Hymes

I like this post and you and Kate's insistence on the thing itself, un-adorned by narrative.
This reminds me of Del Hymes, one of the world's great ethnographers. He was obsessed with ways in which life can become narrative:
The view of narrative as an iterative form, I take from Hymes, who described an incident from his personal life where,

…one often saw a bit of experience becoming an event to be told, being told and being retold until it took shape as a narrative, one that might become a narrative told by others. (Hymes 1996:118)

Hymes developed his concept of narrative using his experiences of living amongst a group of Native Americans where he had a house. He produced this passage to describe what he learnt from them. He linked narrative to wider and more fundamental forms of life,

There is a current movement to go beyond collection and analysis of texts to observation and analysis of performance. That is essential, but perhaps only the second moment of three…Continuous with the others, this third is the process in which performance and text live, the inner substance to which performance is the cambium, as it were, and the crystallized text the bark. It is the grounding of performance and text in a narrative view of life – that is to say, a view of life as a source of narrative. (Hymes 1996:118)