Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts [1 ed.] 1527567486, 9781527567481

Citation preview

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts By

Brian Richardson

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts By Brian Richardson This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Brian Richardson All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6748-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6748-1

To Claudine, We still have Paris

CONTENTS

Preface: Narrative and Fictionality ............................................................ ix Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xii Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1 The Rebirth of the Author Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 21 Reassessing and Extending the Concept of the Implied Author Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 33 Unnatural Narrative Theory: The Poetics of Uniquely Fictional Texts Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 49 The Poetics of Lists and the Boundaries of Narrative Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 62 Linearity and Its Discontents: Narrative Form and Ideological Valence Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 73 Towards a Narratology of Drama Chapter Seven........................................................................................... 85 Fiction versus Factuality: The Status of Historical Characters in Works of Fiction Chapter Eight ............................................................................................ 96 The Paradoxes of Literary Realism Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 111 Multiple Implied Readers and Actual Audiences Conclusion: Theorizing Narrative and Fictionality Today ..................... 127

viii

Contents

Appendix I: Teaching Story, Plot, Time, and Narrative Progression with To the Lighthouse and Other Texts................................................. 135 Appendix II: Definitions of Key Terms.................................................. 148 Bibliography ........................................................................................... 150 Index ....................................................................................................... 165

PREFACE NARRATIVE AND FICTIONALITY

This book began as a collection of independent essays that I had published over the previous dozen years that probed several basic concepts of narrative and critical theory. These are the role of the author, the significance of the implied author, the elements of unnatural narrative theory, the role of lists in relation to narrative proper, the politics of narrative forms, the possibility of a narratology of drama, the paradoxes of realism, the case for multiple implied readers, and the nature of fictionality. In addition, I pursue the adjacent topics of multiple implied authors, the ontological status of fictional characters, and the role of actual readers. As I began to revise the essays, a number of intersections and conjunctions emerged and a substantial amount of new material called out to be added to four of the chapters. In its current form, this book brings together several interconnected essays on narrative, the narrative transaction, and fictionality. Each essay has been thoroughly revised and updated and in many cases considerably augmented. They also allude to and reflect on each other and gesture out toward the positions I have elaborated in my other, more closely focused books. For the most part, I attempt to expand traditional narrative theory and argue for more comprehensive positions than are generally set forth. Thus, I argue for the inclusion of actual authors and readers to the model of the narrative transaction and make the case for multiple implied authors and career implied readers. The entire project of unnatural narrative theory is to expand conceptual frameworks so they are more responsive to antimimetic characters, events, and frames. I also show how the corpus of drama, especially avant-garde and antimimetic works, can usefully refine and enhance many important narratological accounts. In other areas I try to offer a middle ground: I propose a definition of narrative that is more capacious than many though more restrained than the most lax positions; I also argue that the political implications of narrative forms are much more modest and oblique than has often been asserted. Throughout, I articulate and defend a concept of fictionality that complements and grounds the positions articulated in this book.

x

Preface

I start with a chapter on actual authors that offers a critical summary of the main positions taken during the last century and a half and propose some examples that can effectively refute earlier, widespread stances. I argue for a thoroughly revised conception of the significance of authors and authorial commentary, and note the theoretical challenges posed by authors of digital fiction who interact with actual readers about the meaning and import of their work. The second half of this chapter develops these ideas using examples from several works of Vladimir Nabokov as it explores the often ingenious ways in which actual authors attempt to enter into fictional texts. The second chapter examines the contested figure of the implied author. It uncovers its presence in the fiction of Henry James and the criticism of Proust, argues for multiple implied authors in some texts, elaborates the figure of the career implied author, notes the presence of implied authors in other genres including nonfiction, and defends the importance of the figure as a critical concept. The third chapter outlines the basic theses of unnatural (i.e., antirealist) narrative theory and explores distinctive features of the paradoxical paradigm of unnatural narratives, specifically, that it both presupposes and contravenes the basic assumptions of mimetic narrative. The fourth chapter explores the boundaries of narrative and analyses the poetics of lists. It observes how lists, almost always designated as a nonnarrative discourse type, nevertheless regularly slide toward narrative proper. The fifth chapter, “Linearity and Its Discontents,” focuses on the politics of narrative form. I argue against claims of any inherent ideological valence of an individual narrative form, though I do observe that when transgressive subjects are allowed a placid, happy ending, certain cultural master narratives can be upset. The sixth chapter provides an overview of a narratological analysis of drama, looking at the implications of an unnatural text like Beckett’s Endgame for all the major categories of staged narratives: story and plot, characterization, narration, space, time, cause, reflexivity, and audience. I attempt to show what a narratology of drama can add to both the study of drama and the study of narrative. The seventh chapter discusses the representation of historical characters in fictional works. Here I argue for and attempt to test my version of a pragmatist theory of fictionality that insists on the criterion of falsifiability to determine and distinguish fictional texts. Though focused on modern drama, I also include examples from fiction and film. This chapter is followed by a companion study which assesses the paradoxical claims of literary realism, analyses their presence in several dramas, and offers a way to reconceptualize the idea. The final chapter returns to the narrative transmission, this time focusing on the implied reader and returning to many of the subjects

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

xi

broached in the first chapter. Here too I work to loosen up monolithic models and argue for multiple implied readers of several salient texts. This chapter also contains a section on the real readers of various recent types of text, including hyperfiction and fanfiction, to complete the symmetry of the book’s coverage. In the conclusion, I assess some recent accounts of fictionality and return to discussing the key distinctions between fictional and nonfictional discourse by contrasting two such narratives of the 9/11 attacks on New York. An appendix outlines some methods for teaching story, plot, time, and sequence, in which I discuss conventional, modernist, and impossible plots and identify the role of masterplots. This section includes strategies for teaching works like Joyce’s “The Dead” and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. A second appendix defines the terms used in this work. A key element that ties the different parts of this book together is the unifying approach provided by my emphasis on the fictionality of fiction, that is, its fundamental difference from nonfictional narrative. This in turn leads to my interest in antirealist fiction and “unnatural narrative theory,” a theory I helped to develop and which is increasingly popular among many younger narrative theorists. It avoids the mimetic bias of standard narrative theories and seeks to encompass the kinds of antirealist work typical of postmodernism. This volume is intended to provide a critical intervention into disparate yet interconnected subjects from a single capacious perspective. Another benefit of the book is allowing me to update of many of my ideas that had earlier appeared in print in various formats. It is satisfying to be able to rephrase certain formulations, extend many discussions, respond to recent commentaries, and offer additional examples. This book represents the most current and complete account of positions that I have been working on for many years, and can be considered my definitive statement on these issues.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank my many friends and colleagues who have offered their thoughts, responses, and critiques of earlier versions of the ideas presented in this book. These include Jan Alber, William Demastes, Monika Fludernik, David Herman, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, Eva von Contzen, Richard Walsh, and Robyn Warhol, each of whom read and commented on earlier versions of one or more of the chapters. I also wish to thank Porter Abbott, Ryan Claycomb, Melba Cuddy-Keane, Jonathan Culler, Luc Herman, Stefan Iversen, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Françoise Lavocat, Brian McHale, Henrik Skov Nielsen, Sylvie Patron, Ellen Peel, Gerald Prince, Alan Richardson, Catherine Romagnolo, Carlos Reis, Dan Shen, David Shumway, and Bart Vervaeck for helpful comments and discussions of these ideas. I am very grateful to my department chairs, Kent Cartwright, William Cohen, and Amanda Bailey, for their generous support of my work. I also thank the following publications for allowing me to reproduce material that first appeared in their pages. These include Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies (University of Nebraska Press), for material in chapter one; Style for material in chapters two, three, four, and nine; for chapter five, College English, “Copyright 2000 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Used with permission.” Cambridge University Press for chapter six, Letras de Hoja for chapter seven, University of Alabama Press for chapter eight, Oxford University press for a section of the conclusion, and the Modern Language Association for material in the appendix.

CHAPTER ONE THE REBIRTH OF THE AUTHOR

I. The Author Although authors have provided helpful commentary for the elucidation of their works at least as far back as Dante’s letter to Can Grande, the concept of the author as a participant in the critical interpretation of texts they composed has had a difficult time over the last hundred years or so. It is also the case that the corollary question of authorial intent had been important historically; this is readily demonstrated by the imprisonment of Daniel Defoe for his tract, “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” by officials who did not perceive its satirical intent. Much of the twentieth-century opposition to the role of the author in critical interpretation began as a response to two inflated claims of authorial puissance popular in the nineteenth century, a brief account of which should be helpful to partially explain the curious situation that ensued. The first was the Romantic exaltation of the author as a creator of genius, whose productions were the direct expression of a preeminent self. Wordsworth claimed that the poet was a man “endued [sic] with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind” (2010, 567). Percy Shelley similarly affirms that “poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds” (1954, 295) and also claims “poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why” (1954, 282). This is the primary position that T. S. Eliot is opposing in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” He denies Wordsworth’s claim that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of the poet’s powerful feelings and has its origin in emotion recollected in tranquility, affirming instead: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (2010, 961).

2

Chapter One

The other extreme nineteenth century stance was that made by those fixated on an author’s biography as a means of understanding literary works. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the most insistent advocate of this position, affirmed that So long as one has not asked an author a certain number of questions and received answers to them, though they were only whispered in confidence, one cannot be sure of having a complete grasp of him, even though these questions might seem at the furthest remove from the nature of his writings. What were his religious views? How did he react to the sight of nature? How did he conduct himself in regard to women, in regard to money? Was he rich, was he poor? (cited in Proust 1984, 99)

This kind of inquiry was part of a larger nineteenth century fascination (or obsession) with biography, as numerous life stories were constructed and debated, including those of Homer, Jesus, Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s characters. A. C. Bradley famously speculated over the time period that Hamlet was away in Wittenberg and on the number of children that Lady Macbeth had given birth to. There was even a book published on the girlhood of Shakespeare’s heroines. Marcel Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve was written in opposition to this extreme biographical approach and, as we will see in the next chapter, stressed the differences between the self projected in the writing and the actual man who does the living. The rejection of excessive expressionist poetics and biographical criticism soon merged with a growing formalist paradigm for literary studies that emphasized the text to the exclusion of both the author and the reader. This became a well-established stance among the New Critics and was later codified in Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy,” both published in the late 1940’s. Defining intention as “the design or plan in the author’s mind,” they rejected it as a useful critical device (2010a, 1233). The final sentences of their essay ask a hypothetical question concerning T. S. Eliot’s possible allusion to some lines by John Donne; following out the logical demands of their position, they insist that any “answer to such an inquiry [by the author] would have nothing to do with the poem ‘Prufrock’; it would not be a critical inquiry” (2010a, 1246). The rise of poststructuralism coincided with the demise of the authority of the text. Authors were still banished from the works they had created; in this arena, formalists and poststructuralists were entirely united. The poststructuralist position was most memorably articulated by Roland Barthes, whose widely approved formulation affirmed that “we know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a

The Rebirth of the Author

3

variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (2010, 1324). Now it was the turn of the reader; “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author,” concluded Barthes (2010, 1326), though even his privileged kind of reader would soon be dissolved into textuality and discourse itself. It is not difficult to postulate that, in distancing themselves from earlier positions, both formalists and poststructuralists exaggerated their own stances in order to better fit within larger general critical paradigms and to provide a greater degree of separation from their opponents. Though Barthes’ position was widely embraced, several new voices emerged that challenged different aspects of his stance. Eugen Simion, in The Return of the Author, offers a number of effective arguments against poststructuralist and other attacks on the concept, and cannily notes how Barthes constructed his own authorial persona in his later works (1996, 191-204). Jane Gallop makes a similar point from a very different perspective, reflecting on Barthes’ writing concerning the “friendly return of the author” in his Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Barthes 1976, 8). Gallop’s work seeks to revitalize the stale phrase “death of the author” in ways that are both theoretical and personal as she reflects on and commemorates authors she has known who are now dead (2011, 191-204; see also Simion 1996, 107-08). Paisley Livingston, in a witty review of the Pléiade edition of Barthes’ complete works, notes the discrepancy between the theories of the writer and the publication of his works collected together only because he was their author: The publication of a beautiful, five-volume edition of Roland Barthes’s Oeuvres complètes is a good thing, but if we were to rely on this theorist’s meta-hermeneutical dicta alone, it would be hard to say why. Barthes and other advocates of impersonal notions of discourse and textuality tell us there is no good reason to “privilege” the boundary and internal structure of the individual writer’s corpus. Yet Barthes, like the many critics who have trumpeted the “death of the author” theme, continued to rely on the categories of author and life-work. (1996, 436).

