Beyond Classical Narration: Transmedial and Unnatural Challenges 9783110353242, 9783110352573

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Beyond Classical Narration

Narratologia Contributions to Narrative Theory

Edited by Fotis Jannidis, Matı´as Martı´nez, John Pier Wolf Schmid (executive editor) Editorial Board Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik ´ Jose´ Angel Garcı´a Landa, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn Andreas Kablitz, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel Sabine Schlickers, Jörg Schönert

42

De Gruyter

Beyond Classical Narration Transmedial and Unnatural Challenges

Edited by Jan Alber Per Krogh Hansen

De Gruyter

ISBN 978-3-11-035257-3 e-ISBN 978-3-11-035324-2 ISSN 1612-8427 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. 쑔 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck 앝 Printed on acid-free paper 앪 Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents JAN ALBER & PER KROGH HANSEN Introduction: Transmedial and Unnatural Narratology ...........................

1

WOLF SCHMID The Selection and Concretization of Elements in Verbal and Filmic Narration ......................................................................................................... 15

JAN-NOËL THON Toward a Transmedial Narratology: On Narrators in Contemporary Graphic Novels, Feature Films, and Computer Games .......................... 25

MATTHIAS BRÜTSCH From Ironic Distance to Unexpected Plot Twists: Unreliable Narration in Literature and Film ................................................................. 57

GUNTHER MARTENS & HELENA ELSHOUT Narratorial Strategies in Drama and Theatre: A Contribution to Transmedial Narratology ............................................................................... 81

BENOÎT HENNAUT Building Stories around Contemporary Performing Arts: The Case of Romeo Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia ..................................................... 97

NORA BERNING Narrative Journalism from a Transdisciplinary Perspective: A Narratological Analysis of Award-Winning Literary Reportages ....... 117

MARKUS KUHN Web Series between User-Generated Aesthetics and Self-Reflexive Narration: On the Diversification of Audiovisual Narration on the Internet ..................................................................................................... 137

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FELICITAS MEIFERT-MENHARD Emergent Narrative, Collaborative Storytelling: Toward a Narratological Analysis of Alternate Reality Games ................................ 161

YOKO TSUCHIYAMA Photography and Narrative: The Representation of the Atomic Bomb in Photographs of Nagasaki from 1945 to 1995 ............................ 179

MAŁGORZATA PAWŁOWSKA Musical Narratology: An Outline ................................................................. 197

PER KROGH HANSEN Flow-Stoppers and Frame-Breakers: The Cognitive Complexities of the Film Musical Exemplified by Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark .... 221

HENRIK SKOV NIELSEN The Unnatural in E.A. Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” .................................... 239

JAN ALBER Postmodernist Impossibilities, the Creation of New Cognitive Frames, and Attempts at Interpretation ...................................................... 261

Notes on Contributors ............................................................................... 281

JAN ALBER & PER KROGH HANSEN (Freiburg and Kolding)

Introduction: Transmedial and Unnatural Narratology This collection of essays looks at two important manifestations of postclassical narratology, namely transmedial narratology on the one hand, and unnatural narratology on the other. David Herman defines the term ‘postclassical narratology,’ which he had introduced in 1997, as follows: Postclassical narratology (which should not be conflated with poststructuralist theories of narrative) contains classical narratology as one of its ‘moments’ but is marked by a profusion of new methodologies and research hypotheses: the result is a host of new perspectives on the forms and functions of narrative itself. Further, in its postclassical phase, research on narrative does not just expose the limits but also exploits the possibilities of the older, structuralist models. In much the same way, postclassical physics does not simply discard classical Newtonian models, but rather rethinks their conceptual underpinnings and reassesses their scope of applicability. (Herman 1999: 2–3)

Postclassical approaches differ from classical structuralist narratology in three significant ways. First, one can observe a movement away from the predominant narratological interest in prose narratives (i. e., the novel and the short story) toward the investigation of new media and genres. Second, postclassical narratology closely correlates with the inclusion of other disciplines or approaches such as discourse analysis, cognitive studies, feminism, postcolonialism, Marxism, queer theory, rhetoric, and so forth. Third, in contrast to structuralist theorists, postclassical narratologists no longer try to develop a grammar of narrative; rather, they seek to put the narratological toolbox to interpretive use. In the words of Jan Christoph Meister, transmedial narratologists— such as Alice Bell, Per Krogh Hansen, Jörg Helbig, Markus Kuhn, Jan-Noël Thon, Marie-Laure Ryan, Werner Wolf, and others—investigate “the relevance of narratological concepts for the study of genres and media outside the traditional object domain of text-based literary narrative” (2009: 340).1 Furthermore they look at narratives that use different semiotic systems for their stories (such as written or spoken language, static or moving pictures, word-image combinations, music, and so forth). Similarly, Jan Alber and _____________ 1

See also the publications by these authors in the list of works cited.

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Monika Fludernik argue that “while traditional narratologists such as Stanzel and Genette primarily focused on the eighteenth-century to early twentiethcentury novel, transmedial approaches seek to rebuild narratology so that it can handle new genres and storytelling practices across a wide variety of media,” such as “plays, films, narrative poems, conversational storytelling, hyperfictions, cartoons, ballets, video clips, paintings, statues, advertisements, historiography, news stories, narrative representations in medical or legal contexts, and so forth” (2010: 8–9). Among many other things, transmedial narratologists deal with the narrativity of media and genres beyond the novel, and, in relation to that, they also address the question of whether it makes sense to posit narrator figures or narrative instances for plays, movies, graphic novels, cartoons, hypertext fiction, computer games, and so forth. Furthermore, transmedial investigations go hand in hand with the application, adaptation, and reformulation of traditional narratological concepts (such as focalization, unreliable narration, or the story-discourse distinction), and thus deal with the influence of the immediate discourse environment on the process of storytelling. In this context, Marie-Laure Ryan argues that “the diversity of games that narrative can play with the resources of its medium is one of the many reasons that make the intersection of narratology and media studies, an area still largely unexplored, into a productive field of investigation” (2005: 21).2 Unnatural narratology, on the other hand, is a postclassical movement within narrative theory that systematically investigates the anti-mimetic qualities of narratives of all sorts (see Alber 2013b).3 Fictional narratives can either be based on real-world parameters, in which case they reproduce our assumptions about time, space, and other human beings in the actual world. Alternatively, they may violate our real-world frames and scripts by representing storytelling scenarios, narrators, characters, temporalities, and settings that would be impossible in the real world. Unnatural narratologists develop new analytical tools and modeling systems that help describe the fact that many narratives deviate from real-world frames in a wide variety of ways. At issue are categories for narrative analyses (such as the unborn narrator, the dead character, or the retrogressive temporality) _____________ 2 3

In their forthcoming collection Storyworlds across Media, Ryan and Thon speak of a “mediaconscious narratology.” Unnatural narratives are anti-mimetic in a specific sense: while Socrates in Plato’s Republic defines mimetic art as “the art of imitation” (Plato 1970: 431, 595A; see also 439, 600C and 443, 601B), Aristotle equates mimesis with the process of representation, projection, or simulation (1995: 33–37, 1448a–b). Since unnatural scenarios and events do not try to imitate or reproduce the parameters and principles of the empirical world, they are antimimetic in the sense of Plato. However, since such scenarios or events can be represented in the world of fiction, they are mimetic in the sense of Aristotle.

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that build on structuralist narratology but at the same time supplement that work with concepts that were unavailable to structuralists such as Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, A. J. Greimas, Franz Karl Stanzel, or Tzvetan Todorov. For example, as Henrik Skov Nielsen (2004 and 2013) and Rüdiger Heinze (2008) have shown, many fictional first-person narrators—such as the homodiegetic narrator in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Glamorama (1998)—are unnatural because they know more than they could if they were actual human beings who live under real-world constraints.4 Similarly, in opposition to actual human beings, a fictional character can transform into a different character or entity (as in Sarah Kane’s play Cleansed [1998] or Franz Kafka’s short story “The Metamorphosis” [1915]). Third, in contrast to time in the real world, fictional time can move backwards (as in Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow [1991]) or different temporal planes may be fused in ‘chronomontages’ (as in Ishmael Reed’s novel Flight to Canada [1976]) (see Richardson 2002 and Alber 2012b). Finally, in opposition to containers in the actual world, fictional containers may be bigger on the inside than they are on the outside (like the house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves [2000]) (see Alber 2013c). It is perhaps worth noting that the unnatural may occur at the level of the story (the what? of narrative) or the level of the narrative discourse (the how? of narrative), or it may concern both the telling and the told. Generally speaking, unnatural narratologists such as Jan Alber, Rüdiger Heinze, Stefan Iversen, Maria Mäkelä, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson5 seek to “describe the ways in which projected storyworlds deviate from real-world frames,” and then they try “to interpret these ‘deviations’” (Alber et al. 2010: 116). To put this point slightly differently, they reconstruct the unnatural and then address its purpose or point. However, it is also worth noting that there is a methodological debate within unnatural narratology which concerns the question of how best to approach the unnatural. More specifically, some theorists follow a cognitive approach to the representation of impossibilities, while others are opposed to such an approach: the latter fear that the use of cognitive categories might potentially lead to the normalization or domestication of unnatural scenarios and events, whereas cognitive theorists are careful not to monumentalize the unnatural by leaving it outside the bounds of the comprehensible.6 _____________ 4 5 6

Further unnatural narrators and forms of narration are discussed by Brian Richardson (2006) and Alber et al. (2012). See also the publications by these authors in the list of works cited. Articles that fuse transmedial and unnatural narratology are “Ontological Metalepsis” (2012) by Alber and Bell and “Backmasked Messages” (2011) by Hansen. While Alber and

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While traditional structuralist narratologists such as Franz K. Stanzel and Gérard Genette focused on realist prose texts (between the eighteenth and early twentieth century), transmedial and unnatural narratologists are interested in genres, media, and texts that move beyond this classical paradigm of narration. Based on the respective objects of their study, both types of postclassical narratology centrally concern themselves with the development of new analytical tools. Transmedial and unnatural narratologists argue that the existing range of categories has to be significantly broadened so that they can come to terms with storytelling practices across a much wider spectrum. Let us illustrate these processes on the basis of an example. James Phelan and Wayne C. Booth, for instance, define “the narrator” as “the agent or, in less anthropomorphic terms, the agency or ‘instance’ that tells or transmits everything—the existents, states, and events—in a narrative to a narrate” (2005: 388). While this general description is certainly correct, transmedial narratologists would point out that there are important differences between the abilities of the narrator of a prose text as opposed to the narrators of computer games, films, hypertext fictions, or plays—if it makes any sense to posit a narrator figure in such cases in the first place. As far as narrators are concerned, unnatural narratologists would highlight anti-realist experiments with the traditional anthropomorphic narrator figure. For example, in unnatural narratives, the narrator can be an impossibly eloquent child, a baby without a brain, a female breast, an animal, or a tree. In other cases, the narrator has already died or is still unborn. Further impossibilities concern the telepathic first-person narrator; you-narratives, in which a covert narrative voice tells the central protagonist detailed versions of stories which happened to him; and we-narratives in which the ‘we’ comprises the minds of people who have lived over a period of one thousand years. The present volume does not only aim at presenting compelling readings of new types of narrative; it also centrally addresses extensions and modifications of existing narratological categories and/or understandings of how narratives work. Beyond Classical Narration is based on selected and revised papers that were given at the second conference of the European Narratology Network. This conference took place between March 10 and November 11, 2011, at the University of Southern Denmark in Kolding (Denmark). The essays collected here all deal with narratives that somehow deviate or differ from a traditional norm. More specifically, our contributors deal with _____________ Bell discuss metaleptic jumps in prose texts and hypertext fiction, Hansen shows that the unnatural ordering of events, such as the reversed discourse of films like Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) and Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002), transcends the ‘natural,’ forward progression of narrative discourse, thus opening up alternative story-formations.

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narratives that go beyond classical narration in two different senses: the transmedial narratologists in this volume look at narrative media or genres that transcend the well-known narration of the novel and the short story, while the unnatural narratologists in this collection deal with narrative texts that represent impossibilities and thus challenge the parameters of literary realism, which are largely (but of course not only) based on realworld frames and scripts.7 Most of the contributions to this volume deal with new media or genres in the context of a transmedial framework. For instance, our contributors look at the processes of storytelling in films (Schmid, Thon, Brütsch), graphic novels (Thon), drama and the performing arts (Martens & Elshout, Hennaut), musicals (Hansen), web series (Kuhn), computer games (Thon), literary reportages (Berning), alternate reality games (Meifert-Menhard), photography (Tsuchiyama), and music (Pawłowska). In doing so, they also grapple with narratological concepts such as the narrator (Thon); unreliable narration (Brütsch); narratorial mediation or profiling (Martens and Elshout); the narrative discourse (Hennaut); Genette’s distinction between narration and focalization (Berning); narrative elements such as settings, characters, and plots (Schmid); linearity and sequentiality (Meifert-Menhard); referentiality (Tsuchiyama); narrativity (Hansen and Pawłowska); and self-reflexivity (Kuhn). Two of our contributors look at unnatural narratives, i. e., literary texts which represent scenarios or events that could not exist in the real world. Even though they share an interest in the representation of impossibilities, they differ with regard to the question of how to deal with the unnatural. While Henrik Skov Nielsen argues that unnatural narratives are of a different kind than other literary narratives and hence call for a different interpretive approach, Jan Alber argues in favor of a cognitive approach to the unnatural and illustrates how readers can respond to the representation of impossibilities on the basis of pre-existing frames and scripts. Wolf Schmid opens our collection by comparing verbal and filmic narration. By way of Roman Ingarden’s concept of indeterminacy as well as the proto-narratological theories of Russian and other Slavic formalists, Schmid outlines some of the fundamental differences between the selection and concretization of important elements of the represented world in _____________ 7

Roland Barthes, for example, looks at realism from the perspective of reality effects (effets de réel). For him, the realist mode functionalizes “all details to produce strong structures and to justify no notation by the mere guarantee of ‘reality’ ” (1986 [1968]: 147; italics in original). Barthes’s concept thus throws light “on how fictional narratives can promulgate a sense of the real through the strategic, code-based use of verisimilar details” (Bensmaia 2005: 492). In other words, verisimilar details create an impression of authenticity; they cue readers to construct storyworlds which are primarily based on real-world cognitive parameters, i. e., our knowledge of time, space, and human beings in the actual world.

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novels and films (such as situations, characters, and actions). He pays particular attention to the media-specific ways in which novels and films deal with the depiction of characters’ inner and outer lives. Matthias Brütsch examines how the concept of unreliable narration, first introduced and developed in literary theory, has been adapted by film scholars. Special attention is given to (often unacknowledged) changes in meaning related to this interdisciplinary transfer. Starting from the observation that film theorists usually use the term for narrative constellations considerably different from those literary scholars have in mind (false leads with final twists versus ironic distancing), the question arises whether the revision of the concept is justified by differences between literary and filmic narration. By showing that both narrative constellations are possible in either media (even if they are not equally common and not always designated accordingly), it is argued that in the case of unreliable narration, media-specific differences have been overstressed, while crucial differences on media-unspecific levels have been ignored. Jan-Noël Thon’s “Toward a Transmedial Narratology: On Narrators in Contemporary Graphic Novels, Feature Films, and Computer Games” argues that a transmedial narratology should not be limited to a collection of medium-specific narratological models but, rather, should focus on the examination of various transmedial phenomena and strategies of narrative representation across a range of narrative media, acknowledging both similarities and differences in the ways these media narrate. Accordingly, the essay examines the use of narrators as a particularly salient transmedial strategy of narrative representation as well as their realization in contemporary graphic novels such as Gaiman’s The Sandman series (1989–1996) and Spiegelman’s Maus (1991), feature films such as The Usual Suspects (1995) and Fight Club (1999) and computer games such as Hothead’s DeathSpank series (2010) and Supergiant Games’ Bastion (2011–2012). Gunther Martens and Helena Elshout address narratorial profiling in a number of theatrical forms and settings that eschew the traditional ways (messenger’s speech, etc.) in which narrators have been assumed to make their presence felt in drama. This approach hinges on both an extension and a transmedial application of what narratorial mediation may comprise: Narratorial profiling is to be situated on a continuum ranging from paratextual and typographical signs over stage managers to metaleptic comments on the temporality of the play. Martens and Elshout depart from the ambiguous stage directions in Kleist’s Amphitryon (1807), which flout the common conception that the secondary text is an exclusive action territory of the narratorial instance in drama. Kleist announces an experimental type of text theatricality which is later seized upon by postdramatic as well as neo-narrative staging practices. In a second step,

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they engage with the current trend to adapt novels and verbatim lifenarration to the theatrical stage: they tackle selected case studies from twentieth- and twenty-first-century German and Austrian literature and performance: the stagings of Kraus’ collage text The Last Days of Mankind (1918–1922) and Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities (1930), as well as Rimini Protokoll’s neo-documentary performances and their ambient, emergent forms of narration. Benoît Hennaut shows that theatre and the performing arts are rarely the focus of contemporary narratological research, although there are a few notable exceptions. Most of the analysis dedicated to the narratology of drama concentrates on the narratorial figure, reinforcing the importance of verbal mediacy in order for drama to qualify as narrative. However, narratology needs to address a more specific question in drama: the nature and place of narrative discourse, without limiting it to the role and the characteristics of a narrator. In his paper, Hennaut considers the performance and its reception as areas in which narrative discourse operates, specifically in the analysis of a form of theatre not dominated by a dramatic text (words being almost absent), relying instead on performance to create meaning. Focusing on the series of works called Tragedia Endogonodia (2002–2004), eleven pieces created by the Italian director Romeo Castellucci, the paper discusses questions such as the following: Why are these theatre performances relevant to the narrative genre although they are presented as being ‘non-narrative’? How are the responsibility and the locus of the narrative discourse of these pieces contained not only at the performance level but also specifically at the reception level? How do these performances illustrate that narrative format is as much product as process? In her contribution, Nora Berning shows that literary reportages are oftentimes referred to as a text type that is imbued with a narrative dimension. However, descriptions of narrative elements and structures remain vague because scholars typically fail to operationalize narrativity in reportages. By contrast, Berning seeks to grasp the narrative potential of literary reportages via a set of narratological categories commonly used for the analysis of literary fiction. By examining to what extent narratological categories are applicable to literary reportages, it becomes clear that literary reportages can be described, analyzed, and charted with categories that originated in structuralist narratology. The intent of her essay is to challenge the argument that journalism and literature have non-overlapping communicative goals. Markus Kuhn looks at the wide variety of different forms of audiovisual narration in web series. As a relatively new form of audiovisual serial narration on the Internet, web series are often associated with phenomena of web 2.0, and user-generated content. Today, however, there exists a

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variety of different patterns of professional, semi-professional and amateur web series. Due to commercial interests, among other reasons, web series increasingly use conventions and forms that have been established in TV and cinema. Kuhn focuses on a hybrid between user-generated aesthetics and professional production: the web series Pietshow (2008), a crucial example for the diversification of audiovisual narration on the Internet. Before analyzing Pietshow, he describes the development of one of the most popular web series, lonelygirl15 (2006). Kuhn provides a working definition of web series and makes some remarks on their prototypical structures. Eventually, he gives an outlook on further developments by reference to Prom Queen (2007) and other examples. Felicitas Meifert-Menhard explores the relatively recent genre of alternate reality games (ARGs) as multimedial, emergent, and collaborative storytelling engines. Her article works toward a narratological conceptualization of ARGs, suggesting a revised definition of narrative that allows for processes of selection and (unexpected) feedback, spontaneity, and structural openness. Starting with an overview of ARG’s central mechanisms, the paper then moves on to a more concrete evaluation of this genre’s interposition between storytelling and gaming, briefly touching upon the long-standing ‘narratology vs. ludology’ debate, before focusing on central gaming and narrative elements of ARGs. It then proposes a threestage narratological model for the analysis of this and other interactive, multi-linear narrative strategies. This model takes into account the emergent nature of ARGs by expanding traditional narratological ideas of linearity and sequentiality, which imply a backward-looking and predetermined storyline, for the sake of allowing interactive, choice-andconsequence-based narrative experiences. Yoko Tsuchiyama addresses the narrative potential of documentary photography. More specifically, she deals with the ideological underpinnings of photographs by showing that the selection and the treatment of images always serves to construct a certain version of a story (e. g., through the focus on specific elements [rather than others], or the use of color [as opposed to black-and-white photography]). Tsuchiyama examines the role of the photographic records of the nuclear bomb in the context of diverse forms of narration: testimony, propaganda, historical document, etc. In particular, she dwells on the photographs of Nagasaki by Yosuke Yamahata (1917–1966), which were interpreted in diverse ways and used in various different political contexts after 1945. Małgorzata Pawłowska outlines the current status of musical narratology, which is undergoing a phase of dynamic development. In this context, the term ‘musical narratology’ refers to the study of the relationship between narrative and music. Musical narratology deals with the question of

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whether music can tell stories, and it also tries to analyze musical pieces by using tools and concepts from narratology. In her paper, Pawłowska sketches out the most important music specialists who draw on narratological concepts (such as, inter alia, F. E. Maus, J. J. Nattiez, E. Tarasti, M. Grabócz, and B. Almén) and she also discusses different ways of interpreting music as narrative. By referring to “degrees of narrativity” (G. Genette, V. Micznik), she tries to indicate to what extent narrativity, i. e., the quality that makes something a narrative, can occur in music, pointing out, which narrative constituents can be introduced by musical pieces. In his article “Flow-Stoppers and Frame-Breakers: The Cognitive Complexities of the Film Musical Exemplified by Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000),” Per Krogh Hansen also focuses on the relation between music and narrative. He discusses the relation between what he labels ‘the cognitive flow’ and the ‘emotional flow’ of the film musical and the reception of it. His argument is that musicality and narrativity have very different, oppositional qualities. While the former relates to the emotional flow, the latter relates to the cognitive flow. Krogh Hansen addresses the quality of musicality by way of Daniel Stern’s conception of ‘vitality affects’ and discusses Torben Kragh Grodal’s approach to the mental flow of movie spectation, before he pays attention to Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) as an example which very self-consciously thematizes the difference between musicality and narrativity. Henrik Skov Nielsen first presents his approach to unnatural narratives and unnatural narratology, and, in a second step, he presents a reading of Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” (1842) where he tries to demonstrate some of the analytical consequences of what he calls “unnaturalizing” reading strategies. The article thus attempts to address the question of how the process of interpretation changes with an unnatural approach. It is Nielsen’s contention that it makes a considerable difference for the interpretation whether we naturalize and project real-life parameters into the reading process, as Monika Fludernik proposes, or whether we apply the principles of unnatural narratology in the form of un-naturalizing reading strategies. For him, unnatural narrative theory generates different readings because an unnaturalizing reading is an interpretational choice that, in contrast to naturalizing readings, does not assume that real-world conditions and limitations have to apply to all fictional narratives when it comes to logic, physics, time, enunciation, framing, etc. Nielsen tests this assumption and demonstrates what difference it makes by comparing a strong natural(izing) reading and an un-naturalizing close reading of “The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allan Poe. Jan Alber, finally, demonstrates how the physical, logical, and human impossibilities of unnatural narratives urge readers to create new cognitive

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parameters (such as the speaking breast, the dead character, or the telepathic first-person narrator) by blending or otherwise altering pre-existing frames or scripts, and he also demonstrates how readers can make sense of such unnatural elements. Alber uses Philip Roth’s novel The Breast (1972), Harold Pinter’s play Family Voices (1981), and Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981) as postmodernist examples of unnatural narratives, and in a second step, develops a cognitive model which consists of several reading strategies that take both the process of worldmaking and the process of meaning-making into consideration. Taken together, the essays collected here demonstrate how new media and genres as well as unnatural narratives challenge classical forms of narration in ways that call for the development of analytical tools and modelling systems that move beyond classical structuralist narratology. In this sense the articles seek to contribute to the further development of both transmedial and unnatural narrative theory, two of the most important manifestations of postclassical narratology. Works Cited Alber, Jan 2009 “Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them”, Storyworlds 1, 79–96. 2012a “Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama”, Habilitation, University of Freiburg, Germany. 2012b “Unnatural Temporalities: Interfaces between Postmodernism, Science Fiction, and the Fantastic”, in Makku Lehtimäki, Laura Kartunen, and Maria Mäkelä (eds.), Narrative Interrupted: The Plotless, the Disturbing and the Trivial in Literature, Festschrift for Pekka Tammi, New York et al.: De Gruyter, 174–191. 2013a “Pre-Postmodernist Manifestations of the Unnatural: Instances of Expanded Consciousness in ‘Omniscient’ Narration and Reflector-Mode Narratives”, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 61.2, 137–153. 2013b “Unnatural Narratology: Developments and Perspectives”, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 63.1, 69–84. 2013c “Unnatural Spaces and Narrative Worlds”, in Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (eds.), A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 45–66. Alber, Jan and Alice Bell 2012 “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology”, Journal of Narrative Theory 42.2, 166–192.

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Alber, Jan and Monika Fludernik 2010 “Introduction”, in Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1–31. Alber, Jan and Rüdiger Heinze 2011 (eds.), Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson 2010 “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models”, Narrative 18.2, 113–136. 2012 “What is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology? A Response to Monika Fludernik”, Narrative 20.3, 371–182. 2013 “What Really is Unnatural Narratology?”, Storyworlds 5, 101–118. Alber, Jan, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson 2012 “Unnatural Voices, Minds, and Narration”, in Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, London: Routledge, 351–167. Aristotle 1995 Poetics, trans. and ed. Stephen Halliwell, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Barthes, Roland 1986 “The Reality Effect” [1968], in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. 141–148. Bell, Alice 2010 The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bensmaia, Reda 2005 “Reality Effect”, in David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and MarieLaure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London: Routledge, 492. Hansen, Per Krogh 2005 “When Fact Becomes Fiction: On Extra-Textual Unreliable Narration”, in: Lars-Åke Skalin (ed.), Fact and Fiction in Narrative: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Örebro: Örebro University, 283–307. 2009 (ed.), Borderliners: Searching the Boundaries of Narrativity and Narratology/Afsøgning af narrativitetens og narratologiens grænser, Holte: Forlaget Medusa. 2009 “Unreliable Narration in Cinema: Facing the Cognitive Challenge Arising from Literary Studies”, Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology (AJCN). 2010 “‘All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing’ Prolegomena: On Film Musicals and Narrative”, in Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure

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Ryan (eds.), Intermediality and Storytelling, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 147–164. 2011 “Backmasked Messages: On the Fabula Construction in Episodically Reversed Narratives”, in Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze (eds.), Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 162–185. Heinze, Rüdiger 2008 “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, Narrative 16.3, 279–297. Helbig, Jörg 2001 Intermedialität: Eine Einführung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 2003 “Wie postmodern ist Hyperfiction? Formen der Rezeptionslenkung in fiktionalen Hypertexten”, in Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (eds.), Moderne/Postmoderne, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 299–313. Herman, David 1997 “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology”, PMLA 12.5, 1046–1059. 1999 “Introduction”, in David Herman (ed.), Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1–30. Herman, David, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol 2012 Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, Columbus: The Ohio State University. Kuhn, Markus 2011 Filmnarratologie: Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell, Berlin: De Gruyter. Meister, Jan Christoph 2009 “Narratology”, in Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert (eds.), Handbook of Narratology, Berlin: De Gruyter, 329–350. Nielsen, Henrik Skov 2004 “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, Narrative 12.2, 133–150. 2013 “Naturalizing and Un-naturalizing Reading Strategies: Focalization Revisited”, in Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (eds.), A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 67–93. Plato 1970 Plato in Twelve Volumes: The Republic II Books VI–X, ed. and trans. Paul Shorey, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Phelan, James and Wayne C. Booth 2005 “Narrator”, in David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London: Routledge, 388–392. Richardson, Brian 2002 “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”, in Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 47–63. 2006 Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure 1999 (ed.), Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 2001 Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and the Electronic Media, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004 (ed.), Narrative Across Media: The Language of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2005 “Foundations of Transmedial Narratology”, in Jan Christoph Meister, Tom Kindt, and Wilhelm Schernus (eds.), Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1–23. 2008 “Transfictionality across Media”, in John Pier and José Ángel García Landa (eds.), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin: De Gruyter, 385– 417. Ryan, Marie-Laure and Jan-Noël Thon 2014 (eds.), Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Thon, Jan-Noël 2009 “Perspective in Contemporary Computer Games”, in Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert (eds.), Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narration, Berlin: De Gruyter, 279–299. Wolf, Werner 1999 The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2002 “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie”, in Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning (eds.), Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, Trier: WVT, 23–104.

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“Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and its Applicability to the Visual Arts”, Word & Image 19.3, 180– 197. 2007 (ed.), Description in Literature and Other Media, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2011 (ed.), The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Wolf, Werner and Walter Bernhart 2006 (eds.), Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2009 (eds.), Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2010 (eds.), Self-reference in Literature and Music, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.

WOLF SCHMID (Hamburg)

The Selection and Concretization of Elements in Verbal and Filmic Narration A fundamental difference between verbal and filmic narration lies in selection and concretization of the elements of the represented world (depicted situations, characters and actions). Whereas in film the depicted elements are presented mainly visually with the possible accompaniment by music and voice-over text, in the novel the elements are given exclusively by linguistic means. The visual representation projects concreteness of the elements in all facets that are visible from a given point of view. In verbal representation, however, linguistic mediacy gives the elements and the represented world as a whole a necessarily fragmentary existence full of gaps. In the novel, the narrated story is the result of a selection of certain elements and their properties from the ‘happenings,’ the raw material of a narrative (cf. Schmid 2010: 190–193). By selecting the elements of the story the narrator as it were draws a thread through the happenings connecting certain elements and properties and leaving others aside, non-selected. While doing this, the narrator follows the criterion of the relevance of the elements and properties to the story he is narrating. Any story narrated with the aid of linguistic signs implies a huge amount of non-selected elements and properties. The reader leaves most of them aside but brings some elements and properties into presence, that is, he activates and includes them into the story he imagines in the process of reading. The Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden (1931) has called this act “concretization.” Ingarden, who dealt with the ontological status of the depicted objects in verbal texts, has shown that the represented elements in a literary work necessarily contain countless “places of indeterminacy” (Unbestimmtheitsstellen; 1931; tr. 1973: 246–254). The reader is called on to fill in the gaps and to concretize what has been left indeterminate. But this is definitely not the case in all gaps and places of indeterminacy but only in those that are relevant to the story. Indeterminacy is, however, no specific artistic device as has been assumed by some leading scholars, such as Wolfgang Iser (1970; 1976). Inspired by the discovery made by Ingarden many years ago Iser used it as the point of departure for his own theory regarding indetermina-

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cy as a specific trait of modern literature. However, already Ingarden has shown that “indeterminacy” is not an artistic device but an indispensable accompaniment to every linguistic representation of reality, because “it is impossible to establish clearly and exhaustively the infinite multiplicity of determinacies of the individual objects portrayed in a work with a finite number of words or sentences” (Ingarden 1937; tr. 1973: 51). The lack of correspondence between the multiplicity of determinacies of the real objects and their linguistic representation cannot be compensated for, no matter how many words are used. The infinite determinacy of objects in reality cannot be exhausted by any linguistic description. However simple an object may be, it has more determinate properties than any verbal representation can ever denote, not to speak of such complex objects as characters and their consciousness. Therefore a high degree of indeterminacy is a necessary trait of any verbal text of any epoch and culture. Let us now turn to a concrete example: Any film of Anna Karenina shows the heroine physically complete, that is concrete in all observable properties. Not only her shoes, clothes, and hats but everything that is observable in her is necessarily determinate in all visible aspects. (In general, film theory has paid little attention to the necessary determinacy of represented objects, but there is a short reference to it in Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse, when Chatman (1978: 30) states that “clothing, unbestimmt in verbal narrative, must be bestimmt in a film.”) It is the overconcreteness of film representation that may worry the reader. After all the novel’s reader has already shaped an image of the heroine that can be disturbed by the film’s concrete representation imposed on him. But it is not so much that the reader does not agree to the outer appearance of the film’s heroine that he has imagined in a different way. No, he is irritated by the concreteness itself, no matter in which shape it is realized. Most readers will have quite abstract and vague ideas about the heroine’s appearance. The reason for this lies in the fact that Tolstoy characterized the novel’s heroine with a surprisingly small number of features. Among the features selected for the story, which play an important role, are the color of her shoes, clothes, and hats. The colors of her garments, carefully designed and several times modified by Tolstoy in the process of writing, have a symbolic function and appear as leitmotifs (cf. Busch 1966: 21). Another feature often mentioned in the text is the form and the condition of her hair. Anna’s hair is an indexical sign of her liveliness and life force. It is not by chance that the first description of the heroine in her meeting with Dolly is limited to one physical feature—her hair:

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She took off her kerchief and her hat, and catching it in a block of her black hair, which was a mass of curls, she tossed her head and shook her hair down. (AK 73)1

Literary characters as a rule are amazingly abstract schemes, “amazingly”, because in the process of reading we hardly notice their schematic nature. While reading we focus on the selected elements and features and on their indexical and symbolic functions. In doing so we fill in the lacunae and gaps existing in the text, first, more or less automatically, unconsciously, and second, in a quite abstract way, so that we would not be able to give a description of the character in question. Ninety nine per cent of a character’s features remain in the shadow of the reader’s diffuse conception. The concretizations are vague, associated, above all, with a certain atmosphere and emotion. In a film adaption of a novel, the concreteness of a character’s appearance may offend our imagination, because it leaves no room for its unfolding. The fact that the represented elements in a novel and a film are selected and concretized in a different way entails certain significant differences both in the eventfulness of the works and in the sense-generating role of these elements. In the following we will focus on two of these differences. First, in verbal narration there is the presumption that all selected elements have a certain connection with the event told in the story in question. Such a presumption implies that the elements and features are selected not by chance but have a semiotic function, either indexical or symbolical, either with respect to the story or to the text. The aesthetic laws guiding our perception of artistic works of art do not tolerate mere chance of selection. The principle that the selected elements are perceived as something significant in one sense or another is valid even with regard to badly made narratives. Only on the basis of the presumption that all selected elements and features are meaningful narratives with weakly motivated details dissatisfy us. The reader is prone to ascribe insufficiently motivated details empty semantic pretensions. What about selection in film? The artistic problem of the film is its reduced selectivity. Needless to say, the shots of a film representing continuous happenings in discontinuous units clearly are selective. But what is shown within a shot is not subject to further selection. The elements of a shot are in all respects, as far as they are visible, necessarily determinate, concrete. This is why it is difficult to discern, whether an element or a property is intentionally represented and therefore belongs to the story or _____________ 1

Quotes from Anna Karenina (AK) after: Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Ed. and introd. by L. J. Kent & N. Berberova. The Constance Garnett Translation revised by the editors. New York: Modern Library, 1965.

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came into the field of vision accidentally. One could argue that in a wellmade film nothing appears merely accidentally. Yes, of course, but Anna Karenina can not wear shoes, clothes and hats only, and her body consists of more than hair. The audience never knows which of the presented elements and properties are selected intentionally and thus have an indexical or symbolical function and which not. With the help of cinematographic devices the focus can be directed towards certain elements as well as towards single properties. Among those devices are mise-en-scène, point of view, lighting, contrast of color and black and white, blow up, repetition, montage, filmic metaphor and others. According to Boris Kazanskij, one of the first Russian theorists of cinema whose article “The Nature of Cinema” was published in the seminal Russian Formalist collection The Poetics of Cinema (Ejxenbaum (ed.) 1927) the cinema artist has to struggle with the essential shortcoming inherited from photography: Photography is stupid, dry, and boring, like statistics, because it has no choice and is incapable of generalization. It is obliged, like a mirror, to reflect everything that lies in the field of its lens. It pedantically notes every pebble, unthinkingly takes account of every leaf, blindly repeats everything without exception. For it everything is equally significant and therefore equally random. […] And it is therefore, that technical improvements must be provided through the initiative of the artist. (Eagle 1981: 109–110)

No matter how hard the artist struggles with randomness, the principal problem remains: since what is presented in film is concrete and determinate in all visible respects it is difficult for the audience to discern the semantic thread. The meaningful and the accidental lie side by side and it is difficult to decide which of the presented elements and which of their properties are part of the story and which are not. The problem increases as techniques which approximate film to reality is employed, such as color and sound. It is easier for the black and white silent film to mark the elements and properties that are part of the story than for the color and sound film. This is why Jurij Tynjanov states in his essay “On the foundations of Cinema” (1927): The “poverty” of cinema—its planar nature and lack of color—is, in fact, its structural essence. It does not give rise to new devices fortuitously; rather, it generates them; new devices spring from its soil. (Eagle 1981: 83)

Already the Russian formalists discussed the question whether film operates with things or with signs. On this subject Tynjanov comments: The visible world is presented in cinema not as such, but in its semantic correlativity, otherwise cinema would be nothing more than live (or still) photography. The visible man and the visible thing constitute an element of cinematic art only when they serve as a semantic sign. (Eagle 1981: 85)

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In his Czech article “Úpadek filmu?” (“Is the Cinema in Decline?”) from 1933 Roman Jakobson tried to eliminate the incompatibility of the two approaches—things or signs: It is precisely things (visual and auditory), transformed into signs, that are the specific material of cinematic art. (Eagle 1981: 162; cf. Čudakova 1977: 552–556)

However in the film not all things can be exclusively semiotic. Cinema works not least by means of beautiful pictures, on the basis of “photogénie” as the French director of photography Louis Delluc (1920) first wrote. For Boris Ejxenbaum, who took up Delluc’s idea, the photogenic was the analogon of the non-cognitive components in a work of art, comparable to “trans-sense” poetry (in Russian: zaumnaja poezija) or absolute music. In his article “Problems of Cinema Stylistics” he underlines: [The photogenic] is not a matter of the “structure” of the object, but of its transmission on the screen. Any object can be photogenic, it is a question of method and style. The cameraman is the artist of the photogenic. When used as “expressiveness”, the photogenic is transformed into the language of mimicry, gestures, objects, camera angles, distances, etc. These are the basis of cinema stylistics. (Eagle 1981: 57)

Of course, the photogenic of views is part of a narrated story only when the view is in a character’s field of vision symbolizing his or her inner state. But when beautiful pictures are to work on the spectators’ emotions only without playing a role in the narrated story then they go beyond the limits of proper narration. In reviews of mainstream movies, we can often read that notwithstanding all the beautiful pictures the film suffers from a weakly developed story. It was Russian Formalist film theory that was mainly interested in the devices that transform objects into signs and that make objects cinematogenic (cf. Hansen-Löve 1978: 338–358; Russian tr: 2001: 327– 346; Eagle 1981: 86). The most prominent theorist was Jurij Tynjanov with his essay “On the Foundations of Cinema.” Tynjanov transferred the results from his book The Problem of Verse Language (1924) from verse to film with the shot as equivalent of the verse line. Shots in cinema do not “unfold” in a successive formation, a gradual order—they replace one another. This is the basis of montage. They replace one another as a single verse, a single metrical unit, is replaced by another—at a precise boundary. (Eagle 1981: 93)

Tynjanov’s particular interest is focused on the devices of what he calls “delimitation”, “distinction” or “differentiation.” Central in his thinking is the phenomenon of equivalence with its manifestations of similarity and dissimilarity. It is by juxtaposition that the film generates meaning. And we can add: Creating meaningful oppositions between the represented elements activates their semantic interrelation and compensates for their

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overdeterminateness. With the aid of montage the film marks the elements and their properties that are part of the narrated story. We will now focus on the second difference between novel and film—the presentation of the characters’ inner world. In a novel the direct representation of the characters’ minds fully corresponds to the sign system of verbal texts. This device manifests itself in various mind representation patterns: direct speech, indirect speech, free indirect speech, figurally colored narration and others (cf. Schmid 2010: 137–174). It is not rare that in literature even the outer world is represented from the point of view of one of the characters in the pattern of free indirect perception. A classical example of a figurally colored description can be seen in the episode in which the narrator of Anna Karenina represents those properties that make up the attractiveness of the heroine for the first time: [Vronsky] felt he must glance at her once more; not because she was very beautiful, not because of the elegance and modest grace that were apparent in her whole figure, but because in the expression of her charming face, as she passed close by him, there was something peculiarly caressing and soft. As he looked around, she too turned her head. Her shining gray eyes, which looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly attention on his face, as though she recognized him […] In that brief look Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed eagerness which played over her face, and flitted between the brilliant eyes and the faint smile that curved her red lips. It was as though her nature was so brimming over with something that against her will it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile. Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile. (AK 76–77)

We can here see five structures characteristic of Tolstoy’s narration: (1) The narrator has immediate introspection in the minds both of Vronsky and Anna. (2) There is an erotic mutual understanding between the heroes manifesting itself unconsciously not in words but in glances. (3) The decoding of the visual communication becomes even more complicated by the fact that in the given passage Vronsky’s point of view prevails, but not unambiguously. His point of view is closely interwoven with the point of view of a narrator who explains what the hero perceives and feels but cannot express in words. (4) As is often the case with Tolstoy the figural and narratorial components are difficult to discern. (5) What Vronsky sees and the narrator explains in words, namely Anna’s excessive, not suppressible vitality and vivacity, Schopenhauer’s “Will to Live” (cf. Müller 1952), is for the author the principal reason for Anna’s inevitably tragic end. By what means could a film form such a cluster: the hidden but decisive communication of the heroes, on the one hand, and the oscillation be-

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tween figural and narratorial and even authorial point of view, on the other hand? By what means could a film express the inner struggle in the heroine, who in vain tries to put out the light in her shining eyes, to suppress the fatal “Will to Live”? In film, thoughts, emotions, and desires of the characters (in short: what after Palmer 2002 we call “mind”) can be represented only in an indirect way, that is by indexical signs, such as behavior or speech, on the one hand, and the presentation of certain views of the outer world, on the other. In the latter case the mind born origin—and therefore the subjectivity and possible unreliability—of the views can be indicated by certain techniques as black-and-white picture, defamiliarizing shade or strange blow up. In comparison with the novel the filmic representation of mind is oblique and approximate. The direct representation, for instance by voice-over from the off, does not correspond to the semiotic system of film being borrowed from literature. One of the masters of cinematic representation of mind was Sergej Ejzenštejn who developed ideas similar to those of Russian Formalism, but largely independently from it (cf. Hansen-Löve 1978: 352–358; Russ. tr. 2001: 341–346: the relationship between Formalists and Ejzenštejn is somewhat differently accentuated by Eagle 1981: 29–36). Ejzenštejn’s favorite device was montage, montage not as combination but as collision of shots. He realized in practice what Tynjanov had dealt with in theory— the creation of meaningful series of parallels, juxtapositions, and equivalences. By combining “thematic-logical” thinking with “image-sensual” thinking Ejzenštejn managed to create iconic signs, impressive paradigms of human gestures that were able to represent the characters’ minds. A very effective means to represent the characters’ minds is music. Film music is able to represent not only the character’s inner state but also to get the audience into a corresponding mood. So it approximates the character’s and the audience’s emotions. What we call immersion is largely due to film music. Ejzenštejn was also one of the pioneers of film music. In his films Aleksandr Nevskij and Ivan the Terrible he even cooperated with Sergej Prokof’ev. Ejzenštejn strove to integrate musical patterns into what he called “vertical montage.” With regard to Aleksandr Nevskij he wrote: We will try to discover that “secret” of those vertical correspondences which, step by step, relate the music to the shots through an identical motion that lies at the base of the musical as well at the pictorial movement. (Eagle 1981: 31–32)

From our considerations we can draw five conclusions on the correlation between novel and film: (1) Novel and film tell—even on the basis of the same happenings— inevitably different stories.

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(2) The difference of the media is amongst other things based on a different substance and form of the narrated story and the semantic thread that cuts the story out from the happenings. In the novel this thread is “thinner” and more abstract than in the film, where its forming is based apart from linguistic signs mainly on visual and musical indexes and icons. Atmospheric pictures and an emotionally loaded music give the film a multi-layered semantics with a thread that is on the one hand “thicker” and on the other more determinate than in the novel. (3) The activity of the receiver is different in the media. This explains different preference of people for novel and film. The reader and the spectator are people with different talents and needs. The reader should have the ability of converting the text full of gaps and indeterminacies into a more or less concrete imagination. The spectator must have a somewhat different ability, namely that of combining the multilayered verbal, visual and musical impulses to form a semantic, sensual, and emotional impression in which a maximum of symbols, icons and indexes of the multimedia-based cinematographic “text” is foregrounded. (4) Although film with the aid of impressive pictures and expressive music strongly affects the viewer’s emotions cognitive work is in his reception activity no less important than in verbal narratives. The spectator is to compose a coherent story out of ambiguous shots that are more often than not only weakly connected. In this task he must realize what Boris Ejxenbaum calls the “devices of associating the individual parts of the film period,” for him “the fundamental stylistic problem of montage” (Eagle 1981: 76). Ejzenštein’s horizontal and vertical montage requires an intellectual cooperation that is not easier than reading a complicated novel. (5) The novel is the genre of inner events. In film, the characters’ minds can be represented only in an indirect way, with the aid of actions, of actors’ facial expression, of emotional associations of pictures, by means of symbolical, iconic or indexical views of the outer world and—last but not least—with the help of music. In any case, the characters’ minds remain more hidden and enigmatic than in the novel where the narrator can verbally and highly analytically represent his heroes’ finest and most complicated, conflicting emotions.

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Works Cited Busch, Ulrich 1966 “L. N. Tolstoj als Symbolist: Zur Deutung von Anna Karenina”, in Gogol’ – Turgenev – Dostoevskij – Tolstoj: Zur russischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Fink. 7–36. Chatman, Seymour 1978 Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Čudakova, Marietta 1977 “Commentary”, in Jurij Tynjanov, Poetika. Istorija literatury. Kino. Moskva: Nauka, 552–556. Delluc, Louis 1920 Photogénie, Paris: M. de Brunoff. Russian translation: Fotogenija kino. Moskva, 1924. Eagle, Herbert 1981 Russian Formalist Film Theory, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Ejxenbaum, Boris 1927 “Problemy kinostilistiki”, in Boris Ejxenbaum (ed.), Poetika kino, Leningrad: Kinopečat’, 11–52. English translation: “Problems of Cinema Stylistics”, in Herbert Eagle, Russian Formalist Film Theory, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1981, 55–80. Ejxenbaum, Boris 1927 (ed.), Poetika kino, Leningrad: Kinopečat’. English translation: “Poetics of Cinema”, in Herbert Eagle, Russian Formalist Film Theory, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1981, 55–159. Hansen-Löve, Aage A. 1978 Der russische Formalismus: Methodologische Rekonstruktion seiner Entwicklung aus dem Prinzip der Verfremdung, Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Russian translation: Russkij formalizm. Metodologičeskaja rekonstrukcija razvitija na osnove principa ostranenija. Moskva: Jazyki russkoj kul’tury, 2001. Ingarden, Roman 1931 Das literarische Kunstwerk. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1972. English translation: The Literary Work of Art, trans. G. G. Grabowicz, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. 1937 O poznawaniu dzieła literackiego, Lwów. English translation: The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. R. A. Crowley and K. R. Olson, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Iser, Wolfgang 1970 Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa, Constance: Universitätsverlag.

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Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. Munich: Fink. English translation: The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Jakobson, Roman 1933 “Úpadek filmu?”, in Listy pro umění a kritiku, Praha. English translation: “Is the Cinema in Decline?”, in Herbert Eagle, Russian Formalist Film Theory, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1981, 161–166. Kazanskij, Boris 1927 “Priroda kino”, in Boris Ejxenbaum (ed.), Poetika kino, Leningrad: Kinopečat’, 87–135. English translation: “The Nature of Cinema”, in Herbert Eagle, Russian Formalist Film Theory, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1981, 101–129. Müller, Ludolf 1952 “Der Sinn des Lebens und der Sinn der Liebe. Der ideologische Plan der ‘Anna Karenina’”, Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie 21, 22– 39. Palmer, Alan 2002 “The Construction of Fictional Minds”, Narrative 10.1, 29–46. Schmid, Wolf 2010 Narratology: An Introduction, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Tynjanov, Jurij 1924 Problema stichotvornogo jazyka, Leningrad: Academia. 1927 “Ob osnovax kino”, in Boris Ejxenbaum (ed.), Poetika kino, Leningrad: Kinopečat’, 53–85. English translation: “On the Foundations of Cinema”, in Herbert Eagle, Russian Formalist Film Theory, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1981, 81–100.

JAN-NOËL THON (Tübingen)

Toward a Transmedial Narratology: On Narrators in Contemporary Graphic Novels, Feature Films, and Computer Games Current literary and media studies tend to use ‘transmedial narratology’ as an umbrella term for a variety of narratological practices concerned with media other than literary texts.1 Not least since the broad field of ‘narrative media studies’ seems to be heavily affected by the boom of what Jahn and Nünning have called the “narratological industry” (1994: 300), however, I would maintain that a genuinely transmedial narratology should not merely aspire to be a collection of medium-specific narratological models but, rather, should examine a variety of transmedial phenomena and strategies of narrative representation across a range of narrative media.2 There are reasons why this is still rarely the case in contemporary narratological practice: in particular, ‘media expertism’3—i.e., the fact that most scholars specialize in one or two narrative media—seems to be a major pragmatic problem of the still emerging field of transmedial narratology. Ryan’s influential Narrative across Media is symptomatic in this respect, since the majority of contributions are concerned with the specific mediality of a single narrative medium. But even apart from the pragmatic constraints of ‘media expertism,’ there may be good theoretical and methodological reasons for limiting oneself to a single medium. _____________ 1 2

3

See e.g. Herman 2004; 2009; Ryan 2004; 2005; 2006; Wolf 2005; 2009; 2011; and the general surveys by Nünning 2003; Meister 2009; Ryan/Thon 2014a. The following is part of a research project on transmedial narratology that is further developed in Thon 2014c; 2015. In the following, the term ‘medium’ is used to refer to conventionally distinct media sensu Rajewsky 2010, emphasizing what Ryan calls “a cultural point of view.” (2006: 23) I cannot discuss the complex relation between what may be abbreviated as ‘medial’ and ‘generic’ conventions in any detail here, but while graphic novels, feature films, and the kind of ‘highly narrative’ single-player computer games that I will focus on may be more appropriately described as prototypical ‘media forms’ that are realized within the media of film, comics, and computer games, respectively (and, moreover, tend to privilege certain genres such as the Superhero genre in the case of graphic novels, the ‘mind-bender’ in the case of feature films, and the role-playing game in the case of computer games), they still exemplify the specific ‘semiotic,’ ‘technological,’ and ‘cultural mediality’ of these media rather well. As, for example, Wolf remarks, “interdisciplinarity presupposes multidisciplinary competence, and this requirement imposes obvious limits on each scholar.” (2005: 105)

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In the introduction to Narrative across Media, Ryan focuses on two of these (potential) reasons: media blindness and radical relativism. Media blindness refers to “the indiscriminating transfer of concepts designed for the study of the narratives of a particular medium […] to another medium” (Ryan 2004: 34), thereby losing a significant amount of their analytical power. Radical relativism rests on the assumption “that, because media are distinct, the toolbox of narratology must be rebuilt from scratch for every medium” (Ryan 2004: 34) and, hence, proves to be just as blind to the similarities among media as media blindness is to their differences. Most contemporary narratologists, for example, will agree with Jannidis’ statement that “[a]ll representation takes place in a medium, and the characteristics of each particular medium dictate key properties of any representation that takes place in that medium.” (2003: 39) However, the conclusion Jannidis draws here—namely “that it is simply not possible to discuss representation in abstract terms” (2003: 39)—seems highly problematic in its apparent absolutism. After all, it is obvious that one cannot but ‘discuss representation in abstract terms’: just like the notion of a map using a 1:1 scale, the demand to discuss (narrative) representation without some degree of abstraction is plainly paradoxical. Of course, what Jannidis aims at is the fact that the ‘storytelling possibilities’ of media are (or can be) very different. So while Ryan may be right in remarking that “the distinction of story/discourse, as well as the notion of character, event, and fictional world” are “narratological concepts that apply across media” (2006: 6), Jannidis’ relativist position at the very least serves to remind us of the fact that these concepts do not apply in exactly the same way to every narrative medium. The core task of a genuinely transmedial narratology, then, is to acknowledge both similarities and differences in the ways media narrate.4 Even though this dual perspective on transmedial and mediumspecific aspects of transmedial strategies of narrative representation can be used to further illuminate a number of prototypical features of narrative, I will mainly discuss the use of narrators across media in the present essay. Before I take a closer look at narrators in graphic novels such as Gaiman’s The Sandman series and Spiegelman’s Maus, feature films such as The Usual Suspects and Fight Club, and computer games such as Hothead’s DeathSpank series and Supergiant Games’ Bastion, however, I would like to sketch some of the more salient dimensions of the narrator as a narratological concept that ‘applies across media.’ _____________ 4

See the works of Herman, Ryan, and Wolf cited above. Incidentally, transmedial narratology should not be conflated with theories of transmedia storytelling as discussed by Dena 2009; Evans 2011; Gray 2010; Jenkins 2006; Klastrup/Tosca 2004; Ryan 2008; Scolari 2009; Thon 2009a; and various contributions in Ryan/Thon 2014b.

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Narrators across Media In literary narratology, concepts of the narrator are mainly based on the notion that narrative texts should be treated as communicated communication (see Janik 1973). Or, as Schmid remarks, “a narrative work does [not] just narrate, but represents an act of narration.” (Schmid 2010: 33, my typo correction) However, even when we focus exclusively on literary narrative texts, it soon becomes clear that the modes in which the act of narration—and, therefore, narrators—are represented differ widely. As is well-established by now, literary narrators may not only be located on various ‘diegetic levels’ and be more or less strongly involved in the stories they tell,5 but they may also represent themselves implicitly or explicitly through their narration.6 While not uncontested, the common view that (fictional) verbal narration in literary texts “always provides symptoms, no matter how weak they may be” (Schmid 2010: 64) that allow the reader to construct a (fictional) speaker as distinct from the author seems convincing enough for many literary narratologists.7 In the context of a transmedial narratology, however, such a view becomes significantly less plausible since most narrative media are not limited to verbal narration and, hence, do not as easily or self-evidently activate the cognitive schema underlying what Nünning has described as the ‘mimesis of narration’8—i.e., the impression that (fictional) verbal narration is ‘the representation of an act of representation.’ Neither comics studies nor game studies have given the adjacent problem of impersonal narration too much attention, but it has, of course, been long recognized in film studies, where the concept of a more or less intangible ‘image-maker,’ ‘grand imagier,’ ‘enunciator,’ ‘implied,’ ‘cinematic,’ or otherwise ‘elusive’ narrator has not only enjoyed astonishing longevity but also generated a great amount of controversy.9 While I cannot reconstruct this sophisticated discussion in any detail here, it should at least be noted that these kinds of ‘impersonal’ multimodal narrators are _____________ 5 6 7 8 9

See e.g. Bal (1997: 43–76); Genette (1980: 212–262; 1988: 79–129); Lanser (1981: 108– 225); Rimmon-Kenan (2002: 87–106); Schmid (2010: 57–78, 175–215). See e.g. Aczel 1998; Chatman (1978: 198–262); Schmid (2010: 57–78). For critical voices, see e.g. Banfield 1983; Kania 2005; Köppe/Stühring 2011; Lanser 1981; Nielsen 2010; Walsh 1997. See also Cohn 1999; Genette 1993 on the narrator’s fictionality. See Nünning 2001 and Bareis 2006, who builds on Walton 1990. See also Fludernik 1996. See e.g. Black 1986; Branigan (1992: 86–100); Burgoyne 1990; Chatman (1990: 124–138); Gaudreault 2009; Gaudreault/Jost 1999; Kozloff (1988: 43–49); Wilson 1997; as well as the more recent surveys and reconsiderations by Currie (2010: 65–85); Gaut 2004; Grodal 2005; Schmidt 2009; Thomson-Jones 2007; (2008: 72–86); 2009; Wilson 2007. See also Baetens 2001; Groensteen 2010; Marion 1993 on ‘enunciation’ in comics; Aarseth 1997; Eskelinen 2012; Neitzel 2005 on the ‘intrigant’ and the ‘implied author’ in games.

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usually understood to be very different from the narrators recipients construct on the basis of literary narrative texts. Chatman, for example, emphasizes that “[t]he cinematic narrator is the composite of a large and complex variety of communicative devices” (1990: 134) such as mise-en-scène, editing, music etc. Against this backdrop, Bordwell’s famous claim that “to give every film a narrator or implied author is to indulge in an anthropomorphic fiction” (1985: 62) seems imprecise at best, since most of the constructs in question are not conceived as anthropomorphic (or as fictional) at all. If the ‘cinematic narrator’ is not to be understood as an ‘anthropomorphic fiction,’ however, it becomes hard to see why we would want to use the term ‘narrator’ in this context instead of simply referring, collectively or individually, to ‘the composite of a large and complex variety of communicative devices.’10 In fact, this ‘double life’ of the narrator is not limited to film or other kinds of (trans)medial narratology but can be found in literary narratology, as well. Aczel, for example, has proposed to resolve “the problem of to whom one attributes functions of (nonpersonified) selection, organization, and comment” (1998: 492) in literary texts by deanthropomorphizing the narrator, reducing him/her/it to a ‘bundle’ or ‘cluster’ of abstract narratorial functions. While “the selection, organization, and presentation” of storyworld elements seem to be the most fundamental of these functions, narratology has extensively discussed various more optional functions such as a narrator’s “self-personification as teller, comment, and direct reader/narratee address” (Aczel 1998: 492), as well.11 Evidently, the selection, organization, and (re)presentation of storyworld elements can—on a certain level of abstraction—be described as transmedial narratorial functions in that they can be observed in virtually all kinds of narrative representation.12 But while the conflation of narratorial functions and narrators already seems uneconomical with regard to the verbal narration that can be found in literary narrative texts, it becomes positively misleading in the context of a transmedial narratology, since narrative media are not limited to the verbal representation of storyworlds, rendering a concept of the narrator as the sole source of narrative representation unnecessarily metaphorical. _____________ 10 11 12

For recent works that roughly follow Chatman’s line of argument without necessarily giving more convincing reasons, see e.g. Kuhn 2011; Lothe 2000; and Schlickers 1997. See also Chatman (1978: 198–262); Ryan 2001; Schmid (2010: 57–78, 175–215). It needs to be emphasized, however, that the specific mediality of contemporary graphic novel, feature film, and computer game not only determines the range of possibilities with regard to the level of narrative representation, but that the choices that are possible here also at least partly determine the medium’s limitations and affordances with regard to the selection and organization of storyworld elements. I will provide a more detailed discussion of the distinction between ‘presentation’ and ‘representation’ in Thon 2015.

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Hence, I will follow Jannidis in his proposal to treat narrators as constructs “organized in the form of characters” (my translation, “in figuraler Gestalt organisiert,” Jannidis 2006: 159),13 re-emphasizing that to posit a narrator is, indeed, to “indulge in an anthropomorphic fiction” (Bordwell 1985: 62), to posit the ‘representation of an act of representation,’ quite independently of the medium used to represent it (and the degree to which it is represented). Treating narrators in this way “does not mean that the narrator is always a fully realized character” (my translation, “bedeutet nicht, daß der Erzähler stets eine volle Figur ist,” Jannidis 2006: 160), but it further illuminates that while literary narratology may be in a position to take the presence of verbal narration and narrators for granted, transmedial narratology most certainly is not. Rather, a transmedial perspective provides a welcome opportunity to reconsider the author/ narrator distinction that is so well-established in literary narratology. As readers, spectators, and players, we tend to have at least a general idea of what kind of ‘author collective’ created the cultural artifact in question. If no (fictional) narrator is represented or (re)presents itself, we will often attribute the selection, organization, and representation of storyworld elements to the author(s) of graphic novels, to film makers, to game designers, etc. As critics and narratologists, however, we need to remain aware that what we do in these cases largely consists of the construction of (more or less well-informed) hypotheses about the processes involved in a work’s creation. Hence, one could speak of a ‘hypothetical author’ or ‘hypothetical author collective’ when referring to these constructs (which also correspond to some varieties of the ‘implied author’).14 It should be noted, however, that there are some similarities between authors and narrators, as well.15 In his influential discussion of cinematic authorship, Livingston emphasizes that he does not subscribe to an “antirealist notion of authorship” which would result in the construction of a “make-believe persona […] referred to variously as the ‘real,’ ‘fictional,’ ‘implied,’ or ‘postulated’ author.” (1997: 145) But while authors (or author collectives) are usually not appropriately described as fictional, they nevertheless “exists not only as a biographical person, or persons, who has created a text, but also as a cultural legend created by texts.” (Branigan 1992: 87, original emphasis) Just like narrators, then, authors (or author collectives) are represented across a range of media and media texts, though these representations are not necessarily accurate or consistent. _____________ 13 14 15

See also Eder 2008; Jannidis 2004; as well as the survey by Margolin 2009. See Booth 1961; and Kindt/Müller 2006, who provide an extensive reconstruction of the implied author’s conceptual history; as well as Alber 2010; and Nelles 2011. For further discussion of these similarities, see also Branigan (1992: 86–100); Currie (2010: 65–85); Lanser (1981: 108–148).

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There are, in fact, quite a few contemporary graphic novels, feature films, and computer games that represent more or less strongly ‘fictionalized’ versions of their authors in the form of what one might call ‘authoring characters’: while the representation of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill as Victorian gentlemen on the cover of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or the representation of the Hothead team as orcs in the DeathSpank series are obviously ‘fictionalized,’ however, such a decision is not as easily made in the case of Art Spiegelman’s representation in Maus or Charlie Kaufman’s representation in Adaptation., which both leave more open the extent to which they are to be understood as (non)fictional.16 Against this backdrop, I agree with Branigan that “[e]stablishing exact categories for the narrations is usually less important than recognizing pertinent relationships and gradations” (1992: 100), but there still seems to be a prototypical ‘division of labor’ between (hypothetical) authors and (fictional) narrators in most contemporary graphic novels, feature films, and computer games: at least in the context of fictional narrative representations, recipients will generally attempt to attribute (fictional) verbal narration to some kind of (fictional) narrator (even if there are only few cues to such a narrator’s presence apart from the presence of the verbal narration itself), while attributing (fictional) nonverbal narration to the work’s (hypothetical) author(s) in a majority of cases. Even if one limits the concept of narrator to more or less explicitly represented characters to which we attribute verbal narration, however, it remains a decidedly transmedial concept, since the use of this kind of narrating characters is a strategy of narrative representation to be found in a wide variety of media within contemporary media culture. While these kinds of narrators may be described as extra- or intra-, hetero- or homodiegetic, as well,17 I will focus on their medium-specific forms and functions in the following sections, examining the relations between narrators and verbal-pictorial representation in graphic novels, between narrators and unreliable representation in feature films, and between narrators and nonlinear representation in computer games. _____________ 16 17

See also Heinen 2002 and Stein 2009 on the ‘image of the author’ in literature and comics; as well as the detailed discussion of (non)fictionality in Thon 2014a. See Genette (1980: 212–262; 1988: 79–129). While Genette’s well-known distinctions can indeed be applied to narrators across media, it should be noted that there are a number of difficulties inherent in the distinctions themselves. As Lanser has shown (1981: 108–225), a narrator’s involvement in the story she tells may be more appropriately described on a scale than by a binary distinction between hetero- and homodiegetic. Furthermore, drawing the line between extradiegetic and intradiegetic narrators may become problematic if one allows for the multimodal representation of a diegetic storyworld without necessarily attributing that representation to an extradiegetic narrator. See also e.g. Ryan (1991: 175–200); Schmid (2010: 57–78); Walsh 1997; 2007; 2010; as well as the discussion in Thon 2013.

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Narrators and Verbal-Pictorial Representation in Graphic Novels While the nonpersonified verbal-pictorial representation of storyworld elements certainly remains the mode most salient for their mediality, contemporary graphic novels use a variety of more or less explicitly represented narrators, as well.18 Heterodiegetic narrators, on the one hand, tend to be extradiegetic and are often limited to giving spatiotemporal coordinates, as in Alan Moore’s and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (see Fig. 1), but there are heterodiegetic narrators that (subsequently) make more extensive use of their narratorial voice, as in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series. Homodiegetic narrators, on the other hand, can more easily be found in the extradiegetic and the intradiegetic variety, even though deciding which is which may occasionally prove difficult.

Figure 1: Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Vol. 1

_____________ 18

I find it useful to generally distinguish between ‘narratorial representation’ and ‘nonnarratorial representation’ across multimodal narrative media, with ‘narratorial representation’ being prototypically realized as some form of verbal narration and ‘nonnarratorial representation’ being an umbrella term for a variety of multimodal forms of impersonal narrative representation, including verbal-pictorial representation in the graphic novel (whose relation to verbal narration is discussed in more detail in Thon 2013), audiovisual representation in the feature film, and ‘interactive’ representation/simulation in the computer game. For a more detailed discussion of the medium-specific combination of text and images in comics/graphic novels/graphic narrative see e.g. Groensteen 2007; Hatfield 2005; McCloud 1993. For a sample of current research on graphic narrative see e.g. the contributions in Gardner/Herman 2011; Heer/Worcester 2009; Stein/Thon 2013.

