If narration was collecting

In which terms can the aesthetic function of the device of linearization in literature be defined without reducing it to equivalence-driven paradigm building or to the production of eventfulness, by itself rather characteristic of historiography than of literature? Based on the thesis by the Dutch narratologist Mieke Bal, describing collecting as a narrative device of linearization, the author demonstrates that linearization does have an aesthetic function specific for literature. It consists in semantization of the time axis, in the course of which previously asemantic moments of the past acquire new meaning by being arranged in a semantic row - a narration. The main driving force for both narration and collecting is the effort to re-establish the unity with the world which had been lost in course of individualization of the modern age. Being essentially unrealizable this effort is bound to recur again and again thus making up a narrative row. The structural analogy between narrating and collecting is illustrated by the interpretation of the story Chernye doski by Vladimir Solouchin.