragmatic criteria, summarizing a narrative text and retelling a histoire can also be mixed and merge into each other. The ease with which the practice of retelling can be understood should not obscure the fact that it is not easily grasped in terms of literary theory or narratology, and brings into play fundamental questions and problems.