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Even in the comparatively reduced instance of verbal narration that we find at the beginning of The Sandman, the mode in which it is represented also provides us with cues as to the represented mode of the verbal narration. If no contradictory cues are to be found, most recipients will arguably tend to treat the represented mode of ‘unspecified’ verbal narration as spoken by default, but this tendency is at least partly subverted in The Sandman by the fact that the verbal narration attributable to a covert extradiegetic narrator is represented in ‘narration boxes’ which—through their color and shape—emulate the look of writing paper (see Fig. 2).19

Figure 2: Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes

It should be emphasized, however, that contemporary graphic novels can use a variety of medium-specific strategies of written representation such as ‘narration boxes,’ ‘speech balloons,’ and ‘thought bubbles’ to (explicitly) represent verbal narration not only as written but also as spoken and thought. The notion that readers usually try to attribute verbal narration to some kind of narrating character is important in this context, since this attribution further reinforces the reader’s shift of attention from the level of representation (where the default mode of representation of verbal narration in the graphic novel would evidently be written) to the level of the storyworld (where the default mode of verbal narration that is being represented seems to be spoken rather than written or thought). _____________ 19

Since there are no further cues toward the presence of a fictional narrator, one could also follow Lanser 1981 in speaking of ‘authorial voices’ here or understand the verbal elements in question as part of the nonnarratorial representation. See also Thon 2013; 2015.

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Incidentally, the problems we confront when trying to decide whether we should understand a given verbal narration as spoken or thought seem to be connected to the problems that sometimes occur when we attempt to figure out whether we should understand a given narrator as extradiegetic or intradiegetic.20 With its variety of narratorial voices (marked via differently colored ‘narration boxes’), Gaiman’s The Sandman series once more provides a good example of this kind of indeterminacy: in addition to the written verbal narration that we can attribute to a very covert extradiegetic narrator, the series’ first issue, Sleep of the Just (in Volume 1: Preludes & Nocturnes), introduces a second narratorial voice that can be attributed to the story’s main character, Dream of the Endless, who comments on the unfolding story in the present tense. It seems clear that the verbal-pictorial representation does not represent Dream’s experiencing I as actually speaking in these situations (which would, at first glance, imply an extradiegetic speaking narrator), but the reader may, at some points in the graphic novel, also be cued to imagine Dream as an intradiegetic thinking narrator. Independently of this kind of indeterminacy—which narratological analysis should be content to point out, instead of trying to (dis)solve—, however, I would like to emphasize that both the extradiegetic, covert, writing narrator and the more overt but, at the same time, less easily categorized narrating I that belongs to Dream of the Endless are further characterized through the verbal narration’s mode of representation, i.e., the color and shape of both the ‘narration boxes’ and the writing within them (see Fig. 3). Having examined some features of two prototypical graphic novels with regard to the medium-specific realization of narrators, let me discuss the relation between verbal narratorial representation and verbal-pictorial nonnarratorial representation in slightly more detail. There are, of course, graphic novels such as Jeff Smith’s Bone series that use a purely verbalpictorial mode of representation to represent the diegetic first-order storyworld and some special cases such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen series specific parts of which could be described as purely verbal narration, but it should be emphasized that even in more clearly narratorially-dominated works such as The Sandman or Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the combination of verbal narration and verbal-pictorial representation is in constant flux. 21 _____________ 20 21

The distinction between extradiegetic and intradiegetic refers not so much to the mode in which a narrator is represented than to whether or not the act of narration we attribute to the narrator in question can be reasonably situated in the diegetic first-order storyworld. Spatial limitations prevent me from discussing this in any detail in the present essay, but Maus is actually a good example not only of how the verbal narration in some graphic novels may be more appropriately described as ‘authorial representation’ but also of how the verbal-pictorial representation can sometimes be attributed to a more or less explicitly represented ‘authoring character.’ See, once more, Thon 2013 for a more detailed discussion.

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Figure 3: Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes

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Figure 4: Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus

Incidentally, Maus also exemplifies how graphic novels prototypically use verbal narration to frame verbal-pictorial representation.22 The first part of Art Spiegelman’s two-part work begins with the extradiegetic homodiegetic narrator Art Spiegelman telling a story, and the verbal-pictorial representation ‘illustrating’ the story as well as adding additional, but largely consistent, information (see Fig. 4).23 Moreover, Maus uses an intradiegetic homodiegetic variety of this kind of framing narrator, when Art talks with his father _____________ 22 23

Maus certainly deserves more extensive discussion than I can offer in the context of the present essay. See e.g. Chute 2006; Ewert 2000; McGlothlin 2003; as well as the various contributions in Geis 2003 and the survey by Chute/DeKoven 2007. As has already been mentioned, Maus allows us to not only attribute parts of the verbal narration but also the verbal-pictorial representation to the extradiegetic homodiegetic narrator Art Spiegelman, since the latter is what may be described as an ‘authoring character.’

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Vladek about the latter’s survival of the holocaust (see Fig. 5). In some panels, the narrative representation seems narratorially-dominated, but the relation between verbal narration and verbal-pictorial representation continuously shifts, with large stretches of purely verbal-pictorial representation as well as segments where Vladek’s verbal narration is not ‘illustrated’ by the verbalpictorial representation at all.

Figure 5: Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus

In fact, the combination between verbal narration and verbal-pictorial representation in Maus appears to be rather prototypical for how graphic novels narrate not only with regard to the quantitative relations sketched above but also with regard to what may be described as qualitative relations: throughout the graphic novel, the relation between verbal narration and verbal-pictorial representation may be described as (mildly) redundant or complementary, and even though unrelated or downright contradictory combinations are, of course, possible, it seems that not that many graphic novels are too keen on realizing that possibility.24 _____________ 24

For more detailed accounts of the combination between verbal narration as narratorial representation and verbal-pictorial representation as nonnarratorial representation as well as more generally on the relation between verbal and pictorial representation, see McCloud 1993; Rippl/Etter 2013; Schüwer (2008: 445–458). See also the discussion within film studies, e.g. Kozloff (1988: 100–109); as well as Chatman 1999; Kuhn (2011: 98–100).

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Narrators and Unreliable Representation in Feature Films With regard to contemporary feature films, one does not have to look very hard either to find examples of relatively overt extradiegetic narrators that are either heterodiegetic—such as the narrator in Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer—or homodiegetic—such as the unnamed narrator in David Fincher’s Fight Club. Moreover, contemporary feature films use a variety of intradiegetic narrators that tend to be homodiegetic—both when the verbal narration is ‘illustrated’ by the audiovisual representation, as is the case in Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, and when it is not, as in the ‘Burger King’ scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Once again, the specific mediality of the feature film determines the ways in which narrators can be realized: with the exception of subtitles, early silent film’s intertitles, and written inserts which are sometimes used for specifying temporal and spatial locations, verbal narration in feature films tends to be represented through spoken language, independently of whether it is meant to be understood as spoken, written, or thought narration. Even if a voice-over narrator more or less directly adapts the words of a literary narrator, as is the case in Perfume, the medium-specific mode of representation of the verbal narration adds various characterizing paraverbal cues such as voice quality, pitch, and speaking style to the represented mode of the verbal narration, as well. Since both the mediality of the feature film in general and the relation between verbal narration and audiovisual representation in particular have been discussed extensively within film narratology during the 1980s and early 1990s,25 I will focus on a more specific problem. While most contemporary feature films that make use of what I have called a framing narrator employ (mildly) redundant or complementary combinations of verbal narration and audiovisual representation, and while there are, once more, rather few examples where the verbal narration and the audiovisual representation are unrelated or downright contradictory, it seems that feature films quite often—more so than contemporary graphic novels and computer games—make use of unreliable narrative representation.26 Not surprisingly, then, the problem of ‘unreliability’ has gained increasing attention not only within literary but also within film narratology, _____________ 25 26

See e.g. Bordwell 1985; Branigan 1992; Fleishman 1992; Kozloff 1988; Wilson 1986. Particularly if one takes into account the increase in narrative complexity that can be observed in ‘mainstream’ graphic novels since the end of the 1980s and in ‘mainstream’ computer games since the early 2000s, it seems quite unlikely that feature films are intrinsically more capable of realizing strategies of unreliable narrative representation, however. Rather, it seems that certain cultural and economic developments during the 1990s allowed them to sooner incorporate strategies of unreliable representation into the mainstream.

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and the label is currently attached to a large number of loosely interrelated phenomena, not all of which can be discussed in the present essay.27 Following Helbig, however, I would at least like to distinguish between normative unreliability, “where the assertions of the narrator tend not to be compatible with the moral norms of the text” and mimetic unreliability, “where circumstances are represented falsely” (my translations, “bei der sich die Aussagen des Erzählers tendenziell nicht im Einklang mit den moralischen Normen des Textes befinden” and “bei der ein Sachverhalt falsch wiedergegeben wird,” 2005: 134).28 Since normative unreliability is not easily realized in audiovisual representation (or nonnarratorial representation in general), I will focus on mimetic unreliability here. Not unlike contemporary graphic novels, contemporary feature films seldom combine verbal narration and audiovisual representation in a way that immediately and/or directly appears contradictory. Rather, they tend to use complementary (or mildly redundant) combinations of verbal narration and audiovisual representation to realize what has been described as ‘misreporting’ and ‘underreporting’ (see e.g. Hartman 2007; Phelan 2005). Usually, these strategies of unreliable representation are attributed to characters in some way—either to the (misreporting) unreliable narration of a narrator or to the (underreported) unreliable perception of a ‘regular’ character. Incidentally, two of the examples mentioned above—The Usual Suspects and Fight Club—realize what may be considered as the two prototypical forms of unreliable representation in contemporary feature film. In The Usual Suspects the audiovisual representation is framed as ‘illustrating’ Verbal Kint’s highly unreliable verbal narration, quite probably misreporting a number of key elements of the first-order storyworld. At the same time, The Usual Suspects emphasizes the problematic status of ‘nonfictional narration,’ since both Kint’s verbal narration and much of the accompanying audiovisual representation technically represent a second-order storyworld, whose precise relation to the first-order storyworld in which Verbal makes his testimony remains opaque. Moreover, David Kujan is repeatedly represented as enabling Kint’s web of lies through his own speculations about ‘what really happened,’ and the film primarily seems to follow Kujan’s epistemic perspective, which is heavily influenced by his emotional involvement in the case.29 _____________ 27 28 29

See e.g. the contributions in Helbig 2006; Kindt/Köppe 2011; Liptay/Wolf 2005. See also Booth 1961, who coined the term ‘unreliable narrator’ and at least indirectly introduced the distinction between ‘normative’ and ‘mimetic’ unreliability; as well as the distinction between ‘normative unreliability’ and ‘factual unreliability’ in Laass 2008. See Branigan (1992: 63–85, 100–107) on ‘knowledge hierarchies’ and ‘focalization.’ See also Eder (2008: 565–646) on epistemic (and other) perspective(s). For a more detailed analysis of The Usual Suspects see, once more, e.g. Laass 2008 or Lahde 2002.

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While The Usual Suspects largely attributes the unreliability of the audiovisual narration to the unreliability of Kint’s verbal narration, then, the unreliable representation in Fight Club is, at least in the first three quarters of the film, not motivated by a ‘lying’ narrator, but by the underreported representation of the unnamed experiencing I’s mental perspective. Fight Club uses an extradiegetic homodiegetic narrator, who remains unnamed but can be identified through Edward Norton’s voice. Just as it is the case with the underreporting audiovisual representation, however, the narrating I seems not so much to lie as to represent the experiencing I’s mental perspective without explicitly saying so. Accordingly, the interaction between the representation of a character’s subjective version of the storyworld and an intersubjective or even objective version of it forms a key element of this kind of unreliable representation. This becomes particularly apparent in the ‘twist scene’ of Fight Club, in which the experiencing I finally understands that Tyler Durden is a hallucination of his, while the audiovisual representation repeatedly—albeit rather briefly—switches to an intersubjective mode,30 revealing the non-existence of Tyler Durden in the first-order storyworld.31 It should be emphasized that neither the extradiegetic homodiegetic narrator voiced by Edward Norton in Fight Club nor the intradiegetic homodiegetic narrator Kint in The Usual Suspects directly controls the audiovisual representation. However, in both cases, the latter is framed as ‘illustrating’ the (only partially represented) verbal narration of the former. The reliably represented first-order storyworld in The Usual Suspects is also framed by a second strand of verbal narration, brief intertitles that merely give spatiotemporal coordinates and that clearly cannot be attributed to Kint. While The Usual Suspects, then, may imply a covert extradiegetic in addition to the explicitly represented intradiegetic narrator, Fight Club, in a highly metaleptical final twist, implies that (an extradiegetic version of) Tyler Durden is at least partly responsible for the audiovisual representation. In an earlier scene, which is highly metaleptic as well, the narrator tells an unspecified narratee that Tyler Durden “had one part time job as a projectionist” which gave him the opportunity to insert single frames of pornography into family films. The explicit ‘intradiegetic’ image of “a nice big cock” (T. Durden) that he uses in that scene briefly reappears in an ‘extradiegetic’ but otherwise similar form toward the end of Fight Club.32 _____________ 30 31 32

See Thon 2014c for a more detailed discussion of subjective, intersubjective, and objective modes of representation across media. Not unlike Maus with regard to complex narratorial arrangements in graphic novels, Fight Club has become one of the standard examples of unreliability in contemporary feature films. See e.g. Anderson 2010; Hansen 2009; Laass 2008; Poppe 2009; Thon 2009b. For a detailed discussion of this kind of ‘autopoietic metalepsis,’ see Thon 2009d.

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Narrators and Nonlinear Representation in Computer Games Since computers are currently capable of emulating various kinds of semiotic systems, including cinematic sequences and graphic narrative, the range of narrators in contemporary computer games is at least as broad as it is in feature films and graphic novels.33 In Relic’s Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, for example, one can find an intradiegetic narrator whose verbal narration is represented in both scripted events and ‘noninteractive’ cut-scenes, as well as in both spoken and written form. That game’s narrator, Captain Angelos, not only contributes to the representation of the unfolding story but also helps to locate the various game spaces in the storyworld and conveys information about game mechanics and goals. The introductory cut-scene of Bioware’s Dragon Age: Origins even uses a voice-over whose extradiegetic narrator changes from being heterodiegetic— when he speaks about the distant past of the game’s storyworld (see Fig. 6)—to being homodiegetic—when his narration arrives in the present (see Fig. 7)—and eventually turns out to be a major character in the game’s narrative structure. That character, Duncan, later also acts as an intradiegetic narrator, both homo- and heterodiegetic, whose narration is represented in both spoken and written form. Once more, the functions of Duncan’s verbal narration cannot be reduced to representing a story or locating game spaces within the storyworld, but also entail conveying information about game mechanics and game goals. It becomes clear, then, that the main difference between narrators in graphic novels or feature films and narrators in contemporary computer games lies not in the latter’s common combination of writing and speech for the representation of verbal narration. Rather, in computer games, verbal narration relates not only to the nonnarratorial representation in cinematographic or other kinds of cut-scenes but also to the ‘interactive’ parts of the game, to the simulated gameplay.34 Hence, using two recent examples, I will briefly examine how the ‘interactive’ and nonlinear nature of many contemporary computer games’ representation/simulation influences the medium-specific realization of the narrators they (may) employ. _____________ 33

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While the terms ‘graphic novel’ and ‘feature film’ clearly imply narrativity, there are many computer games without much of a narrative structure. Not surprisingly, then, the present essay focuses on contemporary examples of ‘narrative’ single-player computer games. It may also be worth stressing, at this point, that the terms ‘computer game’ (e.g. Fromme/Unger 2012), ‘video game’ (e.g. Egenfeld-Nielsen/Smith/Tosca 2012), and ‘digital game’ (e.g. Rutter/Bryce 2006) are used largely interchangeably in current game studies. I have provided in-depth discussions of the difference(s) between the ‘interactive’ simulation of ‘ludic events’ and more prototypically narrative representations of events elsewhere. See e.g. Thon 2007; 2008; 2009c. See also Aarseth 2004; Backe 2008; Frasca 2003; Jenkins 2004; Juul 2005; Ryan (2006: 181–203); 2009; and the recent survey in Thon 2014b.

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Figure 6: Bioware, Dragon Age: Origins

Figure 7: Bioware, Dragon Age: Origins

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Even beyond the simulated gameplay that generates at least slightly different ‘player stories’ for every player, computer games often employ what may be described as nonlinear ‘designer stories.’35 This does not prevent them from using narrators, though, since different versions of a given narrator’s verbal narration can be actualized by the player’s choices (just as it is usually the case with other narrative strategies such as cut-scenes or scripted events). Contemporary media culture’s tendency toward self- and metareference, however, has influenced computer games as well, and some of them use narrators to reflect on their ‘interactive’ nature in general and their narrative representation’s nonlinear structure in particular.36 The decidedly old, evidently self-referential, and only ‘barely intradiegetic’37 narrator that appears in the introductory cut-scene of the first part of Hothead’s DeathSpank series, for example, turns out to have been more involved in the story than most players will have initially expected. At the end of DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue, the second part of the series, the narrator reveals herself to be Sandy Bravitor, the mentor of the player-controlled hero, DeathSpank (see Fig. 8). This final twist seems particularly relevant for the issue at hand, since both installments of the series repeatedly use Sandy’s experiencing I—instead of what turns out to have been her narrating I—to convey not only part of the ‘backstory’ but also rather salient game goals to both DeathSpank and the player.38 This is only one of two possible endings the game offers, though: just before the final cut-scene, Sandy asks DeathSpank to sacrifice himself in order to save the world from the supposedly corrupted Thongs of Virtue, but the game gives the player a choice here, and she can choose to let DeathSpank fight Sandy. Hence, in this case, the hero can kill the narrator and go on narrating his own story (see Fig. 9).39 Strictly speaking, this development does not cause logical inconsistencies within the storyworld of Thongs of Virtue since the initially introduced narrator does not reveal herself to be Sandy in this version of the ‘designer story,’ but the DeathSpank series certainly makes visible some of the medium’s specific affordances and limitations with regard to the use of narrators. _____________ 35 36 37 38

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See Rouse (2005: 203–206) on the distinction between ‘player story’ and ‘designer story.’ See also Juul (2005: 67–83) on ‘games of emergence’ and ‘games of progression.’ See Jannidis 2009; as well as the general survey in Wolf 2009. While the narrative situation in which the verbal narration originates is explicitly represented, in a way, the player is given so little detail (apart from the rather distinctive qualities of voice) that it seems not entirely unproblematic to speak of an intradiegetic narrator here. The verbal narration of the narrator who, in one version of the ‘designer story,’ turns out to have been Sandy Bravitor’s narrating I is limited to a few cut-scenes, but the somewhat naïve DeathSpank repeatedly encounters and is manipulated by the narrator’s significantly younger experiencing I within the (‘barely’) second-order storyworld. In fact, he continues to do so in the third installment of the series, The Baconing.

Toward a Transmedial Narratology

Figure 8: Hothead Games, DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue

Figure 9: Hothead Games, DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue

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Even if they adapt their respective verbal narration to players’ choices, however, most contemporary computer games that use narrators at all still tend to limit the co-presence of verbal narration and ‘interactive’ simulation to few parts of the ‘player story.’ Hence, it comes as no surprise that Supergiant Games’ recently published Bastion with its supposedly ‘interactive narrator’ has raised high expectations. While it should be noted that the ‘interactivity’ of Rucks, the narrator of Bastion, who eventually turns out to be ‘barely intradiegetic’ and homodiegetic, too, appears less extensive than several previews suggested, the actual game, once more, serves to illuminate the medium’s narrator-related affordances and limitations. The basic principle at work here is not particularly complex: Bastion uses about 3,000 predetermined ‘pieces’ of verbal narration—once more represented in spoken as well as in written form—that are triggered by a variety of player actions (see Fig. 10). As has already been mentioned, the variation regarding both the selection and the organization of these pieces turns out to be lower than one may have expected, but the sheer presence of the narrator, who comments not only on predetermined ‘narrative’ but also on simulated ‘ludic’ events, doubtlessly ‘makes a difference’ in how the gameplay is experienced. As a consequence, Bastion is one of still rather few contemporary computer games whose gameplay experience can, with some justification, be described as narratorially-dominated.

Figure 10: Supergiant Games, Bastion

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Conclusion In the present essay, I have argued that a transmedial narratology should not be limited to a collection of medium-specific narratological models but, rather, should focus on the examination of various transmedial phenomena and strategies of narrative representation across a range of narrative media, acknowledging both similarities and differences in the ways these media narrate. While my necessarily cursory discussion of narrators as a transmedial strategy of narrative representation and their realization in contemporary graphic novels, feature films, and computer games certainly leaves a lot of ground to be covered, I hope to have at least hinted at the heuristic value and future potential of such a transmedial approach. Among other things, a genuinely transmedial narratology provides a welcome opportunity to critically reconsider some of narratology’s canonized terms and concepts: following a review of the more pertinent positions from literary as well as film narratology, I have proposed to treat narrators as narrating characters, emphasizing that to posit the existence of a narrator is to posit the ‘representation of an act of representation.’ It has become clear, however, that even such a comparatively narrow concept of the narrator remains decidedly transmedial, since narrating characters are used in a variety of narrative media beyond the literary text. But while the narrator can, indeed, be considered a narratological concept that ‘applies across media,’ the medium-specific realization of narrators in conventionally distinct media (or ‘media forms’) such as the graphic novel (where verbal narration occurs in combination with verbalpictorial forms of representation), the feature film (where verbal narration occurs in combination with audiovisual forms of representation), and the computer game (where verbal narration occurs in combination with ‘interactive’ forms of representation) has also served to show that the concept does not apply to these media in exactly the same way. It seems, then, as if the project of a genuinely transmedial narratology may best be conceived in terms of a narratological meta-model, providing a theoretical frame (or several theoretical frames) in which medium-specific models from literary and film narratology, from comics studies and game studies, and from various other strands of current narratological research may be critically re-considered, systematically correlated, modified, and complemented to further illuminate the forms and functions of a variety of transmedial strategies of narrative representation. I would like to conclude, then, that there is quite a lot left to do for transmedial narratology today— including, but certainly not limited to, more analytically extensive and historically varied examinations of narrators and narratorial representation across media than I was able to offer in the previous pages.

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Graphic Novels Cited Gaiman, Neil 2010 The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes, Vol. 1, art by Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, and Malcolm Jones III, colors by Daniel Vozzo, lettered by Todd Klein, covers by Dave McKean, originally published in single magazine form as The Sandman #1–8, 1988–1989, New York: DC Comics. Moore, Alan 2002 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Vol. 1, art by Kevin O’Neill, colors by Ben Dimagmaliw, lettered by Bill Oakley, originally published in single magazine form as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1, #1–6, 1999–2000, London: Titan Books. 2007 Watchmen, illustrated and lettered by Dave Gibbons, colors by John Higgins, originally published in single magazine form as Watchmen #1–12, 1986–1987, London: Titan Books. Smith, Jeff 2004 Bone, originally published in the black and white comic book series Bone, 1991–2004, Columbus: Cartoon Books. Spiegelman, Art 1996 The Complete Maus, originally published as Maus, Vol. I, 1986, and Maus, Vol. II, 1991, New York: Pantheon. Feature Films Cited Adaptation (Spike Jonze, USA 2002). Fight Club (David Fincher, USA 1999). Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tom Tykwer, D 2006). Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, USA 1994). The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, USA 1995). Computer Games Cited The Baconing (Hothead Games/Valcon Games, PC 2011). Bastion (Supergiant Games/Warner Bros. Interactive, PC 2011). DeathSpank (Hothead Games/Electronic Arts, PC 2010). DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue (Hothead Games/Electronic Arts, PC 2010). Dragon Age: Origins (Bioware/Electronic Arts, PC 2009). Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (Relic Entertainment/THQ, PC 2004).

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“The Narratorial Functions: Breaking Down a Theoretical Primitive”, Narrative 9.2, 146–152. 2004 “Introduction”, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1–40. 2005 “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology”, in Jan Christoph Meister (ed.), Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality—Disciplinarity, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1–23. 2006 Avatars of Story, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2008 “Transfictionality across Media”, in John Pier and José Á. García Landa (eds.), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin: De Gruyter, 385–417. 2009 “From Narrative Games to Playable Stories: Toward a Poetics of Interactive Narrative”, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 1, 43–59. Ryan, Marie-Laure and Jan-Noël Thon 2014a “Introduction: Storyworlds across Media”, in Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon (eds.), Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming. 2014b (eds.), Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming. Schlickers, Sabine 1997 Verfilmtes Erzählen: Narratologisch-komparative Untersuchung zu El beso de la mujer araňa (Manuel Puig/Héctor Babenco) und Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Gabriel García Marquez/Fransesco Rosi), Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert. Schmid, Wolf 2010 Narratology: An Introduction, Berlin: De Gruyter. Schmidt, Johann N. 2009 “Narration in Film”, in Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert (eds.), Handbook of Narratology, Berlin: De Gruyter, 212–227. Schüwer, Martin 2008 Wie Comics erzählen: Grundriss einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen Literatur, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Scolari, Carlos A. 2009 “Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production”, International Journal of Communication 3, 586–606. Stein, Daniel 2009 “Was ist ein Comic-Autor? Autorinszenierung in autobiographischen Comics und Selbstportraits”, in Stephan Ditschke, Kate-

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2014a “Fiktionalität in Film- und Medienwissenschaft”, in Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe (eds.), Fiktionalität: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming. 2014b “Game Studies und Narratologie”, in Klaus Sachs-Hombach and Jan-Noël Thon (eds.), Game Studies: Aktuelle Ansätze der Computerspielforschung, Köln: Herbert von Halem, forthcoming. 2014c “Subjectivity across Media: On Transmedial Strategies of Subjective Representation in Contemporary Feature Films, Graphic Novels, and Computer Games”, in Marie-Laure Ryan and JanNoël Thon (eds.), Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming. 2015 Transmedial Narratology, forthcoming. Walsh, Richard 1997 “Who Is the Narrator?”, Poetics Today 18.4, 495–513. 2007 The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. 2010 “Person, Level, Voice: A Rhetorical Reconsideration”, in Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 35–57. Walton, Kendall R. 1990 Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, George M. 1986 Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1997 “Le Grand Imagier Steps Out: The Primitive Basis of Film Narration”, Philosophical Topics 25, 295–318. 2007 “Elusive Narrators in Literature and Film”, Philosophical Studies 135.1, 73–88. Wolf, Werner 2005 “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon: A Case Study of the Possibilities of ‘Exporting’ Narratological Concepts”, in Jan Christoph Meister (ed.), Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality—Disciplinarity, Berlin: De Gruyter, 83– 107. 2009 “Metareference across Media: The Concept, Its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions”, in Werner Wolf (ed.), Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1–85. 2011 “Narratology and Media(lity): The Transmedial Expansion of a Literary Discipline and Possible Consequences”, in Greta Olsen (ed.), Current Trends in Narratology, Berlin: De Gruyter, 145–180.

MATTHIAS BRÜTSCH (Zurich)

From Ironic Distance to Unexpected Plot Twists: Unreliable Narration in Literature and Film In terms of narratological research, the relationship between film and literary studies has always been ambiguous.1 On the one hand, film scholars have borrowed extensively from literary narratology, due to its advanced level of sophistication. On the other hand, they have been eager to stress differences between the two media and the necessity for thorough revision of the concepts adopted from a “foreign” field. Narrative theory has thus been enriched but also complicated. In my paper I will argue that in the case of unreliable narration the differences between literary and filmic narration have been overstressed, leading, on the one hand, to unnecessary confusion between narrative constellations which should be held apart, and preventing, on the other hand, the assessment of constellations that are in fact similar in the two media. The term “unreliable narrator” was introduced in literary theory by Wayne Booth in 1961 and has since been used, further developed and criticized by many scholars (e.g. Yacobi 1981 and 2001; A. Nünning 1998b and 2005; Phelan/Martin 1999). In film studies, for a long time it was only occasionally employed (e.g. Chatman 1978 and 1990; Bordwell 1985; Kozloff 1988; Buckland 1995), until in the last decade a wave of publications appeared on the subject, especially in Germany, mainly due to academic conferences and their proceedings (Liptay/Wolf 2005a; Ferenz 2005 and 2008; Helbig 2006a; Blaser et al. 2007; Laass 2008; Hansen 2008; Kaul/Palmier/Skrandies 2009). A scrutiny of film studies publications quickly reveals that many authors speaking about unreliable narration refer to a narrative form considerably different from the one usually associated with unreliability in literature. Before examining some of the reasons for this transdisciplinary change of meaning, I would like to draw attention to crucial differences by opposing the two narrative _____________ 1

A slightly different version of this paper has already been published in German (Brütsch 2011b). I would like to thank Henry M. Taylor for a thorough revision of the English version and Guido Kirsten, Barbara Flückiger and the editors of this volume for helpful comments and discussions.

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forms. The following comparison is of course a simplification, since I will not, in this first step of my argument, take into account the diversity of the notion of unreliability in either field but rather concentrate on two “prototypes” which correspond to the examples most often cited by film and literary scholars.2 The Standard Example in Literary Studies In literary studies, unreliable narration is generally associated with a firstperson or homodiegetic narration shaped in such a way as to allow readers to adopt an understanding of diegetic reality which differs from the narrator’s account (and corresponds to the implied author’s view, if such an entity is assumed).3 The discrepancy between these two assessments establishes a distance, endowing the reader with a privileged position from which he or she can obtain an understanding the narrator does not have. The “uninformed” version of the narrator is the only one conveyed explicitly. An implicit meaning at odds with the narrator’s account must be actively constructed by the reader, drawing on knowledge of the world in general and of fictional narratives in particular.4 The narrator is usually not aware that his account or judgments would seem problematic to the addressee. For this reason, he cannot be considered guilty of deliberately lying or deceiving. On the contrary, he often appears quite honest, as when he openly acknowledges wrongdoings or declares to be evil.5 Conflicts between the narrator’s statements and the reader’s understanding usually arise early on, and the discrepancy between the two often persists until the end. In most cases, there is no final reconciliation of the diverging views, since neither the experiencing nor the narrating I gain the necessary understanding. The introduction of the discrepancy does not necessarily trigger a surprise reaction on the part of the readers,6 and if so, _____________ 2 3 4 5 6

A more nuanced analysis taking into account some aspects of the historical change in the understanding of the concept will be given in the last part of the paper. On the problematic notion of the implied author, which I will not discuss in this paper, see A. Nünning 1998b: 5–17. For a critical discussion and reconceptualization of the implied author in film narration see Alber 2010. For a detailed analysis of the reader’s cognitive activity involved in projecting unreliability, see A. Nünning 1998b: 23–32. As we will see below, the concept of unreliability has sometimes been expanded to include consciously lying or deceiving narrators, even though this implies a major shift in the narrative constellation and, consequently, in the effect on the reader. Here I disagree with Monika Fludernik (1999: 78 and 2005: 40) for whom a moment of revelation or surprise effect (“Aha-Erlebnis”) is among the necessary and central characteristics of unreliable narration in literature, as well as with Volker Ferenz (2005: 143 and 184)

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rather at the beginning than towards the end. Accordingly, the narrative dynamic is not oriented towards a major final plot twist. This narrative constellation can be considered as ironic. The narrator’s statements themselves, however, are not ironic. He really means what he says. But the narrative text as a whole is shaped in such a way so as to suggest or at least enable an alternative or even opposite interpretation.7 Focalisation is also of interest, since the reader can obtain a position in which he or she not only knows more than the main character, but also more than the narrator. In the standard equations measuring the flow of information—the narrator conveys to the reader more, the same, or less knowledge than the character possesses8—this case is not accounted for. Examples of this “prototype” are Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn (1884), where the narrator blames himself for helping an AfricanAmerican slave to escape from his master, a judgment which can be expected to be inverted by readers condemning slavery. Or Ian McEwan’s short story “Dead as They Come” (1978), in which the narrator tells the story of his passionate love to a woman who, as we soon find out, is not a living human being but a mannequin in a shop window.9

_____________

7

8 9

who refers to Fludernik on this issue. Terms such as “moment of revelation” and “AhaErlebnis” imply that readers are first made to believe in something which then suddenly turns out to be wrong. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd clearly features this kind of narrative structure (which is why I consider its effect to be close to the one I will describe as characteristic for the filmic prototype), whereas in most other examples Fludernik cites (e.g., “The Yellow Wallpaper,” The Black Cat, Castle Rackrent, “Oil of Dog,” “Haircut,” The Remains of the Day, “The Disappearance,” “Butterflies”) the unreliability of the narrator (or reflector in the case of “The Disappearance”) can be established either early on or gradually over a period of time. In his definition of the unreliable narrator in literature, Ferenz precisely writes that readers have “reason to suspect,” “sense a discrepancy” and “begin to call the character-narrator’s statements into question,” a description not in accordance with the abrupt reversal typical of a surprise revelation. Whether readers actually adopt a diverging view by projecting unreliability onto the narrator depends to a large degree on their own world-view and predispositions, which may change over time, as Vera Nünning (1998), arguing from a cognitivist stance, has shown. Since my aim in this paper is to point to differences in narrative structure between diverse categories of unreliable narration, my focus is not on the possibility of diverging interpretations of the same narrative texts. E.g. Todorov (1966: 141–142) and Genette (1972: 206). Further examples are “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Oil of Dog” (1911) by Ambrose Bierce, “Haircut” (1925) by Ring Lardner, or The Remains of the Day (1989) by Kazuo Ishiguro.

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Standard Examples in Film Studies When film scholars use the term unreliable narration, they often refer to the following constellation:10 filmic narration presents the events of the story in a way as to prompt the audience to make erroneous inferences regarding the reality of characters, events, or entire worlds. The real state of affairs is only revealed in the end. The narrative’s dynamic is thus geared towards a final plot twist. The narration usually deceives the spectator by restricting perspective and knowledge to the central character, who turns out to be the victim of an illusion of some kind.11 The aligning of spectator and character continues until the end, since the final revelation usually enlightens them both. On the other hand, the surprise ending establishes a distance between the spectator and the narration which turns out to have withheld crucial information. Examples of this “prototype” are La rivière du hibou (aka: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Robert Enrico, France 1962), in which we learn at the end that the protagonist’s adventurous escape from captivity and execution was only a last-minute fantasy before dying,12 or The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, USA 1999), in which it turns out that the main character, a psychologist watching over a boy who sees ghosts, is himself a ghost.13 A similar narrative constellation is possible with voice-over narrators. David Fincher’s Fight Club (USA 1999) deceives the spectators in the same way as La rivière du hibou or The Sixth Sense, even though the story is (in part) told by the main character himself, who has become aware of the unreality of his schizophrenic delusions, but restricts focalization to his former self who experienced them as real (cf. Vogt 2009: 45–49). Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1950) and The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, USA 1995) are also often cited as paradigmatic instances of unreliable narration in film. These two examples, featuring characternarrators who are lying (and not just conveying their former delusional _____________

10 E.g. Liptay/Wolf (2005b: 15), Helbig (2005 and 2006b), Hartmann (2005), Lahde (2005 and 2006), Thoene (2006), Laass (2006: 257–258), Orth (2006) and Poppe (2009). 11 Typically the narration gives various clues as to the illusory nature of the protagonist’s perceptions already before the ending, but makes sure the hints are subtle enough to not give away the surprise. See Helbig (2005) and Brütsch 2011a: 182–211). 12 For a close analysis of the narrative structure in Enrico’s short film see Brütsch 2011a: 204–207 and 292–295. 13 Further examples are: Dans la nuit (F 1929), The Woman in the Window (USA 1944), Angel Heart (USA 1987), Abre los ojos (Sp/F/I 1997), The Matrix (USA 1999), Vanilly Sky (USA 2001), A Beautiful Mind (USA 2001), The Ohters (Spain/F/USA 2001), Identity (USA 2003) and El Maquinista (Spain 2004).

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experience as in Fight Club), even though different from the ones mentioned above as regards the distance between spectator and characternarrator, still adhere to the basic constellation of the false lead which is only revealed at the surprise ending.14 Dissimilarities Between the Two Standard Examples In order to highlight the differences between these two notions of unreliable narration (which I will subsequently call the literary and filmic prototype), I have compiled a list with important differences: deception of reader/spectator distance between reader and narrator/pectator and character distance between reader/spectator and narrative text as a whole discrepancy irony (implicit vs. explicit version) dynamics/dramaturgy surprise focalization/subjectivity

literary prototype no yes

filmic prototype yes no (exceptions see above)

no

yes

between narrator’s version and reader’s reconstruction yes

between first and second version no

continuity no (or only minor at beginning) subjectivity → objectivity

final twist yes objectivity → subjectivity

Deception: In the literary prototype, the reader is not deceived (or only at the very beginning), but on the contrary recognizes illusions or misunderstandings on the part of the narrator. In the filmic prototype, the spectator just as the main character are deceived until the surprise ending. _____________ 14

For Ferenz (2005: 134), only literary scholars “have always shared a common vision of the concept of the unreliable narrator,” whereas in film theory “profound confusion” reigns between different concepts. While I acknowledge that film scholars have over time used the term unreliability in different ways—a topic I will adress below—I would argue that, in the last decade at least, there has been a trend towards associating it with the narrative constellation I have described. When I use the term “prototype,” I do not mean to imply that there are no other narrative strategies called unreliable by some film scholars (as for instance narrative ambiguity in European art films or narrative inconsistency in the films of David Lynch), but merely that it has become increasingly frequent to use the concept for what in German is called “rückwirkende Überraschungsgeschichte”, i.e. films giving false leads and ending in a major plot twist which forces spectators to reassess the whole story retroactively. In accordance with Vogt (2009: 43–52), I see no major difference whether this narrative strategy is accomplished with or without character-narrators.

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Distance between narrational instances: In the literary prototype, there is a distance between reader and narrator, but none between the reader and the narrative text as a whole. In the filmic prototype there is no distance between spectator and character, but implicitly between the spectator and the narrative text as a whole, which becomes explicit in the final revelation.15 Discrepancy: In the literary prototype, there is a discrepancy between the narrator’s version of the story and the reader’s understanding and reconstruction of that same story. In the filmic prototype, there is a discrepancy between the story version first conveyed by the narration and the one it reveals in the end. Irony: The narrative constellation in the literary prototype is ironic, since an implicit meaning can be construed which differs from the explicit one. In the filmic prototype, there is no such ironic duplicity (in any case on a first viewing), since the reconstruction of the alternative version is explicitly carried out by the filmic narration. Dramaturgy: In the literary prototype, the discrepancy is established early on and remains until the end. In the filmic prototype, the discrepancy becomes apparent only at the moment when it is finally revealed. Surprise: In the literary prototype, there is no surprise effect (or only a minor one at the beginning). In the filmic prototype, the entire dramatic structure is oriented towards the final plot twist. Focalization/Subjectivity: In the literary prototype, even though the point of view is restricted, the reader by projecting unreliability and drawing on his own knowledge, is able to acquire a broader perspective. The dynamic is thus one from subjectivity to objectivity. In the filmic prototype, it turns out at the end that the spectator was restricted to the experience of the central character in a much more fundamental way than at first seemed the case. The dynamic is thus one from objectivity to subjectivity.16 _____________ 15

16

As mentioned above, in films in which the “wrong” version is conveyed by a characternarrator—as in Stage Fright, The Usual Suspects or Fight Club—there is of course a discrepancy in knowledge between spectator and character-narrator, but this becomes obvious only with the plot twist at the end. Moreover, in cases where the character-narrator is not lying but merely relating what he lived through (as in Fight Club), there is no distance between spectator and experiencing I (as opposed to the narrating I). And in the former two examples with lying character-narrators the spectators are aligned cognitively with the characters to whom the false account is related (who in the case of Stage Fright also turns out to be the main character). The only publications to my knowledge to address several of these differences systematically are Vogt 2009 and Koch 2011. Koch’s article, which on key issues holds similar views as presented here, was published at the same time as the original German version of this paper.

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In view of this long list of differences the question arises whether there are any similarities at all between the two constellations, especially given that many film scholars have transferred the concept of unreliable narration from one to the other. There are of course parallels between the two at a rather general level. The fact that there is some kind of deception and discrepancy connected to the process of narration and reception, that something must be interpreted differently than the narration suggests, seems to be the common ground justifying the transfer. Nonetheless, the list I have presented shows that these rather unspecific similarities are outweighed by a number of important differences which become obvious as soon as one examines where exactly the discrepancies and deceptions are located. Of course one may object to my prototypes that they exaggerate differences and disregard distinctions already made within literary narratology. The distinctions between misevaluating and misreporting (Phelan/Martin 1999) or normative and factual unreliability (A. Nünning 1998b: 12–13), which have gained general acceptance, are not identical, however, with the distinction between my literary and filmic prototypes, since the literary narrator often misreports on the basis of his erroneous judgments (as is the case in “Dead as They Come”), and in the filmic prototype false evaluations play a significant role as well, even if not at the level of narration but of reception. It is more important in my opinion to ask whether the narrator or narration intends to deceive or not, whether the reader or spectator recognizes unreliability (in whatever form) immediately or only retrospectively, and whether this insight is conveyed explicitly or implicitly. Literature and Film: A Transmedial Comparison Scholars who use the term unreliable narration for examples corresponding to the filmic prototype usually stress the differences between literary and filmic narration, among other things the fact that filmic narration appears as an impersonal, abstract entity without psychological attributes.17 In film, personal narrators in the form of voice-over or character-narrators are only optional ingredients at a secondary level, and contrary to the literary narrator their verbal utterances only cover part of the entire discourse. If one accepts these premises, it would seem logical to conclude that the narrative constellation in the literary prototype is not possible in film. In this view, film scholars are right to call for a modification of the concept. _____________ 17

E.g. Liptay/Wolf (2005b: 13–14), Helbig (2005: 131–134), Lahde (2005: 294), Laass (2006: 254–256), Orth (2006: 286–288) and Poppe (2009: 70).

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But are the differences really such that the narrative form closest to literary unreliability should be one which in many respects appears, as we have seen, more different than similar? And how about literary fiction such as Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890)18 or Leo Perutz’ Zwischen neun und neun (1918)19 which correspond exactly to the filmic prototype, but are not usually considered as unreliable narratives?20 Otherwise the common view that only homodiegetic and overt narrators can be unreliable would become obsolete, since both stories are told by heterodiegetic and predominantly covert narrators.21 For the kind of unreliability based on false leads and twist endings, the question whether a homodiegetic narrator is (partly) responsible for the narration is only of secondary import as regards the basic effect of the narrative structure.22 The Literary Prototype in Film (and Vice-versa) I will subsequently show that there are several narrative constellations in film which are much closer to the literary than the filmic prototype. Among the already mentioned properties of the literary prototype, I consider as central the inadequate perspective of a personal narrator, which the reader or spectator figures out quickly, and the ironic form with an explicit and implicit meaning directly opposed to one another. As we have seen, the filmic prototype displays none of these characteristics. However, before film scholars mainly concentrated on this latter narrative form, another had been proposed as unreliable narration in film23 which fulfils at least some of the requirements: i.e. films in which voice-over narration is in conflict with a simultaneously presented scene, as is the case of Badlands (Terrence Malick, USA 1973) or Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, USA 1994). In the former, the character-narrator adopts a romantic view of her lover, whose behaviour in the scenic presentation is revealed to be ruth_____________ 18 19 20

21 22 23

The short film La rivière du hibou, mentioned above, is based on Bierce’s short story. Just as in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a large part of the events narrated in Perutz’ novel turn out to be a mere fantasy of the dying protagonist who jumped from the roof of a building to escape from two policemen. Martinez and Scheffel are among the few who classify novels such as Perutz’ Zwischen neun und neun as a form of factual unreliability (“mimetisch teilweise unzuverlässiges Erzählen,” 2002 [1999]: 102–103), but by doing so they contradict their own definition of unreliable narration as a form of ironic communication (100–101). It is revealing that literary scholars who consider the possibility of unreliable heterodiegetic narrators (e.g. Cohn 2000; Yacobi 2001; Fludernik 2005) refer to narrative constellations that differ from the two examples mentioned above as well as from the filmic prototype. Cf. Vogt’s analysis of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Fight Club (2009: 43–51). See, for example, Chatman (1978: 235–236) and Kozloff (1988: 112–126). Cf. Ferenz (2005: 145–148).

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less. In the latter, the naïve view of Forrest Gump clashes with the conveyed visual information, as when he tells his addressee about his girlfriend’s father: “He was a very loving man. He was always kissing and touching her and her sisters,” while we are shown a rude drunkard sexually molesting his daughter. In these two examples, there are personal narrators whose commentary appears inappropriate. But, contrary to the literary prototype, the discrepancy is conveyed explicitly. Hence it would seem wrong, strictly speaking, to call this form ironic, as irony, at least in a narrow sense, is based solely on the implication of an opposite meaning. Better examples of an implicit second meaning are Miloš Forman’s Amadeus (USA 1984), where the characterization of Mozart’s attitude and behaviour through the character-narrator Salieri is only indirectly undermined by the narrative situation and the presentation of events, and Oldrich Lipsky’s Happy End (Czechoslovakia 1967), where the voice-over narrator assumes conventional “forward” causality although the events unfold backwards. Ironic constellations with personal narrators are therefore possible in film, but not easily achieved, since verbal narration is usually either explicitly confirmed or contradicted by the audiovisual presentation of events. Ironic Commentary by the Impersonal Filmic Narration If the irony typical of the literary prototype is difficult to find at the level of character narration in film, perhaps we should look for it in impersonal narration? One of the few studies which goes in this direction is Eva Laass’ Broken Taboos, Subjective Truths (2008). Laass discusses Oliver Stone’s controversial film Natural Born Killers (USA 1994) which tells the story of two lovers on a killing spree who become modern folk heroes due to increasing mass media coverage and glorification. The film caused a public dispute not only because of its subject matter, but also due to its postmodern aesthetics, characterized by permanent changes in texture and style. Among film critics and cultural commentators there was much debate about the moral attitude of Stone’s film. Some authors saw a satirical condemnation of sensationalism and violence behind the ostensible celebration of excess and brutality. This reading presupposes that the explicit message (violence and its exploitation by the media are cool) stands in opposition to an implicit message (the central problem of American society is the fact that violence is regarded as cool and is ruthlessly exploited by the media). Other commentators opined that a movie which exploits extreme violence itself by showing it in such a cool and stylized fashion

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cannot pretend to this kind of ironic or satirical critique. Laass herself concludes rather negatively in her analysis: Although the film contains a considerable number of signals encouraging this interpretation [of unreliable narration] and a consistent fashioning of the narrative mediation accordingly might have solved the problems a lot of recipients had with the film, the projection of normatively unreliable implicit narration onto the story’s mediation therefore ultimately does not quite work. Examples in which it does actually work have still to be either found or made, at least to my knowledge. (2008: 134–135)

In spite of this negative assessment, Laass mentions an episode of Natural Born Killers in which the attribution of unreliability to the impersonal filmic narration seems to work: namely the sequence of events titled “I Love Mallory” showing the first encounter of the protagonists Mickey and Mallory. Staged in the manner of a tv sitcom, the episode introduces us to Mallory’s incestuous father, lachrymose mother and dim-witted brother. The father’s rude jokes and harassments are all accompanied by intense cheering and clapping. Since we are not dealing with a real sitcom, of course, but the staging of a scene in the lives of the two protagonists in the manner of a sitcom, the laughter and applause cannot be attributed to a diegetic audience, but have to be interpreted as a commentary by the filmic discourse. And since the behaviour of the father is shown to be utterly repugnant, an ironic reading of this commentary seems appropriate. An even more convincing instance of this form of ironic commentary on the level of impersonal narration is Einspruch III (Objection III, Rolando Colla), a Swiss short film from 2002. The story is about a group of refugees seeking asylum in Switzerland. Shortly after having crossed the border, they are arrested and sent back to where they came from. One of the refugees has an artificial leg, which is left behind on the morning of their deportation. When he realises that his prosthesis is missing, he tries in vain to convince the police to turn around. The film ends with two policemen arguing about how to best dispose of the lost leg. Just as in the episode from Natural Born Killers discussed above, the most striking feature of this short film is its soundtrack of laughter and applause, well-known from sitcoms. The cheering and clapping is most prominent in scenes where the situation of the one-legged refugee worsens. Taken literally, it functions as a cynical commentary, making fun of a handicapped and distressed North African asylum seeker, while approving of inhumane police action. Everybody I spoke to about the film, nonetheless, immediately qualified it as a severe indictment of Switzerland’s merciless refugee policy. In the reception process the meaning of the explicit commentary is thus reversed and understood as the exact opposite. The two examples might be exceptions, nevertheless they demonstrate that

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impersonal filmic narration is capable of irony, at least in the form of comments meaning the opposite of what they explicitly express. From Impersonal to Personalized Filmic Narration We have therefore come closer to the literary prototype, without having reached it yet. The special appeal of the literary prototype is due to unreliability being projected on a (personal) narrator responsible for the explicit discourse in its entirety. In Amadeus and Happy End, solely the first part of this condition is fulfilled, in the “I love Mallory”-episode and Objection III only the second. And if we accept that at its uppermost level filmic narration is always impersonal, then the literary prototype is out of reach for film. In the following, I would like to question this very idea. It is based on the assumption that to narrate by means of sound and image about past events is—contrary to verbal narration—not a common form of human expression. Therefore it appears much more natural to presuppose a personal narrator when reading a novel than when watching a film. Moreover, film production is a collective enterprise which normally resists the projection of a single entity responsible for the overall design of the work. However reasonable this view seems, it ignores the exceptional case in which a filmmaker is established as being responsible for the film’s narration, not on a secondary level as the author of a film within the film, but on a primary level as the instance responsible for all images and sounds. Just as novelists can create narrators who appear to be in charge of the narration, filmmakers may invent directors appearing to be in charge of narration. As a result of this operation we get fake documentaries in which fictional filmmakers report on their lives or the lives of others. Examples of this kind are David Holzman’s Diary (Jim McBride, USA 1967) or Zusje (Little Sister, Robert Jan Westdijk, Netherlands 1995).24 The narrative constellation in these films corresponds to first-person narratives in literature, where the narrator claims to report on real events and persons he has known and observed.

_____________ 24

For an analysis of David Holzman’s Diary as an example of first-person filmic narration see Brinckmann 1997.

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The Unreliability of Personalized Narration in Man Bites Dog The question now is whether filmic narration which has thus become personalized may be as unreliable as the first-person narrator in literature. An example of this kind would confirm the hypothesis that the narrative constellation of the literary prototype, often labelled “genuinely literary” (e.g. Martinez/Scheffel 2002 [1999]: 101), may also be found in film. C’est arrivé près de chez vous (Man Bites Dog, Rémy Belvaux/André Bonzel/Benoit Poelvoorde, Belgium 1992) is just such an example. It pretends to be a documentary about Ben’s daily life as shot by three filmmakers. Ben’s occupation, murdering and robbing people, is, however, rather uncommon. What is striking about this mockumentary is that the filmmakers, who repeatedly appear onscreen or are heard on the soundtrack, not only let Ben go on with his killings without interfering, but they eventually even participate in the murders. Moreover, they ask Ben all kinds of questions, but never why he is killing people or how he feels about what he is doing. This omission is foregrounded in a scene in which Ben, chasing a victim, loses his bracelet. The film director immediately asks him whether the lost bracelet has an emotional value to him, to which he gives a prolonged, affirmative answer. The film crew’s attitude can thus be qualified as unreliable in the sense of Phelan and Martins underregarding. In addition, an analysis of the film’s aesthetic qualities provides further examples of misregarding, as when the filmmakers show Ben’s killings in a swift montage-sequence, thus making an effort to present his activities in a stylish manner worthy of their admiration, or when they help Ben to dispose of the victim and laugh at his racist and sexist jokes. The explicit message of the fictional documentary is therefore: Ben’s behaviour is funny, admirable, and a good example to be followed. Analytical detachment or critical questions are not necessary. The implicit meaning of Man Bites Dog, however, must be understood as the exact opposite: a sharp critique of reality-tv shows and their lack of critical stance towards their protagonists. The fictional filmmakers are not aware of this implicit meaning, even though their roles are played by the real filmmakers themselves. The controversial reactions provoked by the mockumentary reveal that not all spectators were willing to make this distinction. An ironic reading, however, is possible and demonstrates that filmic narration is capable of unreliability corresponding to the literary prototype. The following table lists examples of the narrative constellations discussed as literary and filmic prototypes and shows that literature is perfectly suited for the kind of unreliability generally associated with film and, vice versa, that the kind of unreliability generally associated with literature

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is also possible in film. The examples in bold print are those not usually considered in terms of unreliable narration. unreliable narration

literary prototype

filmic prototype

literature

Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain); “Haircut” (Ring Lardner); “Dead as They Come” (Ian McEwan); “Oil of Dog” (Ambrose Bierce)

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Ambrose Bierce);

film

Man Bites Dog (Belvaux/Bonzel/Poelvoorde)

Zwischen neun und neun (Leo Perutz) La Rivière du Hibou (Robert Enrico); The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan); A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard)

The following table includes films with character-narrators and details some of the aspects that have been analysed in order to establish differences between various kinds of unreliable narration.25 The comparison shows that the filmic prototype without character-narrator and the literary prototype are more dissimilar than any other two groups of examples. And it demonstrates that fake documentaries with personalized narration, although to my knowledge hardly ever discussed in relation to unreliable narration, may feature narrative structures much closer to the literary prototype than often cited films such as Stage Fright, Fight Club or A Beautiful Mind.

_____________ 25

As mentioned above, my distinctions cut across the difference between normative and factual unreliability. There is a partial match, though, since the literary prototype has an affinity to the former and the filmic prototype to the latter. But this link is not exclusive, since mis- or underreporting does not necessarily mislead readers/spectators (filmic prototype), but can just as well be detected from the start (literary prototype).

reader > narrator/spectator > personalized narration

distribution of knowledge (>: knows more than; =: knows the same as; < knows less than)

spectator = narration > characternarrator

no

–

no

Is the characternarrator lying/ deceiving? spectator = narration > characters

no

no

Is the reader/spectator given false leads?

no

no

yes

early/gradual revelation of unreliability

no yes

no

alternative version explicitly

only partly

no

yes

yes

personalized narration

Happy End, Amadeus

Einspruch III, “I Love Mallory“episode

spectator = narration > character- narrator

no

no

yes

yes

only partly

Badlands, Forrest Gump

yes no

yes

yes

before plot twist:: reader < narrator/ spectator < character-narrator

no

yes

no

before plot twist: spectator = character-narrator as experiencing I < character-narrator as narrating I

literature: yes, film: only partly

Stage Fright, The Usual Suspects

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

(variant of filmic prototype)

yes

literature: yes, film: only partly

Fight Club (film)

Man Bites Dog

film

– Fight Club (novel)

–

Huckleberry Finn; “Haircut,” “Dead as They Come,”

literature

–

(variant of filmic prototype)

unreliable narra- literary prototype tion

before plot twist: reader/spectator = character < heterodiegetic narrator/ impersonal narration

–

yes

no

yes

no

La Rivière du Hibou, The Sixth Sense, A Beautiful Mind

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Zwischen neun und neun

filmic prototype

70 Matthias Brütsch

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A Poorly Defined Concept Changes Meaning How did this shift in meaning of the concept of unreliable narration come about? And what part did transdisciplinary adaptation play in this process? Contrary to what my opposition between literary and filmic prototypes— which admittedly is an ahistorical simplification26—could make believe, the change in meaning was gradual rather than abrupt. Let us look at the question of who deceives whom as a good instance of this transformation by degrees. Booth specified his well-known definition27 of the unreliable narrator as follows: It is true that most of the great reliable narrators indulge in large amounts of incidental irony, and they are thus ‘unreliable’ in the sense of being potentially deceptive. But difficult irony is not sufficient to make a narrator unreliable. Nor is unreliability ordinarily a matter of lying, although deliberately deceptive narrators have been a major resource of some modern novelists [...]. It is most often a matter of what James calls inconscience; the narrator is mistaken, or he believes himself to have qualities which the author denies him. Or, as in Huckleberry Finn, the narrator claims to be naturally wicked while the author silently praises his virtues behind his back. (1983 [1961]: 159)

Booth does not exclude lying and consciously deceiving narrators altogether, but he insists on the fact that the concept primarily applies to cases in which the narrator tells his story with honest intentions and appears unreliable to the reader only because of his naïve or narrow-minded pointof-view. This specification is important with regard to the irony of the constellation, which disappears (at least in a strict sense) if the narrator is lying and thus knows the “true” state of affairs. The liar nevertheless soon appeared in typologies of unreliable narrators along with the pervert, the clown or the madman, as Ansgar Nünning has observed in his systematic overview (2005: 94). Chatman’s interdisciplinary Story and Discourse (1978) is of special interest in this context. In his discussion of the unreliable narrator in literature he goes along with Booth’s definition and cites examples which mostly correspond to our literary prototype (1978: 233). As filmic counterparts he analyses Robert Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, France 1950), in which the commentary of a voice-over narrator is _____________ 26

27

A more nuanced analysis would have to include examples of narrative ambivalence, such as Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898), which are sometimes also classified as unreliable narration, even though their main characteristic—the extended hesitation of the reader between two possible interpretations (Todorov’s “fantastic mode” in Introduction à la littérature fantastique, 1970)—is typical neither of the literary nor the filmic prototype. “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” (Booth 1983 [1961]: 158–159).

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“corrected” by the scenic presentation of the events, and Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (USA/GB 1950) with its famous “lying” flashback (1978: 235–237). In doing so, Chatman does not revise his previous definition of unreliable narration, despite the fact that neither of the two filmic examples correspond to it: the former because of its explicitness and lack of irony, the latter for the same reason and the deliberate misleading of the spectator (resulting in a reversal of the knowledge asymmetry typical of the literary prototype).28 Bordwell (who does not refer to Booth) changes the concept even further in the direction of the filmic prototype. He calls Stage Fright “the canonic case of unreliable narration in classical cinema” (1985: 61) and Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, USA 1947) “‘unreliable’ narration par excellence” (83). In both films the spectator is prompted to make wrong inferences which are only corrected much later in a surprising plot twist. But contrary to Stage Fright, in Secret Beyond the Door the misleading information does not come from a character-narrator but directly from the impersonal cinematic narration which elicits false conclusions by skipping over crucial events. Sarah Kozloff cites similar examples as Chatman (e.g. Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese, USA 1976; Badlands; Stage Fright) and she points out that there is a difference between deceiving others and deluding oneself: “At any rate, not all unreliable narrators are liars and murderers. We take some narrators with a pinch of salt just because they are naive or limited” (1988: 112–116). Kozloff is closer to Booth’s notion again, but her phrasing shows how much the understanding of the concept has already changed, since while Booth claimed that unreliability is “not ordinarily” a matter of lying, Kozloff has to caution against the notion that all unreliable narrators are liars. A good instance of the inconsiderate shift from ironic distance to surprising plot twists is Gerald Prince’s entry in his Dictionary of Narratology (2003 [1987]: 103). Prince almost literally takes up Booth’s definition, but the only filmic example he cites—besides two literary ones: Lardner’s “Haircut” and Camus’ La Chute—is Stage Fright, which does not correspond to it. The notion in particular of a “narrator the reliability of whose account is undermined by various features of that account” does not apply to the secondary narration (the “lying” flashback) in Hitchcock’s film, since its veracity is not put into question by that narrative segment itself, but only much later by the primary narration. _____________ 28

In Coming to Terms (1990: 149), Chatman explicitly mentions “mendacity” (along with “inconscience” and “naiveté”) as possible reasons for the unreliablility of a literary narrator.

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More recent, especially German-language, publications on unreliable narration in film focus mainly on false leads and surprising plot twists,29 a development which very likely has been advanced by the fact that films of such narrative constellations have become very popular since the 1990s. The question who deceives whom is connected (but not equivalent) to the question of when a discrepancy becomes obvious. The lie of a narrator can be presented so as to make sure the reader or spectator is suspicious from the start and soon figures it out. Or it can be designed to be unmasked only at the end of the narration. For Booth, only the former could have counted as an exceptional case of unreliable narration, since the latter lacks in irony. Kozloff accepts them both, and later publications in film narratology mainly focus on the latter. Another difference between literary and filmic prototypes concerns the question who is being deceived. In the former, it is the narrator, while in the latter it is the main character and spectator. In this respect, Booth’s position was already ambiguous, since he did not restrict the term unreliable narrator to narrating characters, but also included reflectors, whose experience is mediated by the narration (e.g. Pinkie in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock; Booth 1983 [1961]: 156). Even though this confusion between the experiencing and narrating instance has been criticised by Stanzel (1995 [1979]: 202–203) and by Chatman (1990: 150–151), it can still be observed in film theory. If the difference between experiencing and narrating the experience is reduced, the distance between the literary and filmic prototypes also diminishes. To account for the gradual change in meaning of concepts such as the unreliable narrator is a difficult task, especially given the growing number of publications on the topic. Instead of going into further details of the transfer, I would like to add two general remarks: One source of confusion seems to have been that Booth, although he had a specific narrative constellation in mind, only gave a rather imprecise definition of the concept and at the same time, with the expression “unreliable,” made use of a common and somewhat ambiguous term. Hence it is not surprising that narrators who deceive readers were soon, according to the general understanding of the word, classified as unreliable. A second problem regarding transdisciplinary adaptation seems to be the eagerness with which film scholars usually stress differences between literature and film. This attitude is responsible for the all too quick willingness to modify literary concepts regardless of important and unacknowledged alterations. _____________ 29

See, for instance, a number of contributions by film scholars in Liptay/Wolf (2005a) and Helbig (2006a). Cf. footnote 10.

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Unreliable Narration as a Transmedial Phenomenon I have tried to describe the characteristic features of the literary and filmic prototypes so as to enable an unbiased transmedial comparison. The result of this evaluation was that neither of the two constellations are mediumspecific. In concluding, I would like to provide evidence for this claim on a more theoretical level by making use of Wolf Schmid’s ideal-genetic model (2005: 241–272). Schmid’s model distinguishes between happenings, story, narrative and the presentation of the narrative. The story is the result of a selection of specific situations, actions, characters and their qualities derived from the entirety of happenings implied in the work. The narrative is the result of a process of composition of the chosen happenings and their qualities (for instance their temporal permutation). And the presentation of the narrative consists of its verbalisation in literature and its audiovisual realisation in film. Only the “last” of these operations is medium-specific, the “former” two are not.30 The interesting question in our context now is, on which “level” to situate the features characteristic of unreliable narration. Take the literary prototype. If we assume that personalized narration is possible in both film and literature, then the assignment of narrative activity to a personal narrator appears to be an operation on the “second to last” level. The “last” and medium-specific step would simply consist in having the personal narrator use the corresponding “language” (i.e. words or sounds and images). The question whether the narrator’s reporting and commentary appear reliable depends to a large degree on the selection and qualification of happenings, an operation even further removed from the “last,” medium-specific step.31 The same holds true for irony. If the opposition of explicit and implicit messages is possible by means of sounds and images as well as by words, then establishing an ironic constellation is also an operation “prior” to verbal or audiovisual presentation. The issue of the filmic prototype is even more clear-cut. Both the temporary withholding of crucial information and the alignment of the spectator or reader with the protagonist are mainly based on the selection and temporal permutation of situations, characters, and actions, i.e. of operations on the “first” and “second” levels of Schmid’s model. _____________ 30

31

All terms denoting a temporal succession are of course to be understood metaphorically (hence the quotation marks), since Schmid’s model is an ideal-genetic concept which neither describes a work’s history of production nor its history of reception. See Schmid (2005: 248–249). Schmid only situates commentaries of a purely interpretive nature at the ‘last’ step.

