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Narratives, whether oral stories or forms of historiography and fiction, display ways to make sense of the world and of human experience. ' Fiction, more specifically, offers the possibility to explore and test alternative values and courses of conduct through the representation of hypothetical yet concrete cases. This paper rises to the challenge of reading the Gilgamesh epic through contemporary "models" for narrative analysis.
Obviously, this is a risky undertaking. As Gadamer observed, there is no hermeneutic process that can enable one to jump over one's "prior understanding" (Vorverständnis), or sometimes, one's lack of it. In this case, I must confess complete ignorance as to the literary genres and devices familiar to readers contemporary to the Gilgamesh epos during its long Wirkungsgeschichte. So this paper will not claim any knowledge about the actual narrative structure of the epic, about the way it was received, or about the role it played in the successive cultural contexts which saw its matière develop and settle. I can only present an undoubtedly anachronistic analysis of the structures of meaning I read into this "text," thanks to (among others) Foster's and Vanstiphout's compelling translations and editions.2
Two issues will be central: first, the narrative structure (the representation of action) as the staging of a pursuit of values and of value conflict; second, the act and mode of narration itself as an exemplification and performance of the use and power of the words. My approach is of necessity text-centered, since I lack all contextual knowledge.
But - and this is a necessary caveat at the outset of this analysis- can one even speak of a "text" in this case? Distinguished Assyriologists have devoted much energy to the thorny issue of whether it is legitimate to associate these tablets with the notion of "text," a term that suggests coherence and closure. Alternatively, from a poststructuralist perspective, it is tempting to associate the fragmentary, fragile, and variable "textuality" of such an epic with the contention that in any case, there is no origin nor closure to any text whatever, but only variants and différance, as Derrida famously argued. In this view, the former issue is idle: Coherence is nothing more or less than a normative decision of the reader, who tends to naturalize...