Other objections to this idée reçue were also emerging. Gayatri Spivak began to rethink the notion after a fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie was decreed following the publication of The Satanic Verses (1993, 217-19; see Gallop 2011, 15-17, 136-39). In another, adjacent area, the AIDS quilt, a folk text that memorialized those who had died prematurely because of the virus, was being created. Surely, insisting on the theoretical death of the author must seem both false and callous in the shadow of those, authors and others, who were literally dying. Ross Chambers, in Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author, explores

4

Chapter One

the paradoxes of this unexpected conjunction of actual authors, poststructuralist theory, and the fact of death (1998, 1-16). It is clearly time for a reevaluation of the role of the author in the narrative transaction. More specifically, once we correctly shun the idea of an author as a supreme or infallible commentator on his or her fiction and avoid the pitfalls of a romantic or theological notion of the author, we still have important issues to resolve. One question cuts to the center of the debate: can an author provide important information necessary to the interpretation of a text they wrote? Here, twentieth-century literature provides a number of compelling examples, one of which actually stages the hypothetical question proposed by Wimsatt and Beardsley. After Nabokov published Pale Fire, readers and critics tried for five years to discover the location of the crown jewels of Zembla, the fictitious kingdom described in the novel. If the author were simply just another interpreter whose comments should be either ignored or simply evaluated like those of any other critic, we would not be able to go to him and expect to find the answer to this question. But in fact this happened. Nabokov did explain precisely where they were hidden (1973, 92): in the former resort of Kobaltana, an answer which itself clarifies an otherwise pointless entry in the index to the work: “Kobaltana, a once fashionable mountain resort near the ruins of some old barracks and now a cold and desolate spot of difficult access and no importance but still remembered in military families and forest castles, not in the text” (1962, 310). Some readers felt somewhat foolish for not having been able to deduce the correct location, but the larger point remains—that authors can be invaluable commentators on their own works. A more prominent example is that of James Joyce. At various times, he provided numerous exegeses explaining key aspects of the composition of Ulysses and he also produced two versions of his schema for the construction of the text; he also had extensive discussions with early expositors of the book such as Frank Budgen and Stuart Gilbert. To be sure, some of the statements he made are misleading or inaccurate, and the schemas are imperfect and differ from each other at points; nevertheless, Joyce’s comments on Ulysses remain an indispensable tool for its interpretation that no scholar or critic can do without. In this case, the author is a paramount though imperfect guide to the interpretation of this elusive and challenging work. These issues and the corresponding need for a more accurate account of the role of the author in the narrative transaction have only been exacerbated by the digital revolution, including its proliferation of authorial tweets, Facebook and YouTube postings, and additional communications

The Rebirth of the Author

5

via Tumbler, Snapchat, Instagram, and other such venues. Matthew Kirschenbaum raises significant points in his account of attending a twitteraccessible event promoting William Gibson’s new novel, The Peripheral. Some critics had been wondering about The Peripheral’s relation to his earlier work, and at the event Gibson stated that the new book is in fact a sequel to his recent Blue Ant trilogy. Later at an MLA panel on The Peripheral, one of the speakers set forth an interpretation of the novel’s ending. Gibson, who had been listening remotely to the live stream, tweeted his rejection of the speaker’s postulate. Kirschenbaum wryly comments, “it’s not as if all of us at the MLA hadn’t dutifully read our Barthes back in graduate school. But it’s one thing to autopsy the death of the author from the safety of the seminar table; it’s quite another when the author (with some 157,000 Twitter followers) nixes one’s take on something so basic as the affect of his novel’s ending” (2015 ၁ 11). He concludes that “Authorship, in short, has become a kind of media, algorithmically tractable and traceable and disseminated and distributed across the same networks and infrastructure carrying other kinds of previously differentiated cultural production” (၁ 16). The position that affirms the importance of the statements, including intentions, of the author is I believe a sound one for the reasons given above. We may underscore this by referring to the “crown jewels” principle exemplified by Nabokov. In my own criticism, I regularly use (after appropriate critical scrutiny) statements made by many modernist authors about their work. There is no compelling reason to continue to block the author from the interpretation of the text they have created. They can provide significant insights into their work that are not otherwise available. Of course, their statements need to be carefully evaluated and assessed: authors are notorious for mistaken, misleading, and inaccurate statements about their work. “Utilize, but scrutinize,” is a good motto to guide us back to a judicious and pragmatic position on the appropriate role of the author in literary criticism and interpretation. An additional note: it has been frequently averred that the author is itself a relatively recent Western concept, associated with the development of capitalism. Barthes writes: “The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the middle ages with English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual” (2010, 1322). To be sure, the precise status of authors has undergone changes historically as technology, law, and culture are transformed—as indicated above, we are currently in the middle of just such a change. Far from being the anonymous collective figures that such accounts propose, numerous earlier authors vigorously signaled their presence in their works in a variety of ways. We

6

Chapter One

may adduce Chaucer’s opening and closing stanzas of his Troilus and Criseyde, in which he takes full responsibility for its contents, situates it among the work of Homer, Ovid, and Virgil, and urges future copyists not to make changes in his manuscript: Go, litel book, go litel myn tragedie, Ther god thy maker yet, er that he dye, So sende might to make in som comedie! But litel book, no making thou nenvye, But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace. And for ther is so greet diversitee In English and in wryting of our tonge, So preye I god that noon miswryte thee, Ne thee mismetre for defaute of tonge. And red wher-so thou be, or elles songe, That thou be understonde I god beseche! But yet to purpos of my rather speche. Book 5, 1786-99

We may go further back. Ovid is quite forthright about his ambitions for his Amores: Gnawing Envy, why reproach me with an indolent life: and call the work of my genius idle song? Is it that I don’t follow the custom of the country, seek the dusty reward of army life while I’m young? That I don’t study wordy laws, or prostitute my voice in the forum? The work you seek is mortal. I seek eternal fame, to be sung throughout the whole world forever. Book I, Elegy 12, 1-8

Aristophanes, within his own dramas, urged the judges to award him the prize for comedy in the theater of Dionysus (see the parabasis near the middle of The Peace). Concerning other cultures, we observe that the 14th Century Persian poet Hafiz routinely includes his name within his poems; the concluding lines of one poem are typical of his practice: Well, HAFIZ, Life’s a riddle – give it up: There is no answer to it but this cup. Ode 487, 34-35

It is safe to conclude that authors have asserted their individuality and control over their works and guided the reception of those works for millennia.

The Rebirth of the Author

7

Narrative theory In narrative theory, it was Seymour Chatman who, in his wellknown diagram, literally blocked the narrative text off from actual authors and real readers as he reframed the narrative transaction first set forth by Wayne Booth (Chatman 1980, 151). So impermeable is this boundary that he would affirm that it “makes no sense” to “hold the real Conrad responsible for the reactionary attitudes of the implied author of The Secret Agent or Under Western Eyes” (1980, 149). To confound a historical figure with a structural principle “would seriously undermine our theoretical enterprise,” he insisted. This general position is being relinquished, though it remains widespread, if rarely defended. Recently, James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz have reaffirmed the decisive role of the author: “to the extent that you are considering the narrative as a communicative process, then authors, and their communicative purposes, matter: there can be no rhetoric without a rhetor.” They “account for the effects of narrative by reference to a feedback loop among authorial agency, textual phenomena, and reader response” (Herman et al. 2012, 30; see also 29-31). Many feminist narrative theorists are deeply engaged with a number of facets of both actual authors and real readers, and rarely feel any need to bracket either off from their conceptions of the narrative transaction. As Robyn Warhol states, “the identity, experience, and socioeconomic circumstances of the author [ . . . ] are important in understanding the ways that narrative participates in the politics of gender” (Herman et al. 2012, 39). David Herman also argues for the significance of the author and attempts to refute the argument of Wimsatt and Beardsley. He characterizes “narration as a form of communicative action whose interpretation involves—indeed, requires—ascriptions of reasons for acting,” and notes that his position is thus “a manifestly intentionalist line of inquiry.” It is, he continues, “part of the nature of an action for it to be explicable through an account of how it arises from or originates in a reason (or set of reasons) that involves intentions.” He goes on to locate the source of these intentions in the author, rather than an implied author (Herman et al. 2012, 47-48). The evocation of the actual author continues to grow in narrative theory. Richard Walsh makes a radical move in his reconceptualization of the figure of the narrator. He asserts that “the narrator is always either a character who narrates, or the author. There is no intermediate position” (2007, 78). Thus for him, omniscience is not “a faculty possessed by a certain class of narrators but, precisely, a quality of authorial imagination” (2007, 73).

8

Chapter One

An important point that is often neglected in many discussions of the author is the fact that it is the author who determines whether his or her narrative is fictional or nonfictional. The significance of this designation is obvious when it is absent or incorrect, as happened when James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was published without the name of the author or the information that the book was a work of fiction. Readers naturally assumed that the book was an autobiography, and that the fictional narrator was actually the book’s author (see Rohy 2015, 80-87). It is also the case that, as Philippe Lejeune has elucidated, the narrator of a work of fiction is distinct from the author, whereas in nonfiction the author always is the narrator. This distinction begins to collapse in the case of autofiction, which is mostly nonfiction composed by an author, though occasionally fictionalized, presumably by a narrator. Nevertheless, we need the concepts of author and narrator to explain the ways in which they can be merged or transformed.

II. The Author within the Fictional Text Having established the viability of the actual authors, we may now ask a more theoretically challenging question: can an author ever enter the fictional world they have created? To center our discussion, I will focus on cases in which a character in a novel bears the name or likeness of its nonfictional creator. This situation dramatizes the fault line that separates fiction from nonfiction, a distinction more durable than many care to acknowledge yet not as unbridgeable as others would aver. We can get a sense of what is at stake in this distinction by glancing at the way Nabokov begins his afterword, “On a Book Entitled Lolita”: “After doing my impersonation of the suave John Ray, the character in Lolita who pens the Foreword, any comments coming straight from me may strike one—may strike me, in fact—as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book” (1970, 313). One of the great achievements of modern narrative theory was to firmly establish a fundamental differentiation between the narrator and the author, and to ensure that the positions advocated by the one are not simplistically and erroneously predicated of the other. And this distinction is most important for the understanding of Lolita. But this does not mean that the two cannot be brought closely together—even in Lolita, as we will see. The differentiation between the author and a fictive being who closely resembles the author was central to the theory and practice of classic modernist fiction, and it is worthwhile to review it here. In the major novels of Joyce, Proust, and others, characters are presented that are undisguised

The Rebirth of the Author

9

versions of their authors’ earlier selves who think thoughts and undergo events similar to those experienced by their makers. For the most part, such correspondences are essentially inconsequential, even adventitious: our interpretation of The Shadow Line or Ulysses is unaltered once we learn that the former was very close to Conrad’s experience of his own first command or that the young Joyce actually had a conversation on Shakespeare’s Hamlet with John Eglington and others in the National Library in Dublin, just as Stephen Dedalus does. Or, more pointedly, readers’ understanding of Ulysses is not likely to change even if they learn that it was not the young Joyce but rather Oliver St John Gogarty, the model for Buck Mulligan, who paid the rent for the Martello tower Joyce stayed in, whereas in the novel it is Stephen who pays the rent and Buck thereby becomes the “usurper.” In these cases, the life of the author is largely mere convenient raw material that will later be casually reproduced or radically reworked in the storyworld, depending on the requirements of the progression of the fiction. If Dedalus needs to be dispossessed of his lodging, he will be, whether or not Joyce actually was. The relation then between the actual life and its recreation within a fiction is often one of inconsequential correspondences and insignificant divergences. Insofar as the author’s life forms an appropriate narrative trajectory, its salient details will be retained and enhanced; insofar as those details fail to cohere, new ones will quickly be invented or imported. Nabokov’s earlier novels often require a similar separation of the fictionalized and the autobiographical self, as well as the recognition of salient points of contact. We see this in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1947), where the narrator’s own life merges with the novels written by his half-brother, novels which he is trying to comprehend and save from critics who insist on—what else?—a narrow biographical reductionism. The narrator of this work, identified in the text only as “V.,” has numerous features in common with Nabokov himself: they were both born in 1899 in St Petersburg, both moved to England after the Russian revolution, both attended Cambridge, and so on, and the elusive Sebastian himself may be, as Michael Wood suggests, “a picture of the writer Nabokov sometimes thought he might be. Better still, a picture of the writer many critics thought and still think Nabokov is” (2004, 33). Nevertheless, most of the correspondences between Nabokov and his creations remain partial, inessential, and largely ironic; one may not unproblematically infer anything about Nabokov from the behavior or opinions of his protagonists. While no direct inference from his life to his fiction is authorized by the text, this does not mean that the facts of his life are entirely irrelevant to a comprehensive reading of the work. The two would oscillate in a kind