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That neither the literary nor the filmic prototypes are medium-specific does not mean, of course, that they are equally common and function in exactly the same way and to the same effect in either media. An analysis of medium-specific differences would have to start here and examine both constellations in either media more closely. One final point: There is no implied quality judgment in my comparison of the narrative constellations in film and literature. I appreciate the ironic distancing of the one as much as the emphatic immersion and final surprise of the other. What needs to be stressed is their specificity, which an inconsiderate use of the umbrella term “unreliable narration” tends to obscure. Works Cited Alber, Jan 2010 “Hypothetical Intentionalism: Cinematic Narration Reconsidered”, in Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 163–85. Blaser, Patric et al. 2007 (eds.) Falsche Fährten in Film und Fernsehen, Vienna: Böhlau. Booth, Wayne C 1983 The Rhetoric of Fiction [1961], 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bordwell, David 1985 Narration in the Fiction Film, London: Routledge. Brinckmann, Christine N. 1997 “Ichfilm und Ichroman [1981]”, in Die anthropomorphe Kamera und andere Schriften zur filmischen Narration, Zurich: Chronos, 82–112. Brütsch, Matthias 2011a Traumbühne Kino: Der Traum als filmtheoretische Metapher und narratives Motiv. Marburg: Schüren. 2011b “Von der ironischen Distanz zur überraschenden Wendung: Wie sich das unzuverlässige Erzählen von der Literatur- in die Filmwissenschaft verschob”, kunsttexte.de 1, n. pag., Web. 26 Jan. 2012. Buckland, Warren 1995 “Relevance and Cognition”, in Jürgen E. Müller (ed.), Towards a Pragmatics of the Audiovisual, vol. 2, Münster: Nodus, 55–66. Chatman, Seymour 1978 Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cohn, Dorrit 2000 “Discordant Narration”, Style 34.2, 307–16. Ferenz, Volker 2005 “Fight Clubs, American Psychos and Mementos: The Scope of Unreliable Narration in Film”, New Review of Film and Television Studies 3.2, 133–59. 2008 Don’t Believe His Lies: The Unreliable Narrator in Contemporary American Cinema, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Fludernik, Monika 1999 “Defining (In)Sanity: The Narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper and the Question of Unreliability”, in Walter Grünzweig and Andres Solbach (eds), Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext/Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 75–95. 2005 “Unreliability vs. Discordance: Kritische Betrachtungen zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Konzept der erzählerischen Unzuverlässigkeit”, in Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf (eds.), Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 39–59. Genette, Gérard 1972 Figures III. Paris: Seuil. Hansen, Per Krogh 2008–2009 “Unreliable Narration in Cinema: Facing the Cognitive Challenge Arising from Literary Studies”, Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology 5, n. pag., Web. 26 Jan. 2012. Hartmann, Britta 2005 “Von der Macht erster Eindrücke: Falsche Fährten als textpragmatisches Krisenexperiment”, in Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf (eds.), Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 154–74. Helbig, Jörg 2005 “‘Follow the White Rabbit!’ Signale erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im zeitgenössischen Spielfilm”, in Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf (eds.), Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 131–46. 2006a Ed. Camera Doesn’t Lie: Spielarten erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im Film, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. 2006b “‘Open Your Eyes!’ Zur (Un-)Unterscheidbarkeit filmischer Repräsentation von Realität und Traum am Beispiel von David Finchers The Game und Cameron Crowes Vanilly Sky”, in Jörg

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Helbig (ed.), Camera Doesn’t Lie: Spielarten erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im Film, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 169–88. Kaul, Susanne, Jean-Pierre Palmier, and Timo Skrandies 2009 Eds. Erzählen im Film: Unzuverlässigkeit, Audiovisualität, Musik, Bielefeld: Transcript. Koch, Jonas 2011 “Unreliable and Discordant Film Narration”, Journal of Literary Theory 5.1, 57–80. Kozloff, Sarah 1988 Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film, Berkeley: University of California Press. Laass, Eva 2006 “Krieg der Welten in Lynchville: Mulholland Drive und die Anwendungsmöglichkeiten und -grenzen des Konzepts narrativer UnZuverlässigkeit”, in Jörg Helbig (ed.), Camera Doesn’t Lie: Spielarten erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im Film, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 251–84. 2008 Broken Taboos, Subjective Truths: Forms and Functions of Unreliable Narration in Contemporary American Cinema: A Contribution to Film Narratology, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Lahde, Maurice 2005 “Der unzuverlässige Erzähler in The Usual Suspects”, in Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf (eds.), Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 293–306. 2006 “Den Wahn erlebbar machen: Zur Inszenierung von Halluzinationen in Ron Howards A Beautiful Mind und David Cronenbergs Spider”, in Jörg Helbig (ed.), Camera Doesn’t Lie: Spielarten erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im Film, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 43–72. Liptay, Fabienne and Yvonne Wolf 2005a (eds), Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik. 2005b “Einleitung: Film und Literatur im Dialog”, in Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf (eds.), Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 12–18. Martínez, Matías and Michael Scheffel 2002 Einführung in die Erzähltheorie [1999], 3rd ed. München: C. H. Beck. Nünning, Ansgar 1998a (ed.), Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.

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1998b “Unreliable Narration zur Einführung: Grundzüge einer kognitivnarratologischen Theorie und Analyse unglaubwürdigen Erzählens”, in Ansgar Nünning (ed.), Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 3–39. 2005 “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches”, in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.), A Companion to Narrative Theory, Malden: Blackwell, 89–107. Nünning, Vera 1998 “Unreliable narration und die historische Variabilität von Werten und Normen: The Vicar of Wakefield als Testfall für eine kulturgeschichtliche Erzählforschung”, in Ansgar Nünning (ed.), Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 257–85. Orth, Dominique 2006 “Der unbewusste Tod: Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in M. Night Shyamalans The Sixth Sense und Alejandro Amenábars The Others”, in Jörg Helbig (ed.), Camera Doesn’t Lie: Spielarten erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im Film, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 285–307. Phelan, James and Mary Patricia Martin 1999 “The Lessons of Weymouth: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day”, in David Herman (ed.), Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 89–109. Poppe, Sandra 2009 “Wahrnehmungskrisen: Das Spiel mit Subjektivität, Identität und Realität im unzuverlässig erzählten Film”, in Susanne Kaul, JeanPierre Palmier, and Timo Skrandies (eds.), Erzählen im Film: Unzuverlässigkeit, Audiovisualität, Musik, Bielefeld: Transcript, 69–83. Prince, Gerald 2003 A Dictionary of Narratology [1987], 2nd ed., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Schmid, Wolf 2005 Elemente der Narratologie, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Stanzel, Franz K. 1995 Theorie des Erzählens [1979], 6th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck. Thoene, Tina 2006 “Er liebt mich – er liebt mich nicht: Abweichende Wahrnehmung und erzählerische Irreführung in Laetitia Colombianis A la folie …

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pas du tout”, in Jörg Helbig (ed.), Camera Doesn’t Lie: Spielarten erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im Film, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 73–93. Todorov, Tzvetan 1966 “Les catégories du récit littéraire”, Communications 8.8, 125–51. 1970 Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Paris: Seuil. Vogt, Robert 2009 “Kann ein zuverlässiger Erzähler unzuverlässig erzählen? Zum Begriff der ‘Unzuverlässigkeit’ in Literatur- und Filmwissenschaft”, in Susanne Kaul, Jean-Pierre Palmier, and Timo Skrandies (eds.), Erzählen im Film: Unzuverlässigkeit, Audiovisualität, Musik, Bielefeld: Transcript, 35–55. Yacobi, Tamar 1981 “Fictional Reliability as a Comunicative Problem”, Poetics Today 2.2, 113–26. 2001 “Package Deals in Fictional Narrative: The Case of the Narrator’s (Un)Reliability”, Narrative 9.2, 223–29.

GUNTHER MARTENS & HELENA ELSHOUT (Ghent)

Narratorial Strategies in Drama and Theatre: A Contribution to Transmedial Narratology Introduction In general it is assumed that drama and narrative differ fundamentally: narrative texts are mediated by a narrator, while drama shows events in an unmediated way. This generic distinction has been challenged both in theory and in practice. In fact, narrators have been at the centre of theatrical innovations in the twentieth century. Brecht used epic strategies for the purpose of antiillusionist distancing and for didactic purposes. Postdramatic theatre frequently uses overt narratorial voices such as voice-over narration and (improvising) stage managers in order to undermine traditional aspects of text theatre in particular (mono- or dialogue, plot, conflict, distinct characters) and to decentre text in general (Lehmann). After some methodological preliminaries (section 2), we will discuss both a classical dramatic text (Kleist, section 3), a more experimental dramatic text (Kraus, section 4) and theatrical performances in terms of their purport to transmedial narratology. In the case of the staging of Kraus’ collage text The Last Days of Mankind (section 4) and the adaptation of Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities (section 5), texts that were not written for the stage as such are used as a foundation for theatre. In the case of Rimini Protokoll (section 6), theatre is overruled by situated performance. In each of these cases, we will describe what type of narratorial strategies are involved and to which end or effect. The overall aim is to discuss narratorial strategies in drama and theatre within a transgeneric (prose and drama) and transmedial (text and performance) outlook. Methodological Preliminaries Transgeneric and transmedial narratology, flourishing since the nineties, are more present than ever. One of the most debated questions surrounding the discussion of a narratological approach specifically to drama and performance is the presence of a narratorial instance (Alber and Fludernik

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2011). The role of narratorial strategies in drama has been studied before: De Jong (1991) and Barrett (2002) emphasise the role of messenger’s speech as metanarrative or meta-theatrical narration within Greek tragedy. Nünning and Sommer have identified the following narrative aspects of drama: “direct audience address by a narrator character, prologue, epilogue, asides, soliloquies, parabasis, choric speeches, and messenger reports, verbal summaries of offstage action, all kinds of metanarrative comment, stage directions, choric figures and narrating characters”. (2008: 340f). Some theorists posit the existence of a coordinating compositional narratorial device revealing its voice in the secondary text (Jahn 2001: 672, Fludernik 2008: 359, Korthals 2003: 457), especially when emancipated e.g. in plays of Hauptmann, Kraus, Shaw and Jelinek. Jahn argues that stage directions that are unperformable and unrealizable point to a heterodiegetic narrating instance (Jahn 2001: 673, Fludernik 2011: 359; Korthals 2003: 62, Pfister 1988: 107). Rajewsky (2007: 64), however, disagrees with the emphasis on the similarities between epic and dramatic narrative, and affirms that it is vital for a narratology of drama to take into account the singularities of both genres, which regardless of their common narrative character remain manifest. Similarly, Schenk-Haupt argues that the discussion of narrative devices used in drama such as “authorial characters, embedded stories, epic devices, and the quirky expansion of stage directions merely create the aesthetic illusion of an extradiegetic agent speaking” (Schenk-Haupt 2007: 37). Hühn contests this argument as “all narratological concepts [...] refer to effects created by verbal, visual or auditive signs” (2013: 21). Both Rajewsky and Schenk-Haupt, as well as representatives of Theatre Studies that adhere to the strict separation between drama text and performance text, stick to the opinion that epic elements in drama are strictly intradiegetic. The neat theoretical distinction between extradiegetic narratorial voice as secondary text and epic elements as intradiegetic aspects of the dramatic is in need of revision. This distinction has come under scrutiny, both through the metaleptic usage of extradiegetic mediating narratorial voices in performances and in view of the permeability between primary and secondary text. We will first substantiate this claim by taking a closer look at Heinrich von Kleist’s Amphitryon (1806) and Karl Kraus’ Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1921). The discussion of a generically rather conventional and a more experimental drama text will allow us to find out whether, and if so: in what way and areas a narratorial instance is active. When it can be shown that the narratorial instance in drama goes beyond the secondary text, this sheds a new light on narratorial mediation on stage. Afterwards, we will extend this claim to include contemporary stagings by ‘t Barre Land, Guy Cassiers and ‘Rimini Protokoll’.

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Kleist’s Asides Kleist’s Amphitryon (1807), a loose translation or rather: adaptation of Molière’s play, as the subtitle Ein Lustspiel nach Molière points out, was first performed 92 years after publication in 1899. It had been deemed unplayable mostly because of the hermetic, tragic dialogues between Alkmene and Jupiter, one of Kleist’s most important additions to the traditional Amphitryon-story. In the play, the god Jupiter dresses up as Amphitryon in order to sleep with the latter’s wife Alcmena, and the tragical quiproquo is doubled by the comical servants Charis and Sosia. Kleist’s version of the play is very aware of language, as Sosia is very much concerned with protecting his first-person pronoun. Another innovation is the beginning of the play with a rehearsal scene in which the servant tries out ways to perform his messenger speech. In an inflating concatenation of indirectness and mediation he rehearses the report of a battle that he has not seen and will in the end not be able to perform the messenger speech as this will be done by his double, Mercury. The creative employment of a traditional epic element contributes to the metatheatrical mise en abyme, an endless forwarding of the play within the play that is instigated by the masquerade of the gods. “Für sich” (literally: to him- or herself) is a particularly interesting stage direction in this perspective as it is a variant of ‘aside’ or ‘beiseite’, which marks a metaleptic, more or less overt address of the audience. Although identical in form, the “für sich”-directions in Amphitryon take on different functions. In some cases, there is a consecutive sequence of asides in which two characters are involved. CHARIS für sich. Was hast du da gehört, Unselige? / Olympsche Götter wären es gewesen? / Und der sich für Sosias hier mir gibt, / Der wäre einer der Unsterblichen, / Apollon, Hermes oder Ganymed? SOSIAS für sich. Der Blitzgott! Zeus soll es gewesen sein. CHARIS für sich. Pfui, schäme dich, wie du dich aufgeführt. SOSIAS für sich. Mein Seel, er war nicht schlecht bedient. / Ein Kerl, der seinen Mann stund, und sich / Für seinen Herrn schlug, wie ein Panthertier. CHARIS für sich. Wer weiß auch, irr ich nicht. Ich muß ihn prüfen. / Laut. Komm, laß uns Frieden machen auch, Sosias. SOSIAS. Ein andermal. Jetzt ist nicht Zeit dazu. (Kleist 2001 [1807]: 295) [CHARIS (aside): What have you overheard, unhappy woman! / there may have been gods from Olympus here? / And that the one who passes here for Sosia / May also be one of the deathless ones - / Apollo, Hermes, maybe Ganymede? SOSIA (aside): It may have been great Zeus, the god of lightning! CHARIS (aside): O shame on you for the way you acted.

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SOSIA (aside): My goodness, he was not served badly. / The fellow stood up stoutly to his man / And like a panther battled for his lord. CHARIS (aside): Who knows but what I’m wrong? / I’m going to test him. (aloud) / Come, Sosia, let us also make our peace. SOSIA: Another time. Right now I’m much too busy. (Kleist 1983: 139–140)]

In this case, the aside is used to present the thoughts of the characters. As the utterances of the two characters do not interact, it is shown that they are thinking rather than dialoguing. Both are engaging in an internal monologue, which is presented alternately to mark the simultaneity of the thoughts. Only after the stage direction “Laut” the characters again interact with each other. Most “für sich”-directions in Amphitryon (nineteen out of twenty-two to be precise) are used in this sense, here again creating a micro play within the play refering to the massive theatre within the theatre that makes up the core of the play. The representation of consciousness is an important issue in fiction. In drama and in performances, it is resolved by means of monologues, asides, dramatic irony and indirect figure characterisation through words and actions. Additionally, one could think of more recent plays that can be read as the dramatic equivalent of reflector-mode narratives: Heart’s Desire and Traps by Caryl Churchill as well as memory plays such as Tom Stoppard’s Travesties and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie; this effect is further reinforced through the usage of media, e.g. audio amplification or video projection. While reading Kleist, however, one may imagine that the characters are silently thinking, but on stage, the thoughts are marked (and reflected upon) as spoken out aloud. This can have a humorous effect: although the public understands the theatrical convention of thoughts spoken out loud, the convention remains ambiguous (in the text as well as in a potential staging, but even more so in the latter). It is not clear whether they really do not hear each other or whether they do hear, but deliberately ignore each other. A second instantiation of the aside in Amphitryon plays with this theatrical convention of the thoughts spoken out loud, as the interlocutor overhears something of what the other says, but does not hear or understand everything. In this case the aside and the involved dramatic irony are not always used to a humorous end but on the contrary also to raise the dramatic tension. Thirdly, the utterance can also be well understood—in both meanings—by the dialogue partner, completely flouting the theatrical aside convention. Kleist’s use of the aside refutes the assumption made by the above mentioned narratologists, that the secondary text is the exclusive action territory of the narratorial instance in drama. An elucidation of the stage direction ‘für sich’ in Kleist’s Amphitryon shows how this codified direction, which generally introduces an utterance addressed to oneself, acquires important gradual differentiations as to the overhearing of

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the aside and as to its function. To know to what extent the aside involves the intradiegetic interlocutor, whether the utterance is thought silently, mumbled, or said out loud, the primary text needs to be taken into account. In this dramatic text, a narratorial instance is at work that is not only restricted to the secondary text, in which she coordinates and mediates the structure of the scenes, the identification of the characters, the decor and the nonverbal signs and actions performed by the characters. For the mediation of nonverbal signs, the narratorial instance has to cross the border of the secondary text. In the case of Kleist, the stage directions spill over into the primary text, especially by way of the intense usage of punctuation. For example, the single, double or even triple dashes point to numerous aposiopeses (i.e. a rhetorical device wherein a sentence is broken off) so typical of both Kleist’s plays and prose texts; the latter are often dubbed “theatrical” due to their breathless pace and their reliance on attributes, gestures and facial expression. The aposiopesis in Kleist’s plays has multiple functions: a character interrupts another character, a character suddenly stops, grows silent, censors him- or herself or takes a pause. These speech breaks can be linked back to Kleist’s poetics of language and his skepticism concerning communication. Combined with the antilabe, a rhetorical technique in drama and (and poetry) in which a single verse is distributed over two or more characters creating a lot of white space in the text lay-out, the dashes strongly suggest a narratorial mediation. Thus, we may reach the intermediate conclusion that narrative information enabling the reader and theatre audience to construct a narrative world (i.e. signs that transmit setting, actions and speech modalities) are not only mediated in the secondary but also in the primary text. In Kleist’s Amphitryon this heterodiegetic narratorial mediation in the primary text is to be noted in the complex use of asides and the involuntary self-exposition involved, in the punctuation, indirect personage characterization, and performative statements that entail actions not (always) explicated in stage directions. An example of the last type of mediation is the scene in which Mercury beats the identity out of Sosia. The fact that only one punch is reported in a stage direction and the others are suggested in performative menaces and suffering reactions from Sosia shows the functional entanglement of primary and secondary text and puts the competition between verbal and physical violence and between literal and figurative speech in Amphitryon to the fore. Not only from the perspective of Theatre Studies but in general, it is assumed that performances create a scenic theatricality in unique semiotic registers that are neatly separated from any pre-existing dramatic text the performance is or is not based on. Narratorial mediation through punctuation and lay-out is indeed typical for text and does not apply in this form to performances. Yet, our observation that the field of action of the

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narratorial instance in the drama text reveals itself to be expanding into the primary text, invites us to have another look at narratorial agency in performances. While it is generally assumed that a performance can only contain intradiegetic homodiegetic narrators, never a heterodiegetic extradiegetic narratorial instance, the flouting of this assumption is even more conspicuous in relation to performance than in the case of dramatic text. Our account of the aside in Amphitryon has shown that in a play with a fairly classical form, not yet affected by, though already preparing, the hybridization of genres and the dissolution of the Regelpoetik, the primary and secondary text are to a certain extent intertwined. The analysis refutes the assumption that all narrative elements in theatre remain intradiegetic and shows how heterodiegetic narratorial agency is perceptible through metalepses. These pertain to metatheatrical games such as the mise en abyme plays within the play including the messenger speech as rehearsal and the self-exposing aside. The next section will further explore the entanglement between primary and secondary text in relation to the deployed narratorial strategies by taking a look at a more experimental drama text and recent stagings. Even in postdramatic stagings, text can play an important role and creative transgeneric narratorial strategies are involved that are often engrafted onto more traditional epic elements. Staging Kraus’ Colossal Documentary Collage Play Karl Kraus’ monumental play The Last Days of Mankind, written between 1915 and 1921, resists a traditional, realist concept of staging in many respects: it contains ca. 700 pages, 500 characters and 200 scenes and does not relate a coherent teleological story, but consists of a documentary collection of objet trouvé citations and aphorisms. The programmatic foreword of the play, polemicising against contemporary theatre and allocating its performance to a “Marstheater” (Kraus 1986: 9) furthermore contributes to its reception as closet drama or Lesedrama. As opposed to Kleist’s Amphitryon, it moreover features an emancipating secondary text, most eye-catching in the 28 pages long list of dramatis personae (including larvae, horses and hyenas) before the beginning of the play, wich can be read as a mini play on its own, and the lenghty stage directions at the end of the fifth act. The dazzling sequence of scenes throughout the whole play, repeatedly marked by the stage direction “(Verwandlung)” (‘transformation’), culminates here in a succession of harrowing “Erscheinungen” (‘apparitions’). Die Anwesenden [im Speisesaal bei einem Liebesmahl vom Kommando] schlafen, liegen in Somnolenz oder starren völlig entgeistert auf die Wand, an der das Tableau ‘Die große Zeit’ hängt und nun der Reihe nach die folgenden Erscheinungen aufsteigen. [...] Die Szene wird von

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einem anderen Bilde verdrängt. Durch die Landschaft rast der Balkanzug. Das Tempo verlangsamt sich. Man sieht den Speisewagen, aus dessen Fenstern sich die beiden Kriegsberichterstatter beugen, sie scheinen ihren Ebenbildern im Saal zuzutrinken. [...] Nun ist es wieder das andere Bild. [...] (Die Erscheinung verschwindet.) Zwölfhundert Pferde tauchen aus dem Meer, kommen ans Land und setzen sich in Trab. Wasser strömt aus ihren Augen. (Kraus 1986: 710, 711, 720; italics in original) Those present [guests of a dinner at a corpse command] are sleeping, lying there in a somnolent state or staring, totally aghast, at the wall where the mural ‘The Time of Greatness’ hangs and where now apparitions appear in turn. [...] The scene is supplanted by another picture. The Balkan train is speeding across the landscape. It gradually slows down. One sees the dining car. Both War Correspondents are leaning out, seemingly toasting to their spitting images in the dining room. [...] Now the other scene reappears. [...] (The apparition vanishes.) [...] Twelve hundred horses merge from the sea and come ashore. They trot off, water streaming from their eyes. (Kraus 1974: 221, 222, 232)

It is clear that these stage directions were unperformable at the time and filmic in nature. This fragment exemplifies the unplayability of the stage directions and the prominent heterodiegetic narratorial voice it displays. Yet we claim that, just as in Kleist’s Amphitryon, the narratorial voice is not restricted to the secondary text. In The Last Days of Mankind, however, this permeability between primary and secondary text is more overt. The relation between primary and secondary text is more radically out of balance on the one hand because of the emancipated secondary text, on the other hand because the words of the characters are arranged to reveal something about themselves rather than to allow for self-expression. Despite its unplayable nature, in recent times, postdramatic theatre has been having a field day both with the fragmented and encyclopaedic nature of the play and with its suggestion of narratorial agency. In the following, we discuss the play’s staging by ‘t Barre Land (which premiered on 11 November 2008 in Groningen and was performed until 2010) in the Dutch translation by Bindervoet and Henkes. The translators have gained notoriety by translating another unreadable text into Dutch, namely Finnegans Wake. The shift in balance between primary and secondary text already heralded in Kraus’ text is scenically pursued over striking performative narratorial strategies. Kraus’ early documentary play lacks a coherent plot and consists of (repetitive) tableaus rather than of sequences. In the staging, the lack of plot in Kraus’ play is compensated for by an increase in physical, slapstick playacting with a metatheatrical flavour. Moreover instead of buying in to the pathos of Kraus’ finale, the staging of the fifth act is limited to reading out aloud the secondary rather than the primary text and to displaying the costumes of the successive entering characters instead of playing out their dialogues. The mere mention of the names of the characters that will be (or could have been) present on the scene is a transgeneric narratorial strategy, taking its cue from the already

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mentioned extended dramatis personae in Kraus’ text. The list and the reduction to naming in the performance refers to Kraus’ media critique and his denouncement of the emptying out of language. At the beginning of the play, the press report of Franz Ferdinand’s funeral is similarly limited to naming those self-facetiously present at the funeral. The sheer reduction to naming carries overtones of a post-apocalyptic list of victims. The names themselves, reducing them—to caricatural effect—to their function, profession or ideology, are very significant in Kraus’ play as together with their utterances they bring about an unintentional self-exposing of the character. The staging resorts to an anti-illusionist technique that is quite widespread in postdramatic and other historicising stagings of classical material, namely that of the rehearsal. While in Kleist’s Amphitryon the rehearsal element in Sosias’ messenger report was instigated as a metatheatrical play, it is more radically transgeneric in ‘t Barre Land’s The last Days of Mankind. In their adaptation, the rehearsal scenario is extended over the whole play and rendered explicit, opening up an extensive metadiegetic discourse level (on rehearsel in modern drama see Baker-White 1999). The scenario is stressed by the fact that the actors sometimes hold the scripts in their hands and that the translators are present on the stage. The original text was even further fragmented in aphorisms, read out from filing cards and thrown away afterwards. The actors are openly discussing the quality and style of their performance, and they show the audience the costumes that they will be wearing at the occasion of a planned 2015 centennial staging of the play in Vienna. By referring to an event that will be taking place in the future, the actors deliberately flout the absolute present of the dramatic situation. The work in progress-nature of the performance is certainly no coincidence; ‘t Barre Land strives for a theatre without a director in which the actors as artists determine the creative process. This actual absence of an overt compositional voice is ironically compensated by a situation in which every actor can assume the role of a director. Thus, the actors themselves allow each other to speak or not. This explicit ‘order of discourse’ is reinforced by the on-stage production and spreading of a pamphlet entitled The very last days of mankind by a team of the translators. The periodical adapting Kraus’ satirical Fackel-techniques to the current affairs of every place of performance is a striking example of how scenes are elided or compressed by means of audience address and emergent situations. Narratorial strategies blur the distinction between individual textual speakers or between primary and secondary text, e.g. characters ‘telling’ their own stage directions (as alienating self-characterisation) rather than acting them out in ‘showing’ mode. It is fruitful to draw on the notion of

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dramatic monologue as used in relation to poetry and prose, especially in view of Fludernik’s suggestion to include the dramatic monologue into the debate on unreliability (Fludernik 2005; cf. Martens 2008). Evidently, dramatic monologue is an intensely rhetorical device, as it wavers on the border between ironical distance and access to a character’s innermost thoughts and feelings. Buchholz and Jahn have noted that in Karl Kraus’ The Last Days of Mankind, dramatic monologue in fact returns to the stage. “The dramatic monologue throws a focal spotlight on the speaking character: Typically, in an act of involuntary self-characterisation, monologists give away crucial information about themselves” (Buchholz and Jahn 2005: 124–125). Similarly to the aside analyzed in Kleist the dramatic monologue acts as an ‘an act of involuntary self-characterisation’; its contrived nature points to the presence of a superior speech position. In the case of Kraus’ play, this effect is reinforced by the role of the Nörgler (the Grumbler), which can be regarded as an authorial mouthpiece (Elshout 2013). His role cannot be reduced to that of an intradiegetic narrator figure as in various pro- and analepses he anticipates future events and reflects past scenes; metaleptically, he refers to the foreword and the inserted images. In numerous metatheatrical comments he gradually reveals himself as the writer of the play, performatively writing the play to its end. He explores the possibilities of an extradiegetic narrator in drama, exceptionally turning up in the narrated world but mostly operating from an overt coordination position. In the case of the play’s staging, the superior speech position is inhabited by various characters slipping in and out of the role of stage manager authorising speakers and commenting on their performance. Whereas in Kleist’s play we analyzed distinct aside scenes, in which dialogists in different ways talk at crossed purposes, in the case of Kraus’ play, all dialogues amount to the dialogue sourd of two or more monologists. The fact that the monologists are inserted into a dramatic setting does not alter this metadiegetic ‘touch’, as it endorses the suggestion of a higher-order agency. At one stage, the narrator-character the Grumbler who excels in repartees explicitly acknowledges that his regular interlocutor and mirror image the ‘Optimist’ acts as a prompter (literally ‘catchword-supplier’) for his own monologues. (The generic names reminisce early modern theatre rather than modern psychological realism.) As in the case of the Kleist play discussed above, Kraus makes moreover abundant use of typography. In his case, it indicates that framing is taking place, and its effect is mostly satirical: the italicised words and the parentheses hint at involuntary self-characterisations. The postdramatic stagings capitalise on this capacity and enact a range of visual equivalents to the agency of montage, i.e. Verfremdungseffekte similar to (drastic, overt) narratorial control. This staging practice introduces, via the

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rehearsal frame and the multiplication of narratorial agents, a complex temporality and a layeredness that by far exceed the notions that have previously been discussed in relation to drama, performance and narrative especially with regard to the permeability and radical shifts in balance between primary and secondary text. Musil’s Modernist Novel on the Intermedial Stage We will now turn to Cassiers’ staging (2010) of Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities (1930–1942), which is close to the Kraus-staging in terms of subject matter, yet totally different in its relation to text and narratorial profiling. In a classical narratological understanding of theatrical adaptation, the study of the transposition of the narrative into another medium would be normatively concerned with e.g. the necessity of dividing the novels’ ambiguously distributed free indirect discourse into separate embodied voices (Meyer-Kalkus 2001). From the point of view of transmedial narratology, a more flexible and fluid stance on this issue is in place which attends to a range of techniques such as voice-over, choric fusion of voices, and actor multiplication. The Flemish director Cassiers is renowned for his highly technological performances and for his successful theatrical performances based on modernist novels (Lowry’s Under the volcano, Proust’s Recherche, Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, Brouwers’ Bezonken rood, … ). Cassiers’ staging is not as postdramatic as the staging of Kraus discussed above: it is more faithful to the original text and it contains fairly stable, psychologically rounded characters. Yet, the play makes use of anti-illusionist proxemics: Actors are sharing secrets about a third character while the excluded third is standing next to them, yet without the ability to (over)hear them. This practice of freezing similar to the aside goes against the grain both of traditional illusionist theatre and, we may add, of the realist epistemology inherent in structuralist accounts of focalization. This touch of unnaturalness, however, is very adequate to the amount of internal selfdistancing evidenced by this moderately postdramatic staging. It is underscored by a general sense of stasis, evoked by the video projection of empty frames onto the actors and onto the stage. While the staging does not substantially alter the novel’s essayistic, non-linear, meandering style, some elements of suspense or development are inserted through other semiotic channels such as the costumes. Throughout the trilogy, the costumes evolve: The clothes start out as hyperbolic expressions of the upper class society. Musil’s novel describes and discusses the gradual demise in the wake of WW1 and the spectacular shift in socials hierarchies that ensues from it. In

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the play, this process of decline is visualised through the actor’s increasingly destitute style of clothing. Cassiers’ staging practice has been discussed before in terms of narratology (see Pavis 2010). He has been praised for paying attention to the autonomy of each of the media involved in his performances. In the case of The Man without Qualities, video is not used to widen the epic scope (e.g. through flashbacks). Instead, the extreme close-ups serve the (rather traditional) function of suggesting subjective point of view (thought processes). At the same time, the technological redoubling points to a satirical framing agency: The fish-eye lens applied to the comical character of General Stumm signals a distorted worldview. Thus, the transmediality of the performance (which cannot be analysed in full depth here) aligns itself with the satirical point of view developed by the novel’s narrator. In sum, this case contains a type of narratorial mediacy inherent in the usage of video technology and additional semiotic channels, yet without issuing forth a clearly identifiable narratorial voice or character. That the extradiegetic-heterodiegetic speech position in performance is open to even further experimentation, will be illustrated in the next section by means of the final case study. Rimini Protokoll: Outsourcing Voice and Vision The German-Swiss theatre collective Rimini Protokoll is renowned for its innovative ‘situated performances’ involving non-actors as so-called ‘experts of the everyday’. In Call Cutta. An intercontinental phone play (2005), the spectator turns into an actor. Participants are made to navigate a European or American city by means of the directions of call-centre employees in Calcutta, India. The call centre employees have a script at their disposal, written by the directors. The geographical distance is diminished by the insertion of autodiegetic narration, as both parties are allowed and invited to tell their own life stories. The performance is an ironical comment on outsourcing as economical reality and its vicissitudes. Whilst most of the energy of the interaction is directed towards giving a face to an interaction that normally remains anonymous, the performance also contains interesting shifts in narratorial agency. The slips into the role of a documentary narrator maps stories from the past onto the present city surface. Thus, a kind of intercultural crossmapping is achieved in the avant-garde tradition of the situationalist movement and their conception of psychogeography. In the case of the Berlin performance, the German participants were told the story of one Subhash Chandra Bose, a leader of the Indian independence movement who, unlike Gandhi, favoured military action and eventu-

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ally joined Hitler’s forces in the effort to combat their common enemy, the British empire. Whilst Bose’s actual encounter with Hitler is shrouded in myth and rumours, Rimini Protokoll insert a doctored photo showing Hitler and Bose in order to strenghten the sense of an uncanny intercultural encounter. The peripatetic equivalent of heterodiegetic narration contributes to a type of vicarious experience which, at the same time, constitutes its critical foil. In narrative terms, the phone play alters between heterodiegetic, semiobjective documentary narration and autodiegetic narration, as the “experts of the everyday” tell their own lives in order to establish a connection with the participants. The suggestive use of documentary narration contradicts the widespread assumption that voice-over narration is dogmatic and works to the detriment of image and sound. Such metaleptic breakdowns of documentary narration have been discussed by Richardson, who refers to a case of parekbasis in Stoppard (Richardson 2006: 206). Call Cuta is typical for Rimini Protokoll’s overall attempt to mount performances that are not confined by the stage and that through anecdotical self-narration introduce a ‘reality effect’ into the performance. In narrative terms, the performance engages in the creation of a persistent storyworld shared only by the interlocutors, very much like the interactive digital storytelling involved in digital media (see Hansen et al. 2008). Unlike games, however, the avatars or virtual identities coincide with the real-life identities of the participants. It goes without saying that the conception of emergent narrative is quite compatible with the experimental, interactive type of performance mounted by Rimini Protokoll. This alternative notion of narrative may help to explain why the narratorial interventions are not rigidly directive or meddlesome, but ultimately up to the participant’s discretion. Thus, the nature of the stage directions is altered in the direction of a consensual procedure, once more making the border between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ ‘text’ permeable and open to negotiation. Conclusions We have shown that in drama considerable artistic creativity has been wrought out of seemingly mundane narratorial speech positions such as the aside comment and the documentary narratorial voice. We can conclude that, especially in recent staging practices (either postdramatic or neo-realist), the multiplication of (rival) narrating instances on the scene (e.g. video screens) allow for a broader variety of narratorial strategies than has been accounted for in discussions of narrativity in drama. The relevance of our findings is twofold: on the one hand, they invite to take

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the interaction between narratology and performance studies into the direction of narrative levels, which is not readily associated with performance. All of the cases discussed here, however, are put into stark relief by narratorial strategies. On the other hand, our observations tie in with experimental ways of staging and acting; the changing expectations and conventions still await a more encompassing discussion of narratorial strategies in postdramatic performance and beyond. For the time being, the types of narratorial agency discussed in this article point into the direction of a continuum ranging from paratextual and typographical signs in closet dramas over stage managers to metaleptic comments on the temporality of the play. As such, the present analysis of narratorial strategies in drama can contribute to further checks and balances in the conceptualisation of narratorial agency within transmedial narratology. One may object that the cases’ relevance for narratology is tied to the fact that they are epic either in scope (Kraus), in object matter (Musil’s prose narrative as basis) or in acting style (Rimini Protokoll) rather than dramatic at all. Further research is required in order to establish whether our description of overt narratorial strategies in specific cases can support the more generalising claim that narratorial mediacy is present in all types of drama and performance. At any rate, the estimate of the degree of narrativity hinges on a specific understanding of a transmedial narratology that aims to account for the salient aspects of any of the media involved. This is why we consider it necessary to tackle in terms of narratorial strategies not only the physical acting and the establishment of setting and audience interaction involved in actual performances, but also, in the case of film, such technical aspects as aperture, depth of field and bloom. Vice versa, a media-specific narratology would require, in the case of literarytextual narration, an even more sustained analysis of the paratextual aspects and conventions involved in it (such as typography and other diacritical signs). This allows a truly transmedial narratology to extend the notion of mediacy to include semiotic channels that have hitherto been neglected or considered irrelevant to the study of narration. The question whether and to what extent narrators are present in other media needs to be discussed not only in relation to different media and their stereotypical characteristics, but also in relation to the cross-generic experimentation that continues to provide further material for scrutiny.

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Works Cited Alber, Jan and Monika Fludernik 2013 “Mediacy and Narrative Mediation”, in Peter Hühn et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. URL = http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/mediacyand-narrative-mediation [view date: 12 Aug 2013] Baker-White, Robert 1999 The Text in Play: Representations of Rehearsal in Modern Drama, Cranbury et al.: Associated University Press. Barrett, James 2002 Staged Narrative: Poetics and the Messenger in Greek Tragedy, Berkeley et al.: University of California Press. Bay-Cheng Sarah et al. 2010 (eds.), Mapping Intermediality in Performance, Amsterdam: Amsterdam Universuty Press. Buchholz, Sabine and Manfred Jahn 2005 “Dramatic Monologue”, in David Herman et al. (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London: Routledge, 124–125. Chapple, Freda and Chiel Kattenbelt 2006 (eds.), Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, Amsterdam: Rodopi. De Jong, Irene 1991 Narrative in Drama: The Art of the Euripidean Messenger-Speech, Leiden: E. J. Brill. Elshout, Helena 2013 “Der Nörgler der letzten Tage der Menschheit: Kraus’ Alter Ego als Erzählfigur”, in Lucas Marco Gisi et al. (eds.): Medien der Autorschaft. Formen literarischer (Selbst-)Inszenierung von Brief und Tagebuch bis Fotografie und Interview, Munich: Fink, 87–96. Ernst, Wolf-Dieter 2009 “Interactivity”, in Chiel Kattenbelt et al. (eds.), Theater Topics 4: Concepten en objecten, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 15–25. Fludernik, Monika 2005 “Unreliability vs. Discordance. Kritische Betrachtungen zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Konzept der erzählerischen Unzuverlässigkeit”, in Fabienne Liptay et al. (eds.), Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, Munich: edition text+kritik, 39–59. 2008 “Narrative and Drama”, in John Pier et al. (eds.), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin: De Gruyter, 355–384.

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Grishakova, Marina and Marie-Laure Ryan 2010 (eds.), Intermediality and Storytelling, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Hansen, Frank Allan et al. 2008 “Mobile Urban Drama—Setting the Stage with Location based technologies”, in Ulrike Spierling et al. (eds.), Interactive Storytelling: First Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, Berlin et al.: Springer, 20–31. Herman, David 2004 “Toward a Transmedial Narratology”, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 47–76. Hühn, Peter and Roy Sommer 2013 “Narration in Poetry and Drama”, in Peter Hühn et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. URL = http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrationpoetry-and-drama [view date: 12 Aug 2013] Jahn, Manfred 2001 “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama”, New Literary History 32, 659–679. Kleist, Heinrich von 2001 [1807] “Amphitryon: Ein Lustspiel nach Molière”, in: Helmut Sembdner (ed.) Heinrich von Kleist. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe vol. 1, München: dtv, 245–320. 1983 Amphitryon, in Walter Hinderer (ed.) Heinrich von Kleist: Plays, New York: Continuum. Korthals, Holger 2003 Zwischen Drama und Erzählung. Ein Beitrag zur geschehensdarstellenden Literatur. Berlin: Schmidt. Kraus, Karl 1986 [1921] Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Tragödie in fünf Akten mit Vorspiel und Epilog, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. 1974 The Last Days of Mankind: A Tragedy in Five Acts, ed. by Frederick Ungar, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing. 2008 De laatste dagen der mensheid: Tragedie in vijf bedrijven met voorspel en epiloog, trans. Erik Bindervoet and Robbert Jan-Henkes, illustrated by Aart Clerkx, Amsterdam: De Harmonie. Lehmann, Hans-Thies 1999 Postdramatisches Theater, Frankfurt: Verlag der Autoren. Martens, Gunther 2008 “Extending and Revising the Scope of the Rhetorical Approach to Unreliable Narration”, in Elke D’hoker et al. (eds.), Narrative

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Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel, Berlin: De Gruyter, 77–105. Meyer-Kalkus, Reinhart 2001 Stimme und Sprechkünste im 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Nünning, Ansgar and Roy Sommer 2008 “Diegetic and Mimetic Narrativity: Some further Steps towards a Transgeneric Narratology of Drama”, in John Pier et al. (eds.), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 331– 354. Pavis, Patrice 2012 “Writing at Avignon (2010): Towards a Return of Narration”, TheatreForum—International Theatre Journal 40, 95–102. Pewny, Katharina 2009 “Die Ethik des Botenberichts (in Antike und Gegenwart)”, Forum Modernes Theater 24.2, 151–165. Pfister, Manfred 1988 [1977] Das Drama: Theorie und Analyse, München: Fink. Rajewsky, Irina 2007 “Von Erzählern, die (nichts) vermitteln: Überlegungen zu grundlegenden Annahmen der Dramentheorie im Kontext einer transmedialen Narratologie”, Zeitschrift für Französische Sprache und Literatur 117.1, 25–68. Richardson, Brian 2001 “Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama”, New Literary History 32, 681–694. 2006 Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Schenk-Haupt, Stefan 2007 “Narrativity in Dramatic Writing: Towards a General Theory of Genres”, Anglistik 18.2, 25–42.

BENOÎT HENNAUT (Bruxelles and Paris)

Building Stories around Contemporary Performing Arts: The Case of Romeo Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia Theatre and the performing arts are rarely the focus of contemporary narratological research, although there are a few notable exceptions. For instance, there are discussions that address the question of how drama reveals narrative structures within the field of theatrical studies (as in Umberto Eco’s lector in fabula adapted for the theatre as Patrice Pavis’ spectator in spectaculo). Some narratologists have also addressed the subject. For instance, Manfred Jahn (2001) and Brian Richardson (1987, 1988 or 2001) have demonstrated how a play may use various types of narrators, or how the analysis of time discrepancies between story and discourse (be it at the text or the performance level) may be fruitfully analyzed. Still, most of the analyses dedicated to the narratology of drama concentrate on the narratorial figure, reinforcing the importance of verbal mediacy in order for the drama to qualify as narrative (see Hühn and Sommer 2009). However, narratology needs to address a more specific question in drama: the nature and place of the narrative discourse, without limiting it to the role and the characteristics of a narrator (even a super-generative Chatmanian one). Manfred Jahn (2001), Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer (2008), and Monika Fludernik (2008) have all tried to include the performance level, as opposed to the analysis of the dramatic text on its own.1 They argue that drama’s specificity as a performative genre should be taken into account when defining the different components of the discourse level. This approach allows more cognitivist and functionalist approaches than formalist ones, opening the field to include the role of the spectator. This is the path I would like to follow myself. In this paper, I will indeed consider the performance and its reception as areas in which narrative discourse operates in all forms of theatrical writing. In the following pages, I will first distinguish between the possible narrativity contained in a theatrical performance (as a global performative event) _____________ 1

For a more detailed account of narrative discourse’s localization at the text or performance level within narratological studies of drama, see Alber and Fludernik (2011) and Hennaut (2013b).

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and its acceptable functioning as an autonomous narrative2. I will situate my definitions in the difference between “possessing narrativity” and “being a narrative” (Prince 1996, 1999). From there, I will focus on the existence of texts produced by spectators who, after they experienced the performance, recapitulated the “figural narrativity” of the piece (i.e. the narrative qualities that need language to be properly formulated a posteriori by a receptor; see below, Ryan 1991, 2004). In order to make sure that the analysis takes into consideration the performance level of theatre more than its dramatic text, I will situate my argument within a form of theatre deprived of dramatic text (words being almost absent), relying instead on performance in all its aspects in order to create meaning. I will focus on the series of works called Tragedia Endogonodia (2002–2004), eleven pieces created by the Italian director Romeo Castellucci. By using this corpus, the argument relies moreover on theatre performances in which the director himself disputed their narrative nature. We will see what this means concretely, especially when he encouraged the production of texts by the spectators themselves in order to comprehend the piece from a narrative point of view. To clarify these apparent paradoxes, I will proceed as follows: after briefly presenting the object of study (1), I will discuss the question of how these theatre performances are relevant to the narrative genre even if they are explicitly presented as being “non-narrative” (2): do they possess narrativity, and if so, according to which definition? I will then show how the locus of the narrative discourse of these pieces is contained not only at the performance level but also specifically at the reception level (3). Rhetorically, from the author’s point of view, but also concretely, with textual elements contributed by spectators after they saw the performances. With the help of some examples, we will see how far these texts comply with standard narrative definitions—or not. Like David Herman (2009), I see narrative as a communicative device used for the generation of meaning when one is confronted by peculiar objects of understanding (both aesthetically and emotionally). Presenting the Object: Theatre of étrangeté Tragedia Endogonidia was produced by Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (Italy) between 2002 and 20043. When it comes to narratology, _____________ 2 3

This paper is an introduction to the more in-depth analysis I have made elsewhere (Hennaut 2013a). It consists of a cycle of eleven shows. Their titles have been given the following abbreviations, referring to European cities: C.#01 Cesena, January 2002; A.#02 Avignon, July 2002;

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it is admittedly a rather bizarre object of study. To begin with, even though it does contain a certain level of narrativity (see below), the artist has intentionally deprived it of narrative meaning-making. In fact, the responsibility of narrative meaning-making is explicitly transferred to the spectators, some of whom have actually produced their own narrative texts (see section 3). The cycle of eleven theatrical productions is a series of tableaux and visions. “Illustrating” or communicating experiences produced by ten different cities4, they are long-form performances (with duration, actors, actions and audiences, i.e. traditional theatrical settings), and were presented at major theatre festivals in Europe. They are powerful pieces, mainly silent, often extremely violent and visual, juxtaposing landscapes, actions, colors, historical figures, biblical references and short stories. Exploring the possibility of creating a contemporary tragedy5, Castellucci decided to remove any presence or evocation of an “antic chorus.” The explanatory stasima, and their supposedly narrative function in the tragedy, were abandoned, focusing instead on the raw, brutal presentation of the events (“episodes” in the Greek tradition), without offering any explanation. Castellucci wanted to create a theatre of emotion instead of narration, claiming and defending the “non-narrative structure” of his work over this period of time (see Castellucci 2007, 2008). The result is theatre performances which are mostly presentational and almost intransitive; the use of words is rare (there is often no dialogue at all). The dramatic progression relies only on the images, movements and gestures of the characters, changes in the set, the lighting and the positions or repetition of different figures inhabiting the onstage worlds created by Castellucci.6 Often, the performance consists of a succession of different tableaux, which are named in the program. For example, in the show A. #02 Avignon, the work consists of the following scenes: “Antichamber/ The Poet is writing/ Chamber/ Epilepsy/ The Ambassadresses of the Poet/ The Soldiers of _____________

4 5 6

B.#03 Berlin, January 2003; Br.#04 Bruxelles, May 2003; Bn.#05 Bergen, May 2003; P.#06 Paris, October 2003; R.#07 Roma, November 2003; S.#08 Strasbourg, February 2004; L.#09 London, May 2004; M.#10 Marseille, September 2004; C.#11 Cesena, December 2004. Cesena (IT), the director’s home town, was used twice (episodes 1 and 11). Because, he argued, our contemporary world does not rely any more on a stable community structured by common myths, as the Greeks did (see Castellucci 2008). With this work, Castellucci joins the so-called “postdramatic” theatre. This label was coined by Hans-Thies Lehmann in 1999, and it designates a kind of theatrical writing which abandoned the conventional dramatic organization characterized by mimetic realism, the guiding psychology of characters, and, most importantly, the use of the text as backbone. Postdramatic theatre uses all components of the stage performance in the process of sense-making (the dramatic text is replaced by a “performance text”). Other postdramatic artists are Jan Lauwers, Jan Fabre, The Wooster Group, Heiner Goebbels, Frank Castorf, La Fura dels Baus and many others.

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Conception/ Whiteface is coming from downtown/ Anonymous Mother. Hemorrhage/ Carlo Giuliani/ Alphabet.” (See the pictures below: “Romeo Castellucci, Tragedia Endogonidia. A.#02 Avignon.” ©Luca Del Pia”)

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To What Extent are the Performances of Tragedia Endogonidia Relevant to the Narrative Genre? Do They Contain Narrativity? Since the 1990s, Castellucci has repeatedly expressed interest in antinarrative poetics. Earlier on, he planned to “dig a hole in the narrative framework of the world.” (Castellucci 2001: 46)7 But he did not reject at all the narrative nature of theatre. He did reject narrative elements in his pieces, refusing to formulate them himself, or to give them a univocal existence understood by the spectator. The explanatory function of a narrative, which he assimilates on a theatre stage to the chorus of the antic tragedy, serves as a symbolic foil in the Tragedia Endogonidia project. In other words, he pushes the theoretical position of an essentially “writerly” text (sensu Roland Barthes) to its maximum. The content of a possible story and, subsequently, the formulation of a narrative would then only be revealed by each individual spectator’s experience. Before further clarifying this position and the spectator’s role and function (section 3), we must then ask ourselves this basic question: what are the internal narrative qualities of the Tragedia Endogonidia series (inherent to the performance as a discourse)? How do they generate some sort of “narrative intuition”? If the spectator is asked to produce a narrative structure out of these pieces, how far is it possible to read them as narrative and according to which concepts and definitions? Gradual and Transmedial Approach To qualify the narrative nature of these performing arts pieces, we first have to define narrativity as follows: a gradual narrative quality contained in an art object or in a type of discourse. As it is widely accepted nowadays, being narrative in nature is different from possessing narrativity. However, I do not consider narrativity to be a totally external property of a text (in the widest sense possible), directed by one’s initial intent to read it as a narrative. I find that scaling a text’s narrativity relies more on a sampling of internal qualities, more or less present in that text, whose full density may lead to a readable narrative nature. This is best expressed by the eight steps of the scale to the narrative canon as defined by Marie-Laure Ryan.8 _____________ 7 8

Translated from the French. Unless marked otherwise, all translations from the French are mine. “Spatial dimension 1. Narrative must be about a world populated by individual existents./ Temporal dimension 2. This world must be situated in time and undergo significant transformations. 3. The transformations must be caused by non-habitual physical events./ Mental dimension 4. Some of the participants in the events must be intelligent agents who have

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Although it is pure scene-driven performance and paratactic structure, the Tragedia Endogonidia series (intransitive, closer to visual art) offers an interesting, somewhat unnatural story world, with players, landscapes, actions, disruptions and time development (a chronological beginning, middle and end). Let us examine them through the eight scales of narrativity, according to Ryan’s definition of narrative discourse. The pieces include successive actions performed by anthropomorphic characters in space and time, enduring conflicts and oppositions, making choices that have consequences, either fictionally, or relating to well-known historical events (the death of a demonstrator in Genoa in 2001 during the G8 summit in A.#02, the Lateran Treaty and the relationship established in 1929 between Mussolini and the Holy See in R.#07, etc). Each piece is the result of the combination and selection of various elements in chronological order, with very strong thematic unity. There are also repetitions in successive works in the series: living allegories, locations and characters. Globally, the first five levels of Ryan’s definition are met. But, and this is where the problem lies, the notions of teleology and definite causality are conspicuously absent in the course of these pieces, among its different components (Ryan’s levels 6 to 8). We are aware that this is the choice of the creator (remember: he does not want to be responsible for a meaningful univocal structure). The elements of logical connection and identifiable goals are therefore hard to find. This is the reason why the different pieces in the Tragedia series do not result in a close autonomous narrative, although they do indeed illustrate the gradable quality of narrativity within an articulated discourse9. As the Tragedia is a succession of tableaux rather than a conventional dramatic structure, we can also look at it from a purely transmedial approach inspired by the visual arts and Werner Wolf’s view on these artefacts, picking out the elements of its inherent narrativity. Despite their apparently erratic structure, Tragedia Endogonidia’s episodes are actually packed with elements qualifying as different groups of narratemes organized by Wolf and following Prince’s path (Wolf 2003, 2004). Narratemes may be considered as intrinsic indicators for a text’s narrativity.10 Except for _____________

9 10

a mental life and react emotionally to the states of the world. 5. Some of the events must be purposeful actions by these agents./ Formal and pragmatic dimension 6. The sequence of events must form a unified causal chain and lead to closure. 7. The occurrence of at least some of the events must be asserted as fact for the story world. 8. The story must communicate something meaningful to the audience.” Quoted from Ryan 2006: 8–9. The elements of this definition are present and elaborated in her numerous productions since 1991. The performance as such works as the syntagmatic articulation of signifying elements, in other words, as a kind of discourse. Combining Wolf 2003 and Wolf 2004:

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‘meaningfulness’ and ‘teleology’, all of the general, content and syntactic narratemes selected by Werner Wolf are present in all performances. The actions onstage, as well as the careful theatrical construction, respond to many criteria in terms of building a story world, although it may not make sense at the end! In this transmedial perspective, the performance is the one and only place for these narrativity elements to be realized and organized, as there is neither dramatic text nor structured dialogue. Only the stage and its timely organized progression bring together the various constituents of a potential narrative discourse. Tragedia Endogonidia adds to the debate of drama’s narrativity location, showing us that when the textual dramatic structure disappears, only the performance remains to offer the gradual content and elements of narrativity. Narrative Progression: Plot Issues If the existence of a story world and its time progression is obvious in performance, we can easily see that the central question of Tragedia Endogonidia’s inherent narrativity concerns its plot. Since Castellucci has intentionally removed any stable explanatory devices or structures, the performances do not qualify as narrative based on a plot-driven definition. Of course, I may call upon Monika Fludernik’s experientiality in describing the narrative nature of the pieces performed (1996: 13, 30). After all, they are timely, organized communication devices, texts nourished by the evocation of emotional experiences of anthropomorphic characters in various fictional situations. All the episodes of Tragedia Endogonidia correspond to Fludernik’s criteria and qualify as autonomous narratives onstage in this perspective, with performance as their only discourse level. I may _____________ ‒

‒

‒

general narratemes: to carry meaning, with regards to time in particular (‘meaningfulness’); representing a real or fictional world (‘representationality’); to allow the receptor to experience this world and to be able to express the feeling of this experience (‘experientality’). content narratemes (applying to the classical level of ‘story’, building blocks of the narrative): anthropomorphic figures, at the center of an action or of events that develop in time and space; the existence of conflicts involving conscious choices and having external effects; actions attributed to specific agents (not collective ones), those actions being explicit, representable and concrete even though they are fictional. syntactic narratemes (that apply to the classical level of ‘discourse’): content elements are submitted for selection, combination, presentation, they are thematically coherent and build a homogeneous wholeness (beginning, middle, end); this coherent wholeness shows some chronological, teleological and causal qualities; the discourse is finally ‘tellable’.

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also add that the intent of the pieces seems specifically to transmit these emotions and experiences. Brian Richardson also reminds us that the single plot-progression principle does not apply in all cases. There are “a large number of ordering techniques other than those of conventional emplotment” that can lead to story progression and narrative construction (Richardson 2005: 167). Among the techniques he listed (inspired by Joyce or Proust), I retain certain rhetorical or aesthetical motivations as a way of ordering and organizing narrative elements. Those motivations are particularly clear in the way Castellucci produced each specific episode of the Tragedia as both a work of art and as visual narrative, ordering figures, images and actions. But I do not want to reject the elements of plot, causality and meaning as evaluative criteria for Tragedia’s narrativity. We will see that it remains determinant in confronting the reception level (even as a negative criterion, whose absence is significant), and the completeness of the Tragedia’s meaning. From Tragedia’s Narrativity to Tragedia’s Narrative Interpretation Among the four criteria David Herman lists in his Basic Elements (2009), and in line with his previous works, the second introduces the role of the receiver as a decisive step towards the identification of narrativity11. Plot issues and meaningful structure in Tragedia Endogonidia should clearly be regarded in this light: “the representation cues [its] interpreters to draw inferences about a structured time-course of particularized events.” Moreover, according to Herman and his expressed debt towards Nelson Goodman, progressive character in narrativity is even more determined by his third element (2009: 97), i.e. the text’s capacity to generate a story world. By now, we know that the elements visible in Tragedia’s fictional universe (masks, creatures, golden and marble chambers, uniforms and traditional costumes, deaths and births, landscapes, sounds and voices, characters, allegorical actorial postures, etc.) collectively create specific worlds which validate this criterion. _____________ 11

“A prototypical narrative can be characterized as: (i) A representation that is situated in— must be interpreted in light of—a specific discourse context or occasion for telling. (ii) The representation, furthermore, cues interpreters to draw inferences about a structured timecourse of particularized events. (iii) In turn, these events are such that they introduce some sort of disruption or disequilibrium into a story world involving human or human-like agents, whether that world is presented as actual or fictional, realistic or fantastic, remembered or dreamed, etc. (iv) The representation also conveys the experience of living through this story world-in-flux, highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousness affected by the occurrences at issue” (Herman 2009: 1).

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The more these story world’s elements are present in the content side, (the “content narratemes,” according to Wolf), the more one can identify cues, triggering devices for each spectator to construct his or her own story from the material proposed (inferring a hypothesis on the basis of his or her own encoded knowledge, as well as available scripts). The narrativity level of a performance will also fluctuate according to the layers and the richness of the scripts present in the spectator’s mind. The cues given by Castellucci are diverse, ranging from biblical or mythological references (Christ, Abraham and the Sphinx in P.#07), to historical and current events (the Lateran Treaty or the events of Genoa 2001), art history (Rembrandt in A.#02), and folk figures (the White Clown in A.#02, the Harlequin in L.#09). The Tragedia’s composition invites each spectator to articulate several elements which may not seem connected at first view, but that can form a narrative depending on “how the form of a sequence is anchored in—or triggers [the] recipient to activate— knowledge about the world” (Herman 1997: 1048). The tellability (the Labovian criterion in the above referenced definition of Herman) of such a potential narrative will depend on how the elements exposed may be configured, according to the representations and literary and cultural repertories available to the spectator. And of course it varies from spectator to spectator. To sum up: Tragedia Endogonidia’s inherent narrativity is based upon numerous content elements developed and arranged by the performance. It can be considered gradual according to Wolf’s transmedial terms (more or less narratemes in each episode; semantic and formal aspects of his definition). By not limiting it to the ‘experientiality’ qualification, it meets the meaningfulness and plot-demand requirements only in an open-ended definition like Herman’s (active receptor, functional aspects); it is gradual in this respect too, depending on the spectator’s capacity for inference (number of cues, quality of scripts). But still, according to Marie-Laure Ryan’s eight levels, none of Tragedia’s pieces can be considered autonomous narrative (they meet only five of her criteria). They are even better defined (or conceptualized) thanks to another concept brought in by Marie-Laure Ryan: figural narrativity. When she exposes her eight steps of narrativity (see above), whose completion leads to the narrative canon, she confirms logical connectedness as a determinant element. However, she does not consider the logical level as imperative in order for narrativity to be effective and qualify a text. Her first five criteria may designate any semiotic object in terms of internal narrativity (including the performing arts), whereas the final three are the most difficult to satisfy; their absence will not prevent the functioning of other narrative qualities.

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The reason for this is that, according to Ryan, “only language can express the logical relations and the private worlds which hold together their semantic network” (1991: 265). She has also confirmed this more recently, saying that language remains the “native tongue of narrative” (2004: 11). In other words, narrative discourse may be textually realized elsewhere than within the discursive object being examined for narrativity criteria. This is the case of the primarily visual pieces comprising the Tragedia Endogonidia. Their performance already acts as a primary discourse level full of narrativity indicators (offering, organizing and arranging elements. However, their narrative meaningfulness may be expressed elsewhere than within the pieces. In Possible worlds (1991), Ryan distinguished literal narrativity from figural narrativity, where the former explicitly organizes her eight criteria, and the latter depends more on the receiver’s interpretation when facing allegorized ideas, certain figures and concepts, or even variations on these concepts (265)—precisely the content of Tragedia’s episodes. Figural narrativity can be easily applied to theatre performances like Castellucci’s when reading Ryan, such as: The narrativity of mimetic forms could also be defended by regarding them as virtual stories. When we retell a play, we produce a standard diegetic narrative. The possibility to retell it as a story would then be the condition of narrativity, and the narrativity of a given text would stand whether or not the possibility is actualized. (2004: 13)

Marie-Laure Ryan also precisely illustrates the concept of figural narrativity by the capacity of a spectator, in theatre forms deprived of a chorus and narrator, to infer a narrative structure from the characters’ actions, their expressions and gestures (1991: 265). The episodes of Tragedia Endogonidia act as a case study in this respect. Not only do they possess narrativity elements within their performative discourse, but it is the declared intent of its creator that the receiver should complete this discourse by retelling the piece. And these postnarration texts have been produced, they exist. From an Authorial Rhetorical Position to the Concrete Production of External Narrative Writings: Examples of ‘Narrativization’ Post-Narration as a Dramaturgical Act The Tragedia Endogonidia project encouraged concrete experimentations in the transfer of the locus of narrative discourse to the spectators. Castellucci’s intention is made very clear: it is up to the spectator to fill in the

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gaps left onstage between the images, and to organize his or her own story from it. “The artist is there only to shove on and then disappear. He must be transparent. The real stage is the spectator’s brain, as the location of the soul and of the nerves.” (Castellucci 2009). Of course, the link to contemporary reception theories in the field of theatrical studies must be mentioned briefly here. The spectator’s role is widely commented upon and discussed nowadays, including references to its so-called “inflation” (see Pavis 2005, 2012). Castelluci’s views would align with this “inflation,” the exaggerated importance given to the spectator’s interpretation. More specifically, in her essay Théâtre et réception. Le spectateur postdramatique, Catherine Bouko (2010) detailed a semiological model to describe the kind of reception process that happens when one is attending postdramatic theatre. Among other parameters, she emphasizes the process of “dramatization”12. Through this cognitive mechanism, the spectator tries to construct coherence and dialectic relationships among the different signs and allegories offered to him or her, by the use of thematic and sensorial isotopies, although these signs are neither stable nor transparent. According to Bouko, dramatization is dynamic and constantly re-evaluated in the course of the viewing, or after the performance is over. In short, the semiological approach of Bouko stops exactly where we may begin collecting and analyzing the product of this interpretation process in the spectators’ minds. Some of them can elicit the creation of narratives that are as much the result as the vehicle for a personally elaborated meaning. From this perspective, and in my view, dramatization can also, although not exclusively, rely on narrative isotopies (aside from sensorial or symbolic ones). In the field of narrativity analysis and theorization, the “dramatization” of theatrical studies may echo Monica Fludernik’s “narrativization” (1996: 31, 34)13. Confronted by such a complex environment, one may “narrativize” and use story logic in order to build meaning through the experiencing of the theatre work, even though the story world may be unnatural and the logical-causal links are not easy, if not impossible to grasp. We have already seen how much narrativity can still be detected in these pieces, serving as a basis for this narrative sense-making. This theoretical perspective is made empiric within the Tragedia project. The meaningful act is purposely assigned to the viewer, and to the critics or the analysts coming later as well; Castellucci says this act is made _____________ 12 13

The term “dramatization” with regard to the role of the spectator was first used in the works of Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux (2006) about theatre’s reception. I use the term with its primary meaning, “narrative recuperation.” I am not taking a position in the present debates about the validity or the cognitive analysis of this recuperation.

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possible through narration14. If he explicitly refuses the responsibility of building an immediate narrative structure in the Tragedia pieces, he nonetheless considers the possibility as a determinant element of his work that the pieces may be narrated later, that they are somehow made consistent in this post-narration. This post-narration process is interesting when it comes to narrativity theory, as it is overtly coupled with the experience of each individual spectator according to the creator’s intent. [Chiara Guidi:] Narration (…) is only born where there is an experience. (…) If there is an experience, then I can leave the theatre and talk about what I saw. (…) Narration is not only about the connections between the various figures, (…) At stake in these episodes is that they may have a narrative, but that narrative is reinvented on the basis of experience, (…) I manage to say what I saw, which means I am able to perceive an emotion. (Guidi 2007: 254–255)15

Post-narration exercise becomes a proper dramaturgical act in the development of Castellucci’s theatrical writing. He explicitly relies on narration as a vehicle for the transmission of individual experience and emotions. In this sense, narrativization has become an artistic standpoint, a “dramaturgical act” wished for by the author, from the spectator who has seen his dream-like performances. Beyond Authorial Rhetoric There is, however, more to it than intention. At this point, the expressed position of the artist can be seen as essentially rhetorical. In fact, and as it can be demonstrated at a larger scale (see Hennaut 2013a), Castellucci’s point of view is also a way not to work with a traditional dramatic canvas, to avoid or lose it altogether; he would rather explore new scenic and dramaturgical dimensions. Hence my consideration of this process as “rhetorical.” Still, there are several kinds of narrative texts which were produced around the pieces in Tragedia Endogonidia. I will comment on three specific examples which serve to illustrate the three types most commonly encountered in this large corpus16: narrativized descriptions, narrative recuperation/amplification, and accounts of personal experiences. _____________ 14 15 16

The term ‘narration’ here refers to the linguistic action of organizing/producing a narrative discourse. Chiara Guidi used to be the wife and closest collaborator of Romeo Castellucci. Castellucci’s company (Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio) collected a large panel of texts in the critical apparatus accompanying Tragedia Endogonidia. They were edited by the company as the volumes Idioma, Clima, Crono (Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio 2002–2004). Numerous texts are also gathered in Castellucci 2007. It is worth noting that this textual production has been encouraged by the author and edited by him in order to trace the memory of the performances and of the project as a whole.

