Telling a Story Together: Narratives in a Conflicted Society

This paper addresses the unintelligibility that may arise between distinct groups in a conflicted society due to ‘narrative incommensurability’. It argues that the Aristotelian narrative structure (beginning, middle, and end) can exacerbate this crisis of intelligibility, particularly when the same event is classified differently across varying narratives (for instance, when one event functions as a complication in one narrative and as a resolution in another). Addressing this problem, the paper proposes ‘narrative entanglement’, a practice of endowing meaning through an interaction that links events from different narratives without unifying them or erasing their distinct identities. The paper describes a social project that is set up to establish a narrative viewpoint on the Mount Scopus Hebrew University campus.