10

Chapter One

of arabesque throughout Nabokov’s career; as Michael Begnal points out, “Just as V. plundered Knight’s novels for his own, Nabokov looted Sebastian Knight for [his own autobiography,] Speak, Memory” (1996, 3). Like Joyce and Proust, Nabokov made a work of fiction out of materials culled from his own experience and he invented events and scenes derived from his own and others’ literary texts. But Nabokov braids life and fiction together more deviously than these earlier modernist authors, since some of the divergences between fiction and fact can be read as unactualized possibilities in Nabokov’s own existence. The novel not only traces out patterns of his life but also points toward the life he did not live. And there is another twist: in Sebastian Knight, V. goes on to experience nearly all of the events that Sebastian has written about in his novels. The result is that it embodies Nabokov’s conflicted view toward this whole subject; as Andrew Field has observed, “Nabokov was both repelled and fascinated by biography, which he called psychoplagiarism” (1977, 3). José Ángel García Landa, in a masterful account of the powerful autobiographical resonances of several texts, similarly articulates an important aspect of Nabokov’s oeuvre: “The works thus communicate, between the lines, elements of experience which acquire their full meaning when they are read as projections and transformations of the author’s personal experience, and not merely as the experience transmitted by an ‘intrinsic’ reading of the work” (2005, 274). As Nabokov’s writing evolved, so did his play with the boundary between fiction and autobiography, play which culminates in his last completed novel, Look at the Harlequins!, as I will discuss below. In what follows I will identify six rather ingenious conflations or collisions of author and character, five of which appear in the work of Nabokov. I will be drawing on the pragmatic theory of fictionality, a subject that I discuss in more detail in chapter seven and in the conclusion to this book. Overall, my argument is that Nabokov’s work can help us determine the ways in which an author can enter a fictional world. At the same time, his fiction clarifies the general salience of the fiction/nonfiction distinction that informs this study, as well as indicating significant gray areas where this opposition is difficult to establish and identifying those rare cases where it fails to hold.

A) Author/Narrator Conflation The author/narrator conflation, which proposes to collapse the distinction between the author of the book and the narrator of the fiction, is an interesting stratagem that is prominent among many postmodern and contemporary writers. It appears most cunningly in Bend Sinister (1947).

The Rebirth of the Author

11

This work, like so many other novels, is divided into a preface, written by the author, and a first person fictional narrative, articulated by the work’s narrator. These boundaries are customarily kept quite distinct, as in the prefaces of Henry James or Joseph Conrad, though they can be played with. Thus, in his author’s note to Nostromo Conrad thanks José de Avellanos for being the source of much of the material recorded in the rest of the text. Avellanos, however, is a fictional being within the novel; we thus read this statement of thanks as an ironic gesture that confirms rather than problematizes the fiction/nonfiction distinction. But Bend Sinister provides a different kind of interpenetration that challenges the integrity of the fiction/nonfiction divide enshrined in the very division of novel and preface. These areas are ontologically separate, with the introductory material being nonfictional, written by the author, and falsifiable in theory, while the novel proper is a work of fiction, articulated by a narrator, and not falsifiable by reference to any documents or testimony. For comparable reasons, the case of an author seeming to enter into his or her fictional work as one of its characters, as occurs in a number of Nabokovian texts, need not detain us. Professor Chateau remarks in the novel, Pnin, apropos of an unusual butterfly, “Pity Vladimir Vladimirovich is not here. . . . He would have told us all about these enchanting insects” (Nabokov 1957, 128). Such intrusions are readily accounted for as fictional characters that happen to bear the same name as their authors as opposed to fictional names, just as there is a character named Chaucer in The Canturbury Tales who is unable to tell a good story (“The Tale of Sir Thopas”). Concerning its ontological status, any historical character, including the author, is simply another fictional character when placed within a fictional storyworld; as Marie-Laure points out, “the attribute of fictionality does not apply to individual entities, but entire semantic domains: the Napoleon of War and Peace is a fictional object because he belongs to a world which is fictional” (1991, 15). Within a work of fiction, an entity bearing the name of the author is not the autobiographical figure but a character, and that character may closely resemble (Marcel in the Recherche),1 playfully mimic (“Borges” in many of his stories), or wildly diverge from its model (Chaucer). He may even be brutally murdered, as is “Michel Houellebecq” in Houellebecq’s 2010 La carte et le territoire (The Map and the Territory). In these cases, the figure 1

This is also true of the early works of Henry Miller. As Wayne Booth recounts, when praised by Edmund Wilson for his skillful, ironic portrait of a particular type of American poseur idling around Paris, Miller indignantly responded: “The theme is myself, and the narrator, or the hero, as your critic puts it, is also myself. . . . If he means the narrator, then it is me” (cited in Booth 1983, 367). But the real life names and locations were altered for the book and it was marketed as fiction.

12

Chapter One

remains entirely fictional. But something rather different occurs in Bend Sinister. The protagonist Krug, suffering terribly, is finally assuaged by intimations that he is merely a character in a novel, and that his impending death is thus, in the words of the author, only “a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution” (1964, xviii). For some time, Krug had sensed the presence of a superior being; in his introduction, Nabokov identifies this figure as “an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me” (1964, xviii). That is, the author in a piece of nonfiction identifies the fiction’s vaguely perceived governing intelligence as himself. Similarly, discussing the death of his hero, Nabokov states, “Krug returns unto the bosom of his maker” (1964, xviii). Here he is not creating a fictional character called Nabokov who may or may not resemble the historical Vladimir Nabokov, but is referring directly to the person who created the fictional world. The presence sensed by the character would seem to be the same figure that identifies himself as such in the nonfictional introduction. Here, the nonfictional paratext breaches the fiction and becomes one with it. In doing so, it points us back to an earlier such conflation noted by Genette, who refers to the “odd hybrid” of the “narrator-author of Tom Jones, who ‘is’ not Fielding but who nevertheless weeps once or twice for his deceased Charlotte,” Fielding’s wife, who had died some years earlier (1988, 133). For an unambiguous insertion of the actual author into the world of the fiction we may point to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, a novel that depicts the Allied firebombing of Dresden. At one point the narrator refers to an American prisoner of war in a camp in Dresden; the text reads: “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book” (1991, 125). Philippe Lejeune points out that the autobiographical contract presupposes that an actual person vouches for the fidelity of the narrative (1992, 211-13); I believe this constraint is valid in these examples. As we have noted, while authors often place a figure resembling themselves in their fictions, those remain fictional characters. But in the case of Vonnegut, a much larger and very different claim is being affirmed: the author is testifying to the accuracy of the war crime he has witnessed himself. Here, the statement has the force of the autobiographical pact and is guaranteed by the implicit signature here afforded.

B. “Urfiction,” or Fiction and/as Nonfiction A fascinating fusion of fiction and nonfiction is present in two of Nabokov’s shorter texts that have been published both as short stories and as autobiography. The stories, “Mademoiselle O” (1939) and “First Love”

The Rebirth of the Author

13

(which was first printed under the title “Colette”), both appear in his 1958 short story collection, Nabokov’s Dozen and in his Collected Stories. Both stories also appear, with slight alterations, as chapters of his autobiography, Speak Memory (1951, 1966 rev. ed.).2 The questions immediately raised by such a practice are: what are the implications of composing a work that can be read either as one or the other mode, and what are the consequences of publishing it as both? In The Autobiographical Pact, Philippe Lejeune clarifies the key differences between autobiography and first-person fiction. For Lejeune, the crucial difference is that in an autobiography, “there must be an identity between the author, the narrator, and the protagonist” (1982, 193), whereas in fiction written in the first person the narrator is not the same as the author. But these examples from Nabokov seem to elude this dichotomy: they are, at the same time, both fiction and nonfiction, the very opposition Lejeune set out to keep distinct. A closer look at these curious texts is called for; we may begin by noting some admittedly minor differences between the fictional and the autobiographical versions of the text of “First Love.” The story text is slightly shorter, contains substitutions for a few words, and replaces proper names with occupations: thus, the autobiography refers to “Linderovski” (1966, 151), in his fictional incarnation, he becomes simply “my tutor.” That is, specific names unnecessary to the unfolding of the tale are replaced in the story. Additional personal and historical details, appropriate for a memoir but dispensable in a fiction, are likewise duly removed (e. g. 1966, 142-43). It should be noted that none of the changes has any effect on the status of the text as fiction or nonfiction; the changes merely make the fictional version more economical and provide the autobiographical version with a bit more factual matter. Especially interesting are more essential divergences that underscore the differences in the two modes. Nabokov writes that his sisters angrily protested that he had incorrectly left them out of the railway trip to Biarritz (1966, 14) in the original version of the autobiography; in the revised text he obligingly indicates they were there, riding in the next car (1966, 142), but in the fictional incarnation they are absent since they are unnecessary to the work’s plot: “my two small sisters had been left at home with nurses and aunts” 1995, 604). These emendations underscore the fact that in almost all cases nonfiction is falsifiable; it is always possible (if only theoretically) to identify factual errors, as Nabokov’s sisters did. Fiction is not falsifiable in 2

As Nabokov remarks in the bibliographical note to Nabokov’s Dozen, “‘Mademoiselle O’ and ‘First Love’ are (except for a change in names) true in every detail to the author’s remembered life’” (1995, 662).

14

Chapter One

this sense; no human can protest she was actually present at a scene in a short story. Likewise, we learn in the autobiography that “Colette” is a pseudonym and see that this name appears in the book’s index; no such qualification is needed in the story: there, the girl is simply Colette and there is no index to worry about. I conclude that the text of “First Love,” like “Mademoiselle O,” is a rare hybrid that can be either fiction or nonfiction; that is, it obeys the rules for both modes. Depending on the author’s identification of the type and status of the text, the world depicted is either the actual world or a fictional storyworld. The figure who says “I” either is the author Nabokov or is merely a fictitious narrator, depending on the way the work is designated. Read as fiction, it cannot be falsified; read as nonfiction, it is making verifiable statements about the real world that can be corroborated or refuted.3 Drawing on the famous illustration employed by Gestalt psychologists, we may say that what we have here is the “duck/rabbit” of narrative. To name it, we will employ a term as unusual as the texts themselves: “urfiction.” These examples show that the syntactic theory of fictionality is inadequate: the fictional and nonfictional versions of the same events are virtually identical linguistically. By contrast, a pragmatic approach that stresses the use to which a particular text is put (that is, its designation as fiction or as nonfiction) can explain the potentially oscillating status of these unusual works. We may affirm that fictional narratives are very different speech acts from nonfiction narratives: they are used differently, perform different functions, and require a different kind of reception. The concerned spectator who shouts out to the actor playing Othello, “Don’t believe Iago—he’s telling you a lie!” demonstrates the terms of the fiction/nonfiction distinction as well as the consequences of misapplying them. At the same time, some narratives exist that blur this distinction and remain ontologically ambiguous or indeterminable. In fact, the existence of this gray area is possible only because of the existence elsewhere of the distinctions it collapses. Another sentence from Speak, Memory may also prove relevant to the debate between pragmatic and semantic theories of fictionality. Nabokov 3

Lubomir Doležel, utilizing possible-worlds semantics in his essay, “Fictional and Historical Narrative: Meeting the Postmodernist Challenge,” affirms that nonfictional worlds are marked by epistemological gaps, while fictional worlds have ontological gaps (1997, 257-61). Nabokov’s paradoxical practice here confirms Doležel’s thesis: Nabokov could have continued to invent the exploits of his characters as fictional entities, and he could have filled in additional historical background of the actual people involved. Once again, only the latter would have been falsifiable.

The Rebirth of the Author

15

seems to be disclosing the thoughts of another when he states that the last time he saw Colette she “slipped into my brother’s hand a farewell present, a box of sugar-coated almonds, meant, I know, solely for me” (1966, 152). Taken literally, this statement is the kind that is supposed by Käte Hamburger, Dorrit Cohn, and others to be a signpost of fictionality. And there are many other such statements in this autobiography, which is structured more like a devious modernist novel rather than a conventional memoir (see Moraru 2005, 40-54). Further reflection on this text as well as more extreme examples like Edmund Morris’ notorious biography of Ronald Reagan, Dutch, which provides samples of Reagan’s thoughts throughout the volume, reveal instead that the presence of devices from narrative fiction does not indicate that the text is fictional: Nabokov’s book remains an autobiography, and Morris’ a biography, albeit an eccentric one. Both remain falsifiable on all other points, despite the presence of techniques that normally are only used in fiction. We can easily bracket such impossible thought transcriptions as the educated guesses of the author, or indeed denounce them as blatant fabrications, as Kate Masur does in her review of Dutch. The fact that they are interspersed within a nonfictional narrative does not imply that they cannot be separated back out and identified as fabrications. We may conclude with Gérard Genette that such purported linguistic indices of fictionality are not “obligatory, constant, and sufficiently exclusive that nonfiction could not possibly borrow them” (1990, 773).