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Example A: Narrativized Description Astrié, Céline. “A.#02”, in Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (eds.), Idioma, Clima, Crono I, 2, Cesena (IT), 2002. (…) The Ambassadresses finish their song, a small boy leaves Ur, dressed in a High Court judge’s robes. He has his back to the audience; and two white plaques which look like the Commandment tablets from the Old Testament are positioned downstage, the child moves back and pushes them over and once they hit the ground he stands on top of them. The “soldiers of the conception” enter to the right, one of them carrying a flag reading “Elie the prophet” in Hebrew. Another soldier leaves Ur, he is holding a sheep or goat’s skin at arm’s length, and he has come to put it under the child’s feet. This same soldier removes the judge’s robe from the child. The young boy is dressed in a corset, shorts and white tights and wears an armband with the number 2 on it. The little boy is put through a series of preparations; perhaps for a wedding ceremony, a sacrifice or a surgical operation. The child’s body is the object of all our attention, they try to make him drink a liqueur but he refuses. The soldiers bring in a small bed and lay the boy down on it, they peel back the skin of his arm to see what is underneath it, it’s a sort of re-enactment of one of Rembrandt’s paintings. The soldiers move away and the child gets up from the bed and levitates while a young girl who resembles Alice is put to bed face down at the front of the stage. (…)

Astrié wrote critical reviews of all the pieces in the Tragedia. In the absence of any other textual reference material to these essentially visual performances, she is obliged to systematically retell each episode. This kind of text has a double status: it replays the performance in her memory, and narrativity analysis applies the same way to the development of the piece content-wise; it is also a narrativized description (see below) serving the purpose of further critical discourse, which must be backed up by some textual evidence, given the ephemeral nature of the object commented upon and the various live media involved in its performance. As far as I am concerned, narrative act is certain in this text, as the author must be able and willing to recount the event and the object of her analytical commentary (with a beginning, middle and end). She actually textually recreates the object of her subject. Nevertheless, at the semantic level, the text is composed of a paratactic exposition of events, all appealing to an extraordinary reality, not necessarily logically connected in the reader’s mind. Like the spectator exposed to the actual piece, the reader of this text is invited to construct his or her own logical reading and interpretation of the events. Moreover, the involvement of the narrator in these elements and the need for these events to occur is weak, making this narrative not particularly “tellable” if we remain at the level of the story. At the discourse level however, this type of text corresponds to a “retelling” occasion that supports the critical stance, echoing David Herman’s recently refreshed concept of narrativized description (2009: 13, 91),

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which argues that a certain level of detailed paraphrase of movements and actions was neither prototypically a description, nor a narrative. At the end we feel close to the “zero degree” of narrativity here, to use Herman’s elements again, as this text does not fulfill the fourth essential criterion of “what it’s like,” capable of communicating the feelings provoked by disruptions in the created world. This narrativized description also contains multiple references to actions, not to states or images only, emphasizing the actional logic. The exhaustive account of actions and their context supports the chronological progression, and cannot be reduced to a mere description. It does not pause the diegesis because it actually creates the diegesis. This text type is eventually closer to the “endo-narrative” level relayed by Françoise Revaz (2009: 76). It allows the elucidation of the actions undertaken and linked to one other, without necessarily proposing a model which would help the reader to understand these links. Example B: Narrative Amplification 1. Kelleher, Joe. “A theatre dream,” in Castellucci 2007: 169–170. You see yourself, through a gauze screen that blurs everything, in fancy dress, a straight white wig and a white full-length gown billowing out from the waist. You are kneeling, with your wrists tied together, in an eighteenth- or nineteenthcentury English drawing room. You know where you are from the wallpaper, which is inches from your face, a creamy flocked pattern that extends as high and as far as you can imagine, like the wall of a prison or hospital compound. It is hard, though, to say whether this is indoors or outdoors. Everything ‘speaks’ of a domestic interior, but there is already weather at work there, something like an old English fog from the age of manufacturing, or a heavy fog from the sea, and when you knock against the wall with your fist, you will be answered by thunder. For now, though, your wrists are bound together by a bell rope hanging down from the darkness overhead, the sort that is used to call the servants.

2. Kelleher, Joe. “An enchantment. A fantasia on Romeo Castellucci’s C.#11.,” in Castellucci 2007: 192–199. The boy settled down in the bed, his teddy bear beside him on the pillow, and opened the picture book. It was made of thin grey paper, and the pictures were printed throughout in the same cheap ink. The ink was so uneven you could hardly call that black a colour. All of the books were like that. There was even less colour in the small volumes he kept in a cabinet beside the bed than there was in the world, and there was little enough in the world. Most of what there was—in the bit of the world with which he was familiar—seemed to be concentrated in the body of the cat (he called her Cat) and even then she was not much more than a sort of dingy brownish orange smudge of a thing. He had found her, as he always did, lying on the bed when he came back into the room this evening, and, as he always did, he had picked her up and carried her outside before coming back in to

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say his prayers. He shouldn’t say in the body. On the body. Her fur. Who knew anything in the body? (…) His mother came in to kiss him goodnight.

These examples are the incipits of short novels written after the pieces entitled L.#09 and C.#11. They were both produced by Joe Kelleher, an English theatre scholar who followed up on the process of the Tragedia. These texts are the result of his own narrative interpretation of the episodes, as well as an exercise in creativity and imagination (although somewhat “theoretically” processed). They actualize the hypothesis made earlier about figural narrativity and the capacity of theatre performance to engender a narrative act realized through textual production at its reception. Those two texts organize through a narrative discourse the events developed by the performance and give them a certain coherence through the eye of an elected narrator. The texts recuperate in the performance what I called a narrative isotopie by collecting the elements of the performance’s inherent narrativity and various narratemes. They use different narratorial devices. The narrative around L.#09 (B1) is a second-person narrative, where “you” (considered singular by cotextual markers: “self,” “face”) is addressed to the main character/figure on stage. Either it positions the reader as an external viewer, or it produces a progressive identification between reader and narratee as the figure on the stage. The second example, based on C.#11 (B2), is close to the notion of a tale in the paratextual reference (“fantasia”). It clearly echoes the introductory text to the piece in the program17. C.#11, although totally silent, is the most mimetic episode in the series; it contains many narrativity elements (a child’s disappearance and murder, in a cinematic setting). It is no surprise that it triggered a classical fictional narrative format. As an autonomous short novel, this piece of text would deserve a longer analysis in terms of focalization and the positioning of a third-person narrator among the characters. Example C: Account of a Personal Experience Joubert, Suzanne. “La Tragedia, je l’ai vue naître.”, in Joubert 2004: 57–63. La Tragedia, I saw it born, you can say that. I was in Cesena when it all began. (…) I was right there, watching the hatching of the first one. I am happy to be there, quiet, armed with my knowledge of tragedy, sitting with my mostly Italian fellow audience members, with paper and pencil in hand so as to be able to write down my immediate impressions, until it begins and I and my comrades are blown away with a massive lighting effect, like a bolt of lightning, a blast of wind, a giant eraser.

_____________ 17

The introductory text in the program reads as follows: “It’s a tale about childhood and native land. A tale about family and a little boy, to whom one comes to say goodnight (…)” [Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio], C.#11, evening program (Teatro Comandini, December 2004), quoted in: Castellucci 2007: 187.

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(…) There’s an old soothsayer wearing feathers on his head. There’s a young man, on one side, he’s a wonderful singer and on the other a carabinier. There is a dead child, a living child—perhaps it is the same person. There’s a woman mothering a gold piece of the set. There’s a ceiling which breaks open and flies away, allowing the legs of something skinned to poke through. There is a clown who breaks mirrors and cleans the floor with what looks like a piece of liver. There is a wall of sound, implacable, which grabs me physically and forces me down into my seat. My heart is beating abnormally, I can feel it. Or maybe it’s my ribcage, my God, I feel it—it is shrinking, squeezing my heart. I don’t know but it is so violent. (…) I glance at my seatmates. None of them is getting up screaming, as I feel like doing right now: “Stop it. It’s not right, I don’t feel well, save me!” (…) I don’t know how I got through the Cesena episode. (…) I know that I felt something that evening, that I tiptoed between bodies in the flesh, some of them were actors, some were my seatmates and me. (…)18

This last example is the relating of a personal experience. This and other examples of the kind are narratives detached from the perspective of logical sequence, which translate a real spectator’s experience. Above all we remember Chiara Guidi saying “narration is only born where there is an experience; (…) it is the emotions that restore the narrative to you.” Through her narrative, this author transmits something of her emotions, which, once offstage and away from the darkness of the theatre, cannot publicly exist elsewhere than in language. This transmission is both concerned with the content of the piece, recounting for the purposes of memory the elements of its progress, and with the way those elements have been perceived and borne. Conclusion With this very quick journey, I first showed how Romeo Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia offers a perfect example of what narratology can say about its transmedial application to texts (in its largest meaning) which resist or do not qualify as canonical narratives, although they contain narrativity at a certain level and do generate narrative intuition. Second, the principle of narrativization, conceived as the production of narratives that are external but necessary to the discursive object (at the reception level), is contained in the very essence of this work (at its production level). Not to naturalize the unnatural, nor to make it more reliable, but simply to create meaning by taking advantage of various elements of narrativity included in the performance. Relying on narrativization, post-narration is considered as a part of the dramaturgical project. Third, the Tragedia inspired textual responses, productions of various narrative qualities that are _____________ 18

Translated from the French by Sara Sugihara.

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both a process of understanding as well as a narrative product. It happens as a more or less obligatory and logical step towards the understanding and the comprehension of an art object which possesses and appeals (or cues) numerous narrativity components without organizing them in a mimetic, logically-connected way. More generally speaking, this case study invites narratology’s interest in the field of postdramatic performing arts which often problematized their narrative structure (at least in the 1980s and 1990s). It helps in building a certain methodology. Considering the use of narrative as a discourse strategy, I suggest looking at several questions, generating a narratological analysis when tackling these art works (see Hennaut 2013a). (1) As it is often claimed by the artists, what is “non-narrative” poetics in this postdramatic perspective? How is it declared by the authors? What kind of artistic and cultural positioning does it really mean? (2) Is it possible to identify inherent narrativity within postdramatic works? What are the degrees of narrativity or narrative practices that can be traced within the works? (3) What kind of narrative definitions may be used in this respect? How far are theatre and performance a valid level of narrative discourse? What is narrative discourse when it is applied to an essentially performative theatre? (4) How does narrative work at the reception point of those performances? What kind of actual narrative texts do we encounter a posteriori, recounting the piece? What are their structures and functions? (5) How does narrative become an effective tool for the comprehension and analysis of the performance? What are the challenges raised by the texts collected in terms of narrative functions? Is narrative an effective tool when building a discourse around an aesthetic experience? Works Cited Alber, Jan and Monika Fludernik 2011 “Mediacy and Narrative Mediation”, in Peter Hühn et al. (eds.), The living handbook of narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. 29 Nov 2011 . Bouko, Catherine 2010 Théâtre et Réception: Le Spectateur Postdramatique, Bruxelles: Peter Lang.

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Castellucci, Claudia, et al. 2007 (eds.), The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, London: Routledge. Castellucci, Romeo 2001 “La Discesa di Inanna, Notes sur la Mise en Scène (1989)”, in Claudia Castellucci and Romeo Castellucci (eds.), Les Pèlerins de la Matière. Besançon: Les Solitaires intempestifs, 46. 2004 “Notre Tragédie se Situe dans L’émotion.” La Provence (20 Sept. 2004). 2008 “Système, Fonctions et Opérations d’une Tragédie D’or”, in Enrico Pitozzi and Annalisa Sacchi (eds.), Itinera, Trajectoires de la Forme. Arles: Actes Sud, 13–18. 2009 “Tout est dans le Cerveau du Spectateur”, La Libre Belgique (5 May 2009). Fludernik, Monika 1996 Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London and New-York: Routledge. 2008 “Narrative and Drama”, in John Pier and José Angel Garcia Landa (eds.), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin: De Gruyter, 355–384. Guidi, Chiara and Joe Kelleher 2007 “A Conversation about the Future”, in Claudia Castellucci et al (eds.), The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, London: Routledge, 254–255. Herman, David 1997 “Scripts, Sequences and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology”, PMLA 112.5, 1046–1059. 2009 Basic Elements of Narratives, Oxford: Willey-Blackwell. Hennaut, Benoît 2013a Théâtre et Récit, L’impossible Rupture. La Place du Récit dans le Spectacle Postdramatique (1975–2004), selon Romeo Castellucci, Jan Lauwers, Elizabeth LeCompte. PhD dissertation. ULB, EHESS (CRAL), December 2013. 2013b “Narratologie et Écritures Théâtrales: Quel Dialogue Possible ?”, Cahiers de Narratologie 24 . Hühn, Peter and Roy Sommer 2009 “Narration in Poetry and Drama”, in Peter Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology, Berlin: De Gruyter, 228–241. Jahn, Manfred 2001 “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama”, New Literary History 32.3, 659–679. Joubert, Suzanne 2004 Cesena dans le Paysage, Besançon: Les Solitaires Intempestifs.

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Lehmann, Hans-Thies 1999 Postdramatisches Theater, Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag der Autoren. Mervant-Roux, Marie-Madeleine 2006 Figurations du Spectateur: Une Réflexion par L’image sur le Théâtre et sur sa Théorie, Paris: L’Harmattan. Nünning, Ansgar and Roy Sommer 2008 “Diegetic and Mimetic Narrativity: Some further Steps towards a Narratology of Drama”, in John Pier and José Angel Garcia Landa (eds.), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin: De Gruyter, 339–354. Pavis, Patrice 2005 L’analyse des Spectacles, Paris: Armand Colin. 2012 “Le Point de Vue du Spectateur ”, Critical Stages, IATC Webjournal, n7. 01 Jan 2013 . Prince, Gerald 1996 “Remarks on Narrativity”, in Claes Wahlin (ed.), Perspectives on Narratology: Papers from the Stockholm Symposium on Narratology, Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 95–106. 1999 “Revisiting Narrativity”, in Walter Grünsweig and Andreas Solbach (eds.), Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, Tübingen: Narr, 43–51. Revaz, Françoise 2009 Introduction à la Narratologie, Bruxelles: De Boeck-Duculot. Richardson, Brian 1987 “Time is Out of Joint: Narrative Models and the Temporality of the Drama”, Poetics Today 8.2, 299–309. 1988 “Point of View in Drama: Diegetic Monologue, Unreliable Narrators, and the Author’s Voice on Stage”, Comparative Drama 22.3, 193–214. 2001 “Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama”, New Literary History 32.3, 681–694. 2005 “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses”, in James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (eds.), A Companion to Narrative Theory, Malden: Blackwell, 167–180. Ryan, Marie-Laure 1991 Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, Indiana: Bloomington UP. 2004 Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln & London: Nebraska UP. 2006 Avatars of Story, Minneapolis: Minnesota UP.

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Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio 2002–2004 Idioma, Clima, Crono, 9 volumes, Cesena: Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. Wolf, Werner 2003 “Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and its Applicability to the Visual Arts”, Word and Image 19.3, 180–197. 2004 “Cross the Border—Close that Gap: Towards an Intermedial Narratology”, EJES: European Journal for English Studies 8.1, 81– 103.

NORA BERNING (Gießen)

Narrative Journalism from a Transdisciplinary Perspective: A Narratological Analysis of Award-Winning Literary Reportages “Journalists do not write articles. Journalists write stories.” (Allan Bell) If we take Allan Bell’s statement at face value, we might just as well say that there is no such thing as journalism without storytelling. As a form of communication that is as old as mankind itself, the art of storytelling takes various forms in narrative journalism. Journalistic reportages that rely heavily on storytelling techniques and, as a result, burst with narrative energy are particularly well-suited for giving people a schema for making sense of the world (Brooks 1985; Bruner 1987). They help develop our understanding of world affairs through narrative so to speak. Reporters set out for unfamiliar territories and distant parts of the world as eyewitnesses to history and detectives of the unknown. They recount the drama of life and the comédie humaine, tell stories of hope and despair, creation and destruction, fanatic conviction and cold calculation, of the hardship and the beauty of life. Their passion is reality. (Lettre Ulysses Award)

Except for a few interdisciplinary studies, the narratological analysis of literary reportages published in newspapers and magazines continues to be an underrepresented topic in extant research. For the purpose of this study, I define literary reportages as both a subjective and hybrid text type whose purpose is to inform, educate, and entertain. Surprisingly few studies that deal with lengthy literary reportages exist, indicating that this is an area that needs to be more rigorously theorized and conceptualized (Nünning/ Nünning 2002). This study seeks to give insight into heretofore intangible issues and a more nuanced understanding of the narrative potential of literary reportages. Storytelling and the use of narrative strategies are fundamental means by which journalists give meaning to their reportages. But what exactly do scholars mean when they speak of the narrative dimension of literary reportages? I will address this issue with the help of the following research questions (RQs):

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RQ 1: Which categories of narratological analysis (e.g. voice, mood, temporal order, narrative space, characterization) are applicable to and figure most prominently in selected literary reportages? RQ 2: Which categories are constitutive of and employed predominantly in different types of literary reportages (e.g. Event reportages, Milieu reportages, Portraits, Participant reportages)? By examining these issues the study aims to add on narrative theory and to close a gap in extant transgeneric narratological research by combining feature analysis which “stresses the exact description of the individual narrative elements in their respective particularity” (Stanzel 1984: 54) with systematic narrative theory which “attempts to clarify the correspondences and connections between the separate narrative phenomena” (ibid.). In this context, the applicability to and predominance of narratological categories in literary reportages as well as the predominance of analytical categories in different types of literary reportages will be tested. Literature Review The recent “explosion of activity in the field of narrative studies” (Herman 1999: 1) lets Kreiswirth (1995), Isernhagen (1999), and Richardson (2000) inter alia speak of a “narrative turn” in the Human Sciences, and of a renaissance of narratological analysis. Current trends in narratology are instigated by endeavors into transgeneric, intermedia, and interdisciplinary approaches to narrative (Ryan 2004). This novel line of research is known for examining narrative elements—or in the words of Prince (2008: 19) “narrativehood”—across genre and media (Currie 1998). Nünning and Nünning (2002) argue that narrativity is not constrained to literary fiction but instead can be found in both fictional and non-fictional genres, including semi-literary journalistic texts. A consequence of this transformation in narratology is that theories and models, which derived from a focus on literary fiction, need to be scrutinized as to whether they apply to other genres and text types as well. According to Rimmon-Kenan, who prefigured the trend towards transgeneric narratology already in the 1980s, […] awareness of the presence of narrative and fictional elements in supposedly non-narrative and non-fictional texts need not cancel the differentia specifica of narrative fiction. On the contrary, with this new awareness it is possible to reexamine each type of narrative separately and discover new differences within the similarities. (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 131, italics in the original)

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In other words, if the conceptual apparatus is sufficiently adapted, this new line of research can possibly prove to be beneficial to both media and literary studies. However, the proliferation of transgeneric and interdisciplinary narratologies has thus far been hampered by the fragmentation of insights and methods (Bortolussi/Dixon 2003). The “move toward integration and synthesis” (Herman 1999: 16) is sparse, even though the late Genette (1993) and Dietrich Weber (1998), amongst others, explicitly state that non-fictional narratives should be included in narrative theory. The fact that the flow of research findings across the disciplines is anything but satisfactory is quite remarkable, especially considering the increasing “narrativisation” in the field of print journalism (Fulton 2005). Literary reportages illustrate the continuity between information and narrative models of print media (Konstenzer 2009). Theoretically speaking, literary reportages can cover the whole range of topics usually depicted in conventional journalistic reportages. They perpetuate, on the one hand, the tradition of the travelogue by representing experiences and, on the other hand, the reporter acts as a substitute eye-witness by documenting happenings, that is, by representing events (Haller 2006). These infinite capacities regarding the content require, however, that reporters overcome social, institutional, and spatial distance barriers so that readers can partake in the events recounted. According to Haller (119), four distinct types of reportages exist: 1. Ereignis-Reportage (Event reportage) 2. Milieu-Reportage (Milieu reportage) 3. Personen-Reportage (Portrait) 4. Selbsterfahrungs-Reportage (Participant reportage) Following Haller, Event reportages are characterized by a definite beginning and ending. The event-driven character of the reportage is constitutive of the text’s macrostructure. Put differently, the reportage’s temporal framework is determined by the event it describes. Generally speaking, the bigger the personality involved in the event, the greater its news value. However, if the reportage describes ordinary events and is thus less promising in terms of suspense, it is more demanding with regards to linguistic style. The thematic focus of Milieu reportages is on social spaces and spatial distances (Haller 2006). This type of reportage helps to convey an impression of more or less remote places to the reader. Milieu reportages can have either a descriptive or a problematizing function. In practice, the boundaries between the two types are often blurred, though. In Portraits, the subject matter is either a person who is in the public eye or an ordinary person (Haller 2006). In order to create an authentic

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picture of the person being portrayed, he/she is ideally depicted from different perspectives. Participant reportages, on the contrary, give the reporter the opportunity to abandon his/her role as a mere observer. Rather, the reporter takes part in the events and interacts with his/her subjects (ibid.). The reporter either operates in the shadows which means that he/she discloses his/her identity only at a later stage in the research (if at all), or the reporter engages with his/her subjects in a kind of role play. The theorization of reportages reveals that this seemingly journalistic genre tends to subvert the borderline between literary and journalistic texts. References to the world in literary reportages are as much aesthetically mediated as in literary fiction (Brendel/Grobe 1976). According to Fulton (2005), narrative strategies are omnipresent in many news stories. Amongst the narrative strategies available to journalists are focalization, temporal order, angle, and point of closure. Fulton argues that one of the main strategies to construct journalistic “objectivity” is external focalization. External focalization precludes overt commentary on events and inside views. The journalist as focalizor acts as if he/she were an ignorant and uninvolved observer. Although comments can be transferred via other characters that act as focalizors, Fulton (2005: 239) notes that “[e]ven the internal narrators who make evaluations, do not presume to have privileged knowledge of what the other characters … might be thinking or feeling”. With regards to the chronology of events in the discourse of news reporting, Fulton holds that journalists mainly resort to a disordered chronological structure so as to put emphasis on the immediacy of the events and to make it look like “news as it happens” (2005: 240). The disjointed chronological structure along with the scarcity of follow-up stories lets news oftentimes appear as disconnected and devoid of context. While Fulton claims that such narrative codes like zero focalization erode journalistic ideals of objectivity, Geisler (1982) reckons that the type of focalization being employed is only of ancillary relevance. Rather, it is a question of whether a certain perspective is readily identifiable for the reader and not disguised through other stylistic devices. Geisler argues that writers of literary reportages usually make sure that a distinct narrator voice is perceptible. If one were to apply Franz K. Stanzel’s categories to literary reportages, the reportage would have to be regarded as a hybrid text type inasmuch as it conjoins authorial and first-person narration. In her 2009 monograph on literary reportages, Konstenzer argues that as long as reporters do not neglect journalism’s claim to truthfulness, narrative strategies can be exploited ad infinitum. Moreover, Konstenzer advances the idea that certain narratological categories (e. g. zero focalization, achronological order, etc.) represent quality features of literary reportages. Since Fulton,

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Geisler, as well as Konstenzer work with both Franz K. Stanzel’s (1971) and Gérard Genette’s (1980) categories, it can be inferred that these narratological codes are applicable to literary reportages. However, none of the aforementioned authors test their suppositions by means of a systematic analysis. To my knowledge, only two substantive analytical contributions have thus far been made to the field of transgeneric narratological research. Mattern’s 2008 narratological analysis is based on a qualitative content analysis of German narrative journalism and, in the same year, Müller undertook a discourse analysis of U.S.-American literary journalism. While Müller is primarily interested in the narrative situation and characterization analysis, Mattern’s content analysis involves such narratological categories as voice, mood, temporal order, and narrative space. The study of the former yields the result that American literary journalists prefer heterodiegetic over homodiegetic narration. Heterodiegetic narrators are employed predominantly in combination with zero focalization. Although zero focalization is the type of focalization that is prevalent in the articles, internal focalization occurs as well, albeit only in short text passages (Müller 2008). Regarding the protagonists, Müller finds that in the majority of the reportages, characters enter into lengthy dialogues with each other. This makes a multilayered and three-dimensional representation of characters possible since the protagonists characterize themselves (i. e. auto-characterization), while characters at the same time attribute character traits to one another (i. e. figural characterization) (ibid.). Mattern’s study demonstrates that in contrast to the examples of American narrative journalism, homodiegetic narration is used more often in German literary reportages. In combination with internal focalization, homodiegetic narration creates an effect that Ronald Weber (1974: 16) circumscribes as “inside-the-skin reporting”. Whereas external focalization is virtually absent in the reportages, zero focalization looms large in texts with both homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators. Interestingly, Mattern’s findings confirm Konstenzer’s (2009) claim that a nonlinear, achronological order is employed predominantly in literary reportages. Although Müller and Mattern identify topical foci in terms of the texts’ macrostructure, neither of the two scholars arrive at an integration of thematic and narratological categories. Put differently, they both fail to examine correlations and narrative deep structures (i. e. narrative structures that are used repetitively). A holistic analysis of literary reportages, however, calls for a combination of feature analysis and systematic narrative theory. Transgeneric narratology, as executed below, requires cross-tabulation of narratological and thematic codes and is thus best suited to account for narrative deep structures and minimal criteria for defining literary reportages.

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Methodology In December 2009, Cordt Schnibben, Stephan Lebert, and Ariel Hauptmeier—three supporters of German quality journalism—created an online platform called “Reporterforum.” As part of their project, each year a journalism prize is awarded to outstanding reporters. The twenty-five literary reportages shortlisted for the award (“Deutscher Reporterpreis”) in the category “Beste Reportage 2009” form the basis of this interdisciplinary study. Methodologically speaking, the study is informed by qualitative research methods. Having conducted a qualitative content analysis, I situate my own research within the tradition of what Mayring (2000: n.p.) describes as a “methodological controlled analysis of texts within their context of communication”. Within this framework, narrativity is operationalized with the help of a number of narratological codes. This rule-guided, systematic, text-immanent approach is very much in line with structuralist narratology wherefrom the codes for analysis are derived (Lamnek 1988). As regards the applicability and predominance of narratological categories (RQ 1), I make use of narratological feature analysis. This approach has many resemblances with descriptive methods, because it involves tabulations of categories by case, engaging no more than one analytical variable at a time. Concerning the predominance of narratological categories in particular types of literary reportages (RQ 2), I build on systematic narrative theory. This makes a cross-tabulation, which shows how two variables interact, necessary. Such a systematic approach allows one not only to discern correlations between narratological and thematic dimensions of literary reportages, but it also enables the researcher to divide the sample into prototypes, extreme types, and transitional types. Note that this categorization of literary reportages is not generalizable beyond the selected sample. Hence, all findings will have to be discussed with a view to the corpus in question. The categories under study are chosen on grounds of their relevance in narratological research, and because they figure in previous studies which increases the comparability of the results. In his groundbreaking study Narrative Discourse (1980), Genette argues that voice, mood, and temporal order are core narratological categories. According to Ralf Hoppe (n.d.), a distinguished journalist, these categories are also central components of literary reportages. Moreover, Hoppe argues that narrative space and characterization have to be studied in tandem if one wants to grasp the narrative potential of reportages. Accordingly, I chose to investigate the following five categories: voice, mood, temporal order, narrative space, and characterization.

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Except for mood, each narratological category consists of a pair of opposites, so-called binary oppositions. The binary opposition is…a particularly congenial system of classification for a narrative theory based on the fact that concrete narrative texts exhibit an immense profusion of modifications and modulations of certain basic forms. (Stanzel 1984: 51)

On the basis of previous studies and theoretical reflections, the RQs can be formulated as falsifiable hypotheses (H). Generally speaking, it is assumed that all of the above-mentioned categories are applicable to literary reportages. More specifically, I suppose that a combination of zero focalization and heterodiegetic narration is predominant in the shortlisted reportages (H 1). Furthermore, I hypothesize that achronological (i. e. nonlinear) storytelling can be found most often in the literary reportages under study (H 2). Moreover, using Hoffmann’s (1978: 80) terminology as regards narrative space, I assume that space is presented as an “acting place”, i. e. as a so-called “thematized space” (H 3). Finally, since previous studies have shown that the identity of the characterizing subject usually lies with a character, I suppose that figural characterization is employed predominantly in the reportages of the sample (H 4). The hypotheses concerning RQ 2 arise solely out of theoretical reflections since analytical studies regarding correlations between narratological and thematic categories are inexistent to date. The thematic categories that are central to this study were taken over from Michael Haller (2006). Haller points out that in Participant reportages the reporter interacts with his/her subjects in some kind of role play and takes part in the action. Hence, I infer that a homodiegetic narrator is not only employed predominantly in Participant reportages but is in fact a constitutive feature of this type of reportage (H 5). Event reportages tend to have a definite beginning and ending, and the temporal order follows the overall course of events (ibid.). Consequently, it is assumed that a chronological order, according to which individual events cannot be shifted around without distorting the meaning of the story, is the predominant feature and constitutive of Event reportages (H 6). The Milieu reportage is a form of reportage that focuses on the representation of spatial distances and the protagonists’ social environment. It is therefore highly probable that Milieu reportages are characterized by a thematized space (H 7). Lastly, since Portraits have the function to present people from different perspectives, I assume that figural characterization, as opposed to narratorial characterization, is constitutive of, and prevalent in, this type of reportage (H 8).

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Results The deep structural analysis reveals that literary reportages are informed by a dialectical relationship between structure/form and content. Even though this relationship is articulated differently in different reportages, a number of prototypical structures can be identified in the sample. The analysis shows that the stories are based on a restricted number of narrative deep structures that form the spine of the reportages. These narrative deep structures that function as patterns of meaning construction enable reporters to give unity and coherence to their texts. In what follows, I shed light on those narratological categories that figure most prominently in selected literary reportages and elucidate the combinatory principles that are quantitatively significant in the different types of reportages. Literary reportages that are characterized by a certain combination of features are referred to as prototypical examples, whereas reportages that combine elements of prototypical reportages are called transitional types. In total, there are seventeen prototypes: three Event reportages, two Milieu reportages and twelve Portraits. Among the remaining eight transitional types, one finds five reportages that combine features of Portraits and Milieu reportages and three reportages that are hybrids of Event and Milieu reportages. In the sample, different configurations concerning the narrator’s (i. e. reporter’s) relationship to the story are articulated. Both examples where the journalist is absent from the story and where he/she acquires the status of a heterodiegetic narrator as well as cases where the reporter is present as a character in the story and assumes the role of a homodiegetic narrator can be found in the corpus. The majority of the stories are told by a heterodiegetic narrator, though. In many texts, the narrative situation is made transparent right from the beginning. Especially in those reportages where the journalist reconstructs events that he/she is not an eyewitness and thus has no firsthand knowledge of, the reporter inserts information on his/her research. Secondary sources and inter-textual devices not only have a legitimizing function inasmuch as they function as stylistic devices that underline the accuracy of the information conveyed, but also help to minimize the narratorial distance, that is, the distance between the narrator and the subjects of the story. Consequently, a sense of immediacy and subjectivity can be obtained. In the entire sample, there are only two reportages in which events are narrated with the help of a homodiegetic narrator. In these texts, the reporter acts as an “experiencing I”—as opposed to a “narrating I” (Genette 1980: 252)—that tells the events as they happen. Josef Seitz’s socio-critical literary reportage (“Die Würde des Menschen wird tastbar”)

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about elderly care and the bleak living conditions in German nursing homes is a particularly compelling example of immersion reporting. Rather than reporting events through the eyes of the nursing home residents, Seitz’s voice is foregrounded in the story. The reporter’s personal impressions mirror the anxieties and insecurities of the elderly, their hope and despair. Homodiegetic narration as one finds it in Seitz’s literary reportage gives journalists the opportunity to blur the line between public and private self. Moreover, the use of the “experiencing I” is conducive to the reader’s identification with the story. However, in most of the reportages under study, retrospective narration in which the narrator adopts a perspective on the events that is more distanced than that of a homodiegetic narrator is predominant. Whereas homodiegetic narration contributes to a more affective reading of the story, retrospective narration in which events from the past are narrated from the view-point of a detached observer helps stimulate critical reflection. In the sample, many examples of zero focalization, i. e. a type of narration in which events are told from an unrestricted view-point, can be found. For instance, in Sabine Rückert’s award-winning reportage (“Todfreunde”) zero focalization, together with a heterodiegetic narrator, allow for narrative omniscience. In Rückert’s texts, the narrator’s knowledge exceeds that of the characters. In other words, the narrator says more than any of the characters can know and he/she can guess the characters’ thoughts and feelings. Since this narrative situation is characteristic of most reportages of the sample, H 1 is confirmed. In “Todfreunde” which describes the deep friendship between a police officer and an ex-convict, the narrator enters the characters’ minds and verbalizes the protagonists’ feelings, focusing specifically on the subjects’ subconscious. The content analysis reveals that whenever the narrator is not a character in the story (i. e. heterodiegetic narration), he/she can exercise more control over the flow of the narrative. Although the temporal framework of a literary reportage is considered to be independent of the narrative situation, heterodiegetic narration in combination with zero focalization seems to give reporters more leeway to break up the chronology of narrated events. While most of the reportages under study are characterized by a nonlinear (i. e. achronological) order, in those two reportages where a homodiegetic narrator is the teller of the story, events are narrated in a chronological order. Overall speaking, H 2 is proven correct; yet, there are marked differences as regards the anachronies that reporters make use of in their stories. Whereas prolepses (i. e. anachronies that reach into the future) are virtually inexistent in the corpus, anachronies that reach far back in time are especially popular with reporters. Depending on the reach of the analepsis (i. e. the distance back-ward in time) and its extent (i. e. the duration of

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the temporal sequence), the temporal framework of the reportage varies from highly complex to less intricate. It could be argued that since the reportage’s temporal framework is determined by the relation between the sequencing of events in the story and their arrangement in the discourse, the more out of sync the two orderings of story and discourse are, the more complex the temporal order of the story is. Whereas Seitz’s “inside-the-skin reporting” covers only a period of one day which is presented in strictly chronological fashion, Jana Simon’s shortlisted reportage (“Die Jungs aus Zelle 221”) is characterized by a disjointed temporal framework. The reportage is a “slice of life” in the lives of three young prison inmates who each spend a period of their lives in the same prison cell. The incarceration dates of the teenagers serve as temporal markers to orient the reader. In Simon’s reportage, the temporal framework serves as a structuring device. In contrast to Seitz’s reportage which is characterized by a certain unity of time, place, and action, anachronies in “Die Jungs aus Zelle 221” have a reach of eleven years and an extent of three years. In fact, a disjointed temporal framework seems to be a quality marker of literary reportages given that Rückert’s awardwinning text is likewise informed by an intricate temporal structure. The notion of narrative space in literary reportages refers to the environment that locates objects and characters (Chatman 1978). As one of journalism’s five W’s, space is said to be an indispensable element of any reportage. Oftentimes, narrative space is said to have a cohesive function (Wenz 1997). However, the mechanisms by which it operates vary considerably from one story to another. The reportages of the sample show that reporters create and attach value to narrative space differently. Mostly, space functions as a frame, that is, as a kind of stable setting. The description of narrative space is relegated to the background; put differently, space does not become an object of presentation itself. Consequently, the spatial arrangement of objects and characters is left almost completely to the readers’ imagination. H 3 is not correct, because instead of assigning the status of an “acting place” to narrative space, most reporters content themselves with frame spaces. Although it could be argued that reporters tend to attach more value to time than to narrative space given that the temporal framework is usually very carefully constructed, it would be wrong to assume that frame spaces are devoid of meaning or purpose. The content analysis shows that frame spaces gain meaning through their combination with other narratological categories or by the simple fact that they fulfill an allegorical role. For instance, the macrostructure of Anne-Kathrin Schneider et al.’s story “Die Bewährungsprobe” which is part memoir, part reportage is characterized by the fact that narrative space is intrinsically bound up with collective memory. The story—written

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in external focalization—throws light on the 2009 gun rampage in the southern German city of Winnenden. Narrative space in this literary reportage has a cohesive function, even though Winnenden functions more as a “place of memory” than as an “acting place.” Precisely because in this reportage space is discursively constructed as a result of which a concrete place evolves into an imagined space of national memory, it could be argued that frame spaces contribute significantly to the perspectivization of literary reportages—albeit in a different, that is, more subtle way than socalled thematized spaces. Whereas news stories written in the inverted pyramid style usually contain information about a person’s name, age, gender, and profession at most, the reportages under investigation offer comprehensive personality profiles to the readers. Given that the reportages are quite long compared to ordinary news stories, reporters tend to make use of a wide repertoire of characterization techniques. The content analysis reveals that figural characterization (i. e. a stylistic device where the identity of the characterizing subject does not lie with the narrator but with another character in the story) is a particularly congenial method for creating multilayered narratives. Figural characterization is more often used than narratorial characterization in the reportages shortlisted for the 2009 award. Since in all of the reportages under study at least one character is involved in the characterization process at any time, H 4 is proven correct. There are also cases in which reporters make use of multiple focalizors so as to let the reader experience the emotional reality of the events as intensively as possible. This is the case for instance in Anita Blasberg’s reportage (“Ein Hass, größer als aller Schmerz”) where not the narrator but the protagonists, Um Ayat and Avigail, are responsible for ascribing character traits to one another. In the course of the reportage, the two women who represent the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians enter into lengthy dialogues with one another, reflecting what seem to be irreconcilable differences. The subjects act as foil characters which facilitates a protagonist-antagonist structuring of the reportage and results in a specific kind of multiperspectival narration. In contrast to narratorial characterization, figural characterization has the advantage that it combines what narratologists label altero-characterization with auto-characterization, because whenever the characterizing subject explicitly characterizes another character in the story, he/she also implicitly characterizes him- or herself. The cross-tabulation of thematic and narratological categories reveals that certain narratological codes are not only employed considerably more often than others but, more importantly, constitutive of specific types of reportages. For example, the constitutive feature of the two Participant reportages is homodiegetic narration. Therefore, H 5 is confirmed, as well.

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Another result of the cross-tabulation is that there is no a priori difference between Participant reportages and other types of reportages concerning temporal order, narrative space, and characterization. Hence, the Participant reportages of the sample can be classified as transitional types that take on the form of a hybrid of Event and Milieu reportages. Furthermore, all those reportages that classify as Event reportages have as their distinctive feature a chronological order, whereas a thematized space is the idiosyncratic feature of Milieu reportages. Consequently, H 6 and H 7 are proven correct. Moreover, a strong correlation exists between figural characterization and Portraits. Since figural characterization is employed exclusively in this type of reportage, H 8 is likewise confirmed. The typological circle based on the results of the empirical study visualizes the combinatory principles as regards both prototypes and transitional types of literary reportages (Fig. 1). For example, most Event reportages (E) are characterized by the following category combination: chronological order, frame space, and narratorial characterization. Holger Witzel’s shortlisted reportage (“Endstation”) is a prototypical Event reportage. The dramatic arc of the text is anchored in the strictly chronological framework of the story. The story’s beginning coincides with the debut of “Body Worlds 5” in the German town of Heidelberg on 10 January 2009, i. e. the opening date of the travelling exhibition of preserved human bodies. In contrast to Blasberg’s reportage which is part Portrait, part Milieu reportage and thus can be classified as a transitional type, the main characters in Witzel’s reportage take shape through narratorial characterization, while the description of narrative space, i. e. the exhibition room and its surroundings, is relegated completely to the background. The predominant category combination with regards to Portraits (P) is achronological order, frame space, and figural characterization. Dirk Kurbjuweit’s literary reportage entitled “Der Schattenmann” about Philipp Mißfelder, a German Christian Democratic Union politician, relies heavily on figural characterization. The entire macrostructure of the text is determined by this characterization technique with the help of which Kurbjuweit creates a sophisticated personality profile of Mißfelder. As the chairman of the “Junge Union,” the youth organization of the CDU, the controversial German politician Mißfelder represents a certain type of politician, that is, the power-hungry, career-minded type who, for some people, represents one of the up-and-coming-talents in the wings of German politics. What is striking about most of the prototypical Portraits of the corpus is that they are characterized by an ironic undertone which has a distancing effect on the reader. The Portraits are anything but hymns of praise; rather, the reporter’s intention seems to be that of critical reflection on the part of the reader.

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Finally, Milieu reportages (M) are typically marked by an achronological order, thematized space, and narratorial characterization. In the entire sample, there are only two reportages that can be classified as prototypical Milieu reportages. Ullrich Fichtner’s reportage entitled “Die letzte Schlacht” about the political situation in Afghanistan five months prior to the 2009 Afghan presidential election and Andreas Molitor’s story (“Tyrones Traum”) about Tyrone O’Sullivan, a retired British miner, which retraces the collapse of socialism as a result of Margaret Thatcher’s determination to bring down the British welfare state. The protagonists of these two stories come alive exclusively through the remarks and the comments of the narrator. The configuration of narrative space and the representation of spatial coordinates are central to both stories. Narrative space refers in these reportages simultaneously to socio-historical, cultural, and political spaces. Interestingly, both Milieu reportages are characterized by a problematizing rather than a descriptive function, although it could be argued that Fichtner is even more explicit when it comes to depicting the many problems and challenges that the people living in the war-torn Wardak province have to deal with on a daily basis. Narrative space plays a significant role in “Die letzte Schlacht” since Fichtner uses it as a means to advance his critique of U.S. foreign policy. His reportage can be read as an effective and innovative form of conflict reporting that does not shy away from using narratological categories extensively in the text. Since the aforementioned category combinations are the ones that are quantitatively significant in the reportages of the sample, texts that display these features are referred to as prototypes (see areas I, III, and V). All those reportages that do not display any of these combinatory principles but rather combine elements of the three prototypes are called transitional types (see areas II, IV, and VI). On the basis of the empirical analysis, it becomes possible to supplement Haller’s original classification of literary reportages by so-called narratological minimal criteria which refer to the constitutive elements of prototypical reportages. According to Haller’s definitions, Event reportages (E) focus on the representation of socially significant events. Against the background of the textual analysis, the specific feature of the Event reportage is its chronological order which can be added as a minimal criterion to Haller’s initial definition. Moreover, following Haller, Milieu reportages (M) center on the representation of a social environment and focus on spatial coordinates. Generally speaking, this narrative structure is realized with the help of an “acting place,” that is, a so-called thematized space. Portraits (P) concentrate on the representation of either public figures or ordinary people, characterized primarily by other characters in the story. Consequently, figural characterization serves as a minimal criterion for defining Portraits, just as a homodiegetic narrator is one of the “differentia specifica” of Participant reportages.

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Figure 1: The typological circle

Conclusions The textual analysis of selected literary reportages exemplifies that core categories of narratological research are applicable to what are considered to be unadulterated “journalistic” texts. The reportages of the sample can be described, analyzed, and charted with categories that originated in structuralist narratology: voice, mood, temporal order, narrative space, and characterization. What the reportages have in common is that they mirror the journalists’ attempts to not just report but, most notably, to narrate. In the words of Wolfe (1973: 15), it is that “plus” which reinforces the impression that the reporters succeed in bridging the gap between journalism and literature.

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The analysis of a selected corpus of literary reportages illustrates the complex relationship between journalism and literature. The results of the study give new impetus to Fulton’s (2005: 218) claim that the conventional distinction between information and narrative models of journalism needs to be replaced by “a generic distinction between (non-narrative) ‘information’ and (narrative) ‘news’”. Fulton’s call for a reconceptualization implies that journalistic and literary forms of storytelling cannot be neatly separated. Like Fulton, Konstenzer (2009) argues that literary reportages are hybrid text types that need to be placed on a continuum with other forms of narrative writing. The result of this study that categories which influential narratologists like Franz K. Stanzel and Gérard Genette derived from canonical European literary narratives are transferable to other, semi-literary text types such as literary reportages not only opens up a plethora of new trajectories as regards future transgeneric narratological research but, more importantly, allows one to speak of a transgeneric value in terms of the aforementioned analytical categories. Although narratological categories may sporadically occur in what Fulton (2005) refers to as “(non-narrative) information”, literary reportages are in my eyes best suited for writing on the edge, i. e. for pushing the boundaries between fact and fiction. The decisive factor that renders the experimentation with narrative codes possible in the first place is rooted in the text type itself. The subjective character of the reportage allows reporters to experiment with narratological categories and literary devices associated with Tom Wolfe and the like. Like literary fiction, literary reportages can thus be conceived of as a text type whose intention is to inform, educate, and entertain at the same time. Due to the fact that literary reportages are polyfunctional texts, it could be argued that “(narrative) news” (including literary reportages) and literary fiction have overlapping communicative goals. Hence, I conceive of these text types as highly complementary and disagree with both Blöbaum (2003) and Eder (2005) who argue that journalism and literature are informed by diametrically opposed functions and codes. The multifaceted and polyvalent character of the reportages under study clearly contradicts this claim. What unites the reportages of the sample is the gist of what matters in interpretative, in-depth narrative journalism, namely an enlightened analysis of cultural, social, political, and economic reality. Journalists should therefore strive to widen their repertoire of storytelling techniques, “because the better story-tellers they are, the more readers will respond” (Carey 1988: 78). Narrative journalism is then more likely to translate into a perspective on culture, involving engaged readers whose experiences, in dialogic fashion, both derive meaning from the text and give meaning to it

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(Lünenborg 2005). Accordingly, the author of this exploratory study reinforces Chatterjee’s (n.d.: 3) view that literary reportages should be read as […] an open invitation to the readers by the author to imagine mutually in a possible world full of possible characters striving to get to their goals in such a way that constitutes a direct reflection of our own experiences as we might have moved, achieving our goals in a world which vehemently opposes and gives us much less than we truly desire.

Works Cited Primary Sources Blasberg, Anita 2009 “Ein Hass, größer als aller Schmerz”, Zeit-Magazin, 08.01.2009. Fichtner, Ullrich 2009 “Die letzte Schlacht”, Der Spiegel, 16.03.2009. Kurbjuweit, Dirk 2009 “Der Schattenmann”, Der Spiegel, 25.05.2009. Molitor, Andreas 2009 “Tyrones Traum”, brand eins, 30.01.2009. Rückert, Sabine 2009 “Todfreunde”, Die Zeit, 24.09.2009. Schneider, Anne-Kathrin, Pia Eckstein, Regina Munder, and Peter Schwarz 2009 “Die Bewährungsprobe”, Rems-Murr Rundschau, 11.09.2009. Seitz, Josef 2009 “Die Würde des Menschen wird tastbar”, Focus, 30.05.2009. Simon, Jana 2009 “Die Jungs aus Zelle 221”, Die Zeit, 16.04.2009. Witzel, Holger 2009 “Endstation”, Stern, 15.01.2009. Secondary Sources Bell, Allan 2005 “News as Narrative”, in Inderjeet Mani, James Pustejovski, James, and Rob Gaizauskas (eds.), The Language of Time. A Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 397–410. Blöbaum, Bernd 2003 “Literatur und Journalismus. Zur Struktur und zum Verhältnis von zwei Systemen”, in Bernd Blöbaum and Stefan Neuhaus

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(eds.), Literatur und Journalismus. Theorie, Kontexte, Fallstudien, Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 23–52. Bortolussi, Marisa and Peter Dixon 2003 Psychonarratology. Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brendel, Detlef and Bernd E. Grobe 1976 Journalistisches Grundwissen. Darstellung der Formen und Mittel journalistischer Arbeit und Einführung in die Anwendung empirischer Daten in den Massenmedien, München: Verlag Dokumentation. Brooks, Peter 1985 Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Oxford: Clarendon. Bruner, Jerome 1987 “Life as Narrative”, Social Research 54.1, 11–32. Carey, James 1988 Media, Myths, and Narratives. Television and the Press, London: Sage. Chatman, Seymour 1978 Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chatterjee, Payel 2010 Cognitive Narratology, last retrieved 25.04.2010, http://cognobytes.com/int/notes-applied/57-cognitive-literarytheorization/134-cognitive-narratology?format=pdf. Currie, Mark 1998 Postmodern Narrative Theory, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Eder, Gabriele 2005 “Literatur und Journalismus: ein komplexes Beziehungsgeflecht. Schnittmengen und Funktionsunterschiede in einer analysierenden Betrachtung”, Fachjournalismus 20, 22–25. Fulton, Helen 2005 “Print News as Narrative”, in Helen Fulton, Rosemary Huisman, Julian Murphet, and Anne Dunn (eds.), Narrative and Media, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 218–244. Geisler, Michael 1982 Die literarische Reportage in Deutschland: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines operativen Genres, Königstein: Scriptor. Genette, Gérard 1993 Fiction & Diction, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1980 Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, New York: Cornell University Press Haller, Michael 2006 Die Reportage, Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft.

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Herman, David 1999 “Introduction: Narratologies”, in David Herman (ed.), Narratologies. New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1–30. Hoffmann, Gerhard 1978 Raum, Situation, erzählte Wirklichkeit. Poetologische und historische Studien zum englischen und amerikanischen Roman, Stuttgart: Metzler. Hoppe, Ralf 2010 Die Reportage-Dramaturgie, last retrieved 10.05.2010, http://www.reporter-forum.de/index.php?id=167. Isernhagen, Hartwig 1999 “Amerikanische Kontexte des New Historicism. Eine Skizze”, in Jürg Glauser, Annegret Heitmann, and Christiane Küster (eds.), Verhandlungen mit dem New Historicism. Das Kontext-Problem der Literaturwissenschaft, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 173–192. Konstenzer, Caterina 2009 Die literarische Reportage. Über eine hybride Form zwischen Journalismus und Literatur, Innsbruck: Studienverlag. Kreiswirth, Martin 1995 “Tell Me a Story: The Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences”, in Martin Kreiswirth and Thomas Carmichael (eds.), Constructive Criticism. The Human Sciences in the Age of Theory, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 61–87. Lamnek, Siegfried 1988 Qualitative Sozialforschung. Band 1. Methodologie, München: Psychologie Verlags Union. Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage 2010 About the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage, last retrieved 12.02.2010, http://www.lettre-ulysses-award.org/about.html. Lünenborg, Margreth 2005 Journalismus als kultureller Prozess: Zur Bedeutung von Journalismus in der Mediengesellschaft. Ein Entwurf, Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Mattern, Anastasia 2008 “Literatur und Journalismus”, Master’s thesis, Universität Hamburg. Mayring, Philipp 2010 “Qualitative Content Analysis”, Forum: Qualitative Social Research/Sozialforschung 1.2, last retrieved 12.02.2010. http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/ view/1089.

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Müller, Julia 2008 “Narrativer Journalismus in US-amerikanischen Tageszeitungen”, Diploma thesis, Universität Leipzig. Nünning, Ansgar and Vera Nünning 2002 “Produktive Grenzüberschreitungen. Transgenerische, intermediale und interdisziplinäre Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie”, in Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (eds.), Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1– 22. Prince, Gerald 2008 “Narrativehood, Narrativeness, Narrativity, Narratibility”, in John Pier and José Ángel García Landa (eds.), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin: De Gruyter, 19–28. Richardson, Brian 2000 “Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory”, Style 34.2, 168–175. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 1983 Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London: Routledge. Ryan, Marie-Laure 2004 Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Stanzel, Franz 1971 Narrative Situations in the Novel: Tom Jones, Moby Dick, The Ambassadors, Ulysses, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1984 A Theory of Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Dietrich 1998 Erzählliteratur. Schriftwerk, Kunstwerk, Erzählwerk, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Weber, Ronald 1974 The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy, New York: Hastings House. Wenz, Karin 1997 Raum, Raumsprache und Sprachräume, Tübingen: Narr. Wolfe, Tom 1973 The New Journalism, New York: Harper & Row.

MARKUS KUHN (Hamburg)

Web Series between User-Generated Aesthetics and SelfReflexive Narration: On the Diversification of Audiovisual Narration on the Internet Introduction: Web Series as Forms of Narration on the Internet Narrative on the Internet is a broad field of research as there exists a diversity of forms and modes of narration: From novels to everyday storytelling via weblog, from movies to private video clips, from public communication platforms to the micro accounts on Twitter, narrative is almost everywhere on the Net. Some of these forms of narration are mainly based on language, pictures, sounds, or moving images others on a combination thereof; some are mono-modal, others multimodal, some are based on one-channel media, others on multichannel media. Beyond that, narrative on the Internet is part of an even broader field which is subsumed under headings such as “narrative and digital media,” “digital media,” “digital storytelling” (“digitales Erzählen”), or “digital narrative.”1 In the area of digital or new media one can find such different forms of narration or ‘digital genres’ as “hypertexts,” “text-based virtual reality,” “interactive drama,” “computer and video games,” “live Internet image transmission through webcam,” “interactive fiction,”2 digital cinema, narrative video clips on YouTube, films on Blu-ray discs, web TV and, of course, web series. Talking about web series as a form of narration—or even as a narrative genre—is, therefore, like cutting a small piece out of a big cake: ‘Narrative across new or digital media’ is a small part of the field of ‘narrative across media;’ ‘narrative on the Internet’ is an even smaller one. Within that framework, research on ‘audiovisual forms on the Internet’ exclusive_____________ 1

2

See Montfort (2007, “Narrative and Digital Media”); Kuhn (2012a, “Digitales Erzählen?”); see “Part 5: Digital Media” in Ryan (2004a) and Ryan (2004b, “Will New Media Produce New Narratives?”); see Harpold (2008, “Digital Narrative”); Tophinke (2009, “Wirklichkeitserzählungen im Internet”); et al. For the first five categories—or “digital genres”—see Ryan (2004b: 340 ff.) (Ryan uses the term “digital genres”). For “interactive fiction” see Montfort (2007: 177 ff.).

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ly focuses on all kinds of filmic and audiovisual narration on the Net— which is generally based on a combination of moving images, sounds and language. Last but not least, web series are but those forms of audiovisual narration on the Net that are fictional and serial (see my definitions in chapter 3). In order to classify different genres of digital media, Marie-Laure Ryan lists “the following five properties of digital media as the most fundamental” (Ryan 2004b: 338): 1. Reactive and interactive nature. By this I mean the ability of digital media to respond to changing conditions. Reactivity refers to responses to changes in the environment or to nonintentional user actions; interactivity is a response to a deliberate user action. 2. Multiple sensory and semiotic channels, or what we may call “multimedia capabilities,” if we are not afraid of the apparent paradox of talking about multimedia media. 3. Networking capabilities. Digital media connect machines and people across space and bring them together in virtual environments. This opens the possibility of multi-user systems and live (“real-time”) as well as delayed communication. 4. Volatile signs. Computer memory is made of bits whose value can switch back and forth between positive and negative. Unlike books or paintings, digital texts can be refreshed and rewritten, without having to throw away the material support. This property explains the unparalleled fluidity and dynamic nature of digital images. 5. Modularity. Because the computer makes it so easy to reproduce data, digital works tend to be composed of many autonomous objects. These objects can be used in many different contexts and combinations, and undergo various transformations, during the run of the work. (Ryan 2004b: 338; emphasis in original)

Following Ryan’s categories web series in general may be (but do not necessarily have to be) interactive (1); they have multimedia capabilities (2); they use network capabilities (3) and work with more or less volatile signs (4); and they may be more or less composed of many autonomous objects (5). Multimedia capabilities, the use of network capabilities and— sometimes—their interactivity are, however, the main properties of web series (thus: 2, 3, and sometimes 1). In many approaches on digital narrative or narration in new media there is, however, no particular focus on audiovisual forms of narration; they are, if at all, merely discussed on the sidelines.3 In this article I will therefore stress the importance of audiovisual forms of narration on the Internet, picking out three examples of web series which enable me to highlight some interesting developments of audiovisual forms of serial narration. _____________ 3

Cf. Harpold (2008); Montfort (2007); Ryan (2004b); Schuster (2009); Tophinke (2009).

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As one of the first commercial web series created in Germany, Pietshow4 is an interesting hybrid between professional production and what I call user-generated aesthetics. On the one hand, this example—which I will focus on—helps to illustrate a section of the great spectrum of forms of web series we can find today, only a few years after the development of web series started. On the other hand, I will show that patterns of selfreflexivity in film are not limited to ambitious cinema, but can also be found in new audiovisual formats on the Internet. Before discussing this example, I would like to take a short look at the genesis of one of the first and most famous exponents of web series in the context of YouTube, namely lonelygirl15 (chapter 2), and provide a working definition of web series and their proto-typological structure (chapter 3). After analyzing the web series Pietshow (in chapter 4), I will give an outlook on further developments we can expect in the area of professional web series, by reference to Prom Queen, a successful commercial US-format which has been exported to several countries (chapter 5). I conclude with an overview of the wide range of forms of web series and some remarks on further research (chapter 6). Lonelygirl15 or the Genesis of a New Form of Audiovisual Narration on the Internet The development of web series as a new format of audiovisual serial narration on the Internet is inseparably linked to other popular and well-known developments, especially the evolution of Web 2.0. One cannot talk about web series without talking about Web 2.0 and, of course, the rise of YouTube. To show what this means, I start with a famous example: Hi guys. Um, so, this is my first video blog. I’ve been watching for a while and I really like a lot of you guys on here. […] Well, I guess the video blog is about me. My name is Bree. I’m sixteen. Um, I don’t really wanna tell you where I live, because … you could stalk me […].5

In this way, a girl called Bree starts addressing the YouTube audience in a video clip. Despite the seemingly trivial and banal nature of this address, it was the beginning of a great story of success. When 16-year-old Bree, an apparently ordinary US-American girl, started posting video-clips about her everyday life on YouTube, only a few viewers had an idea of how _____________ 4 5

All web series and TV series are italicized. For country of production, producer/director, and release date, see “Film and Media Bibliography” at the end of this article. “First Blog/Dorkiness Prevails” (episode 1); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goXKtd6cPo (accessed: 07/10/11). Titles of YouTube clips are quoted by using double quotes; titles of films, web series, TV series, and Internet companies are italicized.

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successful this series of video-postings would become. Under the meanwhile well-known user-name of lonelygirl15, Bree, a cute girl with big brown eyes, recounts events of her teenage life. In most of the first 33 clips,6 Bree is talking directly into the webcam, sitting in her room, presenting herself, sometimes with a book or a stuffed animal (see Fig. 1). She talks about her parents, about her best friend Daniel, about being homeschooled in summer, and about the strange “religion” of her parents. Her clips very soon became “most viewed” and “most discussed” on YouTube and broke some click- and visitor-records in the year of 2006.7

Figure 1

Slowly, some of the clips Bree posted got more and more complex, for example, in the rare cases when Bree and her friend Daniel went out hiking8 or swimming.9 Particularly in the clip “Swimming!” one can find an advanced cutting-technique and a lot of signs of an outstanding postproduction; the frequency of cuts is, for example, synchronized with the rhythm of the song “Junkie” by “The Jane Doe’s,” which is used as a sound bridge in six short montage sequences that divide the clip into several parts. All in all, the montage sequences appear almost like a professional commercial (see Fig. 2). _____________ 6 7

8 9

For a list of all lonelygirl15-clips of season one see: http://www.lg15.com/lgpedia/index.php?title=List_of_lonelygirl15_videos/Season_1 (accessed: 07/10/11). For the access rates in 2006 see Davis (2006), Burgess/Green (2009b: 27 f.), or Näser (2008: 2): “Ende des Jahres 2006 befanden sich unter den 40 am häufigsten aufgerufenen Videoclips der YouTube-Kategorie ‘People’ allein fünf von Lonelygirl15. Jeder der Videobeiträge war zum damaligen Zeitpunkt annähernd eine Million Mal angesehen worden.” “My Parents… Let Us Go Hiking!!!” (episode 10), http://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=iRO4JP81HPo (accessed: 07/14/11). “Swimming!” (episode 26); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Q_y0HdJ4x8 (accessed: 07/14/11).

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Figure 2

Could this clip be produced by an amateur user? This was one of the questions many users asked in the endless discussions we can find in the commentaries on this and other clips.10 Eventually, around the 10th of September, when Bree posted her 33rd clip “House Arrest,”11 the hoax was exposed: The followers who had trusted Bree, had helped her getting through heavy emotions, who had discussed her everyday problems in the commentaries, found themselves cheated. Journalists had found out that the narration was not factual but fictional, that the series was not authentic but staged. Bree was a fictional character, embodied by the 19-year-old actress Jessica Rose, scripted and staged by the three non-professional ‘filmmakers’ Miles Beckett, Mesh Flinders and Greg Goodfried. The increasing quality of the video clips, many perfect cuts, professional postproduction and post dubbing casted doubt in the community and pro_____________ 10

11

For example: “Allright … NOW I’m convinced this is STAGED! [sic!]” or “THis [sic!] is so fake! It is obviously a Hollywood set […]” For these and other comments on the Clip “Swimming” see: http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=5Q_y0HdJ4x8&page=7 (accessed: 07/04/11). There have been, at the same time, converse comments (like: “sophiegirl1:” “I don’t think this stuff is staged. How could it be? This 2 are too genuine.”), or ambivalent comments (“It doesn’t really matter if the LG15 videos are fake or not, they’re very entertaining and I’ll keep watching them.”) (ibid.). See also: Patalong (2006a). “House Arrest” (episode 33); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtH7DTu-DgI (accessed: 07/14/11).

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voked grassroot and professional journalists to put a critical spotlight on the production and to start investigating the backgrounds.12 The case of lonelygirl15 found its way into all kinds of traditional media. There were articles and reports in many newspapers, on MTV, in the Wired magazine, and in the German Stern and Spiegel magazines, to name only a few.13 This was one reason that made it possible for the producers to continue the series with nearly the same success. They founded EQAL, a company for the production of web series and other forms of digital storytelling.14 They continued the lonelygirl-series—with more action and more suspenseful events, with more violence and more mystery—through three seasons with over 500 episodes, and a lot of spin offs.15 One can say that the viral strategy of the production team has been very successful and a model for others to follow. Lonelygirl15 turned out to be a professional fictional web series, however, without abandoning the forms of videoblog-aesthetics and the communication-pattern of purportedly real communication with the YouTube-community that had been established in the first clips. The series was continued as if the fictional characters were still ambitious amateurs who publish their video footage on YouTube. This is the reason why a lot of stylistic and formal patterns, especially the direct address of the audience via webcam, became typical patterns for serial audiovisual formats in the context of YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet; and why lonelygirl15 can now be considered as one of the prototypes of web series, whose numbers are still increasing. Yet, I have to stress two more points: First, there was not only lonelygirl15, which was developed around the year 2006, but also other semiprofessional and professional products like SamHas7Friends, which had a rather different style and concept. Secondly, lonelygirl15 was not the first web series to be published at all.16 Nevertheless, lonelygirl15 was one of the first that became highly popular within the web community and beyond. _____________ 12

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14 15 16

For the development of the web series lonleygirl15 from the beginning to the revelation see Burgess/Green (2009b: 27 ff.); Kuhn (2011b and 2012b); Näser (2008); Newman (2006); Simanowski (2008: 84–88); et al. There have also been a lot of reports and articles in print and online magazines and newspapers about lonelygirl15 and the revelation of the real background in September 2006 (for some examples see below). Cf. Davis (2006, Wired); Frankel (2007, Variety); Hoffman/Rushfield (2006, Los Angeles Times); Richards (2006, The Times/The Sunday Times); Munker (2006, Stern); Patalong (2006a and 2006b, Spiegel); in September 2006 the revelation has been subject in MTV News; see: http://www.mtv.com/videos/news/108040/why-will-lonelygirl15-last.jhtml#id=1540927 (accessed: 07/22/11). Cf. http://www.eqal.com/ (accessed: 10/20/11). Cf. http://www.lg15.com/ (accessed: 10/20/11). See, for example, the German web series 90sechzig90, Zwischen den Stunden, or Borscht – Einsatz in Neukölln. See Henne/Kuhn (2011) for a bibliography of German web series.

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As the impressively successful story of lonelygirl15 found its way through all kinds of traditional media, web series are nowadays often associated with the phenomena of Web 2.0, user-generated content and video blogs. This is, as we have just seen, an obvious perspective. Today, however, a variety of different patterns of professional, semi-professional and amateur web series exists. Due to commercial interests, among other reasons, web series increasingly make use of conventions and forms that have been established in TV and cinema (see especially chapter 5). But, then again, many current web series, even highly professional products, show that the online media environment and framing has influenced the aesthetics and structures of the series. The affinity of web series to the Web 2.0 affects the formal and thematic structures of web series. In the case of lonelygirl15, I would refer to pseudo-authentic web series in order to distinguish this form from other developments. Pseudo-authentic web series imitate regular video blogging. They pretend to have been produced by normal amateur users. They are published on video-platforms like YouTube where professional, commercial and amateur users meet. Pseudo-authentic web series employ a latently metaleptic pattern: The fictional characters speak to the real audience. The next example has its origins in user-generated aesthetics, too. Like lonelygirl15, the series Pietshow plays with its affiliation to personal video blogs, both as an aesthetic principle and as subject of the plot. But, at the same time, we will discover a lot of differences. Before we come to this example, let me briefly remark on the term ‘web series’ in general. Toward a Working Definition of Web Series and Some Remarks on their Proto-Typological Structures This is not the place to give a clear definition or to critically discuss in detail the term “web series” as it was initially used by producers and marketers, but let me first of all point to one necessary analytical distinction: Web series are series that are produced exclusively for Internet platforms and not for TV. They are produced for viewing on a small screen, for example, a small window embedded on a website or the display of a smart-phone or an iPad. Taking this into consideration, I would suggest the following working definition: Web series are audiovisual forms on the Internet that are serial, fictional, and have the basic structures of a narrative. They are series which are produced exclusively for Internet platforms (and can, therefore, be watched online).

