Sapiens narrans (englisch)

 

« El Greco’s Views of Toledo are contemporary with the publication of Don Quixote: a fictional machine in which a character, as you may recall, is seized by a narrative intoxication and ceaselessly disavows the world — the things that fill it, the nature he crosses.Don Quixote, in his own way, is the herald of our vertiginous condition — a devourer of fictions who himself becomes a fictional being, haunting his land to transform what he finds there. He is the very image of Sapiens narrans: a being who believes more in the stories he weaves than in the trials of his body and of the world.Remember: he falls, rises, falls again, and rises once more. Fiction within him is a principle of rising again, a tool to evade the ordeal of pain; a spring that allows him to deny life by transforming it through successive narrative enchantments. In this sense, Don Quixote is you, me, us: beings of stories, of encodings, who would like to escape the verdict of life but manage it only by producing languages and narratives that cover it.»

Camille de Toledo, A History of Vertigo, Points, p.13

 

 – Dear Ignatius, apart from the play on words, which, I must admit, makes me smile quite a bit, have you any idea why… or…?

Lucian, aware of the unease that has taken root between him and Ignatius, searches for his words, something that rarely happens to him.
– How did this idea occur to you, this connection between Don Carrot and Don Quixote?

Ignatius is still somewhat agitated, almost grumbling, plagued by the doubts that have sprouted in his mind. He suspects, more or less, that he has become the object of his friend Lucian, who has suddenly put him back in his place — that of a patient. Yet a patient he is not… Moreover, he has seen — albeit furtively — that Mr. Lucian, as he now calls him to restore a certain distance between them, draws in his notebooks images that look exactly like those Ignatius believes he bought and brought to Lucian’s office.
To think that Mr. Lucian himself might be the author of these images is but a small step — one Ignatius does not hesitate to take, for to him, the evidence is clear: the style, the colours on the pages that Lucian adds after his departure — all of it seems proof enough… and, besides, the handwriting in those notebooks is as indecipherable as the signature on the prints he brought!

 – Ignatius, I believe, deep down, that you are a Homo narrans...
– What on earth is that?
– You see, my friend, to be human is not only to think or to make; it is to tell stories — to exist, to understand, to remember, and to act. From Homer’s epic to the modern mythologies analysed by Barthes, to the metaphysical vertigo of Borges, literature shows that man is a symbolic animal whose psychic, social, and political survival depends upon narration.
Thus, Sapiens narrans is not a mere complement to Homo sapiens; it is its foundation. We are beings of stories, and perhaps we remain alive — in the memory of the world as in our own consciousness — only so long as we accept to tell and to be told.

So far, thinks Ignatius, this entire speech could serve quite well as a definition of Lucian himself...

– I would have liked, dear Master, that you return to your question… about Don Quixote and Don Carrot, whose pseudonym, it seems, I have created...

– Well, you see, Ignatius, man is often defined as Homo sapiens, “the one who knows”, or Homo faber, “the one who makes”. Yet this definition overlooks an essential faculty: man is the one who tells stories. The notion of Sapiens narrans reminds us that the human being builds his identity and his relationship to the world through narrative.
Cervantes’ Don Quixote, considered the first great modern novel, stages this beautifully: its hero does not merely live — he narrates himself and reads the world through stories. Thus, the novel explores the power of fiction in the construction of identity and questions our fundamental need for narrative.
How does Don Quixote illustrate the human condition as a narrative condition? We can see that Cervantes’ hero becomes a character through storytelling, acts upon reality through imagination, and reveals the profoundly narrative nature of human existence.

– But, sir, Don Quixote is only a character...
– Don Quixote becomes a character because he adopts a story. Alonso Quijano is not born a knight-errant; he constructs himself from the books he reads. Far from being mad at first, he is, above all, a passionate reader. Immersing himself in the romances of chivalry, he adopts their narrative framework until it consumes his very identity.
To live like the heroes, he must narrate his life as an epic.
He changes his name, names his horse, chooses a lady to serve, assembles his armour — all this, first through language. Don Quixote is not merely a fictional character; he is a man who fictionalises himself. Cervantes thus shows that identity is never given but crafted through stories — whether personal or collective. It is not madness that creates the knight; it is the narrative. And narrative, through writing or theatre, is but a practice that reveals the mystery of the play by which everything is played — when one plays at being another, or at being oneself, akin to what one believes* or desires.

* Daniel Sibony