C Autofiction It is a short step from a fictionalized memoir like Speak, Memory to autofiction proper, though autofiction presses harder against the fiction/nonfiction divide. The term was coined by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 and denotes an a substantially autobiographical narrative that is embellished with fictional inventions and techniques. Popular in France and the United States, such texts are widespread and they continue to proliferate. It allows authors to tidy up mere facts into superior narrative arrangements— much more so than typically allowed by the normal conventions of poetic license. It also allows for a high degree of deniability in especially daring or potentially damaging pieces of self-writing, such as the audacious depictions of the multitude of sexual acts and partners in Catherine Millet’s La Vie Sexual de Catherine M. (2001). At times, the authors themselves can seem to be unsure of the precise status of their writing. Annie Ernaux, in her autofiction, Passion Simple, indicates some of the paradoxes it presents: “During all this time, I felt I was living out my passion in the manner of a

16

Chapter One

novel but now I’m not sure in which style I’m writing about it: in the style of a testimony, possibly even the sort of confidence one finds in women’s magazines, a manifesto or a statement, or maybe a critical commentary” (1993, 20). Autofiction’s blending of fictional and nonfictional elements does tend to confound the binary oppositions set forth by Lejeune–as he himself has admitted. At the same time, we acknowledge that these are separable in theory: we can easily imagine the author of an autofiction clarifying which passages are invented and which ones conform to the actual facts of the case.

D. Transparent Voices We also need to acknowledge an important narrative strategy that may be termed “transparent voices,” in which a dubious or unreliable character narrator can readily (and, more importantly, unambiguously) articulate the ideas of the author.4 In such cases, the narrator may be temporarily “evacuated” and his character dispensed with as the author speaks directly (and sometimes incongruously) through that character’s mouth. Most of Nabokov’s intellectually superior characters share Nabokov’s contempt for popular culture, psychoanalysis, socialist realism, and American philistinism, and they sometimes express their disdain in language more reminiscent of Nabokov’s nonfictional prose than the personal styles of the particular characters. Thus, the author’s voice even breaks through—most implausibly—the second-rate mind of the fatuous John Ray, the otherwise fallible editor of Humbert’s text in Lolita. Consider Ray’s condescending reference to “old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of ‘real’ people beyond the ‘true’ story” (1970, 6), or the following more tongue-in-cheek intrusion: “The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that ‘offensive’ is frequently but a synonym for ‘unusual’; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise” (1970, 7). These sentiments are the kind frequently found in Nabokov’s critical prose and are quite beyond the reach of a middlebrow psychiatrist who is much more likely to parrot various slogans of the day or blurbs for the latest book-of-the-month club selection. It is most suggestive that Sebastian Knight is said to be fond of this practice of using otherwise unreliable narrators as authorial mouthpieces: “He had a queer habit of endowing even his most grotesque characters with 4

This practice corresponds to what James Phelan describes as “mask narration” (2005, 200-4).

The Rebirth of the Author

17

this or that idea, or impression, or desire which he himself might have toyed with” (1959, 114). Because the thoughts of a narrator should not be attributed to the author does not imply that the latter cannot at times speak through the former. This practice needs to be more carefully analyzed and understood within a historical context. After all, it was not that long ago that authors were criticized for using characters and narrators as mouthpieces for their own ideas. As Woolf expressed it in her critique of E. M. Forster’s Howards End: “We are tapped on the shoulder. We are to notice this, or take heed of that. Margaret or Helen, we are made to understand, is not speaking simply as herself; her words have another and a larger intention” (1942, 172). Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde were likewise castigated for using their characters as mere mouthpieces for their authors’ ideas. We should restore this practice to our critical and theoretical lexicons. In answer to the question, how does one know when a character is articulating the views of its author, the answer is to compare the valorization of actions and ideas in a work of fiction with statements on the same subjects in nonfictional works by the same author. To take an easy case, tyrants and totalitarian regimes are regularly pilloried in Nabokov’s fiction and denounced in his essays. We need not shy away from pointing out such congruities, though we need to do it with the care and nuance biographers use when determining the beliefs of their subjects and also use the sensitivity and suspicion that literary scholars can bring to the vagaries of acts of narration.

E. Autobiography as Intertext Another intriguing intersection of the historical author and the fiction’s narrator is present in Look at the Harlequins! (1974), which fully develops a strategy that Nabokov had toyed with in a number of earlier texts, including The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Normally, in the paratextual material at the beginning of each book, we find a list of other books “by Vladimir Nabokov”; these titles are arranged by genre in chronological order. In each of these lists, we find for example Nabokov’s Mashenka (1926), King, Queen, Knave (1928), The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Ada, or Ardor (1969), and other titles. But as you open the first pages of Look at the Harlequins! you find instead a list of a dozen “Books by the Narrator.”5 These titles constitute a 5 This practice almost seems to parody Lejeune’s comment that the author is “a personal name, the identical name accepting responsibility for a sequence of different published texts. He derives his reality from the list of his other works which is often to be found at the beginning of the book under the heading ‘by the same author’” (1982, 200).

18

Chapter One

parodic version of Nabokov’s oeuvre; the Russian works include Tamara (1925) and Pawn Takes Queen (1927), while the English volumes include See Under Real (1939) and Ardis (1970). To get the joke, here and elsewhere in the book, one must know the principal details of Nabokov’s career—and not just themes and images, but also dates of publication, changes in residence, the career of his father, etc. When the narrator, Vadim Vadimich, notes that he had employed the pseudonym, V. Isirin (1974, 97), the informed reader knows this is a variation of Nabokov’s actual pseudonym, V. Sirin. The novel’s sudden turn to a second person address to the narrator’s beloved likewise mirrors the similar turn made in the last chapter of Speak, Memory. Nabokov thus takes the public details of his life and work as an antecedent text to be humorously reworked in this novel more or less in the same way he uses In Search of Lost Time as a general framework for Lolita. The story of his life remains a central “pre-text” of the work, even though the mentally unstable protagonist quickly diverges at many key points from his Doppelgänger, the author. Maurice Couturier observes that the implicit figure of Nabokov, whose presence is felt throughout the work, emerges “as a result of the conflict between the real author and the fictional narrator, a conflict arbitrated by the reader familiar with Nabokov’s life and with his earlier novels. Nabokov encourages us to practice a Sainte-Beuvean variety of criticism even as we celebrate the author’s death, thus placing us in a highly paradoxical situation” (1995, 3). An additional twist is provided when we are presented with the models or clefs of characters that would appear in the later works of the narrator. Referring to his lover, Iris, the narrator states: “Her cheeks and arms, without their summer tan, had the mat whiteness that I was to distribute—perhaps too generously—among the girls of my future books” (1974, 68). Such an assertion invites a look into comparable situations in Nabokov’s works. There we find similar examples but a different pattern: Colette, the girl with whom the very young Nabokov enjoys his first love, has “apricot skin” (1966, 149); Annabel Leigh, the “progenitor” of Lolita, has “honey-colored skin” (1970, 13) as does her later avatar (1970, 41). Thus, Nabokov’s penchant for tanned girls is inversely mirrored by the Harlequins’ narrator’s fixation on young women with pale skin. The relation is thus something like that of a photograph to its negative, with light and dark reversed. This motif in fact appears in another transposition of titles; thus Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark (originally, Kamera Obskura) is transmogrified into the narrator’s work, Camera Lucida, or Slaughter in the Light. To no one’s surprise, the narrator soon becomes haunted by “a dream feeling that my life was the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant, of another man’s life, somewhere on this or another earth. A demon,

The Rebirth of the Author

19

I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that other writer” (1974, 89). These moments resonate with echoes of Krug’s adumbrations in Bend Sinister, though here they are comic and more extended. The Harlequins’ narrator is occasionally confused with this other author whose name resembles his own and finally fears that he is the figment of another’s imagination. Such play with his identity as an author should perhaps not seem unusual coming from an author who, by ceasing to write in Russian, “became a phantom in his own prose, as if, he said, he created the person who wrote in English but was not himself doing the writing” (Wood 1994, 4).

F. Authorial Interpolation Finally, we may note a last form of self-presentation in fiction; this technique, like the other five that I have discussed, militates against the assumption of an absolutely impermeable boundary between author and narrator. In Lolita, there is a character, Vivian Darkbloom, who both exists as a character and whose name is an anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov.” The same is true of the Vivian Bloodmark and Vivian Calmbrood who appear in other works. Nabokov criticism has noted many other such authorial selfrepresentations, involving the letters V or VN, the Russian phrase for “on the side” (na bok), and numerous other manifestations.6 The primary, if not sole function of these names is to inject the alphabetical presence of the author into the text of the fiction, the way many of Hitchcock’s films include an image of the director unconvincingly portraying a supernumerary character or a most unlikely “man on the street.” Stephen Dedalus asserts that Shakespeare has subtly inserted his presence into his plays: “he has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in his plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvass” (Joyce 1986, 172). Commenting on this passage, Nabokov states, “and this is exactly what Joyce has done—setting his face in a dark corner of his canvas” (1980, 319-20). Of course, the same is true for Nabokov.

Conclusion These and many other similar examples testify to the importance and centrality of the fiction/nonfiction distinction; recent violations of these boundaries and the scandals provoked by texts like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces reveal the stakes of calling a work fiction or nonfiction. The 6

For a thorough discussion and bibliography of this phenomenon, see Shapiro 1999.

20

Chapter One

achievement of Nabokov is not to demolish this opposition but to manipulate it in subtle and cunning ways that produce novel responses; indeed, one needs the distinction in order to appreciate and articulate Nabokov’s impressive maneuvers. Though the division is fundamental, as Lejeune affirms, there are moments when authors can in fact enter their fictional worlds. Nabokov’s examples show that some texts will legitimately be able to be read either as fiction or autobiography, some will straddle or blur the divide, some interject nonfictional discourse into the text of a novel, and some readjust the boundary between frame and fiction. Together, these indicate the rare ways in which the author of a book can merge with the narrator of a work of fiction, thereby bending, extending, or contravening established notions of literary criticism and narrative theory.

CHAPTER TWO REASSESSING AND EXTENDING THE CONCEPT OF THE IMPLIED AUTHOR

In 2001, Susan S. Lanser wrote, “few terms have stirred narratologists to so much vexation—and passion—as implied authorship” (153). This debate continues and shows no signs of abating; new voices are adding important extensions and revisions to this concept as is indicated by a special issue of Style (45.1, spring 2011) devoted to the topic. In this chapter, I will outline the history of the concept, critically discuss its main definitions, analyze the debates around it, offer a test case to establish its validity, note a number of ways the concept remains useful, and suggest areas in which it can be further extended, specifically, the career implied author, multiple implied authors, and implied authors in other artforms.

History Wayne Booth notes the first use of this idea in Earnest Dowden’s 1877 discussion of George Eliot, which is referred to by Kathleen Tillotson and called the “author’s second self” in her 1959 monograph, The Teller and the Tale (Booth 1983, 71). Henry James dramatized the difference between the genial living author and the wicked authorial figure implied by his books in “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884). In “The Private Life” (1890), he produces a story about the incommensurability between the ordinary, vapid public man of letters and the very different self that is evident in his scintillating prose. This story contains what seems to be a literal embodiment of the paradox, as different figures appear to represent the divided self in separate bodies in two different places at the same time; the one writing at the desk, we are told, looks more like the author of the literary works than does the public figure making small talk a floor below. Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges also discuss the substantial difference between the authorial construct they have fabricated and the living person who did it. Virginia Woolf refers to “the fictitious V.W. whom I carry like a mask around the world” (1977-84, volume 5, 28

22

Chapter Two

July 1940, 307); Borges’s “Borges and I” is a kind of exemplification of the differences between the private man and the public author. And as we noted in chapter one, Marcel Proust asserts that “a book is the product of a very different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices” (1984, 99-100); the writerly self that produced the novels of Stendhal is distinct from the outer self of Stendhal the citizen, “which may have been very inferior to the outer selves of many other people” (1984, 100). Wolf Schmid further points out that Russian Formalist Jurij Tynjanov “coined the term ‘literary personality,’ which he used to refer to a work’s internal abstract authorial entity” (2013, paragraph 5); he also notes that Viktor Vinogradov, a scholar of language and style with links to the formalist movement, “began developing the concept of the author’s image (obraz avtora) in 1926” (2013, paragraph 5).