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Pointing to the production-oriented aspect—i.e. the intention of the producers to primarily publish the series online first—, I want to distinguish between web series and television series that are available online. Series that are produced both for online and TV distribution are not included in this definition, nor are series that have been produced for TV and ended up online because they had too little success on TV.17 Within the focus of this definition there are, however, web series that are transmedial paratexts—or rather paramedia—to TV series like Lost: Missing Pieces that complements the transmedial storyworld of Lost, the weblog Ihr Auftrag, Pater Castell to the correspondent ZDF TV series, or Nurse Jeffrey: Bitch Tapes as a complement to House M.D. To make a step from a production-oriented definition toward a prototypical one, we should focus on formal, stylistic, and thematic patterns that can be analyzed with respect to the structures of web series itself. After having analyzed many German and a few Anglophone web series,18 I suggest describing the proto-typical structures as follows. One distinct attribute and—as trivial as it looks at first sight—one of the central characteristics of web series is that the episodes are hardly ever longer than 15 minutes; three to ten minutes is the average. In addition to an Internet platform or a channel on an Internet portal, in which the series is embedded and therefore marked as such and perhaps titled, the web series is often labeled by a digital water mark, a short prefix or a reduced form of front credits known from TV series. If we follow the distinction that is usually made between series and serials in television studies, one can say that there exist both series and serials. Nevertheless, many web series we find on the Internet—that are named “web series” by the producers, users, journalists and critics—are not series but serials, because they feature a lot of story arcs spanning a different range of episodes, from two or three to sixty or seventy episodes maximum. Compared to the average length of the episodes and, of course, due to their minor length, most of the story arcs are relatively long. We can differentiate between micro story _____________ 17 18

It is, however, an interesting approach to look for the relation between web series and TV series and ask, for instance, if web series could be seen as remediation (in the sense of Bolter-/ Grusin 1999) of TV series (see Creeber 2011). Insights, hypotheses, and findings about web series in general, which are presented in this chapter, are based on a corpus of first and foremost German web series (see Henne/Kuhn 2011) and some exemplary US web series. In March 2011 we attempted to compile a preferably complete collection of German web series; all in all, we found 62 examples. Given the fact that we included a few examples which are borderline cases and that there are examples we certainly have not found yet, especially in the field of amateur production, this figure could roughly represent the actual figure of web series in Germany at that time. Lonelygirl15, Prom Queen, SamHas7Friends, Nurse Jeffrey: Bitch Tapes belong to the corpus of Anglophone web series which have been analyzed for this article.

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arcs (spanning two to five episodes), meso story arcs (spanning six to fifteen episodes) and macro story arcs (spanning more than fifteen episodes, sometimes more than one season). We can find cliffhangers at the end of many episodes in a great number of web series. I will, however, use the term web series as a generic term, for both web serials and web series, as it is already established. Due to the minor length of the episodes of a web series, a high density of narrative information must be provided within very short time slots. This makes for a remarkable economy of narrative mediation. One episode contains only a few scenes that usually have a great tellability and/or eventfulness. Other tendencies are—accepting obvious exceptions—a limited number of places of action or settings (cf. Die Hütte), and/or a limited number of characters (cf. Die Snobs; 52 Monologe). As web series are produced for viewing on a small screen—e.g. a small window embedded on a website or the display of a smart-phone or a tablet computer—close shots and close-ups (in particular of characters) are used in an above-average frequency (compared to TV series or motion pictures). The minor quality due to the small screens and the reduced number of pixels promotes the use of digital hand-held and consumer cameras. One can find a couple of series which use the production circumstances as a subject of the series, so that the poor quality of the production becomes the central concept which ideally convinces the recipient that there has been no other way to carry it out. This is the reason why we can find quite a lot of mockumentary web series (cf. Making of Süße Stuten 7; Flusstouristen; Die Essenz des Guten). As web series are often embedded in platforms like YouTube and/or imitate video blogging, the characters of pseudo-authentic web series very often talk frontally into the camera to address the supposed audience directly. In clear-cut fictional web series, then again, intradiegetic use of media and communication devices is standard practice. The characters use cameras, mobiles, chats, video messages, e-mails, short messages, Twitter, Facebook, etc. (very often in: Prom Queen, see chapter 5; or Die Essenz des Guten). Another effect of the link between web series and the Web 2.0 is the youthfulness of the characters. Very often the main characters are between 15 and 30; in most cases, they are not older than 20 years of age. As with television series, one can speak of episodes and seasons of web series. Sometimes the terms webisodes (from web and episode) or mobisodes (from mobile and episode) are used as a synonym for the episodes of a web series, sometimes for web series as a whole (i.e. for the sum of all episodes). Another item, which is used without clear definition, is the term web soaps (even used in cases in which the series is no soap in a narrow sense at all such as Pietshow or They Call Us Candy Girls). Furthermore, one can find terms like online series, Internet series, Net

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series and, in Germany, Handysoap (from Handy for cell phone and soap). Most web series can be watched as a free stream without the possibility for free download. Pietshow: Between User-Generated Aesthetics and Self-Reflexive Narration Produced by Grundy UFA and directed by Manuel Meimberg, the web series Pietshow is one of the first professional web series created in Germany.19 The opening of the first episode starts with a video of a typical student party. It could be assumed that it was filmed with a hand-held camera by one of the party guests. At first sight, nothing special happens: The crowd dances, has some drinks, talks and laughs. Yet, we do not have to wait long until something highly remarkable happens. One of the dancers crashes into the wall to the neighboring flat. He does not get hurt but he leaves a big hole in the wall (see Fig. 3). The dancer is, as we learn later, the main character of the series named Piet.

Figure 3

This accidental event is the starting point of the central plot line. The hole connects the flat of Piet and his friend Nick, who have just arrived in Berlin to study, with Jessie’s and Melanie’s flat, two girls of the same age, who just moved in to study in Berlin as well. As nobody is able to fix the damage— _____________ 19

The web series Pietshow has been broadcast since October 2008 on studiVZ; see http://www.studivz.net/l/pietshow (accessed: 08/25/11; access only for owners of a studiVZ account). Most of the episodes are also available on YouTube; for the first episode see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akxchAf2M4w (accessed: 10/20/11).

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or wants to fix it—the four characters have to come to terms with the new situation. The 15 episodes of the first season present how they get to know each other, how they discuss their hobbies, ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, university, and all the other typical problems that student flat mates may share. It looks like an intimate play: They come together, have their arguments, and get along with each other again. And, of course, this constellation of male and female characters unlocks the potential for romantic plot developments. As typical features of web series, the episodes have a length of about five minutes and a high degree of narrative economy. Let’s turn to the narrative mediation: Is there a special audiovisual narrative situation, which is established at the beginning? Can we speak of a home-made video? At first sight it seems that the party scene at the beginning is produced by using hand-held consumer video cameras. There are many signals that indicate a hand-camera-filming. First of all: the fast and flexible camera movement and the uneasiness of the pictures. The fact that the camera spontaneously follows the events of the party indicates an intradiegetic character behind the camera. Furthermore, there are the dancing characters that interact with the camera. And Piet’s pivotal accident happens in the background, as if the character with the camera caught it only by chance. However, the illusion of a recording character, who is a party guest using his personal DV-camera, is called into question by certain aspects of the editing process. The opening scene, which has a length of about fortytwo seconds, includes nine shots, edited by eight cuts. The editing is subtle and may not be noticed by the spectator, but does not necessarily go unnoticed. The sequence is kept together as a whole by the party music that seems to be playing in the background. This is one of the first aspects that contradict the scene’s authenticity: There are no cuts on the acoustic level at all. The party music could not be diegetic music without having acoustic cuts, which would be the case if the camera were switched on and off several times. This implies that either there has been more than one camera, synchronized by a professional time-code, or there must have been someone who post-produced the material and added non-diegetic music or a distinct soundtrack afterwards. Hence, we have, in this scene, both signals for authenticity and indications of a professional production. In this regard, the scene is typical of the whole Pietshow series. And there is a possible explanation for this contradiction between authenticity and signs of a semi-professional postproduction. Piet, the main character, is a student of film who has a film project running: He is currently producing a documentary of his life in his

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shared flat for the German social network studiVZ.20 The episodes of Pietshow are meant to be the audiovisual material, filmed, post-produced and, of course, published online by Piet. The way in which Pietshow was initially published on studiVZ serves as a strong extratextual marker supporting this illusion.21 Thus, we can explain some of the violations of home video aesthetics by assuming that Piet is the semi-professional producer of the series (the title of the series, ‘Pietshow’, is another argument for this assumption, as it signals that it is his show). Furthermore, this can serve as an explanation why Piet is talking directly to the audience in some of the scenes. Like many users who post on YouTube or run a video blog, similar to lonelygirl15 for example, he overtly interacts with his presumed audience in the social network. Nevertheless, there are other sequences, which cannot be explained in this way. Quite a lot of scenes show some of the characters, especially Piet, when they are recording something with a camera in their hands. As these shots on someone who is filming are similar in style to home video aesthetics, they immediately suggest another person who is recording the scene in turn. In some cases, it could be Nick or one of the girls who is responsible for these takes on Piet with his camera. Why should they not possess a camera or borrow one from Piet, who could, as a film student, very likely own more than one digital camera? It is the normal case in the context of internet-platforms that young people own cameras and that they are able to operate them. But there are also some shots that show all the four characters without anyone in the room who could possibly operate the camera. At this point it is impossible to solve the contradictions even if we do assume a second camera: The frame of the shot is not fixed and stable but rather eventful and in move, so that it could not be a camera on a tripod. There is no character that could operate the second camera. We see Piet with one camera but we do not see what his camera is recording (see Figs. 4 and 5 [graph]).

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See http://www.studivz.net/ (accessed: 10/10/11). StudiVZ is a German social network for students that can be—regarding main features and functions—compared to Facebook. See http://www.studivz. net/l/pietshow (accessed: 08/25/11; access only for owners of a studiVZ account).

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Figures 4–5

There are, furthermore, many other stylistic patterns that disrupt the fiction that Piet produces the whole web series about his shared flat. These stylistic patterns circumvent the illusion of being home-made, indeed, but at the same time they open up a kind of meta-level that could serve as an explanation for the contradictory structure. They all have in common that they point to an instance that is situated beyond the diegetic world. In almost every episode there are cues that point to this meta-level. To pick out just a few: In episode 1 Piet discovers a page of a screenplay which contains a dialogue that actually occurs later on in the same episode (see Fig. 6). In episode 6, one of the characters uses the wrong name when he addresses another, namely the name of the actor who plays the character. In episode 10, you can see a professional microphone boom in a location Piet had filmed a few minutes before without an extra microphone (see Fig. 7). This microphone boom might be—so one could assume—the trace of a professional film team behind the scenes. In episode 14, Piet believes that he has heard a female voice that has just said “Kamera läuft. Achtung. Und bitte”—the German equivalent to “camera rolling, and action.” Nick claims that he heard nothing. In fact, there has been a female voice so that the spectator could have heard it, too. In the season finale, this ambiguous plot line is consistently developed into a final structure which is open enough to allow for a second season to follow. Piet finds a sheet of paper with his final message to his flat mates on it, but he cannot remember having written it. This scene is the climax of a chain of scenes, in which one can find a number of metaleptic indications and signals that lead the spectator to reflect on the fictional state of Piet (who obviously notices and reflects on these details as well). Piet finally climbs onto the roof of his house, saying that it is time for some music; just at that moment the music starts playing the soundtrack. Piet prepares for a final test: Convinced that main characters cannot die, Piet

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Figures 6–10

wants to jump off the roof (see Fig. 8). We do not see if he really tries to do it, because the camera runs out of battery just at the moment he is about to jump. There are quite a few more signs and micro-structures in the first season that are comparable to the few I mentioned. All these

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meta-reflexive signs deal with the character of Piet. He is supposed to be the only one noticing them. The other characters always disagree when Piet says that he has noticed something strange. After all, this means that one can read the story of Pietshow in a different way: as the story of discovering a professional film production behind the diegetic world. Piet—and in a way his flat mates—would be some kind of Truman Burbanks captured in a fictional cosmos that is ruled by people beyond. In the film The Truman Show (Peter Weir, USA 1998) there are, however, two diegetic levels, which are visually presented: the ‘Truman-world’ and the exterior world of the producers. In contrast, Pietshow only implies the framing level. There are no characters established which could be identified as the producers of the series. Consequently, the end of the first season of Pietshow tries to avoid being all too clear on this point so that these plot lines could be revisited and refined in the second season. One can argue that Pietshow features, right from the start, a metaleptic structure in which we have the characters and the diegetic world on the inner level, and a presumed production team on the outer level, leaving some traces of their activity on the inner level. Claiming a two-level structure, one should not forget that the illusion of the production level is, in this case, a fiction created by the text itself. It should not be confused with the real production circumstances. There are similar well-known constellations in literature, theater and cinema, which could be compared to this structure. For example Luigi Pirandellos Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore as a play, Daniel Kehlmanns Rosalie geht sterben as a short story, or the film Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, USA 2006). What makes the Pietshow even more self-reflexive is that, as we have seen, even on the inner level a production of a series is reflected right from the start by the illusion that Piet produces the show by himself. This self-reflexive text-based explanation is getting more and more in conflict with the explanation that there might be a professional production beyond the storyworld of Piet and his flat mates. After all, Pietshow marks a point on a scale of forms of web series that lies between user-generated aesthetics and professional production. There are other web series, which lie between these positions. What is special about Pietshow is that it reflects this structure and the feigned origin in user-generated aesthetics, as shown above, in its main thematic motifs and in its formal structure, including all the metaleptic elements I presented.22 To move a little further on the continuum from amateur to professional production, the web series Prom Queen will be discussed in the following. _____________ 22

For a more detailed analysis of the first episode of Pietshow see Kuhn (2010).

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Prom Queen: Transferring Narrative Conventions and Genre Patterns from Cinema and TV into a New Media Environment Produced by ex-Walt Disney CEO Michal Eisner and the Vuguru Company, Prom Queen23 was marketed professionally, using advertising, sponsoring, fan articles, product placement, etc. For example, it was possible to order the clothes the characters wore in the series—exactly at the moment of viewing them—in an online shop that was just one link away (see Fig. 9). The format, which had its success in the United States in 2007, was sold for a Japanese version, the Tokyo Prom Queen.24 It was also dubbed in German, to run on commercial portals like 3min, where the German version was first broadcast, or Sevenload.25 Prom Queen is an example that proves that it is possible to create a business model around a web series that is commercially feasible although the clips themselves can be watched for free. The first episode (out of 80 episodes in the first season) is a kind of prologue that creates a mysterious story arc which will be solved not until the end of the first season; the second episode (“Teenage Wasteland: The Video Yearbook”) is the one which has pivotal expository functions: Danica Ashby, a British visiting student, takes her camcorder and films all her American schoolmates, asking them questions about the prom (“What is the American obsession with prom?”). The characters she interviews represent the typical constellation of characters in high school films: Lauren Holland, the “class flirt,” Chad Moore, the “professional athlete” (see Fig. 10), Sadie Simmons the political activist (“most likely to save the world”), Brett Barnett, the “class clown,” etc. In about 90 seconds we get—both by their answers and the short text inserts—quite a lot of necessary information about the characters and the roles they will play. The sequence’s editing indicates—e.g. in contrast to lonelygirl15—that not all of the moving images could be the footage filmed by Danica herself: Sequences that could be filmed with her camera are cut together with sequences that show her while she is filming and with short stills that show a kind of ID picture in an annual book of each particular character (see Fig. 10, see above). That is one of the reasons why this episode, like the rest of the episodes of Prom Queen, is not pseudo-authentic (in addition there is a well-balanced continuity editing as well as a challenging visual aesthet_____________ 23 24 25

Prom Queen was published on Myspace, YouTube, Veoh and the PromQueen.tv platform—for all episodes of season one see http://www.promqueen.tv/episodes (accessed: 10/20/11; limited access in several countries). For the first episode of Tokyo Prom Queen see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAJ7 HtqW6G0 (accessed: 10/20/11). See http://de.sevenload.com/sendungen/Prom-Queen (accessed: 10/20/11).

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ics including an exacting mise-en-scène). These features point to an extradiegetic audiovisual instance, that is situated beyond the world of the characters (for a conception/model of instances and levels in film see Kuhn 2009 and 2011a: 72 ff., 81 ff.), or to the process of audiovisual mediation itself—if one does not want to use the concept of narrative instances. Furthermore, the main plot lines are established. First, due to the discussion about the importance of going to the prom, the prom is introduced as one of the essential events of the plot, which is comparable to the central role of the prom in classical high school movies like Pretty in Pink (Howard Deutch, USA 1986), She’s All That (Robert Iscove, USA 1999), 10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Junger, USA 1999), or Not Another Teen Movie (Joel Gallen, USA 2001). Second, by the text message Ben receives on his cell phone at the end of the episode (“U r going 2 kill the prom queen [sic!]”), another mysterious plot line is established, and linked to the prom. There is someone who suggests to know more, or who will possibly influence the events from behind the scenes. Both plot lines are macro story arcs that bridge many episodes and hold them together.26 All these necessary bits of information about characters and plots are provided within the 90 seconds of this episode. This makes for a high degree of information density and a remarkable economy of narrative mediation, which hold true for the whole season (almost every episode of the first season has a length of about 90 seconds). We do not have to be film critics to notice that the production quality of this web series is of a better standard than that of other examples discussed in this article (due to its highly polished aesthetics, its professional continuity editing, its wellcomposed mise-en-scène, etc.). At first sight, this could be irritating, as the characters of Prom Queen use cameras themselves, like the characters in lonelygirl15 or Pietshow. But—and this is one of the differences—there is no illusion that the characters produce the whole clip or series by themselves—the cameras are used intradiegetically, inside the diegetic world. The layers are marked clearly: We can distinguish between what is supposed to be filmed by the intradiegetic camera and what is supposed to be the reality of the diegesis—mediated through an extradiegetic instance. Furthermore, there are no metaleptic elements, or characters talking to a presumed audience in the Internet community.27 _____________ 26

27

The typical ‘high school setting’ that is constitutive for the (sub)genres of high school movies or series is, in this episode, rather set up in the background. It is, however, clearly established within the first ten episodes in which one can see a lot of partial settings of a typical high school like the sport yard, the changing room, the class room or the corridor with the lockers. For a more detailed analysis of Prom Queen see Kuhn (2013).

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Hence, one can state: As part of the development of professionalism in the production of web series, digital cameras and digital communication like video-messages and e-mails are used more often within the diegesis than at the outer level of communication. While formats like lonelygirl15 imitate user-generated content and video-blogging, and play with open forms of communication, an increasing number of other professional formats use conventions of cinema and TV series—both forms of classical narration, and special genre conventions—to narrate in a denser and more conventional way. At the same time, the traces of user-generated content and amateur-media use migrate—in this kind of professional web series—from the outer level to the inner level. Conclusions Lonelygirl15 is, as we have seen, an outstanding example for what I call pseudo-authentic web series: It did not only start with the sensational hoax I described and has become very successful on YouTube. It also served as the starting point for the creation of a big fictional storyworld, the so-called ‘LG15-universe’—developed and expanded by numerous web series of the EQAL company. Furthermore, it has become a prototype for web series that make use of user-generated aesthetics. Even if the famous hoax will probably not be copied for another web series, the forms of imitated video blogging and private use of YouTube are almost conventional patterns of that kind of web series. Prom Queen is, contrary to that, a web series that uses a wide variety of genre and storytelling conventions established in film and TV. It does not even try to imitate video blogging although the characters use many different electronic communication devices inside the storyworld. The web series Pietshow lies, as set out above, somewhere in between these categories of user-generated aesthetics and professional media productions. Produced in cooperation with studiVZ, where it was also published, the series plays with its affiliation to personal video blogs and usergenerated content, both as an aesthetic principle and subject of the plot. Nevertheless, it also features a variety of stylistic patterns and structures that break with the illusion of home video aesthetics. Furthermore, a highly self- and media-reflexive structure is established which reflects on the production of this series and of professional web series in general. Lonelygirl15 is, furthermore, an example of a project of a YouTubeactor that Jean Burgess and Joshua Green would call the “entrepreneurial vlogger” (Burgess/Green 2009a). In their article on the relation between amateur and professional media content, identities and motivations on

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YouTube, they highlight that there is no clear distinction between professional and amateur participants, that there exist a lot of actors that lie between these categories, “that amateur and entrepreneurial uses are not separate, but coexistent and coevolving” (103). “The contributors to the site are diverse—from large media producers and rights-owners such as television stations, sports companies and major advertisers to small-tomedium enterprises looking for cheap distribution […], cultural institutions, artists, activists, media-literate fans, non professional and amateur media producers” (103 f.). Some amateur users with explicit economic objectives dreamed the old dream of rising from rags to riches. Some of them are popular now, with or without having commercial success. Other instances of participation, like university groups, registered associations of actors, public theaters, or private playhouses, successively discover that projects on YouTube or in the Net are in general suitable strategies of cross-media marketing for their shows, plays and products, and therefore, cannot be divided in either amateur or professional but some kind of semi-professional protagonists. As I have shown, there exist highly self-reflexive forms of narrative mediation in the area of web series, and there are many different forms of web series which should be investigated further. There are, however, quite a few formats I could not highlight here. One crucial group would be web series with distinctive interactive structures such as Epicsode or Points of You and some other parts of lonelygirl15 (see Kuhn 2012b: 71 ff.). As web series are embedded in certain online platforms in particular and in the social web in general, nearly every web series is interactive to a certain degree. But there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between these general aspects of almost every web series and this special group of web series which provoke—or in a way force—users to participate by their text- and context-based structures (see Kuhn 2012b: 76 ff.). Another group I did not have the chance to mention comprises web series with strong local references like Moabit Vice (Berlin-Moabit), Sex and Zaziki (Düsseldorf), Prenzlbasher (Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg), SPPD: Die Sau ist tot (Hamburg-St. Pauli). Further on, there is a class of web series which are multimedia paratexts to television shows or part of transmedia storytelling universes like Lost: Missing Pieces or Nurse Jeffrey: Bitch Tapes. Besides this, there are web series with strong intermedial references like—once again—Moabit Vice which can be considered a persiflage on the 80s TV series Miami Vice. As the production of web series is in bloom and has a very young target group with a high affinity to the Net, we can expect even more formats in the next years. This certain target group of web series is of very high interest for commercial media. And as there is an increasing number of technical devices like iPads, smartphones, tablet PCs that are always online, there is

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also a need for new forms of digital and audiovisual narration that are suitable to be consumed more or less exclusively via these kinds of hardware. It is obvious that web series are an interesting field of research for a narrative theory of audiovisual and digital media. A narrative theory of web series should not only be careful of the way it analyses the products and artifacts, but also, as we have seen, of the way it considers the influence of the medial environments into which these products and artifacts are embedded. Works Cited Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin 1999 Remediataion: Understanding New Media, Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Burgess, Jean and Joshua Green 2009a “The Entrepreneurial Vlogger: Participatory Culture Beyond the Professional-Amateur Divide”, in: Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader, Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 89–107. 2009b YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Cambridge and Malden: Polity. Creeber, Glen 2011 “Online-Serien: Intime Begegnungen der dritten Art”, in: Robert Blanchet et al. (eds.), Serielle Formen: Von den frühen Film-Serials zu aktuellen Quality-TV- und Onlineserien, Marburg: Schüren, 377–396. Davis, Joshua 2006 “The Secret World of Lonelygirl. How a 19-year-old actress and a few struggling Web filmmakers took on TV. A Wired exclusive”, Wired 14.12 (Dec. 2006), 232–239.

(20 July 2011). Frankel, Daniel 2007 “LonelyGirl15: Rose embraces viral vixen status”, Variety 4 Oct. 2007. (10 July 2011). Harpold, Terry 2008 “Digital Narrative”, in David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 108–112.

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Henne, Jan and Markus Kuhn 2011 “Die deutsche Webserien-Landschaft: eine Übersicht”, in Jens Eder and Hans Jürgen Wulff (eds.), Medienwissenschaft/Hamburg: Berichte und Papiere 127. (20 July 2011). Hoffman, Claire and Richard Rushfield 2006 “Mystery Fuels Huge Popularity of Web’s Lonelygirl15”, Los Angeles Times 8 Sept. 2006. (10 July 2011). Kuhn, Markus 2009 “Film Narratology: Who Tells? Who Shows? Who Focalizes? Narrative Mediation in Self-Reflexive Fiction Films”, in Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert (eds.), Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 259–278. 2010 “Medienreflexives filmisches Erzählen im Internet: die Webserie Pietshow”, Rabbit Eye – Zeitschrift für Filmforschung 1, 19–40. (20 July 2011). 2011a Filmnarratologie: Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. 2011b “YouTube als Loopingbahn. lonelygirl15 als Phänomen und Symptom der Erfolgsinitiation von YouTube”, in Julia Schumacher and Andreas Stuhlmann (eds.), Videoportale: Broadcast yourself? Versprechen und Enttäuschung, Hamburger Hefte zur Medienkultur 12, 119–136. 2012a “Digitales Erzählen? Zur Funktionalisierung digitaler Effekte im Erzählkino”, in Harro Segeberg (ed.), Film im Zeitalter Neuer Medien II: Digitalität und Kino (Mediengeschichte des Films, vol. 8), Munich and Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 183–221. 2012b “Zwischen Kunst, Kommerz und Lokalkolorit: Der Einfluss der Medienumgebung auf die narrative Struktur von Webserien und Ansätze zu einer Klassifizierung”, in Ansgar Nünning, Jan Rupp, Rebecca Hagelmoser, and Jonas Ivo Meyer (eds.), Narrative Genres im Internet: Theoretische Bezugsrahmen, Mediengattungstypologie und Funktionen, Trier: WVT, 51–92. 2013 “Der Einfluss medialer Rahmungen auf das Spiel mit Genrekonventionen: Die Webserie Prom Queen als Transformation des Highschool-Films im Internet”, in Jennifer Henke et al. (eds.), Hollywood Reloaded. Das Spiel mit Genrekonventionen nach der Jahrtausendwende, Marburg: Schüren, 192–217.

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Montfort, Nick 2007 “Narrative and Digital Media”, in David Herman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 172–186. Munker, Barbara 2006 “Die Enttarnung von Lonelygirl15”, stern.de 14 Sept. 2006. (20 July 2011). Näser, Torsten 2008 “Authentizität 2.0 – Kulturanthropologische Überlegungen zur Suche nach ‘Echtheit’ im Videoportal YouTube”, kommunikation @gesellschaft 9.2.

(20 July 2011). Newman, Michael Z. 2006 “lonelygirl15: The Pleasures and Perils of Participation”, Flow 22 Sept. 2006. (20 July 2011). Patalong, Frank 2006a “Nur falsch ist wirklich echt”, SPIEGEL ONLINE 11 Sept. 2006.

(20 July 2011). 2006b “Der Name der Rose”, SPIEGEL ONLINE 13 Sept. 2006.

(20 July 2011). Richards, Jonathan 2006 “Worldwide fame for a lonely girl”, The Times/The Sunday Times 19 Aug. 2006.

(10 July 2011). Ryan, Marie-Laure 2004a (ed.), Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2004b “Will New Media Produce New Narratives?”, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative across Media. The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 337–359. Schuster, Britt-Marie 2009 “Biographisches Erzählen und digitale Medien”, in Christian Klein (ed.), Handbuch Biographie. Methoden, Traditionen, Theorien, 182–189.

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Simanowski, Roberto 2008 Digitale Medien in der Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultur – Kunst – Utopien, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Tophinke, Doris 2009 “Wirklichkeitserzählungen im Internet”, in Christian Klein and Matías Martínez (eds.), Wirklichkeitserzählungen. Felder, Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens, Stuttgart and Weimar, 245–274. Film and Media Bibliography Web Series 52 Monologe (D 2011, Filmebene, 52monologe.de). 90sechzig90 (D 2000, United Vision/T-Online, 90sechzig90.de). Borscht – Einsatz in Neukölln (D 2001, Safran Films, borscht.de). Epicsode (D 2010, Hochschule Offenburg, epicsode.de). Die Essenz des Guten (D 2011, UFA Lab/Das Kind mit der goldenen Jacke, 3min). Flusstouristen (D 2010, 1AVista Reisen, YouTube). Die Hütte (CH 2010, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Frischfilm). Ihr Auftrag, Pater Castell (D 2008, UFA Film- und Medienproduktion, ZDF.de). lonelygirl15 (USA 2006–2008, EQAL, YouTube). Lost: Missing Pieces (USA 2007–2008, ABC Studios, ABC website [abc.go.com/shows/lost]). Making of Süße Stuten 7 (D 2010, Vice Productions, 3min). Moabit Vice (D 2008, Vice Productions, moabit-vice.de). Nurse Jeffrey: Bitch Tapes (USA 2010, Retrofit Films, Fox website [fox.com/house/inhouse/#type:jeffrey]). Pietshow (D 2008, Grundy UFA, studiVZ). Points of You (D 2011, framelife entertainment, pointsofyou.eu). Prenzlbasher (D 2009, Filter Filmproduktion, Myspace). Prom Queen (USA 2007 and 2010, Vuguru, Myspace). SamHas7Friends (USA 2006, Big Fantastic, YouTube). Sex and Zaziki (D 2008, U-Film Produktions GmbH, YouTube). Die Snobs (D 2010, Ulmen Television/ZDFneo, 3min). SPPD: Die Sau ist tot (D 2009, Studio Seidel, sppd.tv). They Call Us Candy Girls (D 2008, MME Me, Myself & Eye Entertainment, Myspace). Tokyo Prom Queen (J 2008–2009, directed by Futoshi Sato, Mixi). Zwischen den Stunden (D 2000, Grundy UFA, RTL.de).

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TV Series House M.D. (created by David Shore, USA 2004–2012). Ihr Auftrag, Pater Castell (produced by Rainer Jahreis/Norbert Sauer, D 2008 ff.). Lost (created by J.J. Abrams/Jeffrey Lieber/Damon Lindelof, USA 2004– 2010). Miami Vice (created by Anthony Yerkovich, USA 1984–1990). Films 10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Junger, USA 1999). Not Another Teen Movie (Joel Gallen, USA 2001). Pretty in Pink (Howard Deutch, USA 1986). She’s All That (Robert Iscove, USA 1999). Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, USA 2006). The Truman Show (Peter Weir, USA 1998). Table of Figures Fig. 1: Bree presenting herself with ‘purple monkey.’ Screenshot: lonelygirl15, “Purple Monkey,” YouTube, see: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=UysCDoKINoA, 1:04 (accessed: 2011–11–11). Fig. 2: Could this clip be produced by an amateur user? Screenshots: lonelygirl15, “Swimming!,” YouTube, see: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5Q_y0HdJ4x8 (accessed: 2011–11–11). Fig. 3: A hole in the wall as an accidental event. Screenshot: Pietshow, season 1, episode 1, 0:45. Fig. 4: Piet (with his camera), Jessy, Melanie, and Nick (left to right). Screenshot: Pietshow, season 1, episode 5, 3:44. Fig. 5: Who operates the second camera? (own graph). Fig. 6: Page of the screenplay of Pietshow, discovered by Piet. Screenshot: Pietshow, season 1, episode 1, 2:27. Fig. 7: Microphone boom. Screenshot: Pietshow, season 1, episode 10, 5:50. Fig. 8: Will he jump? Last shot of the first season. Screenshot: Pietshow, season 1, episode 15, 5:16. Fig. 9: Prom Queen Online Shop; http://www.cafepress.de/promqueentv (accessed: 2011–11–11). Fig. 10: Chad Moore, “most likely professional athlete.” Screenshot: Prom Queen, season 1, episode 2: “Teenage Wasteland: The Video Yearbook,” 0:28.

FELICITAS MEIFERT-MENHARD (Munich)

Emergent Narrative, Collaborative Storytelling: Toward a Narratological Analysis of Alternate Reality Games Alternate reality games (ARGs) form a relatively new genre of gaming that is based on interactive collaboration and problem solving—they constitute a modern-day, digital version of the scavenger hunt. As collective gaming experiences that deliberately blur the line between virtuality and reality, ARGs are performed both online and within the everyday life of the players. Though alternate reality games have received a good deal of critical attention since their appearance around the turn of the millennium, their potential as multimedial, emergent, and collaborative storytelling engines, which allow the generation of performative and immersive narrative sequences, has hitherto been largely overlooked. This essay works toward a narratological conceptualization of ARGs, suggesting a definition of narrative that allows for processes of selection and (unexpected) feedback, spontaneity, and structural openness—aspects that, in traditional theories of narrative, have been diametrically opposed to what the notion of storytelling embodies. Such a narratological extension proves to be relevant not only for the genre of ARGs, but for all types of interactive, multilinear storytelling mechanisms, which are based on patterns of continuation by choice. Such forms of storytelling include, in the print medium, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre, as well as other bifurcating narrations such as Svend Åge Madsen’s forking-path novel Days With Diam or Life at Night (Dage med Diam eller Livet om natten, 1972); they are, moreover, the central structural mechanism of all digital hypertexts, interactive fiction, and, by extension, video gaming. Due to the relatively young age of the genre and its structural complexity, binding and authoritative definitions of alternate reality gaming are far and few between. Indeed, perhaps the most valuable classification can be found on Wikipedia, which defines the ARG as “an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions” (2011). A second usable definition is provided by one of the principal contemporary ARG designers, Jane McGonigal, who describes this form of gaming as

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an interactive drama played out online and in real world spaces, taking place over several weeks or months, in which dozens, hundreds, thousands of players come together online, form collaborative social networks, and work together to solve a mystery or problem that would be absolutely impossible to solve alone. (2008)

The classification of ARGs as ‘narrative’ in the first definition and ‘drama’ in the second is a clear indication of this new genre’s resistance to definitude; it is especially the position of alternate reality games on the interface between narrative and gameplay which complicates attempts of definition. While most descriptions include some reference to ARGs containing (or even being) narrative, few, if any, provide the narratological terms or concepts to support such references; most often, the gaming aspect is similarly undertheorized. Before evaluating ARGs within the context of the long-standing ‘narratology vs. ludology’ debate implied by the genre’s hybrid status between storytelling and gaming, a closer look at the central mechanisms behind this art form shall provide the necessary backdrop for such an assessment. A general consensus within most definitions of alternate reality gaming is reached regarding the genre’s deliberate blending of fiction and reality, its interactive and collaborative nature, and its use of multimedia, especially the Internet. Alternate reality games paradoxically deny their own status as artificially constructed artefacts, as they are based on the TINAGaesthetic—TINAG standing for ‘This Is Not A Game.’ The game designers—or ‘puppet masters,’ as they are referred to in ARG terminology, strive to grant the players a gaming experience that is as close to and involves as much of their real life as possible, thereby generating a reverse immersive mechanism.1 In contrast to related genres such as Pen-andPaper Role-Play, LARP (Live Action Role-Play), MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), or MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), ARGs do not pose as games, but as part of the players’ reality; consequently, the players do not take the guise of an avatar while playing the game, but integrate the gameplay into their every-day existence, playing the game ‘as themselves.’ “In an alternate reality game,” Szulborski describes the TINAG-philosophy, the goal is not to immerse the player in the artificial world of the game; instead, a successful game immerses the world of the game into the everyday existence and life of the player. […] The ultimate goal is to have the player believe that the events take place and characters of the game exist in his world, not an alternate reality. In a strange but very real way, the ARG creator is trying not to create an

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Immersion is a psychological phenomenon of “being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus” (Murray 1998: 98). This phenomenon can be evoked by all fictional media, increasingly so when the medium is interactive.

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alternate reality, but to change the player's existing world into the alternate reality. (2005: 31)

Players are lured into the game not by overt announcements that a game is about to begin, but by covert and often mysterious clues reaching them via mass media, e-mail, or telephone; such entry points into the game are referred to as ‘rabbit holes’ in ARG-terminology. This kind of double aestheticization, in which not only fiction poses as reality, but reality also poses as fiction, makes ARGs especially interesting for marketing purposes. In fact, many of the early games, such as the 2001 production “The Beast,” “I Love Bees” (2004), or “Year Zero” (2007), were developed as viral marketing campaigns that (indirectly) promoted media products such as films, video games, or music albums.2 In the case of the first large-scale commercial—and widely successful—alternate reality game “The Beast,” which was launched in 2001 as a viral marketing strategy for Steven Spielberg’s film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the rabbit holes took on three different forms. First, advertising posters and trailers for the movie listed the fictional name “Jeanine Salla” as “sentient machine therapist” among their credits; a Google search on this name provided access to several websites, including Salla’s own homepage at the fictional “Bangalore World University,” which is tellingly founded in 2028—a first clue that this is no ordinary homepage (cf. Szulborski 2005: 96). Second, a telephone number appeared in one of the film’s promotional trailers, which, when dialled, generated an e-mail response to the caller containing the sentence “Jeanine is the key.” Third, advertising posters had the message “Evan Chan was murdered. Jeanine is the key” encoded in them. Through all of these rabbit holes, players gained access to the world of the game, which tried to solve the mystery of the death of the fictional character Evan Chan, a family friend of Jeanine Salla. While at the outset, the game took place and evolved only on the Internet, it later moved into the real world of the players, who were eventually able to have phone conversations with in-game characters and participated in rallies in New York, Chicago, and L.A. The ARG “I Love Bees” depended mostly on phone calls directed to public phones, which the players had to answer in order to advance the game—again, real-life experience and game world were almost indistinguishably mixed. The interposition of ARGs between storytelling and gaming almost immediately conjures up echoes of the long-standing debate between narratologists and ludologists about how to classify game structures. The two opposing positions revolve around the question of whether games are

_____________ 2

The promoted items were Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the video game Halo 2 (2004) and the Nine Inch Nails 2007 album Year Zero, respectively.

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a form of narrative, or whether they must be viewed and analyzed as a category separate from narratological convention. While narratologists such as Janet Murray argue that games can indeed be conceptualized and evaluated with the help of narratological tools and models—that games, to put it more simply, are merely another way of telling a story and can “be read as texts that offer interpretations of experience” (Murray 1998: 143)—, ludologists, most prominently among them Espen Aarseth and Marku Eskelinen, position themselves distinctly against using theoretical concepts of narrative in order to assess game structures, which should, according to the ludological perspective, be evaluated on their own terms. Indeed, as Eskelinen famously and somewhat polemically maintains: “If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories” (2001). Aarseth regards the application of naratology to the study of gameplay as a mere compromise: “Narrative theory […] seems to be used because there is nothing better to use, not because it fits particularly well,” and argues that describing games in narrative terms denies their unique status as ludic artefacts: “when games are analyzed as stories, both their difference from stories and their intrinsic qualities become all but impossible to understand” (2004: 362). A more intermediary position is adopted by Marie-Laure Ryan, who concedes that while “games may not be stories, […] they can be machines for generating stories” (2006: 189).3 Pierce has similarly attempted to transcend the dialectic opposition between narratology and ludology by positing that “[t]he more interesting question is not ‘Are they [i.e., games]/are they not narrative?’ but ‘In what ways are they narrative?’” (2005) This, indeed, seems to be a more fruitful enquiry, and one that can also aid in assessing alternate reality games’ status as narrative. Perhaps no other genre better reflects the tensions between these two fields in its hybrid position as “playable fiction” (Gouveia 2009) situated between storytelling and gaming—and, in truth, we need both categories to fully assess the semantic and structural potential of ARGs. ARGs certainly possess a game-like quality, which manifests itself most clearly in their requirement of ‘finishing’ or ‘solving’ the puzzle presented. Such a focus on a teleological process toward a (successful) goal is the central feature of the game type that Roger Callois has identified as

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Murray, too, has recently modified her argument, proposing that “no one has been interested in making the argument that there is no difference between games and stories or that games are merely a subset of stories. Those interested in both games and stories see game elements in stories and story elements in games: interpenetrating sibling categories, neither of which completely subsumes the other. The ludology v narratology argument can never be resolved because one group of people is defining both sides of it. The ‘ludologists’ are debating a phantom of their own creation” (2005).

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agon, or competition.4 However, this again links alternate reality gaming to both storytelling and gaming, as “[t]he most common form of game—the agon, or contest between opponents—is also the earliest form of narrative” (Murray 1998: 145).5 Once more, storytelling and gaming overlap within the ARG form, as the genre’s focus on ‘beating’ the game through the collective agency of the players associates it with both age-old forms of gameplay and narrative strategy. The incentive to reach a certain goal is both intensified and complicated by the fact that the rules of alternate reality gaming are neither known nor clearly fixed at the beginning of the game. Indeed, the genre’s rejection of its game-like quality by way of the TINAG-credo both obscures the game interface and calls attention to its status as a game; similarly, as McGonigal has argued, [p]layers of a dissimulative game must simultaneously believe and disbelieve in its hallmark claim. They must believe ‘this is not a game’ in order to enjoy the immersive pleasures of its realistic aesthetic. They must disbelieve ‘this is not a game’ in order to maintain the ludic mindset that makes realistic murders, apocalyptic science, cyberterrorism, and other dark plots pleasurably playable. (2006: 319)

Thus, gameplay retains an ambivalent status in ARGs, as this genre simultaneously obscures and flaunts its own ludic position. Another aspect of alternate reality gaming which links this genre to modes of performative gaming lies in their simulative nature, where the retrospective presentation of narrative content is suspended in favour of exploring the potentiality of collective play. The difference between narration and simulation has repeatedly been posited as a temporal difference between narrative as “what already happened” and simulation as “what could happen” (Frasca 2001: 86).6 That is, simulation can be regarded as a “productive engine that generates many different courses of events through a combination of fixed and variable parameters” (Ryan 2006: 13), a definition that also perfectly encapsulates the emergent nature of alternate reality gaming (as well as other types of gaming situations) and one that is diametrically opposed to conventional forms of narrative in which

_____________ 4 5

6

Callois further distinguishes between alea (games of chance), mimesis (games of mimicry or role-playing), and ilinx (games of vertigo or altered perception). A similar observation is made by Ryan: “In a computer game, the purpose is clearly to win, and the way to win is to defeat enemies. […] Agon is also a driving force on the thematic level of narrative texts—most, if not all plots involve some sort of competition” (2001: 183). Hayles (2005: 6) points toward the essential opposition of narrative representation and simulation: “There are […] important differences between simulations and literary texts. Whereas computation is essential for simulations that model complex phenomena, literature’s stock-in-trade is narrative, especially in the contemporary period where novels have become the preeminent literary form. […] The dynamic tensions between simulation and narrative thus involve a dialectic between the human lifeworld and the (relatively) inhuman world of massive numerical calculations.”

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events have ‘already happened’ at the time of their presentation. Essentially, the differentiation to be made is that between retrospectivity (narrative) and ‘nowness’ (simulation).7 The simulative mode in alternate reality games once more underlines their status as formally undetermined structures; the ‘future’ of these texts is open to a far more radical degree than is possible in conventional narrative media. When Frasca (2001: 86) postulates that “simulation is dynamic and its essence is change: it produces different outcomes,” this statement can, regarding ARGs, be modified as follows: not only the generation of potentially different, but also indeterminately many outcomes is the result of an alternate reality gaming experience. It is particularly the relatively recent genre of so-called forecasting games which functionalizes this polyvalence of results; these games no longer follow a teleologically oriented route through a determined number of puzzles in order to find a concrete solution, but playfully explore solution strategies for future social, political, and economical problems.8 This is an extreme case of the TINAG-credo, as the denial of the game status creates the impression of dealing with real-life parameters and thus turns this form of alternate reality gaming into simulations of potential future processes. Due to the interactive nature of the genre, alternate reality games are directly influenced by player feedback. This ‘writing back’ links alternate reality games to forms of digital textuality such as interactive fiction or hyperfiction, in which the interaction of the user with the system can cause a change or shift in this system. The bidirectional communicative structure of ARGs allows the player community to directly influence the course of the game. In this sense, these games are a formal and structural intensification of what is already possible in hyperfiction: the actions and reactions of the reader/player can manipulate the textual system and constitute a kind of (co-)authorship regarding the total narrative construct; Szulborski has termed this “interactive authoring” (2005: 60).9 Of course,

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The concept of simulation also echoes Michail Bakhtin’s much broader notion of ‘eventness,’ which he defines as “that moment of Being which is constituted by the transitiveness and open event-ness of Being” (1993: 1). This potentiality of any given moment cannot, according to Bakhtin, be represented in aesthetic artefacts, because “the product of aesthetic activity is not, with respect to its meaning, actual Being in process of becoming” (ibid.). Simulative forms of storytelling such as the ARG seem to contradict this argument, as they are defined by open and spontaneous emergence rather than by finality and closure. This special form of alternate reality gaming will be further examined at a later stage in this paper. McGonigal radicalizes this assessment by postulating: “ARG players literally write the rules of the genre, taking on a kind of co-creator status from the very start of each game” (2006: 366). However, even such highly open structures as alternate reality games are to some degree pre-structured by a creating agent; the term ‘puppet masters’ for ARG designers implies the invisible threads held in the hands of these creative instances.

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this feedback mechanism is functionalized to a significantly higher degree in alternate reality gaming than in hypertext narration; in the former case, it can occasionally even lead to a drastic reconceptualization of the entire game setup. In the case of “The Beast,” for example, the player community solved what the game designers intended to be three months worth of puzzles in a single day. As a result of this, the game had to be radically altered: The shocked game designers had to rethink their entire strategy, and ended up choosing to release new information on a weekly schedule. That way, they could create content and deliver it without trying to keep up with the collective force they had created. The players changed the entire story delivery and timing mechanism of the game, just by being eagerly involved. (Kim et al. 2009)10

The interaction of player and text thus determines and forms the narrative of ARGs in a concrete sense, rendering alternate reality games highly sensitive systems whose designers must constantly respond to the reactions of the players. Regarding the narrative aspects inherent in ARGs, varying forms of storytelling have influenced and shaped alternate reality gaming. Direct and indirect references to existing narratives abound in this genre— indeed, it seems safe to argue that ARGs are strongly based on narrative in two senses. First, these games often use “an existing storyline inherited from the sponsoring media […] as a starting point” (Kim et al. 2009); that is, they constitute a spin-off from the ‘main’ text to be advertised. Through the use of ‘rabbit holes,’ the games function as bifurcations from the original text, emerging as satellite narratives whose roots can be traced back to an already established sequence of events. Second, the genre has several literary predecessors that employ similar mechanisms of bifurcation, interactivity, choice making, and immersion. Szulborski lists branching and non-linear narratives such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), or Marc Saporta’s shuffling loose-leaf novel Composition No. 1 (1961) as influential texts (cf. 2005: 75–76); interactive electronic texts such as the genre of interactive fiction (for example, the renowned interactive fictions Myst or Zork) and the whole genre of hypertext fiction would also have to be included in this category. Furthermore, progression by choice lies at the heart of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre and

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Such player influence on the game structure is often avoided in other forms of collaborative play; Miller (2009: 127) notes the potential difficulties inherent in player feedback with regard to massively multiplayer online games: “In a massively multiplayer online game, we are faced with a unique challenge: we can’t let the players dramatically alter the landscape of a game. [...] We needed [sic!] to limit the interactivity that the players had with the environment as well as work within our given framework for stories.”

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other types of immersive fiction such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s multimodal novel House of Leaves (2000). ARGs also pay homage to individual works of fiction, especially to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), which provides the term ‘rabbit holes’ as entry points to the hidden world of a game. The collaborative aspect of alternate reality gaming is reflected in other modes of emergent collective narration, such as oral storytelling and fan fiction. Of course, simply identifying their narrative predecessors certainly does not make a valid case for alternate reality games themselves functioning as narrative. In order to take the next step towards a narratological assessment of ARGs, it is necessary to examine the role of storytelling within the overall structure of this genre. Again, existing studies often highlight the presence of narrative within ARGs, describing these games as “the first narrative art form native to the Internet” (Culatta 2011) without, however, probing deeper into the concrete storytelling mechanisms involved. Interestingly, despite the fundamental openness of narrative processes in ARGs—in which the ‘story’ emerges through the collaboration of many different individuals—most critics regard their storytelling as a rather straightforward process of researching and ‘putting together’ elements of an already existing narrative. Sean Stewart, for instance, views alternate reality gaming as “storytelling as archaeology—or, possibly, the other way around. That is, you work out a story, you create all the evidence of that story, then you smash the evidence into a thousand teeny bits and sprinkle it around and people gather it up, put it together again” (qtd. in Hanas 2006)—this creates the impression of merely (re-)assembling something originally conceptualized as a closed narrative, again implying that the narrative is already there for the players to be discovered. This sense of laying bare an existing, predetermined storyline does not, however, do full justice to the intrinsic open-endedness of ARG narration, and it is telling sign of the lack of a comprehensive narratological framework to capture such emergent modes of storytelling. In particular, the interactive mode between text and player problematizes narratological convention. As Ryan has noted, interactivity significantly influences the category of narrativity: “when interactivity is added to the text […], its ability to tell stories, and the stories it can tell, are deeply affected” (2004: 339). Similarly, Whitton et al. (2009) observe that “[t]he challenge when narrative is combined with an interactive, participatory format is how to tell a strong story that appears to have a range of avenues without loosing the sense of a shared trajectory or story arc.” Including a high degree of interactivity in a story seems to imply sacrificing narrativity; it seems as though you can’t play your game and read it, too. On the other hand, game designer Sean Stewart, who served as lead writer of the influential games “The Beast,” “I Love Bees,” and “Year

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Zero,” openly expresses his desire for ARGs to “work like art. I wanted people to care, to laugh, to cry—to be engaged the way a novel engages” (qtd. in Szulborski 2005: 95). That is, enjoyment of alternate reality gaming should, according to Stewart, be generated through narrative immersion, through losing yourself in a gripping and convincing story line. How, then, can this desire for narrativity be reconciled with the structural indeterminacy of ARGs? A more careful distinction of narrative components in ARGs may offer a solution to this problem. This distinction points to the fact that the underlying narrative structure of an alternate reality game is neither identical to the actual playing process nor to the narrative that results from this process—which may be very different from the one intended or planned by the game designers (this, again, refers to the important category of player feedback within alternate reality gaming). That is, players of ARGs do not ‘uncover’ an existing narrative, they engage in a dynamic performance with a given set of parameters, creating a unique storyline that can be communicated and read as a narrative abstraction of this performance after the game has come to an end. Such a model of ARG narration takes into account the aspect of performative interactivity as the decisive shaping factor for storytelling in this genre; when playing an alternate reality game, the player at once creates and carries out an experience, which is determined by the individual path she has taken through the game structure. Such a distinction between narrative as deep structure and performance is not in itself new; Umberto Eco has aptly identified the work of art as ‘open’ to the participatory involvement of the recipient, arguing that “[e]very performance makes the work an actuality, but is itself only complementary to all possible other performances of the work” (1989: 15). Aarseth posits an even more specific differentiation with respect to his concept of ergodic literature, which he defines as literature in which “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (1997: 1), proposing that [i]t is useful to distinguish between strings [of signs] as they appear to readers and strings as they exist in the text, since these may not always be the same. For want of better terms, I call the former scriptons and the latter textons. […] In a book such as Raymond Queneau’s sonnet machine Cent mille milliards de poèmes […], where the user folds the lines in the book to ‘compose’ sonnets, there are only 140 textons but these combine into 100,000,000,000,000 possible scriptons. (1997: 62)

For the purpose of narratologically approaching the ARG structure, distinguishing between a text’s organizational structure and the concrete realization of this structure by a specific recipient must be taken one step further by introducing a distinction between script, performance, and

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protocol. Players of an alternate reality game do not expose a preconceived storyline, but apply, during their dynamic playing performance, a set of given parameters (constituted by the script), creating a unique and unpredictable storyline that can be abstracted from the player’s activity (this abstraction constitutes the protocol). In what follows, each of these three terms is more thoroughly introduced and related to the narrative conceptualization of alternate reality gaming. The script is the narrative structure underlying an alternate reality game, comprising its rules, its mode of organization, possible entry and exit points, and multimedial components. This part of the overall narrative framework is designed by the game designers or ‘puppet masters’ of an alternate reality game. That is, the script establishes the structural groundwork for the ARG, functioning analogously to a musical score or a screenplay. The difference between such conventional scripts and the script of an alternate reality game is that the latter potentially allows for an infinite number of performative realizations, and that it is subject to direct modification by the players. In other words, the script of an ARG must be designed in a way that allows for more than one specific performance; the player’s choices will determine how this performance will develop over the course of the narrative. In itself, the script may be a “relatively traditional linear narrative backbone” (Whitton et al. 2009), but, depending on how high the degree of interactivity is, even this backbone structure may be permanently altered by the decisions of the players, forcing the puppet masters to rewrite or at least revise their original design. Thus, the script in ARGs must be seen as a potentially dynamic system rather than a rigidly constructed set of “rules governing what happens in the game world and what players must do to progress” (Szulborski 2005: 11); it functions as a structure of empowerment which enables individual performative agency. Since alternate reality games go out of their way in trying to pose as reallife experiences, the script will largely remain inaccessible to the individual player, who discovers the rules of the game as she goes along—there is no possibility for her to ‘see’ or familiarize herself with the deep structure of the game beforehand. This markedly differentiates ARGs from traditional games, where knowledge of the rules is an essential prerequisite for successfully playing the game. Suits’ definition of gameplay underlines this essential role of the rule framework: To play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favor of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity. (1967: 148)

That is, being aware of and accepting the rules is the central precondition for conventional gameplay; ARGs, on the other hand, depend on the

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players’ unawareness of the rules in order to encourage genuinely emergent and creative output. Performative processes in general are characterized by transformation, emergence, and contingency. When John-David Dewsbury characterizes the performative as “the gap, the rupture, the spacing that unfolds the next moment allowing change to happen” (2000: 475), he accounts for the temporal potentiality of performance, echoing Michail Bakhtin’s notion of the “open event-ness of Being” (1993: 1), which Bakhtin regards as the seat of genuine creativity. Unlike in traditional fiction, where the narrative script and its reading performance must necessarily be the same (although of course individual responses to this performance are possible), a performance in an ARG is only one narrative variant using the parameters of the script. This is similar to individual reading performances in hyperfiction or other types of digital interactive storytelling; indeed, performativity and interactivity are closely connected to each other. Klaas Kuitenbrower has observed that “interactive stories always have to be performed to be there” (2005). In a more extreme way than can be argued for all narrative fiction, the performance in ARGs is necessary to bring the storyworld of the game into existence. What sets performance in alternate reality gaming apart from other forms of interactive narration is that any performance here is a collective feat; the interaction of more than one human consciousness makes the direction into which the story will develop exceedingly unpredictable. As in other forms of collective storytelling—such as role-playing games or fan fiction—, the narrative process of ARGs is highly procedural. Being extremely complex puzzles, these games require the creativity and knowledge of a ‘hive mind’ with access to collective information. Indeed, a relatively new branch of alternate reality gaming tries to make specific use of this collaborative performance, pooling group intelligence to find strategies and resources for solving real-life problems of the future. A prime example of this type of alternate reality game, also called ‘forecasting game,’ is Jane McGonigal’s 2007 production “World Without Oil,” (WWO) a thirty-two week simulation of a global oil crisis. The game’s designers call it “a milestone in the quest to use games as democratic, collaborative platforms for exploring possible futures and sparking futurechanging action,” (worldwithoutoil.org) as “World Without Oil” explores, through gaming, the economical, ecological, and social effects of a global oil shortage and possible strategies to deal with such a scenario. “World Without Oil’s” slogan, “Play it before you live it,” indicates that ARG storytelling can serve as a unique way of ‘performing the future’; as one of the game’s reviewers succinctly states the game’s underlying philosophy: “If you want to change the future, play with it first.” In a sense, forecast-

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ing games constitute the most productive performative form of storytelling existing today; Locke has termed WWO “an open, collaborative story in which lots of different threads can exist alongside each other,” (worldwithoutoil.org) and it is precisely this openness which encourages genuine and emergent creativity to arise from the interaction of the player collective.11 Similar attempts at creating emergent simulations of collaborative problem solving were carried out in the subsequent forecasting games “Superstruct” (2008) and “Evoke” (2010); while the six-week-game “Superstruct” created a vision of the world in 2019 by means of a collective forecast, accumulating “[h]undreds of ideas, superstructures for our future, guidelines to redefine the world of today and to improve and prepare it for the challenges of the next decade” (Porpora 2009), “Evoke” was set in Africa and dealt with local social, political and economical issues, aiming to “empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems” (blog.urgentevoke.net). Performative agency lies at the heart of these—and all other—forms of alternate reality gaming, and it is the emergence of a storyline through performativity which constitutes narrative in ARGs. While in traditional narratives, script and protocol are one and the same entity—that is, the narrative deep structure of the story remains the same after the reading process is finished—they are two distinct categories in the case of alternate reality gaming. In other words, the protocol of an ARG can differ from the script to a significant extent; this difference is constituted by the traces that interactivity and feedback have imprinted onto the overall narrative structure. The protocol is the story that can be abstracted from the process of playing an ARG after it has come to an end; it is the narrative which the performance of the game leaves behind. Unlike script and performance, this component is always linear, and necessarily so—it represents one possible narrative path through the game, and since it is reconstructable only in retrospect, all elements of choice or multiplicity have been eliminated. The protocol of an alternate reality game is thus comparable to a ‘walkthrough’ in video games; it is at once an abstraction and a reduction of the game’s original possibilities, and it lacks the categories of interactivity and agency that characterize the performance of the game. This reduction may even trigger a sense of loss— Gosney, when discussing “The Beast’s” elements of real-world interac-

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As the game’s website explains, “By design, the WWO game did not dictate points of view or outcomes to the players. The WWO team established realistic macroparameters of the oil shock (such as the price and availability of fuel on any given week) but relied on the players to successfully imagine how those macroparameters would change everyday life” (worldwithoutoil.org).

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tion, admits that “[i]t would be terrific to be able to still play the game as if it were happening for the first time” (2005: 72). The simulation of a narrative process, enabled by the provided script, is carried out during the performance; the narrativization of this performance forms the protocol, which is closed to all dynamic potentiality. It is, so to speak, the most conventionally ‘narrative’ element within the ARG structure. Whereas traditional narrative forms can be considered as representational artefacts—showing events that have already taken place from a retrospective point of view—, alternate reality games constitute simulative storytelling engines—exploring possible results of a given set of parameters through the dynamic interaction of a knowledgeable pool of participants. The proposal of a three-stage narratological model for the analysis of alternate reality games takes into account this sense of emergence by expanding traditional narratological ideas of linearity and sequentiality, which imply a backward-looking and predetermined storyline, for the sake of allowing an interactive, choice-and-consequence-based narrative experience. At the very point of intersection between storytelling and gameplay, alternate reality games break through narrative’s retrospective temporal architecture in order to expose the unfinishedness of the aesthetic products they revolve around, the potentiality or eventness of any given situation or story. In this, they might be said to mirror life more closely than narrative, concentrating on the process of becoming rather than on being. Regarding the status of ARGs as the newest form of storytelling within (or through) a gaming experience, it is no surprise that they are increasingly functionalized as forecasting tools. According to Jane McGonigal, gameplay and life must be ever more tightly connected to each other in order to create a satisfactory future. As a prolific ARG creator, McGonigal is acutely aware of the simulative potential of these games, which can, according to the theory she develops in her latest work Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How They Can Change the World, teach us problem-solving strategies that are more than applicable to real-life dilemmas: “Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use” (2011: 22). McGonigal’s central thesis revolves around the capability of gameplay to generate satisfying experiences of achievement, experiences that we often lack in ‘real’ life work. Rather than generating a society of isolated individuals driven by escapism, collective gameplay encourages, according to McGonigal, social productivity that is unrivalled in everyday existence. Games, and especially communal and collaborative forms of games, are thus “potent engines for creating and enhancing emotional experience” (Chatfield 2011). In their collaborative nature, alternate reality games simulate, through the TINAG-principle, gaming experiences

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that are based on exactly this sense of collective accomplishment, creating a narrative that emerges as a result of joint cooperation on a given set of problems. Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. 1997 Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004 “Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse”, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 361–376. Bakhtin, Michail 1993 Towards a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov, Austin: University of Texas Press. Callois, Roger 2001 Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Cameron, Andy 1995 “Dissimulations: Illusions of Interactivity”, Millenium Film Journal 28, . Accessed 23 August 2011. Chatfield, Tom 2011 “Jane McGonigal’s ‘Reality is Broken’”, Tomchatfield.net, . Accessed 23 August 2011. Culatta, Richard 2011 “Alternate Reality Games”, Innovative Learning.com, . Accessed 23 August 2011. Dewsbury, John David 2000 “Performativity and the Event: Enacting a Philosophy of Difference”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, 473–496. Eco, Umberto 1989 The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Eskelinen, Markuu 2001 “The Gaming Situation”, Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 1.1, . Accessed 23 August 2011.

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Frasca, Gonzalo 2001 “Simulation Versus Representation”, Ludology.org, . Accessed 23 August 2011. Gosney, John W. 2005 Beyond Reality: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming, Boston: Thomson Course Technology. Gouveia, Patrícia 2009 “Narrative Paradox and the Design of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and Blogs”, . Accessed 23 August 2011. Hanas, Jim 2006 “The Story Doesn’t Care: An Interview With Sean Stewart”, Hanasiana.com, http://www.hanasiana.com/archives/001117.html>. Accessed 23 August 2011. Hayles, N. Katherine 2005 My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Kim, Jeffrey et al. 2009 “Storytelling in New Media: The Case of Alternate Reality Games, 2001–2009”, First Monday 14.6: n.p. Kuitenbrower, Klaas 2005 “Emergent Narrative”, Mediamatic.net, . Accessed 23 August 2011. McGonigal, Jane 2006 This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, . Accessed 23 August 2011. 2008 “Saving the World Through Game Design: Stories From the Near Future”, New Yorker Conference, . Accessed 23 August 2011. 2011 Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How They Can Change the World, London: Jonathan Cape. Miller, Matthew P. 2009 “Storytelling in a Multiplayer Environment”, in: Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, Cambridge: MIT Press, 125–130.

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Murray, Janet 1998 Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Cambrige: MIT Press. 2005 “The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies”, . Accessed 23 August 2011. Pierce, Celia 2005 “Theory Wars: An Argument Against Arguments in the socalled Ludology/Narratology Debate”, Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference: Changing Views – Worlds in Play, . Accessed 23 August 2011. Porpora, Mario 2009 “We Will Be Here – Map of the Future”, Densitydesign.org, . Accessed 23 August 2011. Ryan, Marie-Laure 2001 “Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media”, Game Studies 1.1, . Accessed 23 August 2011. 2004 “Will New Media Produce New Narratives?”, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 337–359. 2006 Avatars of Story, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Stewart, Sean n.d. “Alternate reality games”, Seanstewart.org, . Accessed 23 August 2011. Suits, Bernard 1967 “What Is a Game?”, Philosophy of Science 34.2, 148–156. Szulborski, Dave 2005 This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming, New Fiction Publishing. Urgentevoke.net 2010 “About the Evoke Game”, Blog.Urgentevoke.net, . Accessed 23 August 2011.

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Whitton, Nicola et al. 2009 “Narrative and ARGs”, Argosi Research Group, . Accessed 23 August 2011. Wikipedia.org 2011 “Alternate Reality Game”, Wikipedia.org, . Accessed 23 August 2011. Worldwithoutoil.org 2011 . Accessed 23 August 2011.

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Photography and Narrative: The Representation of the Atomic Bomb in Photographs of Nagasaki from 1945 to 1995 Introduction Can the visual document itself constitute an independent account of an event? We almost always see reproductions of photography rather than original prints in ordinary life. Even in the museum each picture is interpreted and not always seen in its original context. Then, in general, the image is read as a narrative. Visual accounts have to be understood within a given context. In this paper, I would like to address the question of the existence of the power of communication contained in the image itself, set apart from their contribution to the meaning of the image of the editing and the form of presentation of the photography. I will consider some examples of photographs of Nagasaki taken in August 1945, in the aftermath of the atomic explosion and against the background of the nuclear trials during the Cold War period. For reasons of politics and the absence of copyright protection, these pictures of the atomic bomb were used in many different contexts and mobilized to serve many different discourses across the decades. Hayden White says that “real events should simply be; they can perfectly well serve as the referents of a discourse, can be spoken about, but they should not pose as the tellers of a narrative” (1981: 4). According to Abbott’s definition, the term “narrative” denotes the representation of events, consisting of a story and the narrative discourse; the story consists of an event or a sequence of events (the action) while the narrative discourse concerns those events as represented (Abbott 2008: 19). Between the event and the narration, the photographic document would serve as a means of reference or passage for the real event. Indeed, Walton argues that “seeing directly and seeing with photographic assistance are different modes of perception” (1984: 255). Photography is not equivalent to reality for the viewer; rather, it mediates between the viewer and the reality.

