The Mimetic Cycle In Literature
The mimetic cycle is threefold. Mimesis 2 is the world of the plot - the world of literature or filmic plot that interests us in the case of West African cinema. This literary world is itself a bridge between Mimesis 1- (the entire world of human epistemology, the capacity of telling stories, and also the symbolic world that qualifies one as a communicator and as a person that is capable of getting into contact with a text) – and Mimesis 3 - (the completion of the meaning the text confers in the person of the reader or the audience). Mimesis 2, the world of the plot, is a mediational one, it has the power of configuration.
Ricoeur argues that the hermeneutical project supplies for the evident deficiencies in semiology that had positivist
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The ability therefore to identify a plot presupposes the mediation of symbols. Symbols in themselves have spatio-temporal connotations. Symbols are “structural, symbolic and temporal” (ibid). Let us therefore explore the structural, symbolic and temporal character of every plot as developed by Ricoeur himself:
Symbols are structural in the sense that the intelligibility constructed in emplotment finds anchorage in our capacity to utilize the conceptual network that structurally distinguishes the domain of action from that of physical movement. The human mind is capable of asking questions- why? who?- about actions and questions of fortune and misfortune, and then draw the relevant conclusions (ibid). A narrative of every sort presupposes a familiarity of the reader “with terms such as agent, goal, means, circumstance, help, hostility, cooperation, conflict, success, failure, etc – on the part of the narrator and the listener” (ibid., 55). Episodes of different sorts in their paradigmatic order remain reversible until they get engraved in the syntagmatic order that becomes a kind of unchangeable state. To “… understand a narrative is to master the rules that govern its syntagmatic order. Consequently, narrative understanding is not limited to presupposing a familiarity with the conceptual network constitutive
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No use of symbols is indifferent: it always attracts implicitly or explicitly social approbation or reprobation. This judgment is a result of normal understanding, a poetic convention that is respected by the writer and perceived to be thus by the reader. The poetic license therefore takes into consideration all the restrictions of grammar, societal values, and the possibilities that exist for experimenting with certain values. Worthy of note is the observation that “poetics does not stop borrowing from ethics, even when it advocates the suspension of all ethical judgment or its ironic inversion” (ibid.,
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