Definitions The implied author can generally be identified as the figure of the author that the reader constructs while reading or hearing a work. The term was first used by Wayne Booth in 1961; it has been widely used and frequently debated. Three major conceptions of the implied author have been set forth. The first, in the words of Booth, affirms that “however impersonal he may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner” (1983, 71). This is not at all unusual; in fact, “the picture the reader gets of this presence is one of the author’s most important effects” Booth writes (1983, 71). The implied author is thus a kind of “second self,” in Booth’s terms, who is typically superior to the actual author, or, as later commentators have suggested, more consistent. The implied author will always depart from the actual author or authors in a number of ways; the same actual author will construct different implied authors in different works. The concept of the implied author is also to be differentiated from the narrator of a work of fiction. William Nelles pithily explains these differences: “the historical author writes, the implied author means, [and] the narrator speaks” (1993, 22). In Huckleberry Finn, we can think of these functions in this way: the author who cashes the check is Samuel Clemens, the implied author is “Mark Twain,” and the narrator of the work is Huck Finn. This general conception has recently been affirmed by Wolf Schmid, who writes: “The implied author refers to the author-image contained in a work and constituted by the stylistic, ideological, and aesthetic properties for which indexical signs can be found in the text” (2013, para 3). It also lies behind Margaret Atwood’s sardonic comment, “There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched

Reassessing and Extending the Concept of the Implied Author

23

from a magazine—‘Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté.’” (2002, 35) A second, independent conception of the implied author also appears in Booth. He affirms that the implied author as an essential component of the transmission of the text and is a construct parallel and connected to the implied reader: “The author creates [. . .] an image of himself and another image of his reader; he makes the reader, as he makes his second self, and the most successful reading is the one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement” (1983, 138). Seymour Chatman would later formalize this relation as the basic communication structure of fiction in a widely cited and frequently reproduced diagram that shows the actual author and reader involved in yet bracketed off from the transmission of the story that moves from the implied author through the narrator to the narratee and then to the implied reader (1978, 151). It should be noted that this model is only applicable to fiction; in nonfiction, the author is the narrator, though he or she is still distinct from the implied author. Though many theorists feel there is a mutual relation between the ideas of the implied author and the implied reader (e. g. Nelles, Phelan), there is no logical implication; one may affirm either concept without implying the other; one may also find significant asymmetries in their relationship (see Richardson 2006, 114-15, 129-132). The third conception of the implied author has been offered by Seymour Chatman. For him, the implied author is “a structural principle” within the text that is produced by the actual author. This entity, which Chatman refers to as “it” rather than “he or she,” invents the narrator and establishes the norms of the narrative; “it has no voice, no direct means of communicating” but it “instructs us silently, through the design of the whole” (1978, 148-49). This conception, which in some readings equates the implied author with the text itself, has been widely attacked.

Attacks Gérard Genette emerged as a powerful opponent of many conceptions of the implied author. Invoking the principle of Occam’s razor, he denied that the implied author was a necessary (and therefore valid) agent between the narrator and the actual author, and argued that in almost every case one needs only the categories of actual author and narrator. Nevertheless, he did grant that the idea the reader has of the author of a work is a legitimate one: “The implied author is everything the text lets us know about the author, and the literary theorist, like every other reader, must not disregard it” (1988, 148). Other theorists have been more thoroughly opposed

24

Chapter Two

to the notion. Mieke Bal has several objections to the concept, one being that in many uses, “the implied author is a result of the investigation of the meaning of a text, and not the source of that meaning” (2009, 17). This criticism is similar to those leveled by Nelli Diengott (1993) and by Shlomith RimmonKenan. The latter, who found the general concept useful, nevertheless argued against one of Chatman’s formulations: “if the implied author is only a construct, if [it] ‘has no direct means of communicating’ (148), then it seems a contradiction in terms to cast it in the roll of the addresser in a communication situation” (2002, 88). Bal also avers that “the term mystifies and overwrites the reader’s input and is easily recuperated to grant the interpretation of one person [. . .] the authority of knowing ‘what the author meant to say’” (2009, 17). Porter Abbott, however, shows how the concept is compatible with our sense that for many difficult or obscure texts “there may be more than one intentional reading that works for the text as a whole” (2011, 477). Lastly, Bal objects that the implied author does not apply exclusively to the realm of narrative, and thus is not pertinent to narratology. Theorists working with a version of Booth’s primary definition do not find these objections to be serious problems for their conceptualizations. Ansgar Nünning reaffirms similar objections in a series of articles beginning in 1993. He rearticulates some of these positions, observing that the concept (in Chatman’s formulation) is theoretically incoherent: “an entity cannot both be a distinct agent in the sequence of narrative transmission and the text itself” (2005, 92). He also suggests that the concept was originally employed simply as a way to discuss authorial intentions without having to bring in the author and thus risk opposition from those who denounced “the intentional fallacy.” It remains the case, however, that Booth, in addition to the implied author, also used the concepts of author and intention, as James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz also do. This objection of Nünning’s is thus invalid. We also observe that the concept retains its utility after some its purported original function has vanished. David Herman, extending and adding to earlier critiques, asserts: “the idea of the implied author arises from efforts to accommodate an antiintentionalist position that I believe is preferable to dispute from the start” and adds that “talk of implied authors entails a reification or hypostatization of what is better characterized as a stage in an inferential process” (Herman et al. 2012, 50). Marie-Laure Ryan (2011) offers a thoroughgoing critique based on models of communication employed by philosophers of language. She denies that the implied author is a necessary element in the communication model of narrative fiction, that it is reasonably conceived as a design structure, and that it is the source of the norms and values communicated by

Reassessing and Extending the Concept of the Implied Author

25

the text. The focus of her critique are primarily the second and third accounts of the concept indicated above. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, in the only book-length study of the subject, describe what they see as the concept’s problems and its durability; despite those problems: “making use of the implied author reflects a wide range of intuitions which are perfectly plausible when considered separately but which conflict with one another in a single concept” (2006, 152). We may conclude that, of the three major conceptions of the implied author, the third account given above has been largely exploded and is no longer a living concept. Insofar as it describes the implied author as the producer of meaning in the text, it is an unnecessary and unpersuasive reification: authors produce meaning, and they do so in part through their creation of an implied author as a rhetorical tool to impart that meaning. The second approach, centered on Booth’s model of narrative communication from author to reader, is still defended by rhetorical theorists of narrative and widely attacked by most others (for a summary of and defense against such charges, see Phelan 2007, 40-44). The most viable conception is the first one indicated above, the figure of the person who composed the narrative as constructed by the reader. Even Genette approved of that idea. Nevertheless, it too remains contested by some, and is dismissed as a misleading or mystifying concept by theorists like David Herman who warns against the danger “of losing sight of the heuristic status of these models and reifying or hypostatizing the entities they encompass” (Herman et al. 2012, 152; see also 49-50; 151-54). It is perhaps the only narratological construct that is both widely used by many theorists and warned against by others.

Testing the Concept of the Implied Author One important area for determining the effectiveness and utility of the concept is cases in which the values, sensibility, or beliefs of the implied author differ radically from those of the actual author. A classic instance of this is the case of George Eliot. As David Carroll explains, “when her pseudonym was lifted shortly after her first novel appeared, many readers felt they had been badly deceived: the clerical gentleman who stressed so impressively the demands of duty in his vivid picture of a Christian society turned out to be a female atheist living with another woman’s husband” (1971, 2). Equally relevant to this discussion is the situation of the implied author of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” who never questions the heteronormative world he inhabits—unlike the historical author, whose homosexual experiences were among the most profound of his life. Indeed,

26

Chapter Two

the difference between the historical and implied authors can be measured by the shock felt by many when it was learned that the creator of the story was so different from its implied author. Or, to take a more mundane example, the difference between the implied author of an online dating bio and the actual person who shows up for the date. What exactly is a reader to make of this successful authorial performance of impersonation? We may agree with Schmid that, “the implied author cannot be modeled as the mouthpiece of the real author. It is not unusual for authors to experiment in their works with their world-views and put their beliefs to the test in their works” (2013, para 22). It is precisely this difference that points to the potential utility of the idea of an implied author. Some debates can perhaps be clarified by examining divergences between the actual authors of a jointly written text and the authorial figure or figures implied by it. There may be one or more actual authors of a work, and there may be one or more implied authors; thus, there are four possible relations: 1) The most common situation is one historical author, one implied author. Henry James was the only human being who penned What Maisie Knew; the work reads like that of a single intelligence forming a stylistically unified text setting forth the ideas of a single sensibility. 2) A single text may be composed by more than one actual individual; Genette notes the cases of “the brothers Goncourt or Tharaud, of Erckmann-Chatrian, or of Boileau-Narcejac” (1988, 147), and states that none of these examples show signs of multiple authorship. We may add many more cases to this list: the collaboration of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford when Conrad was ill and struggling to complete the overdue chapter of Nostromo for serial publication, and most films, which rarely betray in an obvious fashion the many different hands involved in their composition. Many Renaissance dramas written by multiple hands (Beaumont and Fletcher, for example) appear on the stage as if they were the product of a single authorial consciousness, just as texts by multiple authors of a newspaper story, a Broadway musical, or a critical article are typically edited until they sound as if they emanate from a single sensibility. In these cases, one may argue that dual or multiple actual authors have formed a single implied author. This, it might also be noted, is the goal of forgers, plagiarists, ghostwriters, and authors hired to finish books left incomplete by bestselling authors after their deaths. When these authors fail, it is often because they are not able to convincingly approximate the sensibility of the implied author they mimic. 3) To return to our discussion of Genette: he affirms that, in the cases of joint authorship, “I find it hard to imagine that the texts of these works indicate or betray the duality of their authorial agents. A reader not

Reassessing and Extending the Concept of the Implied Author

27

provided with the paratextual indication of the names of the authors would thus spontaneously construct the image of a single author [. . . .] I definitely see no other cases” (1988, 147). But there are numerous cases that Genette has missed. Literature and popular culture are rife with collaborations that reveal their different styles, divergent tools, and disparate sensibilities. The two authors of The Romance of the Rose have opposed visions, styles, and seem to be working in different genres. The multiple historical authors of individual books of the Bible can be identified by biblical scholars. Often, we can surmise that a greedy studio executive had someone rewrite the ending of a serious film to make it a happy one in order to please certain audiences. In other cases, such as the 1990 Paramount film, The Two Jakes, an incoherent story readily points to multiple authorship: no single professional scriptwriter could create such a mess. The surrealists turned this kind of chaotic situation into an irreverent art form: “Exquisite Corpse” is the practice in which successive actual authors take turns composing fragments of text in ignorance of most or all of the material that was previously written. The result is a very strange work that clearly has multiple implied authors. To demonstrate my thesis here, I suggest that most competent readers of poetry can readily tell which sections of Pericles were written or revised by Shakespeare and which ones were penned solely by an anonymous journeyman (possibly George Wilkins). The reader is invited to compare these two speeches by Pericles from different parts of the play: By your furtherance I am clothed in steel, And spite of all the rapture of the sea, This jewel holds his building on my arm. Unto thy value I will mount myself Upon a courser, whose delightful steps Shall make the gazer joy to see him tread. 2.1.156-61

Compare that passage with this: My dearest wife was like this maid, and such a one My daughter might have been. My queen’s square brows; Her stature to an inch; as wandlike straight; As silver voiced; her eyes as jewel-like And cased as richly; in pace another Juno; Who starves the ears she feeds, and makes them hungry The more she gives them speech. 5.1.110-16

I suspect it is evident that two hands are at work on this play and it is quite clear which passage includes the words of the mature Shakespeare.