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Perceptual contact can itself be mediated—by mirrors or television circuits or photographs. But this mediation is a means of maintaining contact. Viewers of photographs are in perceptual contact with the world. (Walton 1984: 273)

The narrative construction of photography is different from pictorial or filmic narration. Still photography is related to time and space, without the narration by sequence common to film. The real world is at first framed with the finder by the photographer (see Berger 2008: 2–3). The selection of the object is, in a sense, the first interpretation of reality. Secondly, the photographer chooses the picture from a contact sheet, trims a picture, decides on a tone, etc. These processes express the interpretation and the intention of the photographer and change the character of the picture itself. Beyond the act of framing, the presentation specifically of photography possesses a second layer of interpretation (see Lugon 2001). A picture changes its appearance according to the code and also according to the context. By telling a story through photography, the text gives us a direction for reading the image. Not only has the caption with which the image is shown the purpose of explaining the image; the arrangement of the images by the photographer or editor also has the purpose of constructing a narrative for them (e.g. narrative by images, photo story). Photographic montage is a way of producing meaning through the combination of images. In this process, the photograph may be made to exceed the intentions of the photographer. In magazine editing and in the organization of the exhibition, the message constructed through the combination of images is defined by the editor or curator for its reader or spectator. The spectator will be able to read images according to these indications. Roland Barthes writes: The photographic paradox can then be seen as the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the ‘art’, or the treatment, or the ‘writing’, or the rhetoric, of the photograph); structurally, the paradox is clearly not the collusion of a denoted message and a connoted message (which is the—probably inevitable—status of all the forms of mass communication), it is that here the connoted (or coded) message develops on the basis of a message without a code. (1977: 19)

However, the essential value of the image by itself may be not changed through this layer of interpretation. In its narrative, photography remains a reference to the real world. In his book Camera Lucida, Barthes defines photographic referent with the expression “THAT-HAS-BEEN (Ça a été)”: I call “photographic referent” not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. …in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past. (1981: 76)

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The incident of the atomic bomb in 1945 is represented in diverse ways in addition to photography: film, literature, painting, object, poetry by survivors, and so forth. Among the different forms of representation, photography appears to be more faithful to reality and is often considered to be ‘objective’. At the same time, however, it is very easy to confuse fiction and non-fiction in the process of editing. It is in light of this difficulty that I would like in this paper to consider the example of the photographs of Nagasaki by Yosuke Yamahata (1917–1966). They were interpreted in diverse ways and made use of within diverse political contexts after 1945. Although they suffered from neglect and censorship immediately after the Second World War, they were later given their proper place and historical contextualization. This was in line both with renewed attempts to reconstruct memories of the atomic explosions and with the restoration of the negatives of images capturing the events during the nineties. I would like to stress the capacity of these images to convey the immediacy of past events across the passage of time. In this context, Barthes also argues that photographic reality is concerned with time: The realists, of whom I am one and of whom I was already one when I asserted that the Photograph was an image without code—even if, obviously, certain codes do inflect our reading of it—the realists do not take the photograph for a “copy” of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art. To ask whether a photograph is analogical or coded is not a good means of analysis. The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation. (1981: 88–89)

Even today, these pictures of Yamahata show the places and the individuals that the photographer encountered during his walk through the city of Nagasaki after the bombing in 1945. The interpretation and narration attached to images change over time, but the pictures themselves embody the same testament. This is the future Yamahata hoped for his photography. However, as the chronology of the photographs of Nagasaki shows, under the period of censorship and ideological control, it was not an easy task to discover the truth from the purely visual testament and to adequately contextualize visual documents alongside verbal accounts. Here, I will ask three questions concerning the adaptation of photography with a view to constructing the memory of the incident, focusing on the narrative involved in displaying the picture and the aesthetics of its reception. First, I will examine the question of the difference in impact between color pictures and black-and-white pictures of the nuclear bomb. Does the color in the photograph make the image more realistic or does it involve an increase of imagination? Is the black-and-white picture more neutral in telling the incident or is it more effective in inciting the imagination?

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The second question concerns the consistency of the two narratives at work in the two pictures of the atomic bomb: on the one hand, the narrative arising from the representations of the mushroom cloud and, on the other, the narrative from the viewpoint of the victims. These are examples of the manner in which the selection of the motif in the picture has already constructed the narrative best suited for history. For Ricoeur, “all history is one fragment or segment of a unique world of communication” (1984: 151). How then can these pictures be brought together to produce one, unified historical narrative, one which avoids confusing fact and fiction? Sometimes pictures are used along with an ideology to show an ideal future. Althusser tells us that an ideology, i.e., an imaginary world outlook, does not have any history in its background (2008: 33–36). Due to the fact that ideology is an outline of a representation of an event and a representation of the imagination, it does not reflect the real world. So, if the picture is exhibited in such a way as to comply with ideology, our vision of reality is distorted. The third question concerns the relation between photography and testimony. The verbal testimony defines the reading of the image. At the same time, the picture gives witnesses the opportunity to talk about their memories. In the case of the photography of Nagasaki, nowadays we can see the same pictures with the evidence of survivors who were photographed in 1945. Knowing the historical background can also change our perspective on the image. But, how different is it from the first impression when we saw the same picture without linguistic explication? This case shows that the process of the construction of memory from archives changes our recognition of theses images. The historical narrative derived from incomplete archives would not be definitive and would need to be re-examined (see Abbott 2008: 146–147). Finally, in this paper, I would like to examine the role of the image in refreshing memory and in provoking discussion. Differences in the Reception of the Nuclear Bomb: Color vs. Black-and-White Pictures The first question concerning narrative in the presentation of photograph is the following: what different perceptual processes are involved in examining a color picture compared to a black-and-white picture? Does the color picture give us reality or imagination? For example, do the color pictures and films made by the US army give us a clearer vision of the Second World War? On the other hand, we can say that the black-and-white picture is more imaginative, because of the lack of information or detail.

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Documentary film in color from the war is concentrated on the period between the D-Day landings in 1944 and the occupation of Berlin in 1945. And also, there were many pictures and films taken in color one month after the bombardment in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.1 We have two types of pictures in black-and -white and in color, and so we have two types of factual evidence. The color picture tells us about the materials of the buildings or the clothing, and many other details. In this sense, color information gives us more reality and restricts our imagination from going very far. In a historical text, describing modern society, we have more color documents in comparison with the history of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the black-and-white picture is very neutral and sometimes highly stylized (see Fig. 1). However, it is evident that photographic representation is limited. Setsuko Kozawa remarked that according to the painted images of the atomic bomb by survivors, their memories were in color, not monotone (see Kozawa 2002). Let me present a different example: there were numerous tests of the H-bomb between 1952 and 1962 on the ground, and they were photographed. They offer more of a visual spectacle before the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, from which point onwards trials were conducted underground (Light 2003). After the success of the trial of the atomic bomb by the USSR in 1949, the USA explored the H-bomb and the first successful trial took place in 1952.2 These pictures were published in the magazine LIFE International Edition of May 1954, two years after the trial (LIFE 1954a). This first article contained black-and-white pictures with textual explanations of the bomb. The next issue of LIFE International Edition contained color pictures of fireballs of the same trial, in which the stand-alone images were accompanied by little explanation. In the second issue, there is a quotation from the President Eisenhower: “The greater any of these apprehensions, the greater is the need that we look at them clearly, face to face, without fear, like honest, straightforward Americans….” (LIFE 1954b). One of the goals of the color picture might have been to reduce people’s fear of the bomb. In this case, color photography at first glance provokes an immediate emotional reaction in the spectator. Perceiving the image of an event detached from any experience of it leaves us with just a visual stimulus, an image in the brain. Normally, however, the only possible real experience of an atomic explosion would be as one of its victims. Here, photography, as the mere spectral image of this explosion, becomes a sort of illusion, not a document. The image was _____________ 1 They used the color film of Kodak at that time, while the Japanese records were in black and white. 2 Great Britain made its first successful trial of the atomic bomb in 1952, and France in 1960.

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intended to give a positive representation, with a view to rendering the public favourable to further development of nuclear energy and the continuation of the trials. Nowadays, the black-and-white picture of the bomb is connected with the historical narrative of the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the nuclear age. The picture of a mushroom cloud becomes a cliché. It becomes also the national memory of certain countries. They lead us to imagine at the same time the damage on the ground under the cloud. But, it is an acquired characteristic of the image over successive layers of interpretation.

Figure 1: Picture in black & white by the US army, the view from North-West of ground zero in Hiroshima, November in 1945, photo. US Army Courtesy of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

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The Discontinuity of the Discourses at Work in Heterogeneous Forms of Representation of the Atomic Bomb: From the Perspective of the Mushroom Cloud to the Perspective of the Victims The second question concerns the content of the photography of the incident. Whether the use of the atomic bomb was justified or not was fiercely debated during the post-war period. The selection of the content has influenced the direction of historical discourse. In 1994, the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. organized an exhibition on the Enola Gay: The exhibit was to include a section on the effect of the bomb at “ground zero” with artefacts lent by Hiroshima and Nagasaki and photos taken in the hours after the bombing. In the word of a July 1993 planning document: “The Museum hopes that the proposed exhibition will contribute to a more profound discussion of the atomic bombings among the general public of the United States, Japan and elsewhere.” (Hein 1995: 3)

But, finally in this exhibition, the pictures and the objects of testimony were not exhibited to avoid showing them to the ex-servicemen. If they had known the damage the bomb had inflicted, they would have been ridden with guilt. Accordingly, the historical explanation in the US of the War in the Pacific generally starts from the attack of Pearl Harbor and ends with the atomic cloud in the picture. Even the icon of the mushroom cloud became a commemorative stamp of the Second World War captioned “Atomic bombs hasten the end of war, August 1945.” It was used to penetrate the ideology of the justification of the bomb as the end of the war.3 The lack of access to the perspective of the victims renders history incomplete. The pictures of the mushroom cloud and of the victims show different points of view. In the first place, this depends quite literally on the position of the camera: either in the sky, with the American soldiers, or on the ground, with the Japanese. Each has the same documentary value. But, they are used in the construction of different discourses: the mushroom cloud is the common form of representation in the teaching of history. Many war memorial museums frame the picture of the mushroom cloud seen from an American aircraft as a representation of the end of the Second World War; but there is no picture of the injured people on the ground (see Fig. 2). Would the concealing of the image of the bomb victims serve to justify the possibility of the use of the bomb in _____________ 3 The issue of the commemorative stamp of the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb for the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War was banned in 1995 after the protestation of the Japanese government and replaced by the stamp of a photograph of the President Truman.

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the future? The immediate iconization of the image conceals the underlying history of the bomb. On the other hand, focusing our attention on the presentation of the victims highlights the danger of the bomb and speaks out against its use. At the same time, however, it lacks integration within the wider context of the Second World War. It transforms, for example, the Japanese into passive victims rather than active agents of the war.4 How to unite these two perspectives within the same framework? In this case, the political ideology holds a dominant position over the history of photographic documentation.5 In historiography, visual accounts are sometimes less important than written ones, and historical narratives typically use images only as illustrations. Hayden White says that, … in our historiographical practices, we are inclined to use visual images as a complement of our written discourse, rather than as components of a discourse in its own right, by means of which we might be able to say something different from and other than what we can say in verbal form. We are inclined to use pictures primarily as ‘illustrations’ of the predications made in our verbally written discourse. We have not on the whole exploited the possibilities of using images as a principal medium of discursive representation, using verbal commentary only diacritically, that is to say, to direct attention to, specify, and emphasize a meaning conveyable by visual means alone. (1988: 1194)

The visual account cannot tell us everything, but it does have a partial ability to testify to the event (see Didi-Huberman 2008: 65; Lucken 2008: 19). Didi-Huberman mentioned the importance of the analysis of the image itself at the exhibition Mémoire des camps in 2001 for the study of the Shoah (2008: 66; see Chéroux 2001). He insisted that, in the case of the Shoah, the visual document contained the capacity to testify to what happened, in completing what the verbal account cannot say in words. If history is written on the basis of the study of testimonial documents, our understanding of history will be transformed through the construction of memory from diverse types of accounts.

_____________ 4 The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum emphasized the aspect of the Japanese being perpetrators in the Pacific war at the beginning of the exhibition (in 2010). 5 For example, the Bayeux Tapestry is now registered in the collection “the Memory of the World” of UNESCO. This tapestry tells us the history of the Norman Conquest from the point of view of the victorious.

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Figure 2: The expression of the end of the Second World War at the War Museum (Musée de l’Armée) at Invalide in Paris, photo. Tsuchiyama, 2010.

The exhibits consisted from four panels: Right: Nagasaki–9 August 1945 A second nuclear weapon is deployed. Center top: The city of Nagasaki after the atomic explosion on 9 August 1945. Center bottom: USA–15 August 1945–Official announcement of the Japanese capitulation. Left: General MacArthur signed for the Japanese Act signed on the capitulation of the Japanese.

Photography and Testimony The last question is how to deal with pictures as historical documents. When we see a powerful image, displayed without explanation, our first impressions work on the level of emotion and motivate us to discover its background. In the next step, we can perceive it armed with the knowledge at the level of cognition. Susan Sontag writes that: If there was one year when the power of photographs to define, not merely record, the most abominable realities trumped all the complex narratives, surely it was 1945, with the pictures taken in April and early May at Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau in the first days after the camps were liberated, and those taken by Japanese witnesses such as Yosuke Yamahata in the days following the incineration of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August. (2003: 24–25)

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For Sontag, “the photographs were merely the opening of knowledge through the mediation of a moment of seeing. They were therefore decisive for this knowledge itself ” (Didi-Huberman 2008: 84). On the contrary, our perception of the image is sometimes clouded by prejudice. To construct our memory, there is the question of how to narrate with visual document. Let me discuss an example of the photography of Nagasaki taken by Yosuke Yamahata in 1945. These pictures are taken on the day after the bombardment in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Among the photographers who took pictures around the ground zero after bombardment in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Yosuke Yamahata is a professional photographer who was dispatched by the Japanese troops to record the incident.6 During the fourteen hours of his stay, he took more than one hundred pictures. He was not a direct victim of the bomb, although he was affected by the strong dose of radiation he received during his stay. In this sense, these pictures were taken as objective records of the damage by the bomb. After the war, his images were published in the national newspaper. However, it is worth noting that “the following month, General MacArthur imposed a press ban under which all atomic-related information was suppressed for seven years” (Jenkins 19). They were subsequently confiscated by the General Headquarters (GHQ) and were used as part of their survey of the effects of the bomb. In 1952, after the occupation by the GHQ, they were published in the international media as in the magazine LIFE (1952). Yamahata who kept his negatives also published the photobook Atomized Nagasaki: The Bombing of Nagasaki—A Photographic Record in 1952 to report the incident widely in Japan. These pictures are accompanied with the accounts of the photographer. In this book of 1952, Yamahata wrote: Human memory has a tendency to slip, and critical judgement to fade with the years and with changes in life-style and circumstance. But the camera, just as it seized the grim realities of that time, brings the stark facts of seven years ago before our eyes without the need for the least embellishment. (Yamahata 1995: 45)

As Yamahata here suggests, how can the photograph on its own suffice as a testimony to the incident? Later, however, the photographer was disappointed by the uses of his pictures by others, who took advantage of his documents. As the copyrights of the photographer were not respected at that time, these pictures were freely cited and used in diverse contexts. In the magazine LIFE, the pictures were carefully chosen and trimmed in layout. For the exhibition The Family of Man at the Modern Art Museum in New York in 1955 exhibited one of the pictures of Yamahata, with the _____________ 6 Yamahata was accompanied by the painter Eiji Yamada, the writer Jun Higashi, and two unidentified soldiers. Jenkins writes that this is as it must be, for no representation of an event can truly evoke its actuality (1995: 21).

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image of the mushroom cloud of the H-bomb to convey the threat of nuclear weapons represented to the continued existence of human kind. In the film Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais in 1959, the pictures of Nagasaki appeared within a fictional narrative. In this film, the pictures are used in the beginning of the film, and for a fictional scene of film making as a symbol of peace for the grassroots, anti-nuclear movement that arose at the end of the fifties. In this scene, the images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were mixed and functioned uniquely as symbols for the incidents.7 After the death of the photographer Yamahata in 1966, the pictures, films and documents of the atomic bomb were returned from the USA to Japan. After that, the people in the pictures were identified through the efforts of the municipal authorities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a view to constructing the archive of the events. These pictures were restored by digital technology in 1994 in San Francisco to show to the American people for the first time. Around 1995, the NHK, the Japanese TV program NAGASAKI: A Record of Life and Death (NHK 1995a; 1995b), showed the pictures taken just after the bombing to the persons represented in the photographs themselves and then interviewed them. After 1995, we can see the pictures of Nagasaki with the accounts of the survivors. The survivors gave the background to these pictures fifty years after that they had been taken. These pictures were neglected from 1945 to 1995, during which time some negatives apparently went missing. The classification and study of the archive redressed the rupture occasioned by this fifty years hiatus. The survivors did not know of the existence of the pictures, and some had even forgotten the fact that they had been taken. They had previously just been seen as victims of the bomb, the details of their personal story not being known. What changed with the provision of their oral testimonies? The pictures remain the same, but our recognition of them has been changed by their verbal testimonies. For example, in the picture titled Injured Mother with Her Baby (see Fig. 3), we can see it with the reflection of the imago of “The Virgin and Child” of Western art. This picture is symbolically sublimated through its framing to become less shocking than other images. This picture was selected for the magazine LIFE (1952), and was planned for an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1994. The relationship between the beauty of the image and the truth of the event in the documentary photography is complex. The composition _____________ According to Sylvette Baudrot, the scriptwriter of the film, these pictures were prepared by 7 the Japanese staff (conversation with the author in 2010). In reality, the peace movement used Yahamata’s pictures. However, their intentions were different from the photographer’s (see 1995: 19).

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of the image is very important in informing the message and in making a lasting impression on the mind of the spectator. Press photography seeks to present a visually clear message that readers can understand at first glance. Compositions such as “The Virgin and Child” would be easy to interpret and to memorize as a certain icon of femininity in the Western society, because it is already coded within culture.8 However, does it inform the truth and could be a representation of the whole event? The well-composed image will be easy to remain fixed in our memory and in the history of photography, regardless of whether the representation is fiction or non-fiction. In the first publication of this picture in the Yamahata’s photobook of 1952, the photographer himself explains that “the injured waiting their turn seemed to be absent-minded” (Yamahata 1952; NHK 1995b: 229; trans. Tsuchiyama). And, the sequence of images before and after also explains the situation. By and large, however, only one shot from a series of five images of the mother and child was published in magazines. In her account of 1995, she explains that I was waiting for treatment for my baby who was too weak to drink milk from the breast. I was anxious about his condition: he had burns and had hit his head when the blast hit the house. My baby died 10 days later. … So, now I don’t want to speak about the atomic bomb. But, we should not forget it for our grandchildren. (NHK 1995b: 228–239; trans. Tsuchiyama)

Because she had not wanted to talk about her experience until the 1990s, the image might be shown independently from her account, but with symbolic meaning. The interpretation depended on the imagination of the spectator before 1995. The collection and assembling of accounts served for the construction of the memory of the atomic explosion. After carefully studying the documents, one’s individual memory turns into a collective one. Now, in the exhibition and official photobook of the Memorial in Nagasaki, this picture “A mother and child wait patiently for treatment” (see Fig. 4) is explained more dispassionately in her account and that of the photographer: Taken the day after the bombing at the temporary relies station in front of Michino’o Railroad Station, about 3,6 kilometers north of the hypocenter. Both mother and child had suffered injuries. The four month-old infant, who did not even have the strength to suckle, died about ten days later. (The City of Nagasaki 2004: 34) _____________ 8 The photography of the Madonna of Ishinomaki after the earthquake in the East Japan, taken by Tadashi Okubo on 13th March 2011, worked well as an icon of the woman in pity in Western Journalism (see Gunthert 2011), but it didn’t make sense in the domestic journal in Japan.

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Photography is one of the foundational elements in the account of the explosion, because of the difficulty involved in giving a verbal account of it. The perception of the reception of the image will change according to the moment in history in which it is seen, and what we can say about it depends on that time. The study of the image can throw light on the past: something inside the picture has not been narrated, and waits to be brought into the light from the date when it is taken. The use of allegory and myth in overcoming trauma is a common distancing device through which one can engage in the process of communicating or testifying to a catastrophic experience. This device is, in fact, not unlike the photograph itself, another common tool through which testimony is given and stories told. (Jenkins 1995: 17)

The pictures motivate the viewer into talking about the moment depicted, to attempt to convey the experience of the past event. Pictures can awaken their memories of it. The verbal testimony derived from photography subsequently throws light on the image itself. The verbal testimony is also an object to be examined because “testimony is not perception by itself, but a relation, that is to say the story, the narration of the event” (Ricoeur 1994: 111; trans. Tsuchiyama; see Ricoeur 2004: 161–166).9 However, the combination of visual and verbal testimonies complementarily constructs a memory of the event. Moreover, when objects such as clothing, shoes and the belongings of victims and participants are exhibited in combination with images and words, they can provide strong evidence and proof of the event. These material objects have a presence, and can provide additional background and context for photographs and texts. Consequently, when the historian examines the whole archives to verify the facts of the event, they mutually complement each other, awakening and clarifying vague memory. Among these diverse accounts, the advantage of photography is that it can provide the details independently of the viewer’s time and place. The photographic image alone may motivate viewers to explore background details of the image before the viewer has visited archives or places where the recorded event has taken place or been documented.10

_____________ 9 The original French reads as follows: “Le témoignage n’est pas la perception elle-même, mais le rapport, c’est-à-dire le récit, la narration de l’événement.” 10 Barthes defines that “punctum” is concerned with “detail” and “time” in photography (see Barthes 1980; 1981).

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Figure 3: The photograph by Yosuke Yamahata, 10 August 1945 in Nagasaki, coll. Shogo Yamahata.

Figure 4: The exhibition of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. The photographs of Yamahata and the explanations, photo. Tsuchiyama, 2010.

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Conclusion Conceptualizing photography as a purely documentary account of an event is no easy task. Its message changes according to the way in which it is treated and presented. The photograph itself can be adapted both to historical and to fictional narrative according to the editing of the picture. Copyright protection, the intention of the photographer, or the establishing of moral codes governing its use can serve to control its applications and uses. In journalism, the spread of the images is sometimes faster than the interpretation of the event. The agents responsible for the proprietor of the image do not always understand the whole meanings of the image. At first, the picture may show what happened as a record of the event. The interpretation of the event would appear subsequently once there has been time for reflection. As a reader of the image, we can think about the origin of the photography. Where does it come from? By whom is it taken? What is its objective? Examples such as the diffusion of photographs of Nagasaki can be seen within the context of the news reports. Today the same kind of operation takes place for the report of the event. The editing process fashions a perspective and a new and ideologically inflected discourse from the source material of the original photograph. The image is controlled through editing, which chooses the scene, and frames the context of the image. When we take temporal distance from the event, our memory of the event is siphoned down to a few images: certain images come to represent the event. We can refresh our memory through the visual account. However, an image cannot represent the whole event: we need different types of accounts to testify to the event alongside each other. Historical education donates literacy to the image; but written history is sometimes far from memory. Historians may fill in the details of the background of the event, but interpretation is nonetheless still required. The photographic record itself has a testimonial value for the event above and beyond its conventional explanation. We can examine our history using the image as a basis, where the photography remains as its testimony. If we adapt a picture to discourse, this picture becomes an illustration, not a pure document. The story we construct from photography may be a fictional one. So, there are different modes in which we may narrate history through photography: either the picture may serve as some kind of proof of the discourse or history may be narrated through photographic testimony. Rather than being nothing but an illustrative tool for other narratives, the impact of the picture makes us investigate it in order to find out more. In this sense, it is important to conserve our memory through photography as material proof. Furthermore, in order to exhibit

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them, there is the question of the relationship between the recognition of history and the application of photography within its narration. Telling history and fine analysis of documents go hand in hand. Acknowledgments The original suggestion to carry out the research into the photography of Nagasaki was made to me by Olivier Lugon in 2008. The research was made possible by a travel grant « Aires Culturelles » 2010 from the EHESS. I would also like to thank the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Emigi Amagawa, Christopher Beaver, Setsuko Kozawa, Hiroshi Kume, Michael Lucken, Chihiro Minato, Shogo Yamahata and Kazuya Yasuda. Discussions at the European Narratology Network, the University of Tokyo Centre for Philosophy (UTCP), the CRAL-EHESS and the Collaborative Research Center for Theatre and Film Arts of Waseda University for the advancement of my work. I would finally like to thank my supervisor Jean-Marie Schaeffer, my English teacher Terence Holden at the EHESS, and the editors Jan Alber and Per Krogh Hansen.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter 2008 The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Althusser, Louis 2008 “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation) [1970]”, On Ideology, London: Verso, 1–60. Barthes, Roland 1961 “Le message photographique”, Communications 1, 1961, 127–138. 1977 “The Photographic Message”, Image, Music, Text [1961], trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana, 15–31. 1980 La chambre Claire: Note sur la photographie, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma Gallimard Seuil. 1981 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1980], trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. Berger, John 2008 Ways of Seeing [1972], London: the BBC and Penguin Books. Chéroux, Clément 2001 Mémoire des camps: Photographies des camps de concentration et d’extermination nazis (1933–1999) (dir.), Paris, Marval. The City of Nagasaki 2004 Records of the Nagasaki Atomic Bombing [1996], Nagasaki: The City of Nagasaki. Didi-Huberman, Georges 2003 Images malgré tout, Paris: Les Editions du Minuit.

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Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz [2003], trans. Shane B. Lillis, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Gunthert, André 2011 “La pleureuse d’Ishinomaki ou l’esthétique du désastre”, Culture visuelle, 21 Mars. Web. Hein, Laura 1995 “Remembering the Bomb: The Fiftieth Anniversary in the United States and Japan; Introduction: The Bomb as Public History and Transnational Memory”, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 27.2, 3–15. Jenkins, Rupert 1995 “Introduction”, in Rupert Jenkins (ed.), Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata August 10. 1945, California: Pomegranate Artbooks, 13–22. Kozawa, Setsuko 2002 Genbaku no zu, egakareta kioku, katarareta kaiga [The Hiroshima Panels: Painted Memories, Narrated Paintings], Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. LIFE 1952 “Uncensored Photos Show Atomic Bombing through Victim’s Eyes”, LIFE International Ed., 33.13, 29 Sept., TIME international, 19–25. 1954a “5-4-3-2-1 and the Hydrogen Age Is upon Us”, LIFE International Ed., 16.9, 3 May, TIME international, 8–16. 1954b “Color Adds Vivid Reality to Concept of H-Bomb”, LIFE International Ed., 16.10, 17 May, TIME international, 9–12. Light, Michael 2003 “A Note on the Photographs”, 100 Suns: 1945–1962, London: Jonathan Cape. Lucken, Michael 2008 1945-Hiroshima: Les images sources, Paris: Hermann. Lugon, Olivier 2001 “L’écriture des images, l’édition”, Le style documentaire, D’August Sander à Walker Evans 1920–1945, Paris: Macula, 254–64. NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) 1995a NHK Special, NAGASAKI: A Record of Life and Death 9 Aug. Television. 1995b Nagasaki Journey: Nagasaki Yomigaeru Genbaku Shashin, Tokyo: NHK Publishing. Resnais, Alain 1959 Hiroshima mon amour (dir.), Argos Films.

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Ricoeur, Paul 1984 Time and Narrative [1983], Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1994 “Herméneutique du témoignage [1972]”, Lectures 3: Aux frontières de la philosophie, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 107–139. 2004 Memory, History, Forgetting [2004], trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Sontag, Susan 2003 Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador. Walton, L. Kendall 1984 “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”, Critical Inquiry 11.2., 246–277. White, Hayden 1981 “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”, in W. J. T. Michell (ed.), On Narrative, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1–23. 1988 “Historiography and Historiophoty”, The American Historical Review, 93.5. Dec., 1193–1199. Yamahata, Yosuke. 1952 Kirokushashin: Genbaku no Nagasaki [Atomized Nagasaki: The Bombing of Nagasaki—A Photographic Record], Munehito Kitajima (ed.), Tokyo: Daiichi Publishing. 1995 “Photographing the Bomb—A Memo (1952)”, trans. Miryam Sas, reprinted with permission from id., Atomized Nagasaki [1952], in Jenkins (ed.), ibid., Nagasaki Journey: 44–45.

MAŁGORZATA PAWŁOWSKA (Krakow)

Musical Narratology: An Outline The story of narratology becomes as much an auto-reflexive as a postmodern tale. Christine Brooke-Rose

Introduction Musical narratology is currently undergoing a phase of dynamic development. It is part of the expansion of narratology that we have observed within the last few years in the interdisciplinary sphere that has resulted, among other things, in the creation of the European Narratological Network (ENN) and the organization of its conferences. As Anna Łebkowska, a Polish author, writes: “the ubiquity of narrative has become fact” (2006: 181). Similarly, Márta Grabócz, a musicologist who has worked on musical narratology since the early 1990s, observes the following: Today […] I find myself confronted with the problem—or rather exceptional opportunity—that narrative studies encounters: namely an e x p l o s i o n , a lightning renaissance of narrative theory and analysis. (2008: 19, my emphasis);

By “musical narratology” I understand the study of the relation between narrative and music, expressed in the persistent debate on whether music can be narrative or not, as well as analyses of musical pieces as narratives, from the perspective of narratology. As we know, postclassical narratology is “an interdisciplinary endeavour”, and narrative is treated as a “many-sided phenomenon” (Herman and Vervaeck 2008: 450). Therefore, the question of the relationship between “narrative and music” has become a part of narratological investigations, as seen, for example, in the writings of Werner Wolf, or in Marie Laure-Ryan’s Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, in which a whole section is devoted to music. At the same time though, many narratologists, including the aforementioned, deal with the subject of the relation between narrative and music with great caution. Among the variety of media to which the concept of narrative is applied, music seems to be the most controversial. The question arises of whether we should not leave music as a completely abstract phenomenon. As Walter Pater writes:

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All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music, because, in its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression. (1986: 135)

Despite the complexity of the issue, the phenomenon known as “musical narratology” has made itself perceptible in the humanities. In this paper, I will examine the question of narrative and music relation mainly in the writings of music specialists who draw on narratological concepts (such as, inter alia, Byron Almén, Marta Grabócz, Fred Everett Maus, Jean Jacques Nattiez, and Eero Tarasti). It is the work of these—the “narratological musicologists” (Ryan 2004: 270)—that constitutes “musical narratology” as a separate subdiscipline. The term “narrative” is often used in relation to music—both in colloquial expressions and in scholarly discourse. The expansion of the term in the theory of music (together with a whole set of other terms derived from literary narratology) was connected to a paradigm shift. In the 1970s and 1980s, as a reaction to post-Hanslick formalist tendencies (that is, to treat music as “sonorous forms in motion”1), issues concerning expression and meaning in music began to reappear—along with the flourishing of musical semiotics. Since the mid-1970s the subject of narrative has held a significant position during annual meetings of the American Musicological Society. In 1991 an issue of Indiana Theory Review was devoted entirely to musical narrative. The problem of musical narrative is also discussed during the recurring International Congress on Musical Signification.2 What sealed the phenomenon of “musical narratology” was the appearance of the entry Narratology, Narrativity (by Fred Everett Maus) in 2001 in what is considered by many to be the world’s most important music encyclopedia, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. It presents, however, a rather scattered account of the literature (containing mostly articles) which, in a fragmentary way, introduced mainly the fierce debate on whether the existence of narrative in music is possible. In recent years the field of musical narratology has developed greatly. Two books which address the issue of narrative in music have appeared in recent years: A Theory of Musical Narrative by Byron Almén (2008) and Musique, narrativité, signification by Marta Grabocz (2009).

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The original German phrase is “tönend bewegte Formen.” The ICMS is a biennial conference that provides a platform for presentations and discussions of recent developments and future trends in Musical Semiotics. It has been held since 1986 as part of the International Project on Musical Signification.

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The Musicological Debate on Narrative in Music As I have already mentioned, since the 1970s a debate on whether narrativity can exist in music often appears in musical writings. Central questions have been posed: Is the term “narrativity” in music used in a metaphorical sense, as derived from literature? Is narrative possible in music—especially in instrumental music without text or literary program? I will only present briefly some chosen, exemplary attitudes to the problem. As we shall see, authors advocating for, respectively, a positive or negative answer to the question of whether music can be narrative take up very diverse concepts in their arguments. This diversity results inter alia from differences in the understanding of the very term of narrative and from different ideas about which elements are to be regarded as crucial for the existence of narrative. Among the first authors to take up this subject and advocate for a positive answer to the question of whether music can be narrative were Edward Cone and Anthony Newcomb. In his works from 1970s, Cone proposed perceiving music as a language of gestures. He posed a question: who speaks to us through a musical work? He used such terms as virtual persona, virtual agent, virtual idea—we can identify them, but cannot strictly define them. He treated repetitions in music (for example da capo) as being of the past tense, “remembered” by the persona. Cone’s writings therefore launched the debate on whether musical compositions can be treated as stories told by someone. Following Cone, Anthony Newcomb (1984, 1988, 1994, 1997) noticed that when listening to music we can recognize action, tension and dynamics similar to those which we experience while reading a literary text. So he proposed an analysis going beyond the formal level to the level of functional elements in the temporal span of the work. This series of functional events constructs a musical narrative. Newcomb also searched for plot archetypes and paradigms in musical works, with reference to the work of Propp and Todorov, but in a much more general sense. (Example scheme: suffering leading to redemption—Symphonies No. 5 and No. 9 of Beethoven, Symphony No. 2 of Schumann). An outstanding contribution to the theory of narrative in music has been that of Eero Tarasti, who in his book A Theory of Musical Semiotics, published in 1994, clearly stated that narrative units can be observed in music. Tarasti became famous for his narratological analyses of Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantasy Op. 61 and Ballade in G minor op. 23. According to him, we can perceive narrative programs in the structure of music itself, without referring to literature. He draws on the Greimasian model: the idea of the semiotic square, isotopes, modal categories, and actants. Tarasti also

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showed how the performance of a musical work is crucial for bringing out its narrative elements, and has recently presented a theory of three kinds of narrativity: conventional, organic and existential. Conventional narrativity takes shape following the Proppian functions as clearcut narrative programs in which the musical subject appears as actors and “does” something. [...] Organic narrativity, on the other hand, exceeds borderlines; it resists clear segmentation as it strives for continuous growth in accomplishing musical telos [...] The operatic principle or organic narrativity is to let the music appear ‘by itself’ [...]. Finally, existential narrativity crystallizes in those moments that constitute unique situations of choice, from which a paradigm of virtualities is opened. In such moments one gets free from the power and necessity of both conventional [...] and organic-corporeal processes [...]. (2008: 112)

At the same time, the concept of musical actants was taken up by Joseph Kerman, according to whom the study of musical narration should begin with the concerto genre. In his article Representing a Relationship: Notes on a Beethoven Concerto Kerman writes: While plenty of exceptions exist [...] in general one knows exactly who is who in a concerto and who is doing what. There is a soloist and an orchestra, and there is usually quite a sharp sense of character, of ‘the powerful and multicolored orchestra and its weak but high-spirited adversary’ as Tchaikovsky once put it. The agents exist in some kind of relationship, and what is traced in a concerto is the course of a relationship. (1992: 97–98)

Kerman—alluding to the change of paradigm in music theory—postulates an attempt to decipher extra-musical meanings, because on some level they are evident and intersubjectively verifiable. The reception of a work as it develops in time is significant in the context of musical narrative. In the linear course of time the listener uses the function of memory; he compares earlier passages with future ones, he anticipates, he is taken by surprise, he is being led by the musical narration. The possibility of music being narrative is postulated also by authors such as Robert Hatten, Marta Grabocz, Byron Almén, Karol Berger, Vera Micznik, Susan McClary and Raymond Monelle. Among skeptical voices addressing the possibility of musical narrative we find: Jean Jacques Nattiez, Carolyn Abbate and Fred Everett Maus. Nattiez, for instance, argues that music is unable to narrate in the past tense, that music lacks a subject, as well as lacking the subject—predicate relation and causality. He claims that we need a literary reference point to understand a musical work as narrative. Without it we can only speak about narrativity in music metaphorically. So to Nattiez music can only suggest a narrative or be similar to a narrative. Formal syntactic relations developing in time can create an illusion of narration, but only in the mind of a listener. Nattiez quotes Theodor W. Adorno, writing about Mahler, that music is “a narrative which relates nothing” (1990: 149–319). Where-

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as, following Hayden White, he uses the distinction between the verbs to narrate and to narrativize. The second verb does not mean narrating in the strict sense, but making an illusion of it—so for Nattiez music narrativizes (1990: 249). Because of its imitative ability music can imitate narrative style. Carolyn Abbate shares the critical attitude of Nattiez. According to her, through music we can hear the voice of narration, but we do not know what it is talking about. Music therefore imitates a narrative mode. She strongly opposes narrative interpretations which, in her opinion, trivialize music. Fred Everett Maus claims that music is more similar to drama than to narrative (1988, 1991, 1997). Maus thinks that literary language is fully justified in the interpretation of music, but on a high level of abstraction, which means for example that actants should not be identified. He concludes: “the exploration of instrumental music as narrative remains a tantalizing, confusing, problematic area of inquiry” (Maus 2001). The books by Byron Almén (2008) and Marta Grabocz (2009) were partly reactions to the critical attitudes mentioned above. In his book Almén debunks these critical arguments one by one, as we shall see later. Puzzling Definitions It is easy to observe that in this “debate” many discrepancies are caused by differences in the understanding of the very term narrative, by mixing and blurring the notions of epic and narrative, and by different ideas about which elements are to be regarded as crucial for the existence of narrative. No wonder, since even among narratologists there is no single concept or definition of what narrative is. I would therefore like to focus on the definitions and ways of thinking presented by authors who to some extent have organized this chaotic terminology. By doing this, these authors have simultaneously refuted the abovementioned arguments “against” musical narrative. Karol Berger, in his text Narrative and Lyric (1993), tries to organize notions connected to narrative, epic, lyric and drama, with reference to Aristotle, Genette and Ricoeur. The most important among his proposals is the introduction of a dyad—narrative and lyric—instead of a triad. As Berger notes, Genette has traced the ways in which modal and thematic categories have been mixed through the history of these terms. The narrative category, in Berger’s understanding, contains both epic and drama, and it is characterized by what it presents, that is by storyline, plot. The difference between epic and drama lies in their modes of presentation, though both present the same thing. (In this light, Maus’s argument—that music is more similar to

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drama than to a narrative—loses its point, because it seems that Maus has equated the narrative with the epic). Narrative and lyric are, according to Berger, types of form. Whereas narrative is a temporal form properly suited to representing human actions, lyric is an atemporal form representing states of mind. Berger explains, however, that: To be clear I would like to add that all music and all literature happen in time. Yet the notion of form with which we deal here does not concern either the ways of existence of a work of art in the real world or the ways in which it is experienced, but it concerns the temporal or atemporal structure of the world presented in the work. (1993: 54)

In narrative there is a sequence of parts which succeed one another in a determined order, governed by relationships of causation and resulting from necessity or probability. Such a narrative form implies an active and synthetic hearing, in contrast to the lyric form which encourages rather a passive kind of hearing by evoking a certain atmosphere. Berger, referring to the essay of Heinrich Besseler Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit (1959), points to the moment in the history of music in which active synthetic hearing reached its height: the end of the 18th century, i.e. the times of Hochklassik. This is the very moment in which the musical theme—an entity returning throughout the piece of music and subject to modifications—adopted individual features, became original and expressed the unique personality of a particular author. The musical work, united by the main theme which preserved its identity despite all its transformations, was understood as an expression of constant individual moral “character”. While listening to such a composition (for example of Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven), one synthesizes its consecutive phases so that it emerges as an integrated entity in which something has “happened”. A composition evoking a state or moment, however, for example in the musical impressionism of Debussy, is not narrative music. This is why we sometimes have the impression that there can be music that evidently does not try to tell us any story, while sometimes when listening to music “we might sigh and say: ‘How narrative!’” (Tarasti 2004: 287). Byron Almén, in his book A Theory of Musical Narrative (2008), debunks one by one the critical arguments concerning the existence of narrative in music (i.e. the arguments of Nattiez and Maus), proving that the existence of narrative does not require a meta-linguistic discourse that presupposes causality, narrator and referentiality. He arrives at the conclusion that narrative in music is possible, that it is not a secondary phenomenon taken from literature, and that it can manifest itself through the interaction of musical elements. He indicates that the definition of narrative is the source of confusion:

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Because narrative was first conceptualized in relation to literature, we have largely failed to recognize the distinction between narrative proper and narrative as manifested in literature. (2008:12) Among the existing definitions, he distinguishes between those which are based on a descendant model and those on a sibling one. Almén writes: To use a genealogical metaphor, I prefer a sibling model rather than a descendant model for articulating the relationship between musical and literary narrative. The descendant model presupposes a conceptual priority for literary narrative, while the sibling model distinguishes between a set of foundational principles common to all narrative media and principles unique to each medium. (2008: 18)

According to Almén, narrative categories—such as the four mythoi distinguished by Northrop Frye, of comedy, romance, irony/satire and tragedy—are present in music. They are the outcome of particular sequences of narrative formulas. The author gives his own definition of musical narrative: “Musical narrative is the process through which the listener perceives and tracks culturally a significant transvaluation of hierarchical relationships within a temporal span” (Almén 2003: 12). As we can see, it is possible to claim that music can be narrative if we accept rather general, broad definitions of narrative such as those quoted above. If, however, we base our analysis on the definitions proclaiming the existence of a narrator or representation specified in semantic details of the plot as a necessary condition of narrative, we will not be able to claim that music can be narrative. For example, according to Marie-Laure Ryan “a narrative text must create a world and populate it with characters and objects” (2004: 8), and according to Gerald Prince, the presence of at least one narrator is necessary for narrative (2003: 58). In this case— referring to Marie-Laure Ryan’s distinction (2004: 9)—we would rather say that music can’t be narrative, but can have narrativity, because it is able to evoke narrative scripts in the mind of the audience. A Narratological Perspective in Music Analysis In music, there is no narrator or concrete fictional world filled with objects and characters, but musicological narratologists claim that there can be a subject of mental processes and signification present in musical utterance itself. If we try to abstract the manifestations of what is regarded as a narratological perspective in musicological works, they will be: Structures of musical signification, such as, inter alia: ‒ Musical Gestures

This term refers to ‘energetic shaping through time’, grounded biologically and culturally in communicative human movement. Musical gestures are expressed

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within the conventions of a musical style, whose elements include both the discrete (pitch, rhythm, meter) and the analog (dynamics, articulation, temporal pacing) (Hatten 2004: 224).

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Topics

A topic is a complex musical correlation originating in the kind of music. (Hatten, 1994: 294–295). From its contacts with worship, poetry, drama, entertainment, dance, ceremony, the military, the hunt, and the life of the lower classes, music in the early 18th century developed a thesaurus of characteristic figures. They are designated here as topics—subjects for musical discourse (Ratner 1980: 9).

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Modalities

Modalities are general human ways of evaluation. As a series of emotional states, modalities account for the way the listener unites a musical text with human values. (Tarasti 1991: 136). The prevalent modalities of music are ‘being’ and ‘doing’, in addition to the normal temporal process of music, which I call ‘becoming’. Being means a state of rest, stability, and consonance; doing is synonymous with musical action: event, dynamism, and dissonance. The basic modalities of being and doing are sur-modalized by several others: will, the so-called kinetic energy of music, its general direction, its tendency to move toward a goal; know, the information conveyed by music, its cognitive moment; can, the power and efficiency of music; must, the control exercised by the rules of genres and formal types; believe, the epistemic values of music. One can also speak of modalities— that is to say, a process of modalization—in the performance or listening to music (Tarasti, 2004: 295–296).

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Intonations

Intonation signifies formulas, types of specific musical sonorities which transmit a human and social meaning, represented by the characters set out in the entire composition; their destiny is shaped in large musical and dramaturgical units like the characters observed in dramas, and plays its part in revealing the complex world of artists (Ujfalussy 1980, after Grabocz, 2008: 26).

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Semes, Classemes, Isotopies

These are categories helping to “distinguish the extent of the different dimensions of the signified (the smallest is the seme, the largest the isotope, while the classeme would correspond to the level of the phrase and the musical period in the Classical and Romantic eras” (Grabocz 2008: 27). The term “isotopy” refers to “a set of semantic categories whose redundancy guarantees the coherence of sign-complex and makes possible the uniform reading of any text” (Tarasti 1994: 291–292).

Moreover, in certain pieces of music one can detect actants. Musical narratology also deals with: The organizing strategies of the signified ‒ On the micro-level: binary oppositions, functions and directions of action, such as enclosure, disruption, subversion, counteraction, withdrawal, interruption, realization, together with all possible transformations.

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On the macro-level: musical forms and plot archetypes, narrative schemas, narrative programs, arrangement of topics and isotopies through time

The narratological tools derived from literary theory which have been most frequently used in music analyses are those of Propp (with his functions), Greimas (with such narrative units as actants, predicates, modalities, isotopies, the semiotic square, narrative programs and canonical narrative schema) and Todorov (with his narrative schema). Musical Narratives versus Literary Narratives If analytical tools for examining musical narrations are taken over from the theory of literature, what elements of the systems are then analogous for literary and musical narrations? Both music and language can be perceived as systems of utterance, which enable interpersonal communication, with a sender and a receiver. Here we have to add that this “utterance” in the case of music is far remote from linguistic pragmatics. They both have a temporal, linear structure. Therefore both in the perception of literary and musical narratives, Husserl’s categories of retention (an intentional awareness of a past event as past ) and protention (an intentional awareness of a future event as about to happen) are essential (see Polony 2005: 81). Of course, the experience of time is different in the perception of literary and musical narratives. Both language and music are systems of conventional, phonic signs. In both cases we observe the use of grammar understood as rules enabling the formation of an unlimited number of new structures. As part of the grammar in both systems we find syntax. Therefore in both cases the formal relations established between elements in time—like consequence, transformations, repetitions—are significant. In musicology, Schenkerian analysis 3 and the generative theory of tonal music by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff (1983) (inspired by Noam Chomsky) focus on musical syntax. Todorov claimed that in literary narratives “spatial” relations, such as antitheses, gradations, and repetitions, are very important. We can observe that these relations in music are, in fact, even emphasized. Finally, both literary and musical narratives can be understood as processes, as dynamic and energetic structures. Apart from the obvious difference concerning the mere material of literary and musical narratives, the biggest dissimilarity seems to emerge in _____________ 3

This means the method of musical analysis of tonal music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker, first presented in Harmonielehre in 1906.

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the sphere of semantics. Music cannot make a proposition (Micznik 2001: 218), there is no link between subject and predicate in music; moreover, “what music lacks, is vocabulary” (Rosen 1971: 38; qtd. in Micznik 2001: 211). Nevertheless, in musical narratology many misunderstandings (as part of the already mentioned “debate”) result from the use of the term “narrative” in reference to only one of its two levels, which are: story and discourse. Such adversaries of the narratological approach to music as J. J. Nattiez and C. Abbate, while criticizing the use of the term narrative, seem to admit in a way that musical works can fulfill one of the two aspects of narration: discourse. (Here let us remember Adorno’s quote, used by Nattiez: music is “a narrative which relates nothing” and Abbate’s claim, that through music we can hear the voice of narration, but we do not know what it is talking about). Seemingly, to these researchers music lacks the capacity to carry a story, to become a narrative. However, the problem of the ability or otherwise of music to tell a story is more complex. There is no doubt that literary narrations provide full semantics—we follow a particular plot. There is a possibility that music conveys a particular story—in program music, or together with a literary text. The same story can be told by means of literary and musical narration—then we talk about intersemiotic transpositions or about transmutation. The question is: What about narration in instrumental works without text or program, so called absolute music? Can we, with reference to those works, talk about narrative with its two components, discourse and story? Two extreme attitudes to this question are presented; on the one hand by the proponents of the literal transfer of particular stories to the music we listen to, and on the other hand by autotelists, who think that music can only be syntactic—without semantics. Yet there exists an entire spectrum of shades between the two extremes. Musical signifié ? Musical gestures, modalities, topics etc. refer, after all, to meaning which is not purely musical. It is rather ‘abstract meaning’ which, however, indicates some semantic fields. Marie-Laure Ryan recalls an anecdote about the composer Aaron Copeland, who was reportedly once asked: “Does music have meaning?” “Absolutely,” he replied. “Can it be put into words?”; “Absolutely not” (2004: 267). If we agree that semantization can be a phenomenon of various degrees and does not have to represent specific objects which have names, faces and shapes, but just general phenomena which can—but do not have to—undergo specification or elabo-

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ration in the mind of the listener, we will have to admit that music can tell a story. Semantics in music is like an algebraic formula, giving possibilities for the substitution of particular elements with more or less strictly specified designators. The ones specified will be a result of the cognitive process of the music perceiver, in the form of a construction of images. But the most general ones are intersubjectively verifiable and encoded and present in the very music, whether based on natural or cultural musical signs. As Werner Wolf argues: Narrativity is […] considered to be a gradable quality whose constituents [...] and characteristic features can be best illustrated with verbal stories (be they factual or fictional) as prototypical narratives. But narrativity is, of course, by no means restricted to such stories. (2008: 324)

Therefore: if in the Ballade in F major by Chopin we have Andantino and Presto con fuoco, we recognize a binary semantic opposition—a structure of sounds that is calm, gentle and—as its contrary—one that is restless and abrupt. No one would say that it is the opposite (although one might use slightly different words to describe this elementary meaning), so it can be intersubjectively verified. The clash of these two qualities constructs some sort of “event”. Furthermore, we can correlate these contrasting qualities with more specific semantic designations: war and peace etc. Similarly, in music we can hear masculine and feminine actants, but we do not have to say that they are Tristan and Isolde. The general meaning contained in the very musical structure suggests the nature and direction of images. As Vera Micznik writes: The description of musical materials with all their multiple levels of meaning, including the semantic level, offers a solution to the objection that music cannot be narrative because it does not have meanings as literature does: it has its own musical meanings which, hence, qualify its materials broadly speaking as ‘events’. (2001: 219)

We can ask ourselves whether claiming that a specified story applies to our “algebraic formula” does not lead to a trivialization of music. Maybe it does. But musical narratologists do not encourage that. They do not encourage the creation of a specific story with a group of characters with distinctive features. They use the concepts of semic opposition and semiotic square, functions, transformations, plot archetypes, isotopies and modalities to discover the deep narrative structure of a given work— assuming that “musical signification” is another type of meaning.

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Narrative in Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Let us have a look at the symphonic poem Romeo and Juliet by Peter Tchaikovsky (1880). I chose an example of programmatic, although purely instrumental, music on purpose—it is namely a special case in between various types of relationship between word and music. On the one end of the scale there would be a work of music with text, like a song or an opera (say “Romeo and Juliet” by Gounod, Bellini); at the other end is autonomous, “abstract” music (for example Brahms’s symphonies). There are some possibilities between these extremes, connected with the most generally understood program music—without texts, referring to ideas beyond music, determined explicitly by the composer, which can be suggested by the title (for example Schumann’s Dream), or by a story written as a part of the score (for example Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique). 1. The Story Level4 Romeo and Juliet by Tchaikovsky certainly alludes to Shakespearean drama, but the original plot is decomposed. Tchaikovsky extracts and abstracts basic narrative units—first of all the juxtaposition of the idea of love and hate as well as the actant of Helper (Friar Laurence).5 In the course of the narrative we can also hear the evocation of the idea of death, fate and tragedy. The first theme—the classeme of hatred—in a minor key, consists of short, abruptly ending motifs with a dense rhythmical structure and dotted rhythms, with repeated notes and rapid scales, sharply articulated, with loud dynamics, usually in tutti, with emphasized sharp timbres of instruments, and with sudden percussion strokes. The contrasting second theme—the classeme of love—consists of open phrases in a slow, stable movement (long note values), cantilena-like melody, rather quiet dynamics, legato articulation, with the use of soft and warm instrumental timbres such as English horn, con sordino strings, harp. The composer here wrote expressive performance indications: amoroso, espressivo, dolce. _____________ 4

5

As proposed by Vera Micznik in 2001 and appropriated by Byron Almen in 2008, in musical analysis the description of the story level concerns the identification of coherent music units (thematic material, musical events, musical actants) as a kind of a static structure whereas the description of the discourse level is connected with meanings resulting from the syntagmatic, relational aspect of how the musical events are linked together and how the musical material is transformed. We have the evidence of associating some musical themes with respective ideas of hate, love and Friar Laurence from the correspondence of Peter Tchaikovsky with Mily Balakiriev. But these associations are intersubjectively verifiable, which was proved by my experiments with students listening to this piece and guessing which ideas from Shakespeare’s play correspond to respective musical sections.

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Figure 1: Analysis of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet

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The exposition is preceded by a slow introduction with the theme of Friar Laurence—a chorale-like topic. The archaic sound quality here may constitute the mythical seme, a term applied by Tarasti in his book Myth and Music (1979: 69). Both love and hatred are sorts of centrifugal movements, a flow of high temperature. Ortega y Gasset notes that: In love, we feel united with the object of our love. While hatred, even though it is constantly heading towards the hated one—it separates from the object, keeping its distance, opening an abyss. (1989: 17)

While hatred in musical expression is always a struggle for separation, in the expression of love we can observe here two modalities—one of them is connected with the lovers’ aiming at reunion, the other with the state of unity or symbiosis. Those are the two most basic modalities distinguished by Tarasti: musical ‘doing’ and musical ‘being’. Tarasti explains it as follows: According to Greimas the basic situations of any narration are SvO and SΛO, that is, a subject is disjuncted from or conjuncted with an object [...]. One can say that in music the first-mentioned state would equal the musical ‘doing’. Thus the state of disjunction, the lack of some object, is experienced as tensional, and catalyzes the action. Correspondingly, the latter state, conjunction, means a resolution of tension and thus musical ‘being’. (1995: 60)

Moreover, these terms can be placed in a semiotic square as follows:

Figure 2: Adaptation of Tarasti’s model of main modalities in music (semiotic square). ‘Semantics of love’ is my interpretation.

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The semantics of love as it appears in Tchaikovsky’s work can be read in the light of this structure. As Tarasti writes, upon ‘doing’ and ‘being’ there can appear other surmodalizations; in the case of love these could be respectively ‘desire’ and ‘have’. The first one—SvO, modality ‘do’, surmodality ‘desire’—is connected with aspiring to ecstasy and reaching it but not forever. Musically it manifests itself through the use of a full scope of means within a given style, melos ascendens, ff dynamics, accelerando as well as such categories as appasionato and espressivo. The other one—SΛO, modality ‘be’, surmodality ‘have’—is connected with the comfort of the lovers’ union, which is shown by means of the symbiotic symbols of the unison type, but also by creating a general atmosphere of intimacy: usually a slow tempo, pp dynamics, the use of a “soft”, muted timbre of instruments—con sordino strings, woodwind instruments, harp. Among the expressive specifications given by composers we find amoroso, misterioso, dolce, sensibile. The indirect modalities (‘to be going to be conjuncted’, ‘to be about to be disjuncted’) appear in transition passages as junctions between these modalities. 2. The Discourse Level6 The entire narrative of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet is a process full of transformations. It aims dynamically towards the inevitable finale. There is a tendency to apply anticipations, as well as to apply stretto and to surprise the listener with explosions of sound. It corresponds with Shakespeare’s drama: Juliet often mentions that she has bad feelings. These anticipations are connected with obsessive semes of death (e.g. played by gran cassa). Clashes between contrasting sections are very emphatic in the whole symphonic poem, but in the course of the narrative trajectory they become stronger and change with increasing rapidity. The themes return each time in new configurations. For instance the theme of Laurence returns in a new context in the development and recapitulation—together with the topic of hatred, evoking an atmosphere of terror, fighting with fate, and warning, as well as in the closing coda with the reinforced dimension of the sphere of the sacrum, as if transcendent. Not only does music, in a more direct and intensive way than the literary medium, show all kinds of transformations in a narrative, but it can also simultaneously evoke more than one phenomenon, superposing one or more layers. In the case of the topic of love we deal with organic narrativity (one of three types of narrative distinguished by Tarasti.) Ildar Khannanov claims _____________ 6

See footnote 4.

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(after Viktor Bobrovsky), that this theme is a “compositional modulation”, changing in form in the course of its unfolding, growing in size towards the end. According to him, the love theme represents the idea of organic unity and dynamic development; it is unpredictable, yet very persuasive in its logic (Khannanov 2003: 28). Through an unusual relation of distant keys in which the main themes of hatred and love appear in exposition and recapitulation (breaking the schematic rules of sonata form), Tchaikovsky emphasizes the gap between the two musical topics. What is interesting is that there is no love theme in the development section—only those of hatred and of Laurence, as well as obsessive motifs that might evoke the premonition of death; as if the entire struggle over the lovers’ fate took place far away from them without them having any influence over it. In the recapitulation the theme of love will appear suddenly, in an even more direct clash than in the exposition. Here the expression gets intensified—the texture becomes denser, the instrumentation becomes more massive and the dynamics rise. At the end of the recapitulation we can hear the gran cassa that symbolizes fate. The coda (after the recapitulation) seems to transcend this world entirely and transport us to a different one. The expression here is more intimate, contemplative. Chorale-like topics appear, along with the transformed theme of love which is initially in a minor key—as if the love has been conquered. But in the course of the narrative in the coda the harmony brightens up and we can hear the process of transformation of the love theme into a surprisingly triumphant ending. The analysis of the modalities of musical discourse as distinguished by Tarasti (1995) may here help us recognize the “subcutaneous” power of music in its dimension as a process.7 The table (Fig. 1) shows a detailed graph of the intensity (or type) of each modality in the course of the work. 3. The Deep Narrative Level In the deep narrative level of Shakespeare’s play and the whole legend of Romeo and Juliet there are clearly present basic semic oppositions of love and hate, peace and war. Tchaikovsky chose a musical form in which this basic semic opposition could be best expressed and even accentuated. The _____________ 7

Eero Tarasti adapted the Greimasian concept of modality to the analysis of musical discourse in the interpretation of Frédéric Chopin’s Ballade in G minor, Op. 23 (Tarasti 1995). The general “translations” of respective modalities into music are quoted after Tarasti above in the section ‘Narratological perspective in music analysis’. The intensity of each modality in the course of the work is indicated as follows: ‘++’ means excessive, ‘+’ sufficient, ‘0’ neutral, ‘-’ insufficient, and ‘--’ deficient.

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sonata is a type of form based on two contrasting musical themes. What is more, the sonata form consists of several main sections logically unfolding. As Berger states: Only some types of musical forms (the model form being the classical sonata form) use fully the fact that music, happening in time, organizes the succession of the work’s phases and the causal logic of mutual relations between the phases, which is of great importance [for narrative: MP]. (1993: 56).

As shown in Figure 1, in the succession of ‘musical events’ of Tchaikovsky’s composition we can find on a deep level the classic narrative schema leading from an initial order to the final order through its disturbance and the main intrigue (series of trials) (see Greimas 1966, Todorov [1990: 29], Braningan [1992: 4], Grabocz 1999, Prince [2003: 63]). In Tchaikovsky’s poem the initial situation (introduction with chorale topic) is “disturbed” by the clash of hate and love classemes (in exposition), after which there appear a series of musical events (in development and recapitulation), transforming the meanings presented in the first two stages, and then a new order is reached (in the coda). We could say that the archaic sound quality of the introductory choral chords function here “as it were as an unfoldment of the mythical world, that which was called in Propp’s theory an ‘initial situation’, serving to launch the story” (Tarasti 1979: 67).8 In the narrative of this work, we are undoubtedly dealing with transvaluation,9 stressed by Byron Almén with reference to musical narrative, which becomes clear at the end. In the coda—by means of substantially developed musical material which we already know—a completely new type of expression is reached. After some dramatic passages, there are reminiscences of the love theme which—together with the “remote” choral topic and accompanying harp—can be interpreted as a sign of transcendence. Especially since the harmony lightens up at the end and the very ending is triumphant: played tutti, in a pure B major chord. In his correspondence with Tchaikovsky, Balakirev unsuccessfully tried to persuade him to change the ending; he felt that it was unaesthetic and contradictory to the drama of Shakespeare.10 Yet even in Shakespeare’s play _____________ 8 9

10

These original words by Tarasti refer to the opening of Bedrich Smetana’s Ma vlast. Almén takes over the concept of transvaluation from James Jakób Liszka’s The Semiotic of Myth: A Critical Study of the Symbol, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Quoting Liszka, Almén agrees that transvaluation is “a rule-like semiosis which revaluates the perceived, imagined, or conceived markedness and rank relations of a referent as delimited by the rank and markedness relations of the system of its signs and the teleology of the sign user” (Almén 2008). “A quoi bon ces accords assenés dans les dernières mesures ? C’est contraire au sens du drame, autant qu’inesthétique”; a letter from 22 January 1871, quoted after Sophie Co-

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the ending can be considered ambivalent. The return of the highly transformed themes in the coda creates the illusion of a large distance in time. The discrepancy between the time of the piece and the time of the story which is told becomes clear; as Christian Metz writes (about Genette’s theory), “one of the functions of narrative is to invent one time scheme within another time scheme” (Micznik 2001: 194). Friar Laurence in Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” appears to be a key actant in the unfolding of the narrative. Tchaikovsky does not tell the story of Romeo and Juliet by following the course of events from Shakespeare’s play. Laurence’s “presence”, from the very beginning of the symphonic poem through the whole narrative trajectory, emphasizes his role in the narrative: we can say that he is an actant-helper who unwillingly turns into an actant-opponent as a result of misfortune. He is thus a tragic hero and a symbol of a tragedy—from the very first chords. Would all these meanings be clear to us if we did not know that the work was Romeo and Juliet? If the piece was titled simply “Symphony” we would probably understand general meanings, but would not associate them with the characters of Shakespeare’s drama. We would still recognize the struggle between two forces—good and evil (and probably even more: love and hate). We would recognize the evocation of the sacred sphere. We would “hear” fate and tragedy. We would recognize the triumphant, transcendent ending. We would feel the musical “being” and the musical “doing”—we would know in which moments the inner subject is pursuing his goal and in which he reaches it. Could this “Riddle” Be Solved? The mystery, the ambiguity and the semantic enigma of musical narratives is extremely intriguing and they might provide even more possibilities of expression than literary narratives. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet we find the following words: “Let the sweet music tongue unfold the imagin’d happiness”, in a situation in which words are insufficient to express the excess of happiness. According to Lévi-Strauss: Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a

_____________

met, “Introduction au Roméo et Juliette de Tchaïkovski. Un romantisme modéré mais efficace“ Hera’s Peacock no 3: Roméo et Juliette. Ed. Laurence le Diagon-Jacquin, 137.

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mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress (in Rieger 2009).

If we agree that narrative can be a sort of phenomenon preceding the choice of medium, a certain human need, a competence, then authors can create narratives by means of various means. From this point of view— which can seem paradoxical—narrations are not adopted from literature to music, but were simply “discovered” in literature first. What is adopted, however, are the tools necessary if the interpreter wants to take a look at a work of music from the narratological perspective. Could this “riddle” and mystery of musical narrative be solved in the process of narratological analysis? Probably not entirely, and most musicologists are aware of that. They describe musical works in a technical way or by means of one of the multiple methodological approaches for getting closer to the truth about them, without ever wholly unraveling them. Their interpretations can be enriching, but sometimes, faced with music, they… fall silent. Narrative and Music: Conclusion Narrative, as a concept that comes before the means are defined, can be realized in music as well. Being a gradable quality11, narrativity can occur in music to a lower degree that in literature or film, for instance. (As I wrote earlier, music lacks some of the elements that literature possesses, like full, concrete semantics). Moreover, music itself can be more or less narrative, or can be not narrative at all. But musical pieces can introduce narrative constituents, such as: ‒ presenting a set of events or elements in a time-ordered structure Even though music does not present concrete meanings in a literary sense, it “has its own musical meanings which, hence, qualify its materials broadly speaking as ‘events’” (Micznik 2001: 219). Music not only happens in time, but is able “to invent one time scheme within another time scheme,” as Christian Metz puts it (qtd. in Micznik 2001: 194). It is able to evoke, _____________ 11

Gerald Prince writes about the degrees of narrativity: “The degree of narrativity of a given narrative depends partly on the extent to which that narrative fulfills a receiver’s desire by representing oriented temporal wholeness [...], involving a conflict, consisting of discrete, specific, and positive situations and events, and meaningful in terms of a human(ized) project and world [...]” (2003: 65). Vera Micznik in her article (2001) claims that in music we also deal with different degrees of narrativity; she compares the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony by Beethoven with the first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Mahler to draw the conclusion that Mahler’s piece is more narrative than Beethoven’s.

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for instance, a “mythical past” (Tarasti 1979) and to give an intersubjective perception of different time distances; ‒ presenting the relations between elements or events Not only can music present time structured elements (events), but it can also present relations between them. The specific kind of relations for narrative are causal relations, which can be most easily observed in music with a tonal syntax. However, when we speak about causal relations with regards to music, there arises the tantalizing question of whether these relations are in the music itself, or whether they are constructed by the listener. Most probably, they are “coded” in music, but need the active mind of a receiver to be extracted from it. Byron Almén claims that the problem of causality in literature is also controversial, and states that: There is no qualitative distinction [...] between the way narratives are constructed in literature and the way they are constructed in music. In each case, we must infer connections (2008: 31);

‒ presenting a change, transformation, transvaluation Musical pieces can show the process of hierarchical transvaluation; as Jakób Liszka writes, narrative [...] unfolds a certain, somewhat ambivalent, resolution to the crisis, depending on the pragmatics of the tale: the disrupted hierarchy is restorted [...] or, on the other hand, the hierarchy is destroyed [...]. (after Almén, 2008: 73).

The main thesis of Almén’s book A Theory of Musical Narrative is that through musical narratives the listener perceives and tracks culturally significant transvaluation; ‒ being a significant wholeness with at least a beginning, a middle and an end This Aristotelian concept is applied to music as well (and does not need explanation); ‒ possessing a “voice” characterized by human expression This “voice” is a subject of mental processes presented in a musical piece; we can have one “voice”—a kind of inner narrator (it is called “persona” by Cone) or multiple “voices” in the pieces that are closer to the dramatic than the epic (called “agents” and “actants” by, inter alia, Hatten and Tarasti). Even if this “voice” is not always identified nor mentioned in music analysis, the tracking of musical “modalities” (Tarasti) or calling motives “musical gestures” (Hatten) presumes that there is a human factor as a subject of these musical processes. The performer of music can modalize the piece too and underline its narrativity.

