The Narrative Structure of Counterfeit Money 2

This post is part of the Art as Gift Project

What happens in the story happens to the narration (122)
Derrida says that the effect of Counterfeit Money is that of an event that has taken place. This event is not the content of the story, that which the narrative is generally thought to report. What happens happens to the narration, to the elements of the narration itself. Derrida characterises the standard understanding of the narrative discourse in terms of its spatiality and temporality, saying we generally think that the events that it reports “have taken place outside of it and before it.” This is not the case in Counterfeit Money, where what happens happens to the narrator and to the narration, it provokes the narration and the narrator, who says of his friend “I will never forgive him.”

In Counterfeit Money the components of the narration are that without which the event would not take place. It is as if the narrative condition were the cause of the recounted thing, as if the narrative produced the event it is supposed to report. There has to be the condition of narrative for the events to take place. The narrative is the cause and the condition of the thing, that is, the event of gift and forgiveness and the possibility of the impossibility of gift and unforgiveness.

The possibility of narration is the condition of the story, where a story is history, what has happened, narrative condition emerges from the desire to know, which leads to the recounting of events, the story. The time of the narrative, the given time, is that the desire for narrative is in advance of the event. Its spatiality what Derrida calls its spacing, is in the distance that the friends take from each other in their steps on leaving the tobacconist’s. Each step is in the time of the event, proceeding “from given moment to given moment.” The step of the friends “scans the time of the story.”

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