28

Chapter Two

This discussion raises the largely unexplored question of how many multiple implied authors there can be in a single narrative? We may examine The Whole Family, a 1908 novel written by twelve very different American authors. The contributors did not alter their authorial personae; Henry James’ narrator’s section reads just like Henry James, and contemporary reviewers noted how oddly it was situated between the discordant voices that preceded and followed it. The first chapter was written by William Dean Howells in his characteristic tone, style, and sensibility. The second, however, by Mary Wilkins Freeman, displays an ironic and even acidic tone, provides an irreverent set of motives, and makes several outrageous disclosures. It differed so much from the first chapter that it threatened the continuation of the project. As Alfred Bendixen recounts in his introduction to the volume, Freeman “made the old-maid aunt into a thoroughly modern woman who relished the attention of men [. . . .] The quiet world Howells had created in the first chapter was shattered by Freeman’s revelations that the young man who had just become engaged to the daughter, Peggy, was really hopelessly in love with the aunt” (1986, xii). These transformations threatened the identity of the work; Howells loathed Freeman’s chapter and urged the editor, Elizabeth Jordan, not to publish it. Here we have perhaps a dozen implied authors of a single narrative. When the work was first published chapter by chapter in serial form, the individual author of the piece was not identified. Instead, the names of all the contributors to the project were listed with the admonition, “The intelligent reader will experience no difficulty in determining which author wrote each chapter—perhaps” (cited in Bendixen, 1986, xxxv), thus affirming the multiple implied authors of the work. Isabell Klaiber also examines its various voices, styles, and sensibilities. She goes on to explore the collaborative detective story, “Murder at the Beau Rivage,” and the multi-authored, interactive hypertext, One Million Monkeys Typing, and identifies their numerous implied authors. 4) Finally, we may address that strange phenomenon of a single author constructing two or more implied authors. At the level of what Booth called the career implied author (and which I will return to shortly), this phenomenon is widespread. We readily distinguish between early and mature Yeats or major and late works of Hemingway like Across the River and into the Trees which, as Nelles has pointed out, read more like a parody of his earlier work rather than new work by the same historical author (1993, 41-42). The actual author, that is, could no longer produce the implied author he had formerly projected. Nelles also notes that an author may

Reassessing and Extending the Concept of the Implied Author

29

deliberately parody his or her own style in a text (1993, 41-42). In rare cases, an author may produce two distinct authorial voices in a single work: the implied author of Chaucer’s retraction at the end of the Canterbury Tales is entirely at odds with the persona who created the ribald humor that the retraction denounces. In a different vein, the Rabelaisian avant-garde aesthetics of the later chapters of Ulysses read to many as if they were written by a different author from the one who composed the austere, Flaubertian, high modernist earlier chapters. In these cases, one may plausibly claim that a single historical author has produced two implied authors. They also produce more than one implied reader, as I will discuss in chapter nine. The conclusion of this inventory of the practice of authors over several centuries in both high and “low” forms is that the construction of the persona projected by the author is important to literary analysis, and that the term “implied author” is a most useful one to identify the congruence or divergence of different historical authors and inferred authorial voices in a work or body of work. One may affirm that if two actual authors produce, in Schmid’s words, an “author-image contained in a work and constituted by the stylistic, ideological, and aesthetic properties for which indexical signs can be found in the text,” there is every reason to affirm that they constitute a single implied author.

The Career Implied Author Wayne Booth briefly adumbrates the idea of a career implied author “who persists from work to work, a composite of all of the implied authors of all his or her works” (1983, 431; see also 71-72.). For the most part, however, he is more concerned to affirm that authors create different implied authors in different works, as Fielding does in “the satirical Jonathan Wild, the two great ‘comic epics in prose,’ Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, and that troublesome hybrid, Amelia” (Booth 1983: 72). This concept has not been developed much in the subsequent critical literature, though it is touched on by Chatman (1990, 87-89). As we have just seen, however, the “career implied author” can provide extremely fertile ground for analysis. Some writers use a nom-de-plume to create a different authorial persona and thus a second career implied author, as when feminist theorist Carolyn Heilbrun took the name Amanda Cross to write detective novels and thereby free herself from the career implied author she had already constructed. To test the ability of publishers to recognize quality work (and perhaps also her own career implied author), Doris Lessing submitted two novels under the name, “Jane Somers.” Both were rejected by Lessing’s

30

Chapter Two

own publisher. Also illustrative is the decision of Kinsley Amis, who took on the pseudonym of Robert Markham to write James Bond novels which impersonated the style and sensibility of the career author Ian Fleming— and not that of career author Amis. And then there is the case of Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under his own name, under pseudonyms, and under names he called “heteronyms” since the implied authors of each text diverged substantially though not entirely from the personality of the actual author. They were “false personalities, with biographies, points of view, and literary styles that differed from Pessoa’s” (Zenith, 2001, xi). In another twist, he composed his work both in Portuguese and in English, and the projected English implied author differs from his various Portuguese selves. This rich corpus still awaits theoretical disentangling. Other art forms should also be brought into these discussions. An obvious one is film. We all know what it means to say that a film was great until the studio ruined the director’s vision, or, referring to the 1996 film, From Dusk till Dawn, differently co-created by Quentin Tarantino and Richard Rodriguez, “I loved it until the point where Tarantino bailed and Rodriguez took over.” Equally relevant is the notion of the auteur, the distinctive personality of the director that manifests itself in his or her work which corresponds fairly well with the career implied author. One may speak of the director Ingmar Bergman before he became the auteur “Bergman” or divide directors, as Andrew Sarris did, into those who are auteurs and those who are not (1962-63). This concept has in turn provoked further speculation that attempts to go beyond the personality-centered idea of the auteur toward something more geared to the structure of relations associated with the name of the director, scriptwriter, or cinematographer, as David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson explain (1990, 401-2). Art history also provides some compelling examples. It is well known that critic Bernard Berenson, based solely on stylistic features of certain early Renaissance paintings, postulated the existence of a painter whom he referred to as Amico di Sandro, based on affinities and differences to the known work of Sandro Botticelli. This turned out to be a mistake; the implied artist was an illusion. Sometimes, however, the opposite occurs: Hugo von Tschudi postulated the existence of “The Master of Flémalle” and attempted to establish his corpus. He was delighted when historical evidence later corroborated his hypothesis and showed that Robert Campin was indeed the individual who produced the canvasses that bore a singular, distinctive, realistic style. We also can find a theatrical counterpart in the “Wakefield Master,” the name given to the distinctive figure (or figures) who we infer produced the more idiosyncratic and successful of the

Reassessing and Extending the Concept of the Implied Author

31

Wakefield mystery plays. These cases too seem eminently germane to discussions of the implied author. We also point admiringly to Patrick Colm Hogan’s work on this subject (2013). He addresses this general topic at some length in his account of the “cross-textual implied author.” There is a level of interpretive relevance and cognitive unity among different works by a single author, Hogan affirms, as he goes beyond narrative fiction and literature itself in his account of the cross genre implied author in the works of fiction and paintings by creators like Rabindranath Tagore.

The Implied Author of Nonfictional Narratives Booth notes the nonspecialized, everyday uses of this concept: “his different works will imply different versions, different ideal combinations of norms. Just as one’s personal letters imply different versions of oneself, depending on the differing relationships with each correspondent and the purpose of each letter, so the writer sets himself out with a different air depending on the needs of particular works” (1983: 71). This point has been further developed by Rabinowitz (2011, 102-103), who also observes that the implied author is not a theoretical abstraction but something created “by the real author in the same way that he or she creates characters and plots” (103). Rabinowitz, like Booth, also applies the concept equally to fiction and nonfiction. So does James Phelan (2011), who has also argued that the concept of the implied author is as useful of the understanding of nonfictional narratives as it is for works of fiction. A distinctive virtue of this position is that it necessarily is unaffected by criticisms of the concept as an aspect of the transmission of narrative fiction, the second definition listed above. We can see that the idea of the implied author in the limited definition of “the author-image contained in a work and constituted by the stylistic, ideological, and aesthetic properties for which indexical signs can be found in the text” is a concept with a lengthy history in modernist fiction and criticism, is theoretically sound, and quite useful in critical practice. This is most obviously the case when discussing authorial images in the same text, whether written by one author or more than one. The career implied author is also worthy of additional elaboration. Individual and career implied authors are very useful when discussing distinctive authorial images in multiple genres and art forms, and can be essential when determining the attribution of anonymous works. There is no perfect symmetry between implied authors and implied readers; neither concept entails the other. Nonfiction also has implied authors: individual writers of

32

Chapter Two

news stories in The New York Times all strive to mirror the style of the newspaper’s implied author. While recognizing its regular uses in nonfiction, we also observe its distinctive appropriateness for narrative fiction. In fiction, the implied author one creates is largely unbounded; it may differ considerably from the sensibility of the actual author. This is not the case in nonfictional texts, where the implied author needs to bear a reasonably proximate resemblance to the actual person who created it.

CHAPTER THREE UNNATURAL NARRATIVE THEORY: THE POETICS OF UNIQUELY FICTIONAL TEXTS

Unnatural narrative theory is the theory of fictional elements that defy the practices and conventions of nonfictional narratives. It theorizes fiction that displays its own fictionality, and focuses on works that break (or only partly enter into) the mimetic illusion. In my definition, the unnatural consists of events, characters, settings, or acts of narration that are antimimetic, that is, which defy or parody the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, the practices of realism, or other poetics that model themselves on nonfictional narratives. More specifically, I locate unnatural elements in the fictional storyworld and in the narrative discourse. In the storyworld, unnatural elements may be present as events, figures, settings, and frames. There are also cases in which the discourse alters the storyworld. Prominent examples include verbal textual generators, where words, concepts, or images produce the resulting text, as found for example, at the beginning of Robbe-Grillet’s Dans la labyrinthe (see Richardson 2019a, 89-93). Another is “denarration,” in which the text negates or “erases” the events it had instantiated in the fictional world (Richardson 2019a, 132-33). For a pithy example of the unnatural in a single phrase, one may go to Christine Brooke-Rose’s line, “Whoever you invented invented you too” (1975, 53). This sentence is meant literally; it is a kind of double metalepsis. Obviously, it is impossible in the real word and probably logically impossible as well. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan comments on this line—and the narrative as a whole—in the following terms: “The novel repeatedly reverses the hierarchy [of narrative levels], transforming a narrated object into a narrating agent and vice versa. The very distinction between outside and inside, container and contained, narrating subject and narrated object, higher and lower level collapses” (1983, 94). For an example centered on events, we may adduce the following passage from Mark Leyner: “He’s got a car bomb. He puts the keys in the ignition and turns it—the car blows up. He gets out. He opens the hood and makes a

34

Chapter Three

cursory inspection. He closes the hood and gets back in. He turns the key in the ignition. The car blows up. He gets out and slams the door shut disgustedly” (1995, 59). Here, an impossible sequence of events is depicted. Paradigmatic examples of works with global unnatural elements include Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable and many of his later texts, Alain RobbeGrillet’s La Jalousie, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. In addition to these instances, we find unnatural discourse in many second-person, first-person plural, and multiperson forms of narration. In an unnatural second-person narrative, the “you” is employed in different ways than it is in standard discourse, where it may be used as an apostrophe, to provide instructions, to indicate a narrator is speaking directly to a narratee (Camus’ La Chute), or indicate that a character is speaking to himor herself. Unnatural forms do not normally occur in the actual world, but only appear in works of fiction (or the rare work of nonfiction that employs techniques derived from experimental fiction). Standard second-person fiction, in which the central character is depicted as “you,” is one example: “Now you hesitated, weighing the invitation. Sooner or later you would break up with him, you knew. But not yet, not while you were still so poor, so loverless, so lonely” (McCarthy 1942, 163). Reducible to neither firstnor third-person narration but rather oscillating between the two forms, second-person texts problematize or conflate the standard narratological categories of homo- and heterodiegetic narration. There is no place for them to be situated in the narrative models set forth by Franz Stanzel, Gerard Genette, Dorrit Cohn, or Mieke Bal; each has categories limited to first-, third-person, and figural narration, or homo- and heterodiegetic narration, but not for cases that subvert or elude those categories. As Monika Fludernik has written: “second-person fiction destroys the easy assumption of the traditional dichotomous structures which the standard narratological models have proposed, especially the distinction between homo- and heterodiegetic narrative (Genette) or that of the identity or nonidentity of the realms of existence between narrator and characters (Stanzel)” (1996, 226). Hypothetical second-person works of fiction are unnatural in a different way: they typically start as a manual or set of instructions. Instead of simply containing steps for the completion of a project that may be performed, this discourse is transformed into a representation of events that are assumed to have already occurred: “Be glad you know these things [. . . .] Apply to law school. From here on in, many things can happen. But the main one will be this: you decide not to go to law school after all” (Moore 1986, 125). This transforms the traditional fabula, as actions presented as

Unnatural Narrative Theory: The Poetics of Uniquely Fictional Texts

35

hypothetical future possibilities nevertheless become actualized as events that have occurred in the past. There are comparable problems for traditional theories when one treats texts that alternate between first- and third-person narration (Fay Weldon’s The Cloning of Joanna May) or first-, second-, and third person narration (Nuruddin Farah’s Maps) when describing the same individual. Many specimens of “we” narration also conflate the boundary between homo- and heterodiegetic narration when they violate normal possibilities of what one individual can safely predicate of other minds, as in the numerically and generationally shifting “we” of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” or, more emphatically, Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic: “On the boat we were mostly virgins [. . . . ] At night we dreamed of our husbands. We dreamed of new wooden sandals and endless bolts of indigo silk and of living, one day, in a house with a chimney. We dreamed we were lovely and tall [ . . . . ] On the boat we had no idea we would dream of our daughter every night until the day we died, and that in our dreams she would always be three as she was when we last saw her” (2012, 3, 4-5, 12). Unnatural fiction is different not only from mimetic fiction but also what I call nonmimetic or nonnatural fiction. Nonmimetic narratives include conventional fairy tales, animal fables, ghost stories, and other kinds of fiction that invokes magical or supernatural elements. Such narratives employ consistent storyworlds and obey established generic conventions or, in some cases, merely add a single supernatural component to an otherwise naturalistic world. This fact is articulated in one of the versions of Tristan and Iseult: “most men are unaware that what is in the power of the magician to accomplish, that the heart can also accomplish by dint of love and bravery” (Bédier 1965, 20). Similarly, in 1929 M. R. James asserted that an effective ghost story requires the pretense of truth so the reader is put “into the position of saying to himself, ‘If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!’” (2005, 217). By contrast, unnatural texts do not attempt to extend the boundaries of the mimetic, but rather play with the very conventions of mimesis.1 Unnatural or antimimetic narratives draw attention to their constructedness; supernatural narratives occlude their fictionality.