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Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn 1991 Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Princeton University Press. Agawu, Victor Kofi 1991 Playing with Signs: a Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music, New York: Princeton University Press. Almén, Byron 2003 “Narrative Archetypes: a Critique, Theory, and Method of Narrative Analysis”, Journal of Music Theory 47.1, 1–39. 2008 A Theory of Musical Narrative, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Berger, Karol 1993 “Narracja i liryka. [Narrative and Lyric.]”, Jan Stęszewski, Maciej Jabłoński (eds.), Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology, Poznan: Ars Nova, 41–56. Besseler, Heinrich 1959 Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit, Berlin: Akademie. Braningan, Edward 1992 Narrative Comprehension and Film, New York: Routledge. Burzyńska, Anna 2004 “Kariera narracji. O zwrocie narratywistycznym w humanistyce” [The career of Narrative. On the narrative turn in the humanities], in Włodzimierz Bolecki, Ryszard Nycz (eds.), Narracja i tożsamość (II). Antropologiczne problemy literatury, Warszawa: IBL. Cone, Edward T. 1974 The Composer's Voice. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1982 “Schubert’s Promissory Note: an Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics”, 19th Century Music 55.3, 233–241. 1984–1985 “Beethoven's Orpheus – or Jander’s?”, 19th Century Music 8, 283–286. Gasset, José Ortega 1989 Szkice o miłości [On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme], Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1989. Genette, Gérard 1988 Narrative Discourse Revisited, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Głowinski, Michał 2004 (ed.), Narratologia [Narratology], Gdansk: Słowo, obraz, terytoria. Grabocz, Marta 1999 “Paul Ricoeur’s Theories of Narrative and Their Relevance for Musical Narrativity”, Indiana Theory Review 20.2, 19–39.

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“Classical Narratology and Narrative Analyses in Music”, in Robert S. Hatten, et al. (eds.), A Sounding of Signs: Modalities and Moments in Music, Culture, and Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Eero Tarasti on his 60th Anniversary, Acta Semiotica Fennica XXX, Helsinki: International Semiotics Institute at Imatra & Semiotic Society of Finland, 19–42. 2009 Musique, Narrativité, Signification. Paris: L’Harmattan. Greimas, Algirdas Julien 1966 Sémantique Structural, Paris: Larousse. Hanslick, Eduard 1854 Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, Leipzig. Hatten, Robert S. 1994 Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2004 Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Herman, Luc and Vervaeck, Bart 2008 “Postclassical Narratology”, in David Herman, Manfred John, Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, New York: Routledge Ltd, 450–451. Karl, Gregory 1997 “Structuralism and Musical Plot”, Music Theory Spectrum 19, 13–34. Kerman, Joseph 1992 “Representing a Relationship: Notes on a Beethoven Concerto”, Representations 39, 80–101. Khannanov, Ildar 2003 Russian Methodology of Musical Form and Analysis. Diss. University of California. Lerdahl, Fred and Jackendoff, Ray 1983 A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Łebkowska, Anna 2006 “Narracja” [Narrative], in Michał Paweł Markowski, Ryszard Nycz (eds.), Kulturowa teoria literatury. Główne pojęcia i problem, Krakow: Universitas, 181–216. Maus, Fred 1988 “Music as Drama”, Music Theory Spectrum 10, 56–73. 1991 “Music as Narrative”, Indiana Theory Review 12, 1–34. 1997 “Narrative, Drama, and Emotion in Instrumental Music”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism lv, 293–303. 2001 “Narratology, narrativity”, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, London and New York: Macmillan Press.

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“Classical Instrumental Music and Narrative”, in James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.), A Companion to Narrative Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 466–483. Micznik, Vera 2001 “Music and Narrative Revisited: Degrees of Narrativity in Beethoven and Mahler”, Journal of the Royal Music Association 126, 126–249. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 1990 “Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?”, Journal of the Royal Musicological Association 115.2, 240–257. Newcomb, Anthony 1983–1984 “Once More Between Absolute and Program Music: Schumann’s Second Symphony”, 19-th Century Music 7, 233–250. 1987–1988 “Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies”, 19-th Century Music 16, 164–174. 1994 “The Polonaise-Fantasy and Issues of Musical Narrative”, in John Rink, Jim Samson (eds.), Chopin Studies II, Cambridge University Press. 1997 “Action and Agency in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Second Movement”, in Jenefer Robinson (ed.), Music & Meaning, New York: Ithaca. Pater, Walter Horatio 1986 The Renaissance: Studies in Art in Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press. Pettit, Philip 1977 The Concept of Structuralism: A Critical Analysis, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Polony, Leszek 2005 “Mityczny czas muzyki” [Mythical time of music.], in Lidia Wisniewska [ed.], Mity, mitologie, mityzacje nie tylko w literaturze [Myths, mythologies, mythizations not only in literature], Bydgoszcz: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kazimierza Wielkiego, 279–288. Prince, Gerald 2003 A Dictionary of Narratology, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Ratner Leonard G. 1980 Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style, New York: Schirmer. Rieger, Stefan 2009 „Od Lévi-Straussa do Chopina” [From Lévi-Strauss to Chopin] rfi.fr.rti, Web. . Rosen, Charles 1971 “Art Has its Reasons”, York Review of Books, 17 June.

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Rosner, Katarzyna 2006 Narracja, tożsamość i czas [Narrative, Identity and Time], Krakow: Universitas. Ryan, Marie-Laure 2004 (ed.), Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska. Shen, Dan 2008 “Story-Discourse Distinction”, in David Herman, Manfred John, Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, New York: Routledge, 566–568. Tarasti, Eero 1979 Myth and Music. A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music, especially that of Wagner, Sibelius and Stravinsky, Haga: Mouton Publishers. 1991 “Beethoven’s Waldstein and the Generative Course”, Indiana Theory Review 12, 99–140. 1994 A Theory of Musical Semiotics, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1995 “A Narrative Grammar of Chopin’s G Minor Ballade”, Chopin studies 5, Warsaw: F. Chopin Society, 38–62. 2008 “Mozart, Or, The Idea of a Continuous Avantgarde”, in Dario Martinelli (ed.), Music, Senses, Body: Proceedings from the 9th International Congress on Musical Signification, Rome: University of Roma Tor Vergata, International Semiotics Institute, Umweb Publications, Università Popolare di MusicAr Terapia, 111–127. 2004 “Music as Narrative Art”, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska, 283–304. Todorov, Tzvetan 1990 Genres in Discourse, Cambridge University Press. Wolf, Werner 2005 “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon: A Case Study of the Possibilities of ‘Exporting’ Narratological Concepts”, in Jan Christoph Meister (ed.), Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, Berlin: De Gruyter, 83–107. 2008 “Narrative and Music” and “Intermediality”, in David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, New York: Routledge, 324–329, 252–256.

PER KROGH HANSEN (Kolding)

Flow-Stoppers and Frame-Breakers: The Cognitive Complexities of the Film Musical Exemplified by Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) Why do they start to sing and dance all of a sudden? Jeff (Peter Stormare) in Dancer in the Dark

An Undertheorized and Uninvestigated Genre Taking into consideration the immense popularity of the film musical during the Golden Age of Hollywood and the success of later, postclassical musical films1, it is surprising how little work there has been done on the specific narrative aspects of the genre. In what according to many film scholars is the most important study of film and narrative, David Bordwell’s Narration and the Fiction Film (1985), classical popular genres as the western, the film noir, and the melodrama serve as material, but there is hardly no mentioning of the musical, and Rick Altman’s twenty-fiveyear-old seminal study, The American Film Musical (1987), is still not only ‘a’ but ‘the’ key-reference when it comes to discussing structural and narrative features of the genre. In Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art. An Introduction (2010 [1979]) one section is devoted to describing the history of the genre, and another section is analyzing Vincente Minelli’s Meet me in St. Louis (1944). But in the latter section, the film’s nostalgic pre-war and pre-depression ideology is more in focus than the genre specific narration and style . This tendency to approach the musical genre by paying attention to ideology, culture, gender, history, or production—i.e. thematic or extratextual circumstances—is more the rule than the exception in _____________ 1

Even though the literature in general agrees that there is a caesura in the history of the musical (stage and/or film) around 1960, there is no common understanding of how to label the latter period. Ethan Mordden (2003) has focused on the “concept musical” due to a looser plot-line. Gerald Mast (1987) has argued for the “modernist musical” due to the fact that artistic self-consciousness is manifest in many late musicals. I prefer the wider and more loose term “post-classical” since it gives room to a great variety of examples (e.g. Wise and Robbins’ West Side Story (1961), Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972), and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001)), which are clearly distinguished from the classical format.

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film criticism.2 It seems that the genre’s bad reputation of being escapist and reactionary have blocked for more thorough investigations conducted under the auspices of recent narrative theory’s conceptual refinements and reorientation towards a viewer-cognitive perspective. This is quite surprising insofar as there are several reasons why we should pay attention to the genre. First of all due to its multimodal expression and its eclectic complexity: The musical has since the very beginning been a testing ground for cinematographic and technical developments (think of the implementation of zoom and tilt in Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) and Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic top shots from the Warner musicals of the 30s) and it has constantly been integrating and opposing different modalities: acting, singing and dancing. Also, the musical is a very self-aware and self-reflective genre (Feuer 1977), which very explicitly thematizes its own complex ‘modus operandi’ and often declares its own artificiality. This is reflected by either exposing the complexities in the production of musicals (on stage or in film) as in the subgenre ‘the backstage musical’, or by allowing framebreaking and metafictive strategies; where the mimetic/realistic storyworld is interrupted and destabilized by mode-changes and inclusion of non-realistic song- and dance-acts; and where the relation between actor and role is blurred (do we see Fred Astaire or the role he is playing?). The film musical gives us obvious material to study the mechanisms and functions of defamiliarization, logical and physical impossibilities, and of metafiction. In this article I want to focus on these matters with a cognitive interest. It is a basic feature of the narration of the genre that it draws on or operates within two very different mental flows (I will label them ‘the cognitive flow’ and ‘the emotional flow’), in a manner quite distinct from other filmic genres. In a former study I have characterized the genre’s differentia specifica, as a “double integral task”. The first of these tasks is found in the fact that it is a constitutive trait for the genre that it integrates narrative and non-narrative textual and cognitive strategies. This integration occurs through the imple_____________ 2

An exception that deserves mentioning is Martin Rubin’s book on Busby Berkeley, which analyses the formal and compositional aspects of the choreographies Berkeley provided to the Warner Bros. musical’s from the 1930s. (Rubin 1993.) But two, otherwise recommendable, anthologies on the genre confirms the observation: Steven Cohan’s Hollywood Musicals. The Film Reader (2002) and Bill Marshall and Robynn Stilwell’s Musicals. Hollywood & Beyond (2000). Both books open with a small section on “Generic Forms” (Cohan) and “Music and Structure” (Marshall/Stillwell). In the former we find an excerpt from Altman and Rubin, a classical essay by Jane Feuer from 1977, and another one by Richard Dyer from 1992. In the latter, we find two essays of which only one is of general relevance, namely Heather Laing’s “Emotion by Numbers. Music, Song and the Musical”. The rest of the material in the books concerns gender, race, minorities, etc.

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mentation of a plot consisting of progression, conflict and transformation, and of musical-acts functioning in accordance with strategies we rather consider lyrical: That is by suspending the chronological story-time and introducing another mode in the show-acts for the expression of emotions, character traits and character developments, or situations. This task can be characterized as the genre’s ‘flow-stopper aspect’, alluding to the term ‘showstopper’ which in relation to stage performances describes an act so striking or impressive that the show must be delayed until the audience quiets down. The second task is found in the fact that the musical (especially in the classical Hollywood format) is very persistent in demanding both a realistic (mimetic or representational) framing of the story, and a non-realistic (spectacular or non-representational) implementation of the song- and dance-acts (people bursting out in song and dance to music not necessarily being supported by the storyworld)—and in attempting to integrate the two modes. This is what I will refer to as ‘the frame-breaking aspect’ of the genre. In this article I will pay special attention to the first of these tasks, the flow-stopper aspect. My argument is that only by understanding the distinctive and to some degree opposite cognitive features and characteristics of narrative and music respectively, can we gain full understanding of what is at stake in the genre. In the second part of the article, I will take a closer look at Lars von Trier’s Palme d’Or-winning Dancer in the Dark (2000) since this melodramatic musical seems to explore the function of the characteristics I will be focussing on. Music, Narrative, Cognition and Emotion The discussion of music and narrative—and at a more general level of music and meaning (semantics)—is old and still unsettled. In the present collection, Małgorzata Pawłowska provides an excellent overview of the most important recent positions in the ongoing debate on whether stories can be told solely through the language of music. She furthermore demonstrates how a musical piece, Romeo and Juliet by Peter Tchaikovsky (1880), can be analyzed as narrative. For this kind of analysis to succeed, we will however, as Pawłowska claims, have to affiliate with an understanding of narrative that tones down the necessity of a narrator and of specificity regarding characters and settings. Instead we shall pay attention to the changes between states of affairs, the sense of ‘eventfulness’, tension and developments between binary oppositions, and to the modalities expressed. In other words, to describe the narrative of a musical piece like Romeo and Juliet our approach will have to be based on the models and

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concepts derived from formalism, structuralism and semiotics rather on the models developed within literary studies. Indeed, several works and pieces of instrumental music from the classical period of music history most certainly tell stories. However, we could claim that one of the specific characteristics of these narratives is that they can be appreciated and—in some rather paradoxical way—‘understood’ without the listener paying attention to or recognizing these stories. In a survey-article on the topic of music and narrative, Emma Kafalenos reminds us that to presumably many listeners the power of instrumental music to represent changes of state and causal relations without specifying events or agents is a positive rather than negative quality. She therefore relates the experience of instrumental music to Roland Barthes’ notion of the writerly text: “Instrumental music, because it is unburdened by the semantic meanings (however polysemous) attached to verbal signifiers, is more writerly than even the most plural constructs made from words” (Kafalenos 2004: 280). This makes her conclude that when unaccompanied by text or paratext, instrumental music can have narrative features (or what Ryan calls ‘narrativity’) but should probably not be thought of as narrative proper. This undoubtedly counts for much instrumental music, but the question is whether the claim can be generalized and on what basis. One might, quite contrary, claim that music and verbal language share the same fundamental characteristics of arbitrariness at the level of the signifier and signified and of convention based establishment of semantics and meaning. It might very well be that verbal signifiers are ‘burdened’ by semantic meanings, but the semantics are not given by nature—it is based on convention. There is therefore no theoretical problem in having music engage in the same process of establishing conventions for signification through tonality, themes, phrases, harmonies etc. as verbal language does through phonemes or morphemes, words, sentences, etc.3 And as Eero Tarasti (2004) shows in an article from the same anthology Kafalenos’ piece appeared in, music can contain structures that make the listener associate a given piece with stories. Tarasti demonstrates this by applying structuralist and semiotic models to a wide range of compositional music. He illustrates how e.g. the Proppian model of narrative as consisting in sequences of functions and Greimas’ semiotic square can be applied to large scale musical pieces (symphonies, ballets, etc.), and how musical motives and the development of them within a piece and in-between pieces (through intertextual reference) most certainly have narrative functions. _____________ 3

In her article, Pawłowska points out some of the more specific similarities between verbal language and music—see page 205f. in the present volume.

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Nonetheless, I believe Kafalenos is right in reminding us on the one hand “that (much) music is often thought to be more closely related to the lyric than to the narrative” (this is an aspect I will return to later); and on the other hand in claiming that to many listeners it is exactly the abstraction and non-specificity of the ‘eventfulness’ of musical progression that is appreciated. To put this point differently, listeners enjoy a piece of Chopin and might feel a deep understanding of it without knowing what story (if any) he wanted to tell us with the piece. But it might very well be that this understanding is less cognitively oriented than it is emotional. Whereas a cognitive understanding needs a verbal or verbalized ‘hook’ to be established (a title, a biographical fact, an intertextual reference through the repetition and/or manipulation of a formerly known motif or phrase, or some other semantical or thematic anchoring), the emotional understanding is less dependent on framing. This brings us on to one of the other principal questions concerning music and meaning that have received wide attention: can music symbolically convey or express distinct and categorical affects (as Susanne K. Langer claimed in Philosophy in an New Key (1942)), or does it rather generate or ‘arouse’ (individual or collective) emotional reactions in the listener?4 A mediating position has been suggested recently by the Danish film music scholar Iben Have, who argues that Daniel Stern’s conception of vitality affects and vitality contours might help us understand what music is and does. Stern describes vitality affects as emotional states which are not connected to any definable object but which still are ‘directed’. Vitality affects are the emotions connected to the here and now of the subject (the sense of being alive, situated, in movement, due to basic vital life processes such as breathing, becoming hungry, falling asleep) and is opposed to the categorical affects such as anxiety, grief, joy, etc. Stern himself has drawn connections between vitality affects and music and abstract dance. Music and abstract dance are examples, he claims, of the vitality affects’ expressivity. Here, there is no ‘plot’ arranging the affects and no signals of categorical affects but rather a series of expressed affects not related to a defined content. This, though, does not mean that music cannot be given an object or put in the service of categorical affects. Titles, program texts, lyrics, knowledge of the composer’s biographical circumstances, intermusical references, inclusion of recognizable ‘reality’ sounds and—of course— interpretation through performance, can quite easily lock the music’s fluc_____________ 4

This discussion goes back to the difference between the Platonic understanding of mimesis (music mimes the emotions of the creator) and the Aristotelian conception of catharsis (music arouses emotions in the listener).

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tuating emotional quality in definable and graduated affects, in modalities (Tarasti 2004: 295 f.), and semantically (Laing 2000). Film, Flow, Narrative, and Emotion Film-makers have of course been very aware of this, and they have been using background music to evoke emotions and to evaluate characters and situations in the filmic flow. Characters are often presented by the use of musical leitmotif’s; emotional changes and peak-experiences are illustrated by evocative underscore; situations are angled and given significance by supporting music; action is given a pulse and intensity; and so on an so forth. These are all issues that have received fair attention in film studies (Kalinak 1992; Gorbman 1987; Brown 1994, 2005; Langkjær 1997, 2000).5 A lot of these results can of course be transferred to the study of the film musical genre, but they cannot describe the effects of its central feature, namely that music is not just scaffolding the diegesis and the story told but an essential part of it and often effectuated by the aforementioned framebreaking strategy where the border between diegesis and extradiegesis is transgressed: The background music that we by definition consider inaudible for the characters is integrated into the characters’ world. There seems to be two reasons for the priority studies of background music have had over studies of the film musical proper. Firstly, the musical is by definition antirealistic. Therefore, it does not really fit into the maintrend in film studies where realism has had priority—at least since Kracauer and Bazin. Secondly, most film studies after Bordwell have had narrative and meaning construction as its main focus points. Bordwell’s interest was to promote a formal description of how the narration (the style and the sjuzet) of fiction film functions, and what it demands of the spectator with regard to sense-making, whereas the spectator’s emotional response and involvement wasn’t confronted to the same extend. This has later been brought to attention by Torben Kragh Grodal in his book Moving Pictures (1997), which is an ambitious description of the mental flow of film viewing. Taking departure in the fact that directors, actors, and audience appreciate narratives, which activate mind and body and arouse emotional reaction, Grodal maps out the emotional responses and structures involved in film viewing and analyses their function as motivating forces for the narrative flow. _____________ 5

Even though it focuses on theatre and not film, Peter Rabinowitz’ (2004) enlightening study of the role of the music in Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat by way of rhetorical narrative theory, deserves mentioning. By e.g. relating the extradiegetic music to the position of the implied author, Rabinowitz accounts for elements of authorial irony, etc.

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I will not go into a long discussion of Grodal’s study here but just mention that even though he is aware of the many different aspects of the mental flow, he still gives the narrative structure primacy. In a significant opening formulation in the article “Emotions, Cognitions, and Narrative Patterns in Film” Grodal states that “Film viewers prefer to experience narratives that strongly activate the mind and body, that move and touch, that cue the production of adrenaline and elicit visceral reactions.” (1999: 127.) Narrative is, according to Grodal, what we first and foremost experience and the structure to which the emotional reactions relate. The narrative structure and process are therefore considered the fundamental structure of the mental flow, whereas modes of lyricality, montage, etc. are considered ‘flow-stoppers’. Grodal is of course right when he claims that the narrative structure and flow is dominant in most films and genres, but the underlying assumption that narrative is a fundamental and indispensable aspect of the filmic flow is more questionable. If it is so, why do other modes exist at all in the movies? In Grodal’s perspective their function is to create suspension and tension, they are interruptions of the narrative that the spectator wants to overcome. But is it actually so? At least the film musical genre seems to make another case. In the classical Hollywood-format the storyline is basically the same in all films set in different environments. The narrative structure is here only a framework for bringing together the song and dance acts, and it might very well be claimed that the narrative structure here is the disturbing, flow-intervening factor, and that the primary flow is that of ‘musicality’. It shall not be considered here whether Grodal’s priority of the narrative flow is based on the fact that he is subscribing to a theory of the brain, where the left hemisphere (see Fig. 1) and thereby aspects like language, analytical and verbal capacities, conceptualization and timeconception, are considered dominant. But if we allow for a ‘flat’ (rather than a ‘hierarchical’) approach (i.e. if we at a general level consider the narrative and the lyrical flow as co-ordinated instead of sub-ordinated) and acknowledge, as it seems to be the case by several neurotheoretical researchers,6 that the relation between the two brain hemispheres is less a matter of dominance than of complementarity, Grodal’s study provides us with an excellent conception of what is at stake cognitively between the narrative and the musical aspects in film in general and in the musical genre specifically.

_____________ 6

A 1998 issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science gives a good overview of this shift in orientation—see, e.g., Beeman and Chiarello 1998; Chabris and Kosslyn 1998.

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Emotion and Cognition, Music, and Narrative as Mental Processes Albeit the fact that there is a persistent discussion of whether the distinction between the hemispheres of the brain’s activities hasn’t been exaggerated, I take the liberty of approaching the complexity by way of the clarity of an outline in binary oppositions. This approach might very well be considered reductive by neurologists and neuro-psychologists, but insofar as no one seems to deny that there does exist a left-right distribution of central mental activities, I find the approach justified.7

Figure 1: Map over left and right brain hemisphere activities.

As the figure shows the left hemisphere activities are characterized by being syntagmatic or diachronic processes, whereas the right hemisphere activities generally consist in processes of a paradigmatic or a- or synchronic kind. The left hemisphere is considered the place for verbal activity, for analytical processes and conceptualizations, as well as for giving names to colors, and for perceiving time. Contrary, the right hemisphere is non-verbal and functions holistically by way of synthesis. Spatial understanding and musicality also belong to the right hemisphere and so does the distinction between colors. The right hemisphere supports presence in the moment as opposed to timely understanding. It is therefore also obvious that the left hemisphere supports mental activities related to cognition proper and to narrative understanding and/or processing insofar as narrative in a cognitive perspective is understood as “long chains of simulated _____________ 7

Moreover, this approach is to a large extent shared with Grodal, whose chapter 2 of Moving Pictures the following presentation relies on.

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acts directed toward conceptualized images of objects or situations which serve as goal for the acts” (Grodal 1997: 50). The cognitive mental processes consist in information processing, voluntary goal-directed acts, and linearity. In this light, it is obvious why narrative reasoning and construction are considered a fundamental cognitive operation. Narrative reasoning is characterized by gratification (between e.g. tensity and relaxation), by vectorized sequential meaning construction, and a ‘directedness’, which constitutes time as going towards the future due to some intentional motivation. On the contrary, the right hemisphere supports activities related to ‘lyrical’ or ‘musical’ processes (that is rhythmic and repetitious acts and orientation toward the moment). The emotional mental processes are modes of relational action readiness, involuntary repetitive rhythmic acts, and associative fields. The emotional constructions form the basis for the intentional motivations and our goal-oriented activities due to the fact that they let us react on the present situation. They are therefore characterized by arousal, presence and ‘momentness’. If we accept that the left hemisphere activities/cognitive aspects and the right hemisphere activities/emotional aspects are interrelated respectively, it is obvious why music and narrative has been juxtaposed to the extent they have in musicology. Musicality belongs to the activities of the right hemisphere and is characterized by repetition, by arousing vitality affects and emotion, whereas narrativity is characterized by goal-oriented progression, by evoking categorical affects and meaning. Narrative is manifesting a goaloriented time conception, whereas music is manifesting a repetitive time conception. Furthermore, as Marie-Laure Ryan points out with reference to Paul Ricoeur and Susanne Langer, there is a kinship between music and narrative insofar as the narrative emplotment of experience is a way to come to terms with the ‘being-in-time’ of the human existence (Ricoeur), whereas music is a ‘virtualization of time’ (Langer)—an abstraction where time is liberated from the changes in concrete objects and space. Ryan concludes: “Whereas content-based narrative creates a time-space continuum, the abstract narrative of music captures time in its purest form” (206). We can bring this observation a step further and claim that music proper, that is in its purest form, is a suspension of the human condition of ‘being-in-time’; it gives the listener an opportunity to transgress his/hers embedment in chronological, historical time, in favor of an abstracted time. Where narrative fix’ the reader/receiver in ‘being-in-time’, music liberates the listener and gives an experience of ‘being-out-of-time’ by giving grounds to ‘an existential escapism’ in the creation of an abstract space of emotional presence and fluctuation. If we relate this to the film musical we can make a less ideological claim for the genre’s escapism: Escapism is actually a fundamental aspect of the genre but not understood in the cultural or political way

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that otherwise has been the case. It is at a mental level that the musicality as such provides this escapism, which, quite paradoxically, is effectuated by facilitating the spectator with an emotional presence established through tone, rhythm, and repetition. What characterizes the film musical’s narration is that it is attempting to integrate the two quite distinct flows of narrative and musicality respectively. Where other filmic genres in general subordinate the musical flow and the narrative flow, the musical genre (tries to) co-ordinate them—not necessarily by establishing a polyphony of the two flows or by frictionless transition between them but through contrast and conflict and by disintegration. Music(al) as Mental Escapism: Dancer in the Dark Lars von Trier’s musical Dancer in the Dark (2000) explores the aspects of the musical flow as opposed to the narrative flow and the escapism the genre and the musicality offers. Dancer in the Dark is part of what Trier has called the ‘Golden Heart Trilogy’ (the two other films being Breaking the Waves (1996) and The Idiots (1998))—a series of films about self-sacrificing, good-hearted and naive heroines who maintain their ‘golden hearts’ despite the tragedies they experience. In Dancer in the Dark, the heroine is Selma (Björk), a Czech immigrant and single mother who has moved to the United States to work in a kitchen-sink factory. Selma is a great musical-lover who together with her good friend Kathy (or ‘Cvalda’ as she calls her [Katherine Deneuve]) uses musicals to escape mentally from the misery of the life she’s living. And Selma most certainly has all the reasons in the world to escape from reality: She and her son Gene (Vladica Kostic) suffer from a hereditary degenerative disease, which is gradually making them blind. Selma is therefore saving up all she earns to pay for an operation of Gene. The only pleasure she allows herself when not working is going to the cinema for old musicals with Cvalda and to participate in the local amateur production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. But due to her growing blindness (which she hides from the world), her stressful work schedule and her lack of talent, her part in the play is being questioned and finally given to someone else. Selma, however, still has the musical in her heart and mind. Quite literally insofar as she creates mental musical spaces out of the situations she is in to escape the everyday trivialities and—later in the movie—her gloomy fate: Her friend and landlord, the policeman Bill (David Morse), who is broke due to the spending’s of his materialistic wife Linda (Cara Seymour), asks Selma for a loan, which she

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denies him, and instead he steals her savings. In an attempt to get the money back, she struggles with him and ends up killing him on his own demand. He hasn’t told Linda of his financial situation, and Selma has promised not to tell anyone either. She is therefore put on trial and sentenced to death. Cvalda finds out about the real reason for the events and tries to make Selma take on a lawyer for the money she has saved up for Gene’s surgery. Selma rejects this solution and is hanged at the end of the movie but learns just before the execution that Gene has regained his vision. As it is evident in this plot-summary, the musical’s escapist offering is a strong motive in Dancer in the Dark. This is particularly obvious at the diegetic level insofar as the plot follows the logic of the tragedy and is set in a poor, ‘super-realistic’ environment.8 Selma seeks shelter from her everyday sufferings and trivialities in musicals by attending shows in the local movie theatre, by participating in the local amateur production of Sound and Music, and by creating mental musical spaces out of the situations she is in. Whereas the escapist possibility of the two first mentioned are characterized by not being accomplished (partly due to Selma’s blindness), the mental musical spaces of Selma most certainly are effective hideouts for her. Her mental escapes into these musical acts are escapes into time- and frictionless spaces, where, as it is sung in “In the Musicals”, “There’s always someone to catch me/When you fall”, and where the ‘wrongs’ of the storyworld are if not made right then at least forgiven as in “Smith and Wesson (Scatterheart)”, when (the dead) Bill and Linda forgive Selma for the murder of Bill. The ‘entry’ to these fantasy spaces is by way of a repetitive sound in Selma’s surroundings (the sound of a machine, a passing train, footsteps, etc.), producing a rhythmic pulse, a monotone redundancy in the storyworld, giving Selma the possibility to leave it mentally but without losing the connection to it.9 It is uncertain how long the musical moments are in the real-time of the storyworld—sometimes a change has occurred _____________ 8

9

In the manifest Trier wrote for Dancer in the Dark, he stressed that the settings should be characterized by ‘super-realism’ and that no one should be able to notice that the film was not shot on location or that anything had been done to the scenery before the shooting (185). Furthermore, he remarks that all scenes not including Selma’s musical fantasies should be as realistic as possible with regard to the acting, the surroundings, etc. (Trier 2000: 182). It is also significant that even though the film style changes radically when we enter Selma’s mental space, settings and dressings are still the same. Trier commented on this feature in the manifest mentioning that all props that should be used in a song or dance should be present due to the story, the location, or the characters. This is, as Trier claims, against the classical musical’s principles insofar as there will not suddenly be 10 identical props or a chorus of dancers dressed identically. (Trier 2000: 185)

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while Selma was distracted (she has moved from one place to another), sometimes it seems like no time has passed, making the musical act function as a ‘time-loop’. The latter is seen in the track “I’ve seen it all” where Selma’s friend Jeff’s question just before the act (“You can’t see, can you?”) is repeated after the act. The entry into these mental, musical spaces is always gradually effectuated, whereas the exit is characterized by abruptness and often caused by outer circumstances (a machine break-down, the train that provided the rhythm has passed, etc.), bringing both Selma and the spectator back to the fatalistic narrative of the storyworld. Trier chose two distinctly different styles for the ‘reality’ scenes and the ‘musical’ scenes of the movie: The depiction of reality is carried out by handheld cameras and in a very rough cutting not necessarily paying attention to continuity. This gives an impression of a roughly edited documentary style and a grey and prosaic realism.10 The musical scenes on the contrary have brightened colors and are filmed by over 100 stationary cameras giving a nearly endless number of angles and perspectives on the acts, which are edited according to what Trier called ‘love-cutting’—that is with respect to which shot he liked best. The result of this multiperspective editing is that space dominates over time in the musical scenes, whereas the handheld documentary style of the storyworld scenes makes time dominate space: The camera has to ‘catch up’ with the actors’ movements, actions and interactions in the storyworld scenes, while it is present everywhere and ‘everytime’ in the musical scenes. If we relate these stylistic features of the narration of Dancer in the Dark to the theoretical framework I presented earlier in this article, it is evident that Trier (consciously or unconsciously) is playing with distinctions and contrasts between the cognitive/narrative flow and the emotional/musical flow. The storyworld scenes are characterized by progression (especially after the point of no return where Bill steals Selma’s money and the climax where Bill is killed); by voluntary goal-oriented acts (Bill steals the money to save himself, Selma kills Bill to get the money back, Selma sacrifices herself for Gene, etc.); by a goal-oriented time conception and consciousness of the time-limited being (Selma’s knowledge of how her vision gets worse; her knowledge of the necessity of her self-sacrifice to save Gene); and by categorical affects like love, pain, grief, despair, etc. By contrast, the musical scenes are characterized by repetition (both due the melodic structures but also by the fact that the song-compositions carry traces of melodic bits and pieces and orchestrations from the musi_____________ 10

The style is close to that of the Dogma95-movies—Trier’s contribution “The Idiots” came out in 1998 and belongs also, as mentioned, to the ‘Golden Heart Trilogy’.

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cal genre’s history11); by arousing vitality affects (“Cvalda” is establishing an emotional room of joy, happiness, energy, whereas e.g. “Smith and Wesson (Scatterheart)” call forward alertness, danger, uneasiness, but also presence and, in a strange sense, harmony and confirmation). The timeconception of the musical-acts is, as mentioned, basically an ‘out-of-timeness’ characterized by repetition, presence and harmonic fluctuation, and the camera-work with the 100 cameras produce a sense of omnipresence and spatiality as opposed to the handheld camera’s subjectivity and temporal existence. It can be (and has been) claimed that Trier’s film isn’t a ‘real’ musical insofar as he doesn’t incorporate the musical acts explicitly in the storyworld. However, this critique neglects some important features of the film. First of all: Even though the show-acts take place in Selma’s fantasy, they are more fully integrated in the storyworld than many other classical acts insofar as they stick to the props, characters, and settings of the storyworld. Secondly: Selma’s musical fantasies depend on the reality she is placed in—she needs an impulse from the storyworld (a sound) to produce the musical-act, and the musical-act is in that sense integrated in the storyworld. Thirdly: Albeit the storyworld and the musical-acts belong to different spheres, their co-existence is being accentuated progressively during the course of the plot. The first two acts, “Cvalda” and “I’ve seen it all” (the first taking place in the factory settings, the second on a train-bridge), function as what I earlier called time-loops and bring us out of the storyworld time and into an abstract, temporally non-existing space. But in tracks like “Smith and Wesson (Scatterheart)” and—especially—“107 steps”, the storyworld and musical-act coexist. In the former, Selma leaves Bill and Linda’s house during and by help of the song; in the latter, she uses the song to pass the distance of the 107 steps from the cell to the scaffold. During this act a measured counting of the steps accompanies Selma’s freefloating movements and song-improvisation over the tracks. On the one hand, Selma adds musicality to the measured steps of herself and the policemen guarding her, and creates a non-time-bound room of her own. On the other hand, by way of the audible measured counting of the steps, the dreadful events of the storyworld invade Selma’s otherwise rather exclusive mental spaces. Fourthly: Selma’s dependence on external sounds to make the musical-acts come into being is stressed through the track “My favorite things”, taking place in the prison cell. The only sound Selma can pick up _____________ 11

In the manifest, Trier gives directions on how the music should be composed: The music should be grounded in the musicals Selma loves, e.g. as fragments or instrumentations. (Trier 2000: 183).

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here is the vague sound of the chapel-choir through the air-conditioning, but the sound is so weak and ‘unrythmic’ that it doesn’t really ignite a musical act in Selma’s mind. And fifth and finally: The same setup as in “My favorite things” is made in the final scene, when Selma is on the scaffold. Here she can hardly stand due to fear and anxiety, but when Kathy tells her to listen to her heart, she calms down and starts singing the final song of the film, “Next to last song”, a cappella. Where we, the spectators, have followed Selma into her mental space in all other acts, we are left in the storyworld in this act. Whether this means that nothing takes place in Selma’s mind this time due to the reversal (she picks the rhythm in herself this time, not in her outer world), or it is a matter of the narration placing us together with the characters witnessing Selma’s fall, is of course open to interpretation. But the power of the act is intensified by the fact that this is the first and only moving song act taking place in (and therefore fully integrated in) the storyworld. Selma recognizes the power of her Golden Heart and can stay in her timeless musical space as long as it beats—no need to mention that the effect of the abrupt ending, when the trapdoor of the scaffold silences Selma, is extremely strong. Selma and Selma’s song dies, and the spectator is left in the dreadfulness of the storyworld. Conclusions It has been my intention to show that by studying film musicals we can learn important lessons regarding the mental flow of movie reception and structure. First of all, the genre serves as a ‘problem child’ to the conceptions of film as dominated by the narrative flow. Those who have knowledge of early film theory—Eisenstein, Münsterberg, Landry, Arnheim and others—will know that these early theorists of the medium did not pay much attention to narrative but instead conceptualized film in musical terms. Because film as art form was structured in time, and because the early theorists quickly became aware of the medium’s possibilities of both emotional expression and to arouse the spectator’s feelings, film was compared to music. As Arnheim remarked, the increasing realism in film robbed its ‘melodic shape’. Furthermore concepts like counterpoint (Eisenstein), rhythm, frequency, motif, and even compositional terms like ‘symphony’ and ‘rondo, were used to describe the features of the—in those days—new medium and art form. My point is not to demand that we turn back the time and reintroduce this terminology (psychologist Annabel Cohen (2002) has recently made an attempt in that direction). What I recommend it that we as film scholars and

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as narratologists make sure that our analyses and theories of film treat the spectator’s emotional involvement and response to film in a fair way. The musical genre is an obvious object for investigation in this respect insofar as, like no other genre, it employs both the narrative (cognitive) flow and the musical (emotional) flow without subordinating the latter under the former. At its best, the musical explores the cognitive properties of these flows, both by opposing them and by integrating them. It might very well be that the musical act functions as a narrative flowstopper, but at a general level, the musical is more of a flowshopper (moving rather freely between the two presented flows) than a flowstopper. Works Cited Altman, Rick 1987 The American Film Musical, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Beeman, Mark Jung, and Christine Chiarello 1998 “Complementary Right- and Left-Hemisphere Language Comprehension”, Current Directions in Psychological Science 7.1, 2–9. Bordwell, David 1985 Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson 2010 Film Art: An Introduction, 9th ed., New York: McGraw-Hill [1979]. Brown, Royal S. 2005 “Music and/as Cine-Narrative Or: Ceci N’est Pas Un Leitmotif”, in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowits (eds.), A Companion to Narrative Theory, Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 451–465. 1994 Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music, Berkeley: University of California Press. Chabris, Christopher F. and Stephen M. Kosslyn 1998 “How Do the Cerebral Hemispheres Contribute to Encoding Spatial Relations?”, Current Directions in Psychological Science 7.1, 8–14. Cohan, Steven 2002 Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, London and New York: Routledge. Cohen, Annabel. J. 2002 “Music Cognition and the Cognitive Psychology of Film Structure”, Canadian Psychology-Psychologie Canadienne 43.4, 215– 232.

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Feuer, Jane 1977 “The Self‐Reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 2.3, 313–326. Gorbman, Claudia 1987 Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, London, Bloomington: BFI Pub., Indiana University Press. Grodal, Torben Kragh 1999 “Emotions, Cognitions, and Narrative Patterns in Film”, in Carl Platinga and Greg M. Smith (eds.), Passionate Views. Film, Cognition and Emotion, Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 127–145. 1997 Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition, Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press. Hansen, Per Krogh 2010 “‘All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing!’ Prolegomena: On Film Musicals and Narrative”, in Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Intermediality and Storytelling, Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 147–164. Have, Iben 2008 “Background Music and Background Feelings. Background Music in Audio-Visual Media”, JMM: The Journal of Music and Meaning 6, http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/pdf/JMMart_6_5.pdf, last visited 31.3.2011. Kafalenos, Emma 2004 “Overview of the Music and Narrative Field”, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln & London: Nebraska University Press, 275–282. Kalinak, Kathryn Marie 1992 Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Laing, Heather 2000 “Emotion by Numbers. Music, Song and the Musical”, in Bill Marshall and Robynn Jeananne Stilwell (eds.), Musicals: Hollywood and Beyond, Exeter, UK; Portland, OR: Intellect, 4–13. Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth 1942 Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Langkjær, Birger 2000 Den lyttende tilskuer. Perception af lyd og Musik i film. København: Museum Tusculanum. 1997 Filmlyd og filmmusik. København: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, [1996].

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Marshall, Bill and Robynn Jeananne Stilwell 2000 Musicals. Hollywood and Beyond, Exeter, England; Portland, OR: Intellect. Mast, Gerald 1987 Can’t help singin’. The American Musical on Stage and Screen, Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press. Mordden, Ethan 2003 One More Kiss: The Broadway Musical in the 1970s, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rabinowitz, Peter 2004 “Music, Genre and Narrative Theory”, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative across Media. The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln & London: Nebraska University Press, 305–328. Rubin, Martin 1993 Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle, New York: Columbia University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure 2004 “Introduction”, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative across Media. The Language of Storytelling, Nebraska & London: Nebraska University Press, 1–40. Stern, Daniel N. 1985 The Interpersonal World of the Infant. A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, New York: Basic Books. Tarasti, Eero 2004 “Music as Narrative Art”, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative across Media. The Language of Storytelling, Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 283–304. Trier, Lars von 2000 Dancer in the Dark. Manuskript Fra Filmen, trans. Svend Ranild, København: Gyldendal.

HENRIK SKOV NIELSEN (Aarhus University)

The Unnatural in E. A. Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”1 Introduction: Aims of the Article In this essay I want to first briefly present my approach to unnatural narratives and unnatural narratology, and secondly to engage more thoroughly in a specific reading where I try to demonstrate some of the analytical consequences of what I call unnaturalizing reading strategies. Numerous articles, panels, anthologies and books on the subject of unnatural narratology have appeared in recent years since Brian Richardson’s Unnatural Voices from 2006.2 Not all, but much of the work by my many colleagues in unnatural narratology (Maria Mäkelä, Brian Richardson, Jan Alber and Stefan Iversen to mention just a few) and by myself for that matter, has been either descriptive/empirical/deductive by listing and describing a huge amount of unnatural narratives, or theoretical/metatheoretical by accounting for the assumptions and theoretical consequences of an unnatural approach. These approaches differ from one another; yet, they are complementary and supplementary. Comparatively few articles and papers, however, have dealt in depth and in detail with the interpretational consequences for particular texts that an unnatural reading might have. This article is an attempt to answer—at least partially, on my own behalf, and for one specific text—some of the questions we have often encountered, and quite reasonably so; questions like “what difference does it make?”, “how does interpretation change with an unnatural approach?” The text I wish to read is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”, and needless to say I am only able to deal with some aspects of unnatural narratology and with some of the interpretational consequences in a specific text. Many of the consequences and assumptions are, however, general and generalizable, and I hope to indicate how. First of all, I will say a few words to frame the approach and the reading. _____________ 1 2

I wish to thank Stefan Iversen, Stefan Kjerkegaard and Rikke Andersen Kraglund for their very valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. For example Alber 2009; Reitan 2011; Alber and Heinze 2011.

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What is Unnatural Narratology? For me, the expression “unnatural narratives” first and foremost takes on meaning in relation to what it is not: natural narratives. By natural narratives I refer to narratives that have been designated as such by influential narrative theorists. Most prominently the term “natural” has been applied to narrative theory by Monika Fludernik in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. Here, she describes the term as follows: Natural narrative is a term that has come to define “naturally occurring” storytelling […] What will be called natural narrative in this book includes, mainly, spontaneous conversational storytelling a term which would be more appropriate but is rather unwieldy. (Fludernik 1996: 13)

This is the first and most important of three different meanings that feed into the term “natural narratology”. Its source is Labov and linguistic discourse analysis. The second meaning of the term “natural” comes from “Natürlichkeitstheorie” which uses the term to “[...] designate aspects of language which appear to be regulated and motivated by cognitive parameters based on man’s experience of embodiedness in a real-world context.” (ibid.: 17). Whereas both of these two meanings function as descriptive denominators of a certain kind of narrative or language, the third one is on a completely different level and refers to the readers’ reaction towards certain types of narrative, literature or discourse. It comes from Culler and his use of the term “naturalization” to designate readers’ efforts to make the strange and deviant seem natural and thus to familiarize it: “Culler’s naturalization in particular embraces the familiarization of the strange” (ibid.: 31). It is exactly this shift of focus that interests me here: from a description of a particular type of text, language or narrative and towards a specific readerly approach and reaction to narrative. In another text, from 2001, Fludernik writes: “When readers read narrative texts, they project real-life parameters into the reading process and, if at all possible, treat the text as a real-life instance of narrating” (Fludernik 2001: 623). I think it is worth noting, first, that as a descriptive statement as opposed to a normative statement about what readers should do, it hardly covers all readers, nor all lay readers; and second, that even if this is what many readers tend to do, we are not obliged to repeat the projection at a methodological level. Familiarization, or what Culler calls naturalization and Fludernik narrativization, is a choice, and whether the choice is conscious or automatic, it remains a choice and not a necessity. A different choice in the form of un-naturalizing interpretation is equally legitimate and rewarding in many texts. I will try to demonstrate this in relation to “The Oval Portrait”. Generally speaking for me then, unnatural narratives are a subset of fictional narratives that—unlike many realistic and mimetic narratives— cue the reader to employ interpretational strategies that are different from

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those she employs in non-fictonalized, conversational storytelling situations. More specifically, such narratives may have temporalities, story worlds, mind representations, or acts of narration that would be physically, logically, mnemonically, or psychologically impossible or implausible in real-world storytelling situations. An unnatural approach, however, allows the reader to construct such situations as authoritative, reliable or matterof-fact renderings of the fictional universe. This also goes to show that if the reader constructs something strange within the fictional universe as, say, a dream or a hallucination then, for me, that would not count as unnatural which in turn goes to show that naturalization or familiarization, for me, annihilates the unnatural. Unnatural narratology, in turn, is the investigation of these strategies and their interpretational consequences and more broadly the effort to state the theoretical and interpretive principles relevant to such unnatural narratives. This means that for me all unnatural narratives are fictional but only some fictional narratives are unnatural. Only some fictional narratives cue the reader to interpret differently than real-life storytelling situations do, whereas scores of realistic and conventional fictional narratives do not do that. What Difference Does it Make? My contention here as elsewhere is that it makes a considerable difference for the interpretation—for lay readers as well as for professionals— whether we naturalize and “project real-life parameters into the reading process and, if at all possible, treat the text as a real-life instance of narrating” as Fludernik has it, or whether, conversely, we apply the principles of unnatural narratology in the form of un-naturalizing reading strategies. In that sense, unnatural narratology generates different readings because an unnaturalizing reading is an interpretational choice that, unlike naturalizing readings, does not assume that real world conditions and limitations have to apply to all fictional narratives when it comes to logic, physics, time, enunciation, framing etc. If we interpret the words in a 300-page dialogue novel with a character narrator, or—on a smaller scale—the shorter rendering of a dialogue that took place 50 years ago as only appearing to be verbatim accounts, we make a legitimate but naturalizing choice. If we believe instead that they are part of the invented act of narration, we can also believe that the dialogues are verbatim accounts and can thus base interpretations on the characters saying some words rather than others. In making this equally legitimate choice we would also be following the principles of unnatural narratology because we would make an interpretational choice that is un-

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naturalizing in the sense that it is not limiting the narrative possibilities to what is mnemonically possible or plausible in real-world narration. For me this means that unnaturalizing approaches generate readings that are quite different from prevalent natural and naturalizing readings. Unnaturalizing reading is an interpretational choice based on theoretical assumptions (and especially on disputing/questioning certain theoretical assumptions). From an unnatural point of view, we need not impose real-world necessities on all fictional narratives. We need not put all narratives into communicational models based on real-life storytelling situations. I test this assumption and demonstrate in detail what difference it makes by comparing a strong, natural(izing) reading and an un-naturalizing close reading of the same short text, i.e. “The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allan Poe. Reading Poe Naturally Several good readings of Poe’ story already exist.3 Emma Kafalenos, for example, has recently published an excellent study of the tale in Blackwell’s Companion to Narrative Theory. I will use this study as the main example of a natural reading, and briefly go through the major points and insights. Kafalenos’ focus is specifically on the effects of sequence and embedding. I do not mean to imply that everything one can add to Kafalenos’ reading has to be unnatural, or that Kafalenos herself would not have much to add in other contexts or if the focus was different. Instead I want to compare assumptions and the interpretations they lead to—in the belief that both ways are legitimate and profitable, though they will probably appeal to different readers and different narrative theorists. Kafalenos takes her point of departure in the long quote in Poe’s story from a volume about paintings and their histories, telling us the story about the oval portrait and about the girl it portrays. This quote is also the end of the tale. Kafalenos compares readers’ likely reactions to the quote and its causal relation as an independent text to “our interpretation of exactly the same text when we read it as an embedded segment in Poe’s story” (2005: 254). She ends her analysis of the embedded quote about the gleeful girl that gradually dies while her picture is being painted by concluding that it opens with a state of equilibrium that is then destroyed by a whole series of disruptive events (ibid.: 256) from her marriage to the painter over her being painted to her eventual death. Central, disruptive events include in Kafalenos’ account: “the girl grows dispirited and weak” (ibid.) and “painter won’t recognize that he is killing the girl by painting her” (ibid.). _____________

3

In the realm of Poe-scholarship one can mention Gross, Thompson, and Bassein.

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Kafalenos then turns to analyze the ways in which the quote’s embedding in the story in its entirety effects the reading: she concludes her analysis by stating that what we and the character narrator read in the quote actually functions to stabilize his experience and to make his interpretation of the picture’s appalling life-likeliness more reliable to the reader (ibid.: 262): “the circumstances in which the picture was made can be understood to explain the narrator’s experience” (ibid.: 262). Kafalenos ends her paper by having successfully demonstrated that: Poe’s complete story shapes readers’ interpretations of the effects of the girl’s death very differently than the quoted paragraph does. […] Because the portrait is represented only through ekphrasis, readers can question the accuracy of the narrator’s scarcely believable perceptions and conceptions […] Then, because readers can join the narrator in reading the words of the quoted paragraph, we can substitute our experience for his and read the passage as he presumably does: as evidence of the accuracy of his perceptions. (ibid. 265–266).

What we have, thus, is an interpretation that resolutely deals with something strange and “scarcely believable”, i.e. that the “life-likeliness of expression is appaling” (ibid.: 262) and a reading that explains how readers are led to believe that what seems strange and unbelievable is probably true. The seemingly unreasonable experience of the narrator should hardly be dismissed as unreliable, this reading claims, because it is a “natural” cause of the circumstances of the picture and the girl it depicts. The reading works well and convincing in its own right. It addresses and accounts for the central feature of the story and does not explain it away as the result of a hallucination or the excessive use of opium which would detract a lot from the story and its title which seems to throw the spectacular portrait rather than a particular hallucination into relief. Remarkably Kafalenos does not question something that might be seen as more fundamentally strange and unnatural, the very fact that the girl is supposedly killed because she is depicted. Not only is this fact quietly accepted. For the reading to work this incident has to be acknowledged, not just as some old wive’s tale or as a figural explanation in some history book, but as something real enough to explain the extraordinary features of the portrait. It is a necessary part of the explanation. It is not my intention to say that this is an unreasonable move. On the contrary, I believe it is a correct description of what the story cues readers to believe and of how most readers will construe the story. I mention it instead partly because even as it serves to explain something strange and unnatural, it remains itself unnatural, and partly because it is the only point or assumption (unmentioned as it is) that would, in my view, have to be changed in Kafalenos’ interpretation have to be changed if the story was a nonfictional real life story, and if, consequently, “The Oval Portrait” was a

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portrait of a real, living person. Insofar, that is, as we don’t accept “death by painting” as a real world danger. Unnaturalizing Assumptions and Interpretations In the following I wish to conduct an unnaturalizing reading by asking what assumptions can be added in an unnatural framework, and, recursively which assumptions we don’t necessarily have to apply if we don’t impose real world restrictions. I will divide the analysis into four, increasingly unnatural subject areas. It is not a systematic overview of unnatural narrative assumptions but rather a pointing out of the features that are relevant for the specific text in order to show what difference an unnatural reading makes. A fundamental assumption in my reading is that “The Oval Portrait” deals with relations between life and art in many ways and stages the encounter between life and art on many levels. In the following four sections, therefore, I describe the ways in which the tale: a) refers to myths about the relation between life and art, b) stages this encounter also as an encounter with another Poe-text, c) frames the relation between life and art, d) makes this relation significant not only in the story world, but also at the level of narration and of the narrator. a) Reference to Myths The story goes to great length to establish that in spite of what it calls, with a highly unusual word, the “life-likeliness” of expression, the picture does not at all look like a real person—it is far too artful: Least of all, could it have been that my fancy, shaken from its half slumber, had mistaken the head for that of a living person. I saw at once the peculiarities of design, of the vignetting, and of the frame, must have instantly dispelled such idea— must have prevented even its momentary entertainment. (Poe 1845: 264; Poe’s italics)

In that context it is worth noting that the story contains two descriptions/depictions of the girl; that of the portrait and that of the art book. As for the latter, the lines quoted from the book really do not resemble the kind of description of a painting one would expect to find in an art book. Rather it reads like unusually pure pulp fiction. As if the description “a maiden of rarest beauty and not more lovely than full of glee” wasn’t already enough of a cliché it is even carefully repeated ad verbatim after just a couple of lines, as if it were a quotation from a quotation from a quotation. This is emphatically not real life but rather a fictional cliché. Least of all the description could be mistaken for a real, living person. The girl is as she is described and portrayed in the book is not the living and

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real contrast to the artificial, but herself a highly marked by artificiality. The contrast is not only between life and art, but also between different kinds of representation and their consequences. This is relevant for the way in which the story refers more to myths about art than to real life. Specifically the tale can be read as a reversal of the Pygmalion myth (Ovid 1986: X, 243–297). Pygmalion creates life out of art. The painter in “The Oval Portrait”, in turn, creates art out of life when his wife dies in the process of his creation of the art work. In this reversal “The Oval Portrait” comes very close to another Ovidian myth about the relation between art and life and death: the myth about Orpheus. The myth about Orpheus tells us how Orpheus had the chance to save Eurydice from death, but did not succeed because he turned and gazed at her too early. Poe’s text is filled with gazes: the reading of the book about the painting is described by the words “[...] devotedly I gazed.” The painting of the girl is revealed when the candelabra is moved for a quick “glance,” which is replaced by closed eyes, which in turn is replaced by a more sober “gaze.” The painter, for his part “[...] would not see [...]” (Poe’s italics), that the girl dies during his work; he seldom turns “his eyes from the canvas [...]”. Not until the end, at the moment of completion, when he has finished his work of art, does he look at his wife and then with a gesture that repeats Orpheus and has the same result: […] for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, “This is indeed Life itself!” turned suddenly to regard his beloved:—She was dead! (Poe 1845: 265; Poe’s italics)

“The Oval Portrait” is also an ocular portrait—a portrait of sight and the eye. At the very end the artist turns, like Orpheus, “suddenly to regard his beloved”. He turns his gaze away from the painting, from the portrait to that which is represented, to life. He turns at the moment he has given the stroke that completes the portrait, that gives it life, makes it alive, makes it similar, but as though it were a result of his turning, this is also the moment of the woman’s death and therefore of the portrait’s non-similarity. The painter thus repeats Orpheus’ feat. His art has the same goal, to bring to life, and his gaze and turning the same result, to kill. When Orpheus turns around, Eurydice sinks back to the kingdom of the dead, and when the painter turns around the girl is dead. Blanchot sees this turning as non-incidental but as a condition of true art: But not to turn toward Eurydice would be no less untrue. Not to look would be infidelity to the measureless, imprudent force of his movement, which does not want Eurydice in her daytime truth and her everyday appeal, but wants her in her nocturnal obscurity, in her distance, with her closed body and sealed face—wants to see her

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not when she is visible, but when she is invisible […] and wants, not to make her live, but to have living in her the plenitude of her death. (Blanchot 1982: 172)

As the “art book” describes the girl, she is of “rarest beauty,” but as the first-person narrator sees her in the painting, she is of “immortal beauty”. The picture has at once killed her and guaranteed her an immortality which is also in a certain sense Eurydices’. They are both kept alive in death, or in Blanchot’s words: the plenitude of her death is living in her.4 To write literature, in Blanchot’s view, is to assume Orpheus’ gaze. The life that maintains itself in death is located in literature and the word. Literature and the word kill and preserve: “In speech what dies is what gives life to speech; speech is the life of that death, it is ‘the life that endures death and maintains itself in it’” (Blanchot 1995: 327).5 _____________

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Blanchot’s concluding words can be interpreted as a chiastic variation of a sentence that itself exists in four variations in his earlier text “Literature and the Right to Death,” where it says: “life endures death and maintains itself in it” (1995: 322). This final sentence is itself a variation on Hegel’s words in the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit which reads as follows: “Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it” (Hegel 1977: 19; Hegel 1986: 36). In Hegel the sentence says something in addition to all of Blanchot’s four repetitions; the life that endures death and maintains itself in it is the life of the Spirit, das Leben des Geistes. This life in death and this life of the spirit are important in Poe’s text. In his four variations, Blanchot localizes this life that endures and maintains itself in death, in literature, in words, in language. In Poe’s text it is first of all the spirited paintings that are the place for “life in death,” but secondly precisely language, words, literature. In Ovid it says that Eurydice must return to the underworld as a result of Orpheus’ gaze: “He turned his eyes—and straight she slipped away. […] And she, dying again, made no complaint (For what complaint had she save she was loved?) […]” (1986: X, 57–61). Eurydice cannot blame Orpheus for his great love—a love that is not only destructive but above all self-destructive as is clear in the prayer and the promise with which Orpheus moves the shadows and bloodless spirits: She too, when ripening years reach their due term, Shall own your rule. The favour that I ask Is but to enjoy her love; and, if the Fates Will not reprieve her, my resolve is clear Not to return: may two deaths give you cheer.’ So to the music of his strings he sang, And all the bloodless spirits wept to hear […]. (X, 37–43) Orpheus does not only move with his request, but with his sacrifice. He would rather live a life in death with Eurydice than live a life in the light of day without her—and this first wish is also granted to him, since he is killed by the maenads after his final long mournful song and then united with Eurydice. In Ovid, Orpheus’ destructive move is inextricably bound up with the self-destructive. When Orpheus turns toward Eurydice he also turns toward the kingdom of the dead. So perhaps the most poetic topic in the world is not the death of a beautiful woman after all, but rather the death of the speaker, the death of the bereaved lover.

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In this reading we do not have any access to what might have been a real girl that we can then oppose to her representation in art. What we do have access to, is instead two different depictions/representations; one written, one visual. The written in the art book—as far as the description of the girl before she is depicted goes—is the repeated expression of a triviality. The visual representation is apparently a master piece. Neither can be mistaken for real persons, and both are artificial, but whereas the former petrifies a cliché, the latter immortalizes beauty. In that sense Poe’s text uses the references to Greek myths life and art to convey a conception of art in which the relation is a dangerous and unnatural one where the depicted is not left untouched by the depiction, but where; on the contrary, art is literally a matter of life and death. b) Reference to other Poe Texts In the article “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration” I have argued that standard narratological model of the relationship between narrator and author has served to naturalize the understanding of fictional narratives and of fictionality in the sense that fictional narratives are understood along the lines of everyday reports since a narrator supposedly reports what he or she “knows”. In its attempt to understand fiction as a form of communication from a narrator, narratology has rarely devoted much attention to the author. My main argument in the article is that the real author is the narrating agent who can invent what no-one knows and narrate what no-one (except the author herself) communicates. By acknowledging this, readers can more easily account for undisguised inventions and transgressions of communicational models as they frequently occur throughout literary history. When communicational models are transgressed and techniques of fictionality (zero focalization, etc) are employed, these phenomena cannot helpfully be acknowledged or explained by assuming the existence of a narrator distinct from the author. Instead they are techniques (or what Phelan calls resources [Phelan forthcoming a]) at the disposal of the real author—not of a narrator modeled on everyday non-inventive, reporting language. In this section I will pick up on the question about the relation between unnatural narration and the real author, not with a specific view to transgressive or inventive techniques, but rather to the ways in which Poe creates references and echoes between two texts that significantly refer more to each other than to real life. In his forthcoming “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Narrative Communication”: Or, from “Story and Discourse to Authors, Resources, and Audiences” James Phelan signals already in the title exactly the kind of shift that interests me here—a shift to an interest in the rhetorical resources of the author. In the article Phelan argues that occa-

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sion, paratext, narrator, characters, FID etc. are not indispensable elements in a narrative communication model, but are all resources at the optional disposal of the (implied) author. Phelan goes on to demonstrate that this shift has considerable consequences: Let me turn now to demonstrating some of the practical consequences of the revised model. I start with the increased importance it gives to the implied author as a teller. In Chatman’s model, the implied author outsources just about everything to the narrator or to the nonnarrated mimesis. In my model, the implied author typically does not tell directly but he or she does more than outsource the telling, as my focus on the channel of narrative structure suggests. Put more positively, my claim is that the implied author is the grand conductor of narrative communication, the agent who seeks to make all the resources work together. And sometimes the conductor’s arrangement of those resources makes her role in the mediated communication especially prominent. Consider one more example from Eddie Coyle: The first sentence of the last chapter, “Jackie Brown at twentyseven sat with no expression on his face” (179), echoes the very first sentence of the novel: “Jackie Brown, at twenty-six, said with no expression on his face that he could get some guns” (3). The echo contributes substantially to the communication of the ethics of the told: A year later, facing his first conviction, inferring that Eddie Coyle is responsible for his sitting there, Jackie Brown is essentially the same tough guy—though now he sits in silence rather than making deals. Who is responsible for the echo? Given that Higgins makes minimal use of the narrator between Chapter 1 and Chapter 30 and typically restricts his function to straightforward reporting of who is speaking and of a small number of other events, I find it implausible to attribute that responsibility to the narrator: Such an attribution would give him a strange and sudden eleventh hour selfconsciousness. It makes much more sense to understand the echo as coming only from the implied Higgins (Phelan forthcoming a: 71f.).

In the following I argue that it makes sense also to hear not only intratextual echoes but also echoes and references across texts that contribute substantially to the meaning of each text in ways that makes it even more implausible to attribute the responsibility to an intratextual narrator.6 Three years before “The Oval Portrait” was printed in The Broadway Journal a very similar text called “Life in Death” appeared in Grahams Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. The general tendency has been to describe the two texts as basically two versions of the same text—or even as the same text with two different titles as in the bibliographical notes to The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe: “First Printing: Grahams Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, 20 (April, [1842]), 200–201, as “Life in Death”” (1079). I am certainly not going to argue that the two texts are completely different tales or have nothing in common. Instead, I claim that what they have in common _____________ 6

Arguably these cross-textual references are also arguments in favor of speaking simply about the real author instead of about implied authors which are always linked to single texts and hence cannot be responsible for echoes between different texts.