1

Nonmimetic genres can be transformed and antimimetic works produced if an antiillusionistic element is present, as in many of Angela Carter’s postmodern fairy tales.

36

Chapter Three

Exigency In most models of narrative theory, both ancient and modern, there has been little consideration of or space for highly imaginative, experimental, anti-realistic, impossible, or parodic figures and events. Instead, we generally find a pronounced inclination or even a strong bias in favor of mimetic or realistic concepts; repeatedly, fictional characters, events, and settings are analyzed in largely the same terms or perspectives that are normally used for actual persons, events, and settings. In many types of narrative theory, the model or default type of narrative was and still is a more or less mimetic one.2 This is even largely true of structuralist narratology, despite its scientific posture and attempts to transcend humanism, as Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck have thoroughly established (2019, 42-109, esp. 68-70, 8892, 109). As they conclude, “the creation of unambiguous and generally accepted categories remains a utopian enterprise”; further, in many cases “the structuralist is forced to acknowledge that concrete stories always upset [strict] theoretical demarcations” (2019, 109). Fortunately, there have been a number of exceptional theorists who have attempted to go well beyond the parameters of the mimetic, including Viktor Shklovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Ricardou, Christine Brooke-Rose, David Hayman, Leonard Orr, J. Hillis Miller, and Werner Wolf, as I discuss in Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice (2015, 23-27). The fact remains, however, that most current narratological accounts continue to employ substantially or exclusively mimetic models. Thus, on the subject of narrative time, nearly all general works of narrative theory or narratological handbooks employ and limit themselves to Genette’s categories of order, duration, and frequency. The category of order contrasts the sequence of events presented in the text (récit, sjužet) with the sequence of events we can derive from the text and place into a chronological order (histoire, fabula). These are real world categories; there is no trouble applying these concepts to most every nonfictional narrative or to fictional works that maintain a consistent, mimetic time scheme and fixed storyworld. But there are numerous other possibilities that have appeared in literature for centuries that create several kinds of impossible, variable, or unknowable chronologies. These include unending circular fabulas that, even as they move forward in time, nevertheless return to their point of origin, as in Nabokov’s “The Circle” or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; dual or multiple fabulas, which 2

We follow James Phelan’s account of the mimetic component of narrative, responses to which “involve an audience’s interest in the characters as possible people and the narrative world as like our own” (2005, 20).

Unnatural Narrative Theory: The Poetics of Uniquely Fictional Texts

37

result in mutually inconsistent story lines and which can be found in many works of Shakespeare and in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (in this play, twenty-five years pass for the characters while, at the same time, a century passes for the rest of the world). Contradictory fabulas do not allow a single story line to be derived from the text (Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie; Anna Kavan’s Ice). Still other narratives have erased or “denarrated” events, such as “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining,” as I discuss in Unnatural Voices (2006, 87-91). Any comprehensive account of fabula or narrative temporality needs to include additional concepts to describe the practices of unnatural narratives. Similar problems appear in several other areas where unnatural and impossible forms are employed, including the theory of narration, narrative space, fictional worlds, characterization, and reading (see Richardson 2015, 2847). In short, a near exclusive focus on substantially mimetic works and mimetic concepts has left little theoretical space available for the many innovative, impossible, parodic, or contradictory events and figures that permeate contemporary literature. It is occasionally suggested that predominantly mimetic theories only leave out a few recent, extreme, or outré examples, but in fact they leave out an enormous number of antimimetic texts. This has resulted in a partial, incomplete narrative theory. Historically, it is easy to see how this situation may have come about. Modern narrative theory, from Henry James and the Russian formalists to Czech and French structuralism and German narrative theory (Stanzel, Hamburger, and others) and even including some Chicago School theory (especially that of Wayne Booth), was written in the shadow of the great narrative experiments of literary modernism, which offered new deployments of first-person narration, unreliability, emplotment, narrative sequencing, temporality, open endings, the implied reader, growing divergences between fabula and sjužet, and other narrative strategies. But the conceptual apparatuses developed to encompass early modernist poetics were inadequate for postmodernism, or, for that matter, the more anti-realist experiments of the modernists themselves. Classical narrative theory was able to circumscribe most of Proust, Mrs. Dalloway, The Sound and the Fury, and the first half of Ulysses, but had little or nothing to say about the impossible chronology of Orlando, the unusual narration of The Waves, seemingly telepathic knowledge in As I Lay Dying, or the deconstruction of narrative voice in the second half of Ulysses. Still less could it deal with the more radical experiments of Beckett, the nouveau roman, magical realism, écriture féminine, and postmodernism. To appreciate the importance of how thoroughly one’s horizons of expectations are informed by the choice of texts one selects as models, one need only imagine how different narratology

38

Chapter Three

would have been had Genette used Beckett’s trilogy rather than Proust’s Recherche as his tutor text. Literature continues to evolve, and new forms of innovative work have arisen, many of them developing or inventing original ways to violate mimetic conventions. It was inevitable that a new theory would emerge. My goal and that of my colleagues has been to expand the conceptual apparatus of narrative theory so it can encompass antimimetic practices, and thereby be more inclusive, more comprehensive, and more accurate. Despite many excellent critical studies of a large number of experimental works, the old mimeticism seems to be making a comeback in some circles. Recently, this bias has been made additionally problematic by a number of theorists, such as David Herman, who apply the results of cognitive science to works of fiction without addressing key differences that only fictional practices can produce. Herman’s determinedly mimetic approach to possible worlds theory, character theory, and the representation of consciousness in fiction are especially inimical to the inclusion of antimimetic narratives, and in fact generally precludes them.3 This retrogressive neo-mimeticism is unfortunate; at its worst, it threatens to ignore or undo many of the achievements of narrative theory during the last quarter century. Nevertheless, it has not failed to engender a very productive series of debates that are helping to clarify the distinctive difference of fictional narratives.

History and Terminology Since the terms I have used to describe my work have altered over the years, it will useful to clarify them here. My first article on what may be called unnatural narrative theory avant la lettre appeared in 1987; in it I critiqued existing theories of narrative time and their needlessly limiting mimetic biases and identified a number of examples from drama with impossible temporalities that could not be contained within existing models (Richardson 1987). In 2000 in an article in Narrative, I extended my analyses to narrative time in works of fiction, offered a considerably expanded theoretical framework, and applied my conceptions to narration and frames (2000a); I called the texts I discussed “postmodern” or “antimimetic.” The same year in a special issue of Style on “Concepts of Narrative” (34.2), I tried to draw attention to a number of narrative theorists who were taking seriously the challenges to existing models of narratology posed by 3 For a critique of Herman’s positions on these and other subjects, see my response in Herman et al. 2012, 235-49, esp. 243-45.

Unnatural Narrative Theory: The Poetics of Uniquely Fictional Texts

39

postmodern authors; I called their work “postmodern narrative theory” (2000b, 169). In 2006, I outlined a theory of what I called “antimimetic” practices of narration in Unnatural Voices. By this time, several younger scholars were independently doing important work on unnatural narratives; these included Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, Maria Mäkelä, Stefan Iversen, Rüdiger Heinze, and, to a degree, Marina Grishakova; these theorists helped transform and develop these concepts into an extensive, growing, dynamic field of research and theory. Derived from the title of my book, the name “unnatural” was becoming adopted by sympathetic scholars to describe their own work and the name started to catch on. In 2008 at the International Society for the Study of Narrative conference in Austin, Texas, Alber, Nielsen, Iversen, and I put together the first panel explicitly designated “unnatural narrative theory”; we agreed on the name with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The papers presented there formed the basis of an article outlining our collective positions that appeared in the journal Narrative in 2010 (Alber et al., 11336). The first conference devoted to the subject, organized by Alber and Heinze, took place at the University of Freiburg in November 2009; this conference led to the publication of the anthology, Unnatural Narratives— Unnatural Narratology (Alber and Heinze 2011). Since then, many other colleagues have explored a wide range of narratological topics under the “unnatural” rubric; these include Catherine Romagnolo, Katherine Weese, Ellen Peel, Sylvie Patron, Christopher Kilgore, Zuzana Foniokova, Leslie A. Adelson, Francesca Arnavas, and Annjeanette Wiese (see Richardson 2019b and Alber and Richardson 2020). Other narrative theorists, such as Monika Fludernik, James Phelan, and Dan Punday, are increasingly addressing some of the theoretical issues posed by unnatural or postmodern texts. We have also constructed a website complete with a “Dictionary of Unnatural Narratology”: http://projects.au.dk/narrativeresearchlab/unnatural/ undictionary/. The term “unnatural” of course carries with it its own accumulation of ideological baggage. Many of us consider our work to be a radical extension of that performed by Monika Fludernik in her Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996), where she follows out the paradigm of conversational natural narratives to its limits. We go on to theorize narratives that cannot be contained within the model of nonfictional natural narratives. My preferred definition leaves out any reference to natural narratives, since my central, defining categories, mimetic and antimimetic figures and events, are both found natural narratives: conversational, nonfictional natural narratives are mimetic, while tall tales and the more extreme kind of skaz can be antimimetic (2015, 22-23). For me, an unnatural

40

Chapter Three

narrative is not diametrically opposed to a natural narrative. The opposite of a “natural” or naturally occurring (i.e., oral) narrative is a carefully composed and written story. The opposite of an unnatural narrative is a mimetic (or realistic) work, such as, say, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. I also tend to avoid debates over “naturalization” as not being that helpful for me in articulating and clarifying my own position. Other unnatural narratologists, such as Nielsen, have different perspectives on these subjects. For each of us, the word “unnatural” has no extranarrative connotations, but is merely a narratological term derived from sociolinguistics. We have no position concerning any cultural practices, individual actions, or sexual preferences commonly designated as unnatural by society; we use the term in a different, limited sense. Having said this, we also note that some feminists who utilize unnatural narrative theory, such as Catherine Romagnolo (2020), prefer to play on both of these meanings in their analyses of works that employ unnatural narrative strategies (ie, antimimetic) to depict situations that society has designated “unnatural” (ie, morally transgressive).