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and how they establish it, is significant and that we can profitably examine this significance in relation to the choices of the author. In the very same issue of Graham’s Magazine from April 1842, where “Life in Death” is printed, one finds, some 50 pages later, a little text by Poe, a preliminary review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales. Already at the beginning Poe explains: An accident has deprived us, this month, of our customary space for review; and thus nipped in the bud a design long cherished of treating this subject [the tale] in detail; taking Mr. Hawthorne’s volumes as a text. In May we shall endeavor to carry out our attention. At present we are forced to be brief. (Poe 1842b: 298)

The volume was supposed to have contained a longer, actual review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, writes Poe. In the following issue of Graham’s Magazine, the last issue edited by Poe, this review is actually published. In his review of Hawthorne, Poe presents a series of demands to be met by the successful tale: […] the unity of effect or impression is a point of greatest importance. […] A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents, but having constructed, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tends not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design. (Poe 1842c)

Along with this review and poetics, Poe’s own tale “The Mask of the Red Death” is brought in the May issue, a tale in which all of Poe’s demands for the successful tale are met. There is alignment between theory and practice. On the other hand, “Life in Death,” which is brought in the issue in which the review should have appeared, does not seem to meet many of these demands. In the article “The Ironic History of Poe’s “Life in Death”: A Literary Skeleton in the Closet,” Richard W. Dowell writes about this relationship between review and text. Dowell ventures to make the qualified guess that for various unflattering reasons Poe does not finish his review of Hawthorne; as a result, he does not publish “Mask” either, which was written to appear along with this very review. Poe is therefore in a great rush to produce a substitute text for the April issue, which is why “Life in Death” is as bad as it is: “By any standard, ‘Life in Death’ is a weak tale. By Poe’s own exacting standards of unity, brevity, and originality, it is a failure […]” (1971: 478). This is fairly plausible, but not entirely. I cannot accept the idea that “Life in Death” is “a weak tale” and, as concerns originality, a pure fiasco. The question of originality can, I think, fruitfully be examined in the context of a previously unnoticed, almost inexplicable peculiarity exactly in Poe’s assessment of Hawthorne’s

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originality. When the longer review of Hawthorne appears in the May issue, Poe writes: […] the nature of originality, so far as regards its manifestation in letters, is but imperfectly understood. The inventive or original mind as frequently displays itself in novelty of tone as in novelty of matter. Mr. Hawthorne is original at all points. (Poe 1842c; Poe’s italics)

It is difficult to find this viewpoint consistent with the words in Poe’s third and final discussion of Twice-Told Tales five years later, in which Poe writes: “The fact is, that if Mr. Hawthorne were really original, he could not fail of making himself felt by the public. But the fact is, he is not original in any sense” Poe 1847; Poe’s italics). Without the pretension of entirely clearing up this peculiarity, I think it finds some explanation in the review of Hawthorne that actually appeared in the April issue together with “Life in Death.” In what appears to be an exceptionally well-disposed and sympathetic review, the objections nevertheless seem to inadvertently take up more space than the positive comments. As for the title of Hawthorne’s collection Poe makes the following shrewd comment: Mr. Hawthorne’s volumes appear to us misnamed in two respects. In the first place they should not have been called “Twice-Told Tales”—for this is a title which will not bear repetition. If in the first collected edition they were twice-told, of course now they are thrice-told. May we live to hear them told a hundred times! In the second place, these compositions are by no means all “Tales.” (Poe 1842b: 298; Poe’s italics)

Hawthorne’s title does not bear repetition, writes Poe in the issue where “Life in Death” is printed for the first time. On a superficial level this is a witticism bordering on slanderousness; on another level it is a serious objection: Hawthorne’s stories, Poe seems to imply, are not essentially twice-told. They are merely repeated, merely reprinted, and it is not qua reprinting that a story can qualify as twice-told, because in that case, as Poe emphasizes, it could soon be thrice-told and so forth. It seems to me very likely that Poe stages his own alternative to Hawthorne’s version of twice-told tales as a part of his very repudiation of Hawthorne’s use of the “genre” and thus situates a true “twice-told tale” in precisely the issue where he writes about Twice-Told Tales. “Life” and “Portrait” are among other things about reality and art, about life and portrait and they stage these relations not just within each of the tales but also in their interrelation. Beyond a couple of major changes in the beginning and ending, Poe makes countless small corrections, so that almost every single sentence is told in a different way—is in short twice told. “Portrait” has “Life”likeness, but the likeness is based on difference as much as on identity. By publishing “Life in Death” Poe tells a tale that is to be told twice, the second time three years later, and a tale that does not run into the paradox

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of calling itself twice told, but that is twice told. The two tales are each about the relationship between original and reproduction. With “Life in Death” and “The Oval Portrait” Poe creates a narrative that is both one and two, and that does not just bear repetition, but thematizes it on all levels. In particular the relationship between the two titles seems to bear witness to this. Poe creates a narrative that in all likelihood imitates Hawthorne’s “Edward Randolph’s Portrait.” thematically, but that is original in its twice-told structure where Hawthorne’s original is merely a reprint. Poe’s tale is original by transgressing frames and narrative voices normally limited to single, autonomous texts and in making form and theme correspond so intimately in this treatment of relations between original and copy, life and portrait in this very transgression and across this configuration of texts. I would characterize this as weakly unnatural because it does not amount in itself to creating a physically or logically impossible universe, but it does reward the reader that employs interpretational strategies that are different from those she employs in non-fictionalized, conversational storytelling situations since that reader can see correspondences that are invisible to the reader that treats each of the texts as if it was a real life instance of narration attributable to the narrator and limited to the narrators knowledge, choices, frame, narration, and resources. In the next sections, I go on to argue that much is unnatural about frames and narration also inside each of the texts and thus turn again to “The Oval Portrait” to analyze these two topics in the text. c) Frame and Framing Turning to frame and framing first, one can take the point of departure in the simple fact that there are two portraits: the oval portrait of the girl and “The Oval Portrait” of the character narrator watching and reading about the oval portrait of the girl. The narrative describes how the book describes how the painting depicted the girl. “The Oval Portrait” is not unequivocally a portrait of the girl, but also and perhaps more importantly a portrait of the first-person narrator. These two portraits, it turns out, share almost every single feature. Kafalenos’ focus on embedding is certainly apt, since the tale is characterized by embedding on so many levels. In a natural framework there has to be a clear hierarchy between levels when embedding is in play. One level or story will have to embed and include and surround another story or segment. In that sense the story “The Oval Portrait” can be seen as embedding the story about the girl and her picture and (in a more loose sense of the word embedding) “The Oval Portrait” embeds the oval portrait. The peculiar structure of Poe’s story, however, is that almost every word that de-

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scribes the oval portrait is equally accurate about “The Oval Portrait”. Similarly, almost everything that characterizes the girl in the portrait seems to hold equally true for the character narrator in “The Portrait”: (1)As Kafalenos mentions, we never get a chance to return to the perspective of the girl, because she dies. Similarly we never return to the perspective of the character narrator, because that story ends at the same dead point without return7. (2) The two characters share many features. They are both in a remote, dark “turret”, seemingly lit by the same kind of candles. The description of the character’s room corresponds to the description of the room in which the girl was painted and died. I will even go on to say that it is a reasonable assumption that this is not just a similar room, but the room in which the girl was depicted. Not just because of the similarities but because of the simple fact that the portrait is hanging here, thus literally having a connection to the room. (3) The girl in picture and the character in the story are both in desperate, life-threatening conditions when they are depicted. (4) The two portraits correlate and find completion at the same time and with the same words in the end. Hence, there is a sense in which the embedded is not surrounded by what supposedly embeds it. If one is the mise en abyme of the other, both end abruptly in the same abyss. (5) When the depiction is completed the depicted has disappeared in the story as well as in the picture (except exactly as depicted). The girl and the character have both disappeared as something that exists independently of being depicted, as something outside the depiction. The points here about frame and framing range from weakly to strongly unnatural. Starting at the weak end, the similarities between the girl and the protagonist are uncanny and unlikely at the least, and as mentioned it is an unnatural and explicit assumption here that the girl is indeed a victim of death by depiction. It is strongly unnatural if we go on to conclude from the five points—as I will right now—that from an unnatural point of view “The Oval Portrait” is constructed in such a way that the framed frames the frame and the embedded embeds the embedding in the sense that the embedded description in the book comes to embed the framing description of the character reading the book. From the viewpoint of the character and the beginning, the book and the description is embedded, but from the viewpoint of the book and the end, what little we read about _____________

7

Poe is a master of exploring the effect of frame narratives that do not return to their framework. Among numerous examples “Berenice” and “The Black Cat” can be mentioned.

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the character in the beginning is really just a vague background for a metaleptic repetition in which the depicted character in the dark turret (character in story as well as girl in picture) vanishes so that all that’s left is the depiction. In that sense, the story, like the portrait, is a vignette. It says about the portrait that the depiction of the girl “[...] melted imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow which formed the back-ground of the whole”. Again, quite the same is true for the depiction of the character, whose position in the narrative is anything but clearly framed. A vignette in general is characterized by not being distinctly demarcated by a frame, and thus “The Oval Portrait”, like the oval portrait, is, in that sense, itself a vignette where the first-person narrator imperceptibly disappears out of the text and melts into the background of the whole, so that we never return to the introductory situation8. In the next section I go on to examine this vanishing of the narrator and the relation between narrator and narration. d) Narrator, Narration and Enunciation In a natural framework we would have to assume that the character narrator must have survived since we have the tale, and that therefore this fate is (the only) one the protagonist does not share with the girl. Kafalenos, accordingly, seems to take it for granted, and talks about the response to the portrait as a “minor distraction during recovery” (264). The protagonist, however, is not just wounded but in a “desperately wounded condition.” But can narration take place if the narrator dies in the process? The answer to that question compels me to revisit some points from an early article of mine called “The Impersonal Voice in FirstPerson Narrative Fiction” which played a role in the emergence of unnatural narratology along with work by Maria Mäkelä, Jan Alber and Brian Richardson. In the article I argue that in first-person narrative fiction the limits of the protagonist’s voice in such areas as knowledge, vocabulary, and memory is sometimes strikingly transgressed and that this is neither a mistake nor something foreign to the genre, but on the contrary, a matter of utilizing a possibility fundamental to it. The general point that goes beyond any specific example is that the reader is faced with interpretational choices in these kinds of narrative. In an unnatural framework, first person narratives can be unnatural in the sense that they designate and refer to a character with the first person pronoun “I” without necessarily emanating from that character. If we assume, then, as an unnatural reading _____________ 8

And the same is even true for the “art book” about the words in which it says that they are “vague and quaint” like the portrait itself.

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strategy that the possibility of transgressing the limits of personal voice regarding knowledge, vocabulary, memory, and so forth, is present, we should not restrict our interpretations to what would be possible or plausible in natural narration. From an unnatural point of view, we need not impose real-world necessities on all fictional narratives. We need not put all narratives into communicational models based on real-life storytelling situations. Unlike standard interpretations of “natural narratives” the reader can assume about some unnatural first person narratives that the protagonist is designated by the pronoun “I” but not enunciating it. The narrating “voice”, in that case, does not emanate from the character but invents a story, including the first person and his or her limitations, life and death. This means that I go on to assume that the protagonist shares not just all the superficial circumstances with the girl, but also the most crucial one: that, like her, the protagonist is destroyed in and by the very process of the being portrayed. That is unnatural too—first of all again because of the death cause, but also because it means that the character is seen, not as a living person, but as depicted, as part of a portrait, as part of the story “The Oval Portrait”. From a natural point of view I assume this has to be at best insignificant and at worst an annoying deconstructivistic postmodern platitude. From an unnatural perspective it seems like the result of a careful construction that cues us to realize that we might miss what the text tells about the relation between life and art, if we mistake the character for a living person and if we don’t see that “[…] the peculiarities of design, of the vignetting, and of the frame, must have instantly dispelled such idea”. In this interpretation, the reader is left in the moment of completion—just like the painter and the character—in front of the portrait of a dead. The very last word is “dead” and the rest is silence. From out of that silence, behind the words “She was dead” an unnatural ear might hear the three words Poe’s Valdemar made so famous: the words “I am dead”. Conclusion, Comparison, and Interpretation For me the real author is a necessary part of a rhetorical model for natural and unnatural narratives and the concept of a narrator (as someone distinct from authors and characters) is superfluous and misleading in fictional as well as nonfictional stories. Positing a narrator to help understand a fictional narrative as a report about something that the narrator supposedly knows or sees or experiences and hence as a literal communicative act from the narrator (cf. Walsh 2010: 39) amounts to assuming that someone, i.e. the narrator, is telling a story that is not fictional and that

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can therefore, on its own level, be interpreted as if the rules of non-fiction were in play. It is, in a sense, a way of conceiving of fiction as framed nonfiction (cf. Walsh 2007: 69). By assuming instead that a narrative is the fictional invention of the author, the reader assumes that she is invited to interpret the story as invented and independent of the real world. That is the reason fictions can contain unnatural events, minds and acts of narration. My argument against the narrator and for readings that are unnaturalizing in the sense that they resist applying real-world limitations to all narratives is therefore not at all a move towards incomprehensiveness, mysteriousness or non-communication. Nor is it a move beyond rhetorical interests in the means, ends, purposes, and occasions of narratives. Instead, it is an attempt to reframe these very questions about communicational techniques, purposes, means, and ends and to attribute them to the appropriate agent in order to show the relevance of un-naturalizing readings and in order to not unnecessarily limit interpretations to what is possible in literal communicative acts and in representational models. In effect, my proposals are completely compatible with rhetorical models like James Phelan’s—especially in later versions such as in (Phelan forthcoming a). Compared to readings that assume that readers try to treat all narratives as real world instances of narration this approach makes it easier to explain why intertextuality and other extratextual references potentially add a meaning to the understanding of a text. My claim is not a pragmatic and analytical claim that natural readings will not discover or recognize such references but a metatheoretical claim that this very recognition sits uncomfortably with a framework that assumes that narration has to be report and hence has to attribute it to an agent at the ontological level of the story world. Naturalizing assumptions include but are not limited to assuming ‒ that it is a given that a character narrator has to have survived the events he or she tells about. ‒ that “I” has to refer to the speaker. ‒ that there has to be a hierarchy between frames. ‒ that a character narrator cannot authoritatively tell what other people think—especially if they are not present, or tell what happened in a place where she is not present herself These claims have in common that they work from an assumption that the rules and constraints of real-life narration have to be in place. Even if I believe that such assumptions are sometimes misguided, I do not want to claim that they are self-evidently wrong, neither in general nor in the specific case of “The Oval Portrait”. On the contrary: naturalizing and un-

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naturalizing options will necessarily stand in an agonistic relationship to each other, so that it is always a matter of competing interpretations. This is not something to regret. Instead it is an opportunity to emphasize that naturalizing readings are options and interpretational choices as opposed to the idea that it is natural or necessary to naturalize. It seems to me that naturalizing readings will appeal to readers who like explanations and who want textual inconsistencies and ambiguities to be finally resolved. At the same time some readers, like me, might think that many natural readings will tend to disambiguate what is presented in the text as ambiguous. In “The Oval Portrait” that would again hold true for the question about the fate of the protagonist, and for the relation between narrative levels, but also—and this is where I want to end—for the very identity of the protagonist and for just a basic outline of what actually happens in the crucial moment of the narrative where the character narrator looks at picture and finds it appalling. Let us examine these two last questions on the basis of two assumptions that are not prohibited in an unnatural framework: ‒ Nothing in an unnatural framework prevents us from assuming as an exceptionality thesis and as opposed to real-life instances of narrating that the framed in the form of the picture and in the form of the book description itself frames the story about the protagonist and thus also describes the fate of the protagonist. ‒ Nothing in an unnatural framework prevents us from assuming as an exceptionality thesis and as opposed to real-life instance of narrating that we can read words that the character narrator cannot tell9,10. As a result of these assumptions I said above that we can assume that protagonist shares fate with the girl and dies during depiction, so that the final words “She was dead” holds true for the protagonist as well as for the girl in the portrait. But why not go on assume that the protagonist is accurately described not just by the word “dead”, but also by the word “she”?11 This would mean that the words—notably in the third person— “She was dead” hold true on all levels. Every single one of the readings of the tale that I know of, including Kafalenos’ and including Bassein’s feminist reading takes for granted that the protagonist is a man. The text gives _____________ 9 10

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In my “Naturalizing and Un-naturalizing Reading Strategies: Focalization Revisited” I point out that such cases are in fact not at all rare, but very common and discuss a range of examples. I wish to thank Sarah Copland for several very useful comments and especially for pointing out to me that the narrative situation in the “art book” is already itself an impossible narrative situation since it provides detailed descriptions of what happens at a time and in a room in which it says itself that no-one was allowed to enter for weeks. I am grateful to Rikke Andersen Kraglund who first pointed this possibility out for me.

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us no evidence to the fact. Perhaps we assume that the gaze has to be male, like the painter’s. It is not impossible, but the truth is, I think, much more shockingly appalling. It appears if we assume that the wounded character is, or at least might be, a girl. I will acknowledge right away that this assumption is unproved and probably unprovable, but have to add that so is the assumption that it is a man. In addition there are a number of reasons that makes it seem more likely. First of all it entails that the numerous structural similarities between character in story and girl in picture extend and go all the way. Secondly it helps explain a core event in the tale: We never actually and exactly hear what is so absolutely shocking about the experience of the picture. Even if we might not notice it, this is actually a case of paralipsis in which crucial knowledge possessed by the character is withheld from the reader. Let us throw a final glance on the crucial passage: But the action produced an effect altogether unanticipated. […] I glanced at the picture hurriedly and then closed my eyes. Why I did this was not at first apparent even to my own perception. But while my lids remained thus shut, I ran over in my mind my reason for so shutting them. It was an impulsive moment to gain time for thought—to make sure that my fancy had not deceived me—to calm and subdue my fancy for a more sober and certain gaze. In a very few moments I again looked fixedly at the painting. That I now saw aright I could not and would not doubt; […] I had found the spell of the picture in an absolute life-likeliness of expression, which, at first startling, finally confounded, subdued, and appalled me.

Is this a man who is agitated because of the lifelikeness of the painting? Or is this a woman who is shocked to the point of disbelief by unexpectedly, impossibly seeing herself portrayed in “the oval portrait”. I want to back down a little bit on the claim that this is a woman, and I don’t want to re-disambiguate what remains in the story itself ambiguous12. Whether this is a girl seeing herself in the picture, or, even more unnatural, a male character seeing himself transformed to a woman in the picture, or simply just an indeterminate protagonist seeing him/herself depicted in the picture, it seems to me that the protagonist is trapped in an appalling impossibility. The turret is a trap. The “chateau had been temporarily and very lately abandoned.” The book about the pictures is not accidentally found at some shelve, but “had been found upon the pillow” which seems more _____________ 12

Indeed, a couple of things might speak against the idea that the protagonist is a woman. In “Life in Death” it is explicitly stated that he/she has lost blood in “the affray with the banditti”—an affray that we would probably associate with a man rather than a woman. And in “The Oval Portrait” it seems as if he/she sleeps in the proximity of the valet, Pedro which would be unlikely for a woman. It remains unclear, though, whether they sleep in the same room, or whether Pedro just prepares the room. To my mind, thus, neither of these points settle the matter.

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like cheese in a mouse trap than like an incidental place in the room. At the same time the pillow is the place where dreams and nightmares originate. The protagonist, in this reading, is trapped in an unnatural space where the book is in the room and the room is in the book, and where, therefore, he/she is by structural necessity him/herself a part of both. The reader is reading the same words and is similarly offered no way out and back to the frame. The reader, like the character, makes “entrance” as one of the very first words in the story reads, but finds herself in the end “entranced”13 as one the very last words reads. The girl, the character, the reader are all finally framed by “The Oval Portrait”.

Works Cited Alber, Jan 2009 “Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them”, Storyworlds 1, 79–96. Bassein, Ann 1984 Women and Death, London, Greenwood Press. Blanchot, Maurice 1982 “Orpheus’s Gaze”, in The Space of Literature, London, Nebraska Press, 171–188. 1995 “Literature and the Right to Death”, in The Work of Fire, California, Stanford University Press, 300–344. Dowell, Richard W. 1971 “The Ironic History of Poe’s ”Life in Death”: A Literary Skeleton in the Closet” American Literature 42, 478–486. Fludernik, Monika 1996 Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London, Routledge. 2001 “New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization, and New Writing”, New Literary History 32, 619–638. 2003 “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters”, in David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford, CA, CSLI Publications, 243–267. Gross, Seymour L. 1959 “Poe’s Revision of “The Oval Portrait”” Modern Language Notes 74.1, 16–20.

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Thanks to Stefan Kjerkegaard for pointing out that these two words mirror each other in beginning and end.

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Hegel, G. W. F. 1977 Phenomenology of Spirit, with A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1986 Phänomenologie des Geistes, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kafalenos, Emma 2005 “Effects of Sequence, Embedding, and Ekphrasis in Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’”, in James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (eds.), A Companion to Narrative Theory, Oxford, Blackwell, 253–268. Nielsen, Henrik Skov 2004 “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, Narrtive 12.2, 133–150. 2011 “Unnatural Narratology, Impersonal Voices, Real Authors, and Non-Communicative Narration”, in Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze (eds.), Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 71–88. 2013 “Naturalizing and Unnaturalizing Reading Strategies: Focalization Revisited”, in Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (eds.), A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 67–93. Ovid 1986 Metamorphoses, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Phelan, James Forthcoming a “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Narrative Communication: Or, from Story and Discourse to Authors, Resources, and Audi-ences”. Forthcoming b ”Rhetorical Literary Ethics: Or, Authors, Audiences, and the Resources of Narrative”. Poe, Edgar Allan 1842a “Life in Death”, Graham’s Magazine 20, 200–201. 1842b “Twice-Told Tales”, Graham’s Magazine, no pagination http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/nhpoea.html. 1842c “Twice-Told Tales”, Graham’s Magazine, May 1842, 298–300. http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/nhpoe1.html. 1845 “The Oval Portrait”, The Broadway Journal, 264–265. 1847 “Tale-Writing” Godey’s Lady’s Book 35, 252–256. http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/nhpoe2.html. 1958 “The Philosophy of Composition” The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. New York, Alfred A Knopf, 978–987. Reitan, Rolf 2011 “Theorizing Second-Person Narratives: A Backwater Project?”, in Per Krogh Hansen et al., Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 147–174.

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Richardson, Brian 2006 Unnatural Voices, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Thompson, G. R. 1968 “Dramatic Irony in ‘The Oval Portrait’: A Reconsideration of Poe’s Revisions” English Language Notes 6, 107–114. Walsh, Richard 2007 The Rhetoric of Fictionality. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. 2010 “Person, Level, Voice: A Rhetorical Consideration”, in Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 35–57.

JAN ALBER (Freiburg)

Postmodernist Impossibilities, the Creation of New Cognitive Frames, and Attempts at Interpretation In this paper, I want to demonstrate that unnatural narratives, i.e., fictional texts that represent physically, logically, or humanly impossible scenarios or events (see also Alber 2009, 2013a, 2013b), urge us to create new cognitive parameters (such as that of the speaking breast, the dead character, or the telepathic first-person narrator) by blending or otherwise altering preexisting frames or scripts. These novel cognitive frames “open up new conceptual spaces” which typically make “the process of interpretation difficult” (Zunshine 2008: 156–158). As I will show, unnatural scenarios or events have an unexpected and hitherto neglected narrative potential (they call for stories that elaborate on them). Moreover, there are numerous ways in which we can explain or make sense of represented impossibilities without “mentally domesticating” (Abbott 2008: 448) them or “neutraliz[ing] the immediate effect of the inexplicable” (Abbott 2009: 138). In the context of this article, I also take issue with Henrik Skov Nielsen’s recent proposal concerning what he calls “unnaturalizing reading strategies” (2013: 67–93) because, as I will show, his model does not go far enough. I feel that his strategies only concern the cognitive reconstruction of the unnatural, while they bracket out the interesting and important question of what the unnatural might mean or say about us.1 I will therefore propose a model which is designed to help readers come to terms with the unnatural. This model takes both the process of world-making and the process of meaning-making (see Bordwell 1989: 8–9 and Doležel 1998: 165, 160) into consideration.

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At the same time, I do not wish to imply that Nielsen never interprets: see, for example, his reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (Nielsen 2011a) and his interpretation of Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park (Nielsen 2011b) as well as his reading of Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” (1842) in this volume. My article is a contribution to an ongoing discussion in unnatural narratology that concerns methodological issues, i.e., the question of how to best approach the unnatural.

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The Process of Blending and the Creation of New Cognitive Frames When we are confronted with physically, logically, or humanly impossible scenarios or events, our task as readers becomes a Sisyphean one: we have to conduct seemingly impossible mapping operations to orient ourselves within storyworlds that refuse to be organized with the help of our prior knowledge. In such cases, we are urged to blend pre-existing frames, scripts, or schemata2 (and thus create new cognitive ones) in order to adequately reconstruct the unnatural elements of the represented storyworld. According to Schank and Abelson, a script (or frame or schema) comprises “specific knowledge to interpret and participate in events we have been through many times” (1977: 37), and can be used as points of reference to help us master new situations. Furthermore, such cognitive parameters are “dynamic” knowledge structures that “must be able to change as a result of new experiences” (Schank 1986: 7; my italics, J.A.). Similarly, Marvin Minsky points out that “when one encounters a new situation (or makes a substantial change in one’s view of a problem), one selects from memory a structure called a frame. This is a remembered framework to be adapted by changing details as necessary” (1979: 1). Lubomír Doležel, for example, argues that fictional texts often urge us to change our cognitive orientation, which is largely based on our real-world knowledge, and create new frames: […] in order to reconstruct and interpret a fictional world, the reader has to reorient his cognitive stance to agree with the world’s encyclopedia. In other words, knowledge of the fictional encyclopedia is absolutely necessary for the reader to comprehend a fictional world. The actual-world encyclopedia might be useful, but it is by no means universally sufficient; for many fictional worlds it is misleading, it provides not comprehension but misreading. (1988: 177; 181; my italics, J.A.)

For instance, when readers are confronted with physical, logical, or human impossibilities, which for me can only exist in fictional texts, they may generate new frames by blending pre-existing schemata. Mark Turner explains the process of blending by pointing out that “cognitively modern human beings have a remarkable, species-defining ability to pluck forbidden mental fruit—that is, to activate two conflicting mental structures [...] [such as tree and person, J.A.] and to blend them creatively into a new mental structure [...] _____________ 2

“Frames differ from scripts in that frames are used to represent points in time [such as the organization of a house, J.A.]. Scripts represent a sequence of events that take place in a time sequence [such as going to a restaurant, J.A.].” Furthermore, a schema is “a synonym for framelike structures” (Mercadal 1990: 254–255). Since these terms all relate to the representation of knowledge in our minds, which is not found “as a loose assembly of individual bits of information, but is stored in meaningful structures” (Schneider 2001: 611), I use them interchangeably.

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[such as speaking tree, J.A.]” 2003: 117).3 Monika Fludernik also points out that the creation of new and what she calls “non-natural storytelling frames [such as the telepathic first-person narrator or you-narratives, J.A.] arise[s] from the blending of previously familiar natural or naturalized storytelling scenarios” (2010: 15).4 Indeed, in a recent experiment, the Dutch neuroscientists Mante S. Nieuwland and Jos J.A. van Berkum have shown that subjects try to make sense of unnatural entities (such as an amorous peanut or a crying yacht) through the blending of frames. They report that the subjects needed [...] to construct and gradually update their situation model of the story to the point that they project human characteristics onto inanimate objects [...]. This process of projecting human properties (behavior, emotions, appearance) onto an inanimate object comes close to what has been called ‘conceptual blending,’ the ability to assemble new and vital relations from diverse scenarios. (2006: 1109)

Let me present three postmodernist examples of unnaturalness that call for the development of new cognitive frames, namely that of the speaking breast, that of the dead character, and that of the telepathic first-person narrator. To begin with, the first-person narrator of Philip Roth’s novel The Breast (1972) is Professor David Alan Kepesh from the Department of Comparative Literature of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who has—actually and objectively—transformed into a huge female breast. He describes his physically impossible state as follows: I am a breast. A phenomenon that has been variously described to me as ‘a massive hormonal influx,’ ‘an endocrinopathic catastrophe,’ and/or ‘a hermaphroditic explosion of chromosomes’ took place within my body between midnight and four A.M. on February 18, 1971, and converted me into a mammary gland disconnected from any human form, a mammary gland such as could only appear, one would have thought, in a dream or a Dali painting. They tell me that I am now an organism with the general shape of a football, or a dirigible; I am said to be of a spongy consistency, weighing in at one hundred and fifty-five pounds

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Mark Turner mentions the character of Bertran de Born in Dante’s Inferno as an example of an impossible blend. This narrative confronts us with “a talking and reasoning human being who carries his detached but articulate head in his hand like a lantern.” Turner argues that “this is an impossible blending, in which a talking human being has an unnaturally divided body” (1996: 62, 61; my italics, J.A.). Similarly, Manfred Jahn refers to the creation of new frames in terms of “tweening,” which is originally a process used in animations. More specifically, one generates intermediate frames between two images to create the illusion that the first image evolves smoothly and naturally into the following one. “Conceivably, tweening could generate the special frames or subframes needed for less common narrative situations [...]. Tweening could also be used to create suitable subframes for many interesting hybrid or transitional devices used in modern texts” (1997: 448).

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(formerly I was one hundred and sixty-two), and measuring, still, six feet in length. (1972: 12)

Second, one of the figures in Harold Pinter’s play Family Voices (1981) is a speaking or writing corpse and thus alive and dead at the same time, a phenomenon which is logically impossible because it violates the principle of non-contradiction.5 The dead father describes his situation to his son, who is still alive, as follows: “I am dead. As dead as a doornail. I’m writing to you from the grave. A quick word for old time’s sake. Just to keep in touch. An old hullo out of the dark. A last kiss from Dad” (1981: 294). Third, Saleem Sinai, the telepathic first-person narrator in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981), is humanly impossible because he transcends standard human limitations of knowledge. More specifically, this narrator is in a position to literally hear the thoughts of other characters. Sinai explains “the mental peculiarity” (1981: 167) of his “miracleladen omniscience” (149) as follows: My voices, far from being sacred, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust. Telepathy, then; the kind of thing you’re always reading about in the sensational magazines. […] It was telepathy; but also more than telepathy. […] Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. (166–167)

We all know that in the real world, breasts do not produce lexemes; also, human beings are incapable of acting if they are dead; and we cannot literally hear the thoughts of our fellow human beings.6 All of these phenomena are unnatural: they are physically, logically, or humanly impossible aspects in otherwise more or less realist storyworlds. These examples of unnaturalness “suggestively violate some sort of important conceptual ‘boundary’” (Zunshine 2008: 19; italics in original), and we are urged to create new cognitive frames, namely, the frame of the talking breast, the frame of the _____________

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The mutually exclusive storylines in Robert Coover’s short story “The Babysitter” (1969) are another example of logical impossibility. In the represented storyworld, the contradictory sentences “Mr. Tucker went home to have sex with the babysitter” and “Mr. Tucker did not go home to have sex with the babysitter” are true at the same time, and these truth conditions violate the principle of non-contradiction. See also the many-worlds cosmologies in science-fiction novels such as Ursula le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and time travel stories with history alteration: “time travel into the past seems to be a logical impossibility, because any alteration of history is implicitly paradoxical” (Stableford 2006: 532). I am of course aware of the fact that certain cultures do not believe in natural laws, logical principles, or standard human limitations of knowledge, and thus have a different notion of the unnatural. In this article, I assume the position of a contemporary Western reader who has a rationalist-scientific and empirically-minded world view. For me, physically, logically, and humanly impossible scenarios and events are possible in our imagination, in the world of fiction, but not in the actual world, and this fact turns them into interesting phenomena. Furthermore, I try to explain these phenomena from the perspective of my world view.

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speaking (or writing) corpse, and the frame of the telepathic first-person narrator. One might actually leave it at that, and simply illustrate how fictional narratives permanently urge us to work on our cognitive architecture. This seems to be what Henrik Skov Nielsen has in mind when he states that when confronted with the unnatural, the reader “can trust as authoritative and reliable what would in real life be impossible, implausible or, at the very least, subject to doubt” (2013: 92). Nielsen does not investigate the interpretational consequences of such phenomena and instead remains content with the idea that the unnatural “cue[s] the reader to interpret in ways that differ from the interpretation of real-world acts of narration and of conversational storytelling” (ibid.: 91).7 Similarly, H. Porter Abbott proposes that some texts force readers to abandon efforts at interpretation and to instead “rest in that peculiar combination of anxiety and wonder” 2008: 448) or remain “in a state of bafflement” (2009: 132). However, I do not find the proposals by Nielsen and Abbott to be particularly satisfactory because they do not seem to generate compelling readings or interpretations. In contrast to them, I am primarily interested in why texts represent impossibilities, what unnatural phenomena might mean, and what they potentially communicate to us. In what follows, I will therefore present provisional interpretations and readings of the speaking breast in The Breast, the dead father in Family Voices, and the telepathic first-person narrator in Midnight’s Children. At the same time, I want to highlight that I do not try to explain away the fundamental unnaturalness of the represented impossibilities; rather I speculate about the functions of the unnatural, i.e., the question of what these impossibilities have to say about us and the world we live in. Furthermore, through my readings, I try to isolate cognitive mechanisms that readers may resort to when they are confronted with the unnatural. In order to specify these cognitive mechanisms, I deal with the question of how I approach the unnatural and I also look at already existing interpretations. I do not necessarily try to generate new readings; rather, I try to show what we as readers do—or perhaps can do—with the unnatural. _____________

7

Nielsen discusses Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama (1998), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851), Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953), and argues that these four works “are interpreted as unnatural in the sense that they designate and refer to a character with the first-person pronoun “I” without emanating from that character. The narrating “voice” does not emanate from the character but invents and creates a world, including the first person and his knowledge or lack of knowledge” (2013: 84). However, as I see it, Nielsen does not address the purpose or point of the represented unnaturalness.

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The Talking Breast in Philip Roth’s The Breast As I have already said, The Breast is narrated by David Alan Kepesh, a professor who has miraculously transformed into an enormous female “breast” (1972: 12). This speaking breast inhabits a private room in Lennox Hill Hospital, where it is visited by and has conversations with Dr. Gordon, Dr. Klinger (the narrator’s psychoanalyst), male and female nurses, Claire (Kepesh’s twenty-five-year-old girlfriend), the narrator’s father, and Arthur Schonbrunn (the dean of Kepesh’s college). Let me look at the blend between a female breast and a ‘male’ human mind in greater detail to determine how much ‘breastness’ there is to Kepesh. The narrator, who exists as a breast but still has a human mind, gives us a sense of what it must be like to be a breast: Kepesh insists that ‘he’ is still human, “but not that human” (21). Indeed, as a mammary gland, the narrator can still talk and listen to others, and ‘he’ has still got his former mind (apart from the fact that he has become extremely emotional and has to “sob uncontrollably” [18] again and again). However, Kepesh has obviously lost his human body (including all extremities) and ‘he’ can no longer see. We also learn that the breast in general and its nipple in particular are very sensitive to touch: the narrator describes this sensation in terms of “that exquisite sense of imminence that precedes a perfect ejaculation” (17).8 Furthermore, we get a sense of the narrator’s feelings of claustrophobia inside ‘his’ ‘body’: “it’s hideous in here. I want to quit, I want to go crazy, to go spinning off, ranting and wild, but I can’t. I sob. I scream. I touch bottom. I lay there on that bottom!” (22; italics in original). This unnatural blend of a ‘male’ mind and a female breast, i.e. a part of the female anatomy, leads to a number of absurd situations. To begin with, Kepesh’s girlfriend Claire regularly engages in quasi-lesbian practices by squeezing and sucking ‘his’ nipple (31). However, the narrator would still like to have ‘actual’ sexual intercourse with a woman but does not dare to demand “the ultimate act of grotesquerie” (29) from Claire. ‘He’ thus offers money to a nurse “to pull down her girdle and stick [‘his’] nipple up into her cunt” (37). Kepesh wishes to provide an explanation for his physically impossible state: “WHAT DOES IT MEAN? HOW HAS IT COME TO PASS? AND WHY? IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN RACE, WHY DAVID ALAN KEPESH?” (23; capitalization in original). During the course of the novel, the narrator discusses numerous explanations but _____________ 8

Debra Shostak argues that what is interesting about The Breast is “precisely that consciousness in itself does not change at the moment the body is altered. […] Kepesh’s consciousness does change gradually as a result of the transformation, but not as a condition of it” (1999: 319).

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they are all refuted. At first, Kepesh believes that ‘he’ experienced an accident which turned ‘him’ into “a quadruple amputee” (17), but soon realizes that this is not the case. The next explanation has to do with Kepesh’s fascination with the breasts of his girlfriend. At one point, the narrator “wanted to be breasted, or Claire’s breast” (34). However, since ‘he’ considers his narrative to be “a true story” (rather than “a fairy tale”) the narrator “does not subscribe to the wish-fulfillment theory” (34). Later on, Kepesh tries to account for his transformation in terms of a “primitive identification with the object of infantile veneration” (60; italics in original) but turns down the idea of “mammary envy” as well (60–61). At a different point, Kepesh points out that “a man cannot turn into a breast other than in his own imagination” (49). However, Dr. Klinger convinces him that ‘he’ is neither dreaming (50) nor hallucinating (55): ‘he’ has actually become a breast in the projected storyworld. As Kai Mikkonen observes, the narrator rejects all explanations “except for the theory that fiction has caused his change” (1999: 20). Indeed, Kepesh at one point argues that his metamorphosis has to do with fiction, or, more specifically, his European Literature course, in which he taught “the unnatural transformations” (59; my italics, J.A.) in Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” (1842) and Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” (1915), as well as the strange worlds of Jonathan Swift’s satirical Gulliver’s Travels (1726, amended 1735): in “The Nose,” Major Kovalyov’s nose goes for a walk; in Kafka’s story, Gregor Samsa is transformed into a vermin; and in Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver sees the giant breast of a nurse during his journey to Brobdingnag.9 Kepesh’s state in The Breast is related to these narratives as follows. To begin with, Roth’s novel inverts “the synecdochial dynamic in Gogol’s text” (Mikkonen 1999: 26): while Kovalyov’s nose turns into a man and back into a nose, Kepesh turns into a breast, i.e., a part of the human body. Second, The Breast shares with Kafka’s narrative the transformation of one entity into a categorically different entity: Gregor Samsa becomes a vermin, while Kepesh turns into a female breast. Third, both Gulliver’s Travels and The Breast contain enormous breasts that are six feet long. Throughout the novel, the narrator, a professor of literature, is convinced that fiction influences our lives, and toward the end, ‘he’ urges us “to proceed with our education” (78). Since this advice is followed by _____________ 9

In Chapter I, Part II, Gulliver describes this enormous breast as follows: “I must confess no Object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous Breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious Reader an Idea of its Bulk, Shape and Colour. It stood prominent six Foot, and could not be less than sixteen in Circumference. The Nipple was about half the Bigness of my Head, and the Hue both of that and the Dug so verified with Spots, Pimples and Freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous” (Swift 2003: 87; my italics, J.A.).

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Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (1908), the narrator evidently refers to our specifically literary education. At the same time, however, the novel suggests that Kepesh takes fiction far too seriously. Indeed, the narrator points out that in contrast to other professors, he used to teach Gogol, Kafka, and Swift with “much [maybe too much, J.A.] conviction” (55). In other words, one might argue that the novel ridicules and mocks a slightly obsessive professor of literature who takes fiction too seriously and literally follows the advice at the end of Rilke’s poem: “You must change your life” (78; original). Kepesh has changed his life in a rather fundamental way but, unfortunately, to no avail: fiction has effectively destroyed Kepesh’s life.10 That is to say, without downplaying the fundamental unnaturalness of the talking breast, one can interpret The Breast as a satire on scholars who take their discipline too seriously and in doing so, end up destroying themselves. Kepesh has—actually and objectively—been transformed into a breast, while the function of this unnatural phenomenon is to mock or ridicule the pomposity and self-importance of certain professors of literature. The Dead Character in Harold Pinter’s Family Voices Let me turn to my second example. As I have already said, Family Voices contains a character who literally speaks and/or writes from the grave (see also Richardson 2006: 110). Pinter’s radio play confronts us with three different voices by a twenty-year-old man (VOICE I), his mother (VOICE II), and his father (VOICE III). The beginning of the radio play is dominated by the voices of the young man and his mother, and we get the impression that the voices relate to letters that they send to one another. The son has left the family and tells his mother that he enjoys “being in this enormous city.” Also, he expects “to make friends in the not too distant future” (Pinter 1981: 282). He lives with the Withers family in an urban boardinghouse and experiences a number of bizarre (perhaps sexual) encounters with Jane, who seems to be Mrs. Withers’s fifteen-year-old granddaughter (286–287), a man named Riley (289, 292), and Mr. Withers (290–291). His mother, on the other hand, is worried that he never thinks of her: “Do you ever think of me? Your mother? Ever? At all?” (283). Also, she wonders “if you remember that you have a mother” (286). _____________ 10

Similarly, Christian Moraru points out that Kepesh has “changed into the topic of his wellattended lectures.” The novel thus accentuates that “one cannot rule out the possibility that some day we might transform into what we teach” (2005: 148, 146).

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According to Steven H. Gale, Family Voices develops “a picture of a parent and a child who care for one another and who think about one another, but who lead separate lives and never communicate their mutual thoughts and concerns, a fairly commonplace occurrence” (1984: 148). Indeed, at one point, the mother tells her son that she informed him of his father’s death but is unsure whether he “receive[d] [her] letter” (284). Later on, she asks him the following questions: “Where are you? Why do you never write? Nobody knows your whereabouts” (287). She also announces that “the police are looking for [him]” and that when he is found “no mercy will be shown to [him]” (295). Hersh Zeifman argues that “what appear to be letters are simply voiced thoughts, not written down; or if written down, not sent; or if sent, not received; or if received, not read” (487). Pinter’s radio play reaches the realm of the unnatural when the third voice begins to speak because this voice belongs to the father who has already died. He reflects upon his situation in the next world as follows: “I am dead. As dead as a doornail. I’m writing to you from the grave. A quick word for old time’s sake. Just to keep in touch. An old hullo out of the dark. A last kiss from Dad” (294). The dead father seems to write a letter but he is aware of the fact that this ghostly kiss will never reach his son. Family Voices ends with the following words by this speaking corpse: “I have so much to say to you. But I am quite dead. What I have to say to you will never be said” (296). It is worth noting that the dead father’s final statement clearly suggests that we should articulate whatever we wish to articulate before we die. Otherwise it will be too late because the ontological gap between life and death cannot be bridged. At the same time, Pinter’s radio play highlights that the dead father and the living son are as disconnected as mother and son (even though they are both still alive). Family Voices thus shows that if people do not make efforts to communicate, familial relations can be dominated by death in a metaphorical sense. At one point, the mother tells her son that he may be as dead as her husband: “nobody knows if you are alive or dead” (287). Pinter’s radio play illustrates that the lack of communication in families can easily lead to alienation and separateness. For example, the mother states explicitly that after the death of her husband, she is “alone” (287). However, she has felt alone and isolated most of the time: “I sometimes think I have always been sitting like this, alone by an indifferent fire, curtains closed, night, winter” (289). Furthermore, the son was not even present when his father died: we learn that his father cursed his mother from the deathbed as he died “in lamentation and oath” (287). Also, even though the son at first states that he has finally “found [his] home, [his]

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family” as well as feelings of “happiness” (290) in the Withers household, he later on complains about his surrogate family in the following way: The only place where I’m not highly respected is this house. They don’t give a shit for me here. Although I’ve always been a close relation. Of a sort. I’m a fine tenor but they never invite me to sing. I might as well be living in the middle of the Sahara desert. (292–293)

This statement suggests that miscommunication and alienation are inherent dangers of all family constellations—and not just the one represented by the three voices.11 Hence, without mentally domesticating the fundamental unnaturalness of the dead father, who is actually and objectively dead, Family Voices can be read as an allegory that highlights and simultaneously critiques the potential lack of communication and mutual understanding in families. The unnatural character of the dead father becomes the paradigmatic case of family communication in this sense: he speaks without being heard by the others.12 The fact that the individual characters lack names and are only represented as VOICE I, VOICE II, and VOICE III underlines the idea that they represent common voices that can potentially be heard in every family. In the words of Robert Gordon, they relate to “the archetypal psychological drama of the nuclear family” (2003: 27). Pinter’s narrative argues that if we want to avoid alienation and separateness, we should express our thoughts and feelings to those that are close to us—before it is too late.

_____________ 11

12

The son also finds it increasingly difficult to disentangle the actual relationships between the members of the Withers household: “Is Lady Jane Withers Jane’s mother or sister? If either is the case why isn’t Jane called Lady Jane Withers? Or perhaps she is. Or perhaps neither is the case. Or perhaps Mrs Withers is actually the Honourable Mrs Withers? But if that is the case what does that make Mr Withers? And which Withers is he anyway? I mean what relation is he to the rest of the Witherses? And who is Riley?” (293). These unclear relationships reflect upon the fundamental disconnect between the members of the son’s original family. As Kristin Morrison observes, the message by the dead father “is so hackneyed, so indicative of emotional poverty, that it epitomizes everything wrong with relationships in this family” (1983: 218). Indeed, the father’s remote style clearly suggests that he has never been able to actually speak to his son (even when he was still alive).

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The Telepathic First-Person Narrator in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children is my third example because it confronts us with a first-person narrator whose consciousness is significantly expanded insofar as the speaker knows more than he could if he were a ‘normal’ human being living under real-world constraints. This humanly impossible narrator is called Saleem Sinai and he is talking to Padma, his wife-to-be. Sinai presents us with very detailed information about his ‘grandparents’ (Doctor Aadam Aziz and Naseem Aziz/Reverend Mother), his ‘parents’ (Ahmed Sinai and Amina Sinai),13 and his own birth (Rushdie 1981: 115–116). Since the exhaustive stories he tells us in Book One (11– 118) cover the period between 1915 and 1947, and all take place before (or partly during) his birth, they are far too detailed to be credible. In other words, they transcend the knowledge Sinai could have acquired about this period by talking to others or through hearsay: “the narrator […] is born in the ninth chapter, 116 pages after his narrative began, so he had been absent from everything he earlier described in such dramatic detail” (Gurnah 2007: 95). It is also worth noting that the narrator never tells us the source of his knowledge about the period before his birth.14 Moreover, as a nine-year old boy, Sinai realizes that his head is full of voices: “I heard, at first, a headful of gabbling tongues, like an untuned radio; and with lips sealed by maternal command, I was unable to ask for comfort” (161). The first-person narrator functions like a radio receiver and can literally hear the thoughts of others: “I was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up; I could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will, switch off my newly-discovered inner ear” (162). Nicholas Royle thus argues that in Midnight’s Children, “the telepathic […] accedes to a new level of explicitness” (2003: 105). Like the other ‘Midnight Children,’ Sinai is born on India’s arrival at independence from Britain, i.e., during the first hour of August 15, 1947—between midnight and one a.m. (192). All of these ‘Midnight Children’ are endowed with quasi-magic (or unnatural) powers.15 Saleem Sinai _____________ 13 14 15

The inverted commas are supposed to indicate that the narrator is actually the product of an affair between Methwold, a profligate Englishman, and the wife of a minstrel. The babies were swapped after their birth by Mary Pereira, a nurse (116). Rushdie’s novel thus imitates Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767) but, as I will show, it also goes one step further because the narrator of Midnight’s Children is actually telepathic. One of them (a boy from Kerala) can travel to different parts of the country by stepping into a mirror; a Goanese girl can multiply fish; another one is a werewolf; a boy from the watersheds of the Vindhyas can change his size at will; yet another one of these children can change his (or her) sex by jumping into the water; the words of a girl at Budge-Budge

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soon founds the new “Midnight Children’s Conference” (203) when he discovers that he cannot only broadcast his own messages but also “act as a sort of national network, so that by opening [his] transformed mind to all the children [he] could turn it into a kind of forum in which they could talk to one another, through [him]” (221). Since the birth of these unnatural creatures coincides with India’s independence from British colonialism, the children’s telepathic power seems to serve a specific thematic purpose, namely as an opportunity for mutual understanding among different ethnicities, religions, and local communities in the postcolonial age. More specifically, Rushdie’s ‘Midnight Children’ are all hybrids in the sense of Homi K. Bhabha’s use of the term; they closely correlate with what he calls the ‘Third Space.’ Bhabha argues that an “interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha 1994: 5). Furthermore, the ‘Third Space,’ “the in-between space [...], makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people.’ And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves” (ibid. 38–39). Indeed, Sinai describes the hybrid Midnight Children’s Conference in terms of “the very essence of multiplicity” (Rushdie 1981: 223),16 and at one point, he even states explicitly that they speak from a space similar to Bhabha’s Third Space: “We […] must be a third principle, we must be the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma; for only by being other, by being new, can we fulfil the promise of our birth” (248; my italics, J.A.). However, it is worth noting that the Midnight Children’s Conference remains only a moment of miraculous potentiality. Later on in the novel, the group is put under threat by “fantasies of power” (223) both from inside and outside: Sinai himself admits that he “was not immune to the lure of leadership” (222), and we learn that the group “finally fell apart on the day the Chinese armies came down over the Himalayas to humiliate the Indian fauj” (247). That is to say, in the novel, power relations gradually begin to destroy this platform of common understanding, and the novel ends with a pessimistic outlook due to the persistence of hierarchies and _____________ 16

can literally inflict physical wounds; and the face of a boy from the Gir forest can take on any features he chooses (195; 222). Saleem is also hybrid in a different sense: his father is English (and a former colonizer), his mother a Hindu (and a former colonized); and, he is brought up as a Muslim by a Catholic ayah (Gurnah 101). Saleem also tells us that “when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no difference! I was still [the] son [of Ahmed Sinai and Amina Sinai, J.A.]: they remained my parents. In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts” (117; italics in the original, J.A.).

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domination. Nevertheless, Saleem Sinai’s telepathic qualities, which exist actually and objectively, suggest the idea of reconciliation and mutual understanding in postcolonial India. Conclusions: My Cognitive Model The unnatural always involves what Mark Turner calls “creative” or “impossible blend[s]” (Turner 1996: 60). Physical, logical, or human impossibilities therefore centrally concern the nature of representation, simulation, or mimesis in the sense of Aristotle (1995: 33–37, 1448a–b). The unnatural seeks to exhaust the possibilities of our imagination and the worlds of fiction, and it involves new “mental models” (Johnson-Laird 1983: 10–12)—such as that of the talking breast, that of the dead character, or that of the telepathic first-person narrator—that transcend our real-world knowledge. The stimulation of our imagination through projected impossibilities closely correlates with an aesthetic kind of pleasure that is perhaps valuable in itself insofar as it draws us “forwards towards the new, into strange, unfamiliar and monstrous compounds” (Gibson 1996: 272). To paraphrase Werner Wolf, one might also argue that the unnatural celebrates the faculty of imagination, i.e., “the faculty of the human mind to engage in the field of ‘the imaginary’ regardless of rational ‘impossibilities’” (2005: 102), as a source of enjoyment and stimulation. In contrast to Nielsen, who argues that the unnatural “cue[s] the reader to interpret in ways that differ from the interpretation of real-world acts of narration and of conversational storytelling” (2013: 91), and Abbott, who proposes to “let go of the explanatory impulse” (Abbott 2009: 138), I offer the following model which involves the cognitive reconstruction of represented impossibilities, i.e., the creation of new cognitive frames, on the one hand, and the subsequent interpretation of the unnatural on the other. I suggest the following reading strategies or navigational tools (see also Yacobi 1981 and Ryan 2006) on the basis of which readers can generate provisional explanations of the unnatural. The basic idea is that once we have reconstructed the unnatural, we can address its potential significance. From my perspective, physical, logical, and human impossibilities are not completely alien to our thinking; we can do more than remain in “a state of bafflement” (Abbott 2009: 132): (1) Blending/frame enrichment: the processes of blending (see Turner 2003) and “frame enrichment” (Herman 2002: 108) play a role in all cases in which we try to make sense of the unnatural. Since the unnatural is by definition physically, logically impossible, or humanly impossible, it always urges us to create new frames (such as that of the speaking

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breast, the dead character, or the telepathic first-person narrator) by recombining, extending, or otherwise altering pre-existing cognitive parameters. (2) Generification: in certain cases, the processes of blending or frame enrichment have already taken place and the unnatural has already been conventionalized, i.e., turned “into a basic cognitive category” (Fludernik 2003: 256).17 Readers may thus account for certain represented impossibilities (such as the speaking animal in beast fables or time travel in science fiction) by identifying them as belonging to familiar literary genres and generic conventions. (3) Subjectification: we can explain some unnatural scenarios or events by attributing them to somebody’s interiority. In this case, the seemingly unnatural is naturalized and neutralized because it turns out to be entirely natural after all.18 (4) Foregrounding the thematic: unnatural elements (such as the telepathic narrator in Midnight’s Children) may not be mimetically motivated occurrences but exemplifications of particular themes that the narrative addresses.19 (5) Reading allegorically: readers may also see unnatural phenomena (such as the dead character in Family Voices) as parts of allegories that say something about the human condition or the world in general.20 _____________ 17

18

19

20

Examples of what one might call the “impossibility of the familiar” (Bode 2011: 129) include the speaking animals in beast fables and children’s stories; the supernatural elements in epics, certain romances, some Renaissance plays, Gothic novels, ghost plays, weird fiction, and later fantasy literature; the talking objects of eighteenth-century circulation novels and other satirical exaggerations that merge with the unnatural; the omniscient narrator in realist fiction; the numerous insights into character interiority in modernist novels; as well as instances of time travel and further impossibilities in science fiction (see also Alber 2011 and 2013a). To clarify my terminology: the term ‘conventionalization’ denotes generic conventions that involve the prior transforming of unnatural scenarios or events into cognitive frames (such as the speaking animal in beast fables or time travel in science fiction) in the context of my reading strategy 2, while the term ‘naturalization’ only refers to my reading strategy 3, which reveals the seemingly unnatural to be something entirely natural. I would refer to all of my other reading strategies as explanatory tools or sense-making mechanisms. In this context, the term ‘theme’ refers to “a specific representational component that recurs several times in the [narrative, J.A.], in different variations—our quest for the theme or themes of a story is always a quest for something that is not unique to this specific work” (Brinker 1995: 33). Since “anything written in meaningful language has a theme” (Tomashevsky 1965: 63), this reading strategy plays a role in most (if not all) cases in which we try to come to terms with the unnatural. For me, a distinction can be drawn between modes (such as allegory and satire) and proper literary genres such as the science-fiction novel. In principle, one could try reading any text allegorically (or satirically), and therefore I base separate reading strategies on the concepts of allegory and satire.

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(6) Satirization and parody: narratives may use impossibilities (such as the talking breast in The Breast) to mock or ridicule certain states of affairs. The most important feature of satire is critique through exaggeration, and the grotesque images of humiliation or ridicule may occasionally merge with the unnatural. Parody is a subcase of satire which denotes the mocking recontextualization of a prior text or style. (7) Positing a transcendental realm: sometimes we can make sense of impossibilities by assuming that they are part of a transcendental realm (such as heaven, purgatory, or hell). (8) Do it yourself: Marie-Laure Ryan has shown that we can explain the logically incompatible storylines of some narratives by assuming that “the contradictory passages in the text are offered to the readers as material for creating their own stories” (2006: 671). In such cases, the text serves as a construction kit or collage that invites free play with its elements. (9) The Zen way of reading: this reading strategy is close to Abbott’s proposals insofar as it presupposes an attentive and stoic reader who repudiates the above mentioned explanations, and simultaneously accepts both the strangeness of the unnatural and the feelings of discomfort, fear, worry, and panic that it might evoke in her or him. I do not conceive of the mental operations of my reading strategies in terms of a chronological before-after sequence. Rather, I assume that these cognitive mechanisms are layered on top of each other simultaneously during the reading process. Furthermore, they are not intrinsically connected with specific examples but constitute options that readers may resort to when they are confronted with the unnatural. It is perhaps also worth noting that one can approach the same unnatural phenomenon from the perspective of several navigational tools, and that these strategies may occasionally overlap in actual readings or interpretations. As I have shown in my first section, the unnatural urges us to work on our cognitive architecture: we have to blend or otherwise alter pre-existing frames or scripts (reading strategy 1). The speaking breast in The Breast, for instance, is disorienting because it is half breast, half human; thus, “we cannot safely ‘place’ [this entity] in a familiar category” (Zunshine 2008: 149). Similarly, the dead character in The Family Voices is dead and alive at the same time and hence confronts us with “a violation of our intuitive ontological expectations, which forces us to reconsider all familiar social scenarios concerning death” (ibid. 72). The telepathic first-person narrator in Midnight’s Children, finally, is half human, half superhuman and therefore moves beyond standard anthropomorphic limitations of knowledge and ability. The unnatural thus significantly widens our cognitive repertoire.

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At the same time, however, we can deal with the question of what these impossible narrators or characters might mean or communicate to us. In this paper, I have used my reading strategies 4, 5, and 6 to make sense of the unnatural. More specifically, Kepesh’s transformation in The Breast can be read as a satire which mocks and ridicules a professor of literature who takes himself and his discipline far too seriously (reading strategy 6). The dead father in Family Voices, on the other hand, begins to make sense in the context of an allegory on the potential lack of communication and resulting feelings of alienation in families (reading strategy 5). The telepathic firstperson narrator in Midnight’s Children, finally, may be seen as an opportunity for mutual understanding among different ethnicities, religions, and local communities in postcolonial India (reading strategy 4). While Nielsen and Abbott are suspicious of normalizing or domesticating the unnatural through the application of cognitive parameters, I am suspicious of monumentalizing the unnatural, by leaving it completely outside the bounds of the comprehensible. In other words, I refuse to see the unnatural as something transcendental or godly that we poor human beings cannot even begin to make sense of. The unnatural is created by human authors and we should therefore address the question of what it has to say about humans and their being in the world. I certainly agree with Lisa Zunshine’s argument that “cognitive uncertainty [...] flexes and trains our categorization process” (2008: 164), but I also try to build on her argument by spelling out different cognitive mechanisms that help us deal with and make sense of the kind of cognitive uncertainty that the unnatural induces in us as recipients. Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter 2008 “Unreadable Minds and the Captive Reader”, Style 42.4, 448– 470. 2009 “Immersions in the Cognitive Sublime: The Textual Experience of the Extratextual Unknown in García Márquez and Beckett”, Narrative 17.2, 131–142. Alber, Jan 2009 “Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them”, Storyworlds 1, 79–96. 2011 “The Diachronic Development of Unnaturalness: A New View on Genre”, in: Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze (eds.), Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 41–67.

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Notes on Contributors JAN ALBER is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Freiburg in Germany, where he has recently completed his Habilitation/faculty dissertation (“Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama”). He is the author of Narrating the Prison: Role and Representation in Charles Dickens’ Novels, Twentieth-Century Fiction, and Film (Cambria, 2007), and has authored or co-authored articles that were published or are forthcoming in such journals as Anglistica, Anglistik, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Dickens Studies Annual, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Journal of Narrative Theory, The Journal of Popular Culture, Literature Compass, Narrative, Storyworlds, Style, and Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. The “Deutscher Anglistenverband,” the Association of German Professors of English, has recently awarded him a prize for the best Habilitation in English Studies between March 2011 and March 2013. NORA BERNING is a postdoctoral researcher and member of the management team of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. She has published widely on narratological topics. She is the author of Towards a Critical Ethical Narratology: Analyzing Value Construction in Literary Non-Fiction across Media (WVT, 2013) and Narrative Means to Journalistic Ends: A Narratological Analysis of Selected Journalistic Reportages (VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010). Her main research interests are interdisciplinary approaches to the study of narrative, genre theory, travel literature, and the politics of aesthetics. Nora Berning is a habilitation candidate of the Department of English and American Literature at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, with Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning. MATTHIAS BRÜTSCH is senior lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. He is the author of Traumbühne Kino: Der Traum als filmtheoretische Metapher und narratives Motiv (Screening the Dream: Cinematic Metaphors, Oneiric Narration and the Function of Dreams in Film, Schüren, 2011) and a number of articles on film narratology and aesthetics. He has codirected the International Short Film Festival Winterthur from 1999–2003, worked as a script analyst for the Zurich Film Foundation from 2003–2007, and has been a member of both the board of trustees of the Swiss Arts Council and the promotion agency Swiss Films from 2007–2011.

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HELENA ELSHOUT has been a doctoral researcher within the Research Group German Literature at Ghent University since 2009, carrying out a research project on rhetoric and narratology funded by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO-Flanders). In her PhD, she investigates the interferences between narrative and rhetorical processes in selected novellas from Heinrich von Kleist, Wilhelm Raabe, Gottfried Keller and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. She studied German, French and Comparative Literature at the universities of Ghent and Bamberg. Supported by a scholarship of the Swiss government, she conducted research on narratological processes in drama at the bilingual university of Fribourg/Freiburg. Her research interests include style, figurativeness, narratology, drama and theatre. She is the author of articles on Heinrich von Kleist, Wilhelm Raabe, Karl Kraus and Alexander Kluge. PER KROGH HANSEN is Head of the Department of Design and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. His research focuses on a great variety of narratological concepts. His book Karakterens rolle: Aspekter af en litterær karakterologi (The Role of Character: Aspects of a Literary Characterology, 2000) explores the concept of character, whereas his other studies deal with narration, unreliable narrators, metafiction, realism, fairy tales, corporate storytelling, film musicals, etc. Beside narrative theory, Krogh Hansen is a specialist of modern Danish literature. He has edited and co-edited many books – among these are When we get to the end…Towards a Narratology of the Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen (with Marianne Wolff Lundholt, 2005), Borderliners: Searching the Boundaries of Narrativity and Narratology/Afsøgning af narrativitetens og narratologiens grænser (2009), and Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction (with Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Rolf Reitan, 2011). Since 2004, Krogh Hansen has been a literary critic for the Danish newspaper Berlingske, and in the period 2011-13 he was chairman of ENN – The European Narratology Network. BENOÎT HENNAUT has completed his PhD at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and EHESS (CRAL) in Paris. His research is dedicated to the articulation of a general theory of literature in terms of narrative and narration on the one hand, and contemporary theatrical writings on the other. Apart from reinforcing the links between drama/the performing arts and narratology, he focuses on various ways whereby live performances are textually archived through narrative discourse. He is actively involved in the organization of several doctoral and MA seminars in literary theory and theatre studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is carrying on his academic work while working in the field of the contemporary performing arts, and the management of cultural institutions.

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MARKUS KUHN is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Hamburg. He studied German literature, media studies, and art history in Göttingen and Hamburg. His MA thesis on “Narrative Situations in Literature and Film” was awarded the “Karl H. Ditze-Preis” for outstanding Master’s theses. Kuhn worked as a freelance journalist for various newspapers and online magazines. From 2006 to 2008, he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Hamburg; and a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Bremen from 2008 to 2009, where he supervised the doctoral research group “Textuality of Film.” His dissertation Filmnarratologie: Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell was awarded the graduate prize by the “Studienstiftung Hamburg” in 2009 and was published in 2011 at De Gruyter—available as Studienbuch (paperback) since May 2013. He has just published (together with Irina Scheidgen and Nicola V. Weber) Filmwissenschaftliche Genreanalyse: Eine Einführung (De Gruyter, 2013), an introduction to genre studies. GUNTHER MARTENS is Professor of German literature at Ghent University in Belgium. He specializes in modernist literature, rhetorical narratology, and in the cultural history of the encyclopaedia. He is the coordinator of research projects on the relationship between rhetoric and narratology, on narratorial profiling in performance and on new forms of documentary literature. He also acts as the coordinator of a project on educational innovation, which aims at developing a platform for computer aided language and literature teaching and teleclassing. He is a board member of the European Narratology Network. Most recent publications: (as editor, with Ralph Müller, Benjamin Biebuyck, and Helena Elshout) thematic issue on rhetorical narratology, in Language and Literature (forthcoming). FELICITAS MEIFERT-MENHARD completed an accelerated B.A. degree in English and Philosophy at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, in 2001 before continuing her studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, graduating with an M.A. in 2004. Her PhD thesis, “Multiperspectivity and Unreliable Narration in the English Novel since 1800,” was published by Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier in 2009. She held a postdoc position in the research project “Narrating Futures,” funded by the European Research Council and chaired by Prof. Dr. Christoph Bode, from 2009 until 2012. Her second monograph Playing the Text, Performing the Future: Future Narratives in Print and Digiture appeared in 2013 (De Gruyter). Currently, she is a research assistant for Christoph Bode at the English Department of LMU Munich. Her main research interests include narratology and the literature of the Romantic period.

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HENRIK SKOV NIELSEN is Professor at the Department of Aesthetics and Communication at University of Aarhus, Denmark. He is head of the recently established “Centre for Fictionality Studies” where he is working on a project on fictionality conceived of one of the most fundamental human cognitive skills and as an ability to imagine how something might be, or can be, or would have been or simply: is not. Simultaneously, he is working on narratological research projects about the relation between authors and narrators and unnatural narratology in the context of two research groups, NRL and “Unnatural Narratology.” http://nordisk.au.dk/forskning/forskningscentre/nrl/intro/; http://nordisk.au.dk/forskning/forskningscentre/nrl/unnatural/. MAŁGORZATA PAWŁOWSKA is a lecturer in Music Theory Department of the Academy of Music in Krakow, Poland. In her doctoral thesis, she studied the problem of musical narratology, taking into consideration musical pieces of different styles and genres inspired by the story of Romeo and Juliet. She was also awarded the national competition for her MA thesis entitled “The Devil in 19th- and 20th-century Music” (2006). Pawłowska graduated from the Academy of Music in Krakow in 2006. She spent part of her MA studies at the Royal Conservatoire in Brussels (2003-2004). Pawłowska has also completed postgraduate studies in Culture Management in the European Context (2007) and has been very active in organizing international artistic and scientific events. She is a member of European Narratological Network and The Polish Composers’ Union. WOLF SCHMID is Professor emeritus of Slavic Literatures at the University of Hamburg. Founder of the Narratology Research Group and former director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology at the University of Hamburg, he has also served as the chairman of the European Narratology Network. He has published books and articles on Russian prose fiction (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, Bitov and Russian prose of the 1970s). His narratological publications include Narratology (in Russian 2003, 2008; in German 2005, 2008, 2013; in English 2010) and two collections on Slavic narratology: Russische Proto-Narratologie. Texte in kommentierten Übersetzungen (2009) and Slavische Narratologie. Russische und tschechische Ansätze (2009). He is co-editor of the (Living) Handbook of Narratology and executive editor of the series Narratologia at Walter de Gruyter Press. JAN-NOËL THON is a research associate at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Tübingen, Germany. His current research interests include transmedial narratology, comics studies, film theory, game studies, and convergent media culture. He has published widely in these

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areas as well as co-edited Computer/Spiel/Räume: Materialien zur Einführung in die Computer Game Studies (University of Hamburg, 2007), Probleme filmischen Erzählens (LIT, 2009), Poetik der Oberfläche: Die deutschsprachige Popliteratur der 1990er Jahre (De Gruyter, 2011), and From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative (De Gruyter, 2013). Two additional co-edited volumes, Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (University of Nebraska Press) and Game Studies: Aktuelle Ansätze der Computerspielforschung (Herbert von Halem), are forthcoming in 2014. YOKO TSUCHIYAMA is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre of Arts and Language at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (CRALEHESS) in Paris. She obtained her Masters in Art history at Waseda University (Tokyo), and her DEA/Master2 in Aesthetics at Paris University 8. Her doctoral thesis “The Reinterpretation of The Family of Man Following the Cold War” focusses on the structure and narration of the photographic montage in the exhibition The Family of Man in the context of the 1950s and on the reconstruction of discourses on The Family of Man conserved in Luxemburg as the cultural heritage of the memory of the Cold War after the restoration of the panels in the 1990s.