The Model Peter Rabinowitz states that one way to determine the characteristics of the narrative audience is to ask, “What sort of reader would I have to pretend to be—what would I have to know and believe—if I wanted to take this work of fiction as real?” (1987, 96). Many unnatural worlds, however, do not allow themselves to be taken as real. Thus, when encountering a mimetic or a nonmimetic world, the narrative audience believes that Rastignac lives in Paris and that there are functioning magic mirrors in the world of “Snow White.” But an antimimetic or unnatural fiction requires a partial belief in the fictional world and also sabotages that belief. When we encounter contradictory versions of events that are both present in the storyworld (and thus not reducible to differing perceptions by separate characters), we are forced to abandon the normal beliefs of the narrative audience. The authorial audience then becomes melded with the narrative audience; we wonder what the (authorial) purpose is for the disruption of the storyworld. For similar reasons, we can no longer depend on what Marie-Laure Ryan calls the “principle of minimal departure” (1991, 48-60): such a princliple presupposes a relatively stable fictional world. With unnatural fiction, we should expect a pattern of repeated departures; intriguingly, these often trace out their own distinctive trajectories. It also follows that the experience of immersion in a storyworld is often altered or compromised in unnatural narratives (although the opposite can also

Unnatural Narrative Theory: The Poetics of Uniquely Fictional Texts

41

happen, as Daniel Punday (2020) has explained). The paradigm I have proposed insists on a dual, interactive model of mimesis and antimimesis, though in my writings I have generally emphasized the missing antimimetic practices and the absent theory of those practices. Postmodernism, with its endlessly inventive construction of antirealistic and impossible worlds and events, has forced the conceptual/methodological issue: either we have a primarily mimetic theory that is serously incomplete, or we employ new concepts that embrace the unnatural narrative practices of postmodernism and other experimental and avant-garde texts. It is increasingly evident that to comprehend unnatural works, we need a second, additional poetics. Thus, I do not offer an alternative paradigm so much as another, complementary one. In most areas, we do not need to reject existing models but rather to supplement them with a more comprehensive one that can embrace both mimetic and antimimetic narrative practices. By definition, a mimetic model cannot comprehend antimimetic works that violate the rules of mimetic representation. A complete narrative theory requires a binocular vision and a dialectical poetics, one that is able to address the fictional aspects of the fictions. Unnatural narratology is the capacious paradigm that supplies the missing parts, the missing theory, the missing vision. One issue immediately presents itself to anyone attempting to define the unnatural: how exactly it should be delimited. One the one hand, no one wants to play the enforcer, definitively determining just what is and what is not unnatural. On the other hand, no one wants a concept so vague or elastic that any odd, unusual, strange, or unexpected text can be tossed into it. This situation partly explains the proliferation of distinct definitions and concepts of the unnatural that are differently formulated even though they largely circumscribe most of the same cluster of texts. Unnatural narrative theorists are happy to let the narrative studies community ultimately determine the most effective account as it establishes its preference for one conception over the others. In our practice, we often find it most useful to point to paradigmatic instances of the unnatural. We also acknowledge the fluid nature of the limits of the unnatural: no matter which definition is employed, there will always be disagreement about borderline cases. Biwu Shang has recently made an important distinction between local acts of unnatural narration and conceptually larger, global instances (2019, 6). We find this to be a very helpful contribution. A good guide in these matters can be found in Stefan Iversen’s discussion of the subject. He takes the example of a story about a man who wakes and finds himself transformed into a giant bug but still in possession of a human mind. He then offers three possible endings. In the first, the story

42

Chapter Three

concludes by revealing that all the events happened in a dream. The second scenario postulates a kindly scientist who, having turned into a giant insect superhero, goes on to hunt down villains. The third possibility keeps the man situated in a possible world that resembles our own and who keeps trying, to the best of his new physical abilities and limitations, to act in accordance with what is expected of him as the human he no longer is. Iverson explains: These three examples are alike in that they all present the reader with combinations of physical and mental attributes that are impossible in my world, but they differ because they prompt rather different readings. As I see it, the mind in the first case is naturalized by the fact that the transformation takes place in a dream, in the sense that it doesn’t really happen. A slightly different logic can be applied to case two. Here, the transformed mind is unnatural in the sense that it is impossible in a realworld scenario but the mind may be conventionalized with the help of my knowledge of the genre in which it appears: in certain action hero comic books fragile but brilliant scientists are known to transform into raging beasts.

Iversen clarifies, however, that in the third case “I am unable to naturalize or conventionalize the consciousness resulting from the physically impossible metamorphosis. This monstrous irregularity cannot be eliminated in the name of sense-making with the aid of text-external cues such as knowledge of how actual minds typically work (‘this happens all the time to Central European salespeople’), knowledge of genre or literary conventions (‘this type of text is easily resolved with recourse to an allegorical reading’), or text-internal cues” (2013, 96-97). Building on the work of Sylvie Patron (2020), we may also note that in Kafka’s story, even if there had been a naturalizing disclaimer at the end like, “Then he woke up and realized it was all a dream, climbed out of bed, and hurried off to work,” this would be insufficient to negate the unnaturalness of the entire story, which is so substantial as to defy such a simple mimetic recuperation. It is evident that my notion of the unnatural is based on a significant distinction between fiction and nonfiction: specifically, the antimimetic performs that which is impossible in nonfiction. Unlike realist works that are successful as such insofar as they mimic nonfictional accounts, unnatural narratives can only exist in fiction, and are clearly intended to be fictional (unlike, for example, many supernatural stories). This leads to our general affirmation of the fiction/nonfiction boundary, though we readily acknowledge areas where that boundary is vague, shifting, obscure, or partially permeable, as we saw in chapter one. My preferred formulation of the difference of fiction is the pragmatic theory of fictionality; as we have

Unnatural Narrative Theory: The Poetics of Uniquely Fictional Texts

43

seen, Genette and others have shown that most of the allegedly distinctive syntactic components of narrative fiction can be and occasionally are found in works of nonfiction. It is also the case that authors of unnatural narratives frequently, if not characteristically, enjoy probing or violating the fundamental boundaries and oppositions that must be maintained in nonfiction and mimetic fiction, and this includes the fiction/nonfiction divide—the very opposition that makes the other violations possible. This results in what might be called the “paradox of unnatural fictionality.” Unnatural authors thus must be expected to challenge that boundary, even as they must usually be unable to breach it. It also suggests that fictionality can be indicated by the represented events in the fabula: if we read a narrative in which the direction of time is reversed as the events move forward into past and causal sequences are inverted, as in Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow, we know we are reading fiction. As we have noted, one of the reasons that a narrative theory modelled on mimetic narratives will necessarily fail to be applicable to a large number of fictional narratives is precisely that many works of fiction delight in violating the rules that govern mimetic fiction. We may even identify this as a basic principle of the poetics of fiction: whenever there is a fixed convention, invariant practice, or venerated order, irreverent authors will come along and violate these norms. If the critical consensus demands playwrights observe the “unity of time,” authors like Shakespeare and the romantics are certain to transgress and parody them. The same is true of mimetic practices and pretences, much to the dissatisfaction of Henry James and other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century apologists of a seamless mimeticism. We may call this the “Loki Principle.” Narrative theory needs to be able to account for distinctively (and exclusively) fictional play, especially as such play is often not without its own patterns.

Unnatural Narratives in Literary History Postmodern fiction is a primary source of unnatural narratives, but unnatural works can be found in many other periods and genres. I identify the unnatural in Aristophanic comedy, Menippean satires, the more playful and parodic kinds of Greek and Roman fictional narratives (e.g., Lucian’s A True Story; see also de Jong 2009); metaleptic prologues in ancient Sanskrit dramas; and numerous medieval and Renaissance texts, especially those of Shakespeare, who is a great font of unnatural practices and techniques and even inverts time and cause in Macbeth (Richardson 2015, 102-19). We find compelling examples in eighteenth century fiction, including “it” narratives that tell the story of a banknote, a vehicle, or an

44

Chapter Three

atom. Romantic fiction and drama are also great sources of unnatural narratives, especially in works that develop and extend Shandean techniques. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, and Goethe all generously employed antimimetic strategies. Nineteenth century British and American fiction provides numerous examples of the unnatural, from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey to the illusion-breaking asides in Thackeray, Trollope, and others; we similarly find late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazilian and Spanish specimens in the fiction of Machado de Assis and Miguel de Unamuno. Jan Alber (2016) has carefully traced a wide range of unnatural strategies in the history of English literature from about 1200 to the present. Maria Mäkelä (2013) identifies unnatural elements in eighteenth and nineteenth century realist fiction. In addition to works of literature, unnatural techniques have been employed in a large number of folk tales and folk dramas as well as works of popular culture. The latter include Edward Lear’s nonsense verse, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books (see Arnavas 2021), Gilbert and Sullivan musicals, Looney Tunes cartoons, Bob HopeBing Crosby “Road” movies, Monty Python films, MTV productions, many comics, some graphic novels, and numerous television commercials. Karin Kukkonin and Sonja Klimek have assembled an important anthology that investigates metalepsis in popular culture (2011). Unnatural narratives are everywhere.

Misunderstandings and Debates A common mistake that frequently arises is the overapplication of the term “unnatural.” Critics who have not read much on the subject often incorrectly apply the term to all sorts of mildly unusual realist texts, standard modernist inversions of linearity, certain unexpected characters or scenarios, or conventional nonrealist works. As already noted, I try to carefully distinguish unnatural, or antimimetic narratives from those that are simply nonmimetic, such as conventional fairy tales, beast fables, and stories involving magic. For me, the unnatural does not include supernatural narratives, fantasy, “weird tales,” what Todorov calls “marvelous” fiction, traditional science fiction, or allegories (see Richardson 2015, 9-12, 16). I affirm that the supernatural is very different from the unnatural: supernatural texts tend to be very serious about their storyworld, while unnatural authors are openly playful. Supernatural events can usually be placed within an otherwise naturalistic storyworld, while unnatural works deconstruct a mimetic or naturalistic world. In a supernatural world, a character may attempt to ascend Mount Olympus on a flying horse; in an

Unnatural Narrative Theory: The Poetics of Uniquely Fictional Texts

45

unnatural storyworld, a character might, like the protagonist of Aristophanes’ The Peace, ascend to Heaven on a giant dung beetle to speak directly with the gods. From Aristophanes and Lucian to Shakespeare and Cervantes to Fielding and Goethe to Joyce and Rushdie, the unnatural has been used to critique and satirize supernatural claims. Most works of standard science fiction are unconnected with antimimetic fiction; the impetus for many is a keenly realist one. A recent collection of science fiction stories, Finn and Cramer’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, stresses its realistic grounding, specifically its attempts to encourage science fiction writers to “conjure up grand ambitious futures” that will inspire others “to get out there and make them real” (2015, xxv)—not the kind of thing one could ask of Borges or RobbeGrillet. Similarly, Andy Weir’s novel, The Martian, was written by a scientist who posted it online so other scientists could contest or confirm the physical accuracy of its scenarios. Whenever there was a mistake, the author checked the math and then rewrote the passage in question to make it conform to the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. This is an extreme case of a general principle governing most science fiction since the time of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells: that it be (or at least seem to be) physically possible. Naturally, there are writers who violate this principle (Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Italo Calvino) and produce instead impossible, antimimetic, postmodern science fiction. Another frequent misunderstanding concerns the possible changing or relative nature of the unnatural. After all, many claim, what people in the industrialized West in the twenty-first century claim to be impossible has been believed to be possible, even actual. Who is to judge, the argument usually continues, what is really possible or impossible? Following Ellen Peel’s suggestion (2021, 77-78), we may simply say impossible according to the work’s implied reader. Typically, these are flagrant violations of what is considered possible, such as a storm so powerful that it blows a ship not merely off course but all the way to the moon, as in Lucian’s A Tue Story. Some critics try to minimize or denigrate unnatural narratives by limiting them to merely one restricted type like postmodernism or metafiction. Our recent work on the history of unnatural narratives should readily dispel such mistakes. Others take the opposite tack, arguing for example that it is widespread in mimetic fiction like the Victorian novel. Robyn Warhol notes unnatural passages in Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray and concludes that “realist novels have been indulging in antimimetic practices for as long as realist novels have been written” (Herman et al. 2012, 21314). Our response is: Exactly. Unnatural or antimimetic elements can be

Chapter Three

46

found in a wide range of ostensibly realist fictions, though they are often ignored because they can be quickly subsumed within the works’ general mimetic frame. In addition to flagrantly antimimetic narratives like Diderot’s Jacques le fatalist and Beckett’s The Unnamable, we can discover a playful unnatural trajectory within substantially realist works running at least from Cervantes through Fielding and on through Austen, Thackeray, and Trollope. The unnatural is ubiquitous; it is now being recognized as such and analyzed in more of its sites. .

The paradigms and interpretive frameworks of cognitive narratology and unnatural narrative theory have frequently been opposed; Stefan Iversen has provided a bracing critique of the doctrine of “mind reading” (2013, esp 98-104) and Maria Mäkelä (2006) has also pointed out limitations of the approaches of many cognitivists. David Herman has recently attacked several unnatural narrative theorists for affirming that “readers’ experiences of fictional minds are different in kind from their experiences of the minds they encounter outside the domain of narrative fiction” (2011, 8); this subject continues to be debated (see Richardson 2014). Building on the work of Alber, Iversen, and Nielsen, I have critiqued a needlessly mimetic insistence in possible worlds theory when applied to fictional universes (Richardson 2015, 37-38). At a more general level, I have attacked the way cognitive theory has been applied to narrative by certain theorists while affirming the work of others (Richardson 2015, 29-43; 165-67); for me, it is not the cognitivist approach itself that is faulty but the unnecessarily restricted ways in which it is often applied, particularly by first-generation theorists. This is especially true in many cognitivist accounts of literary character, which I find much too narrow, partial, and incomplete (see Richardson: 2020, 135-36). A model of literary character that restricts itself to treating characters as if they were people, “more or less prototypical members of the category of ‘persons,’” in the formulation of David Herman (Herman et al: 2012, 125), necessarily neglects or erases those characters that defy standard concepts of personhood, such as schematic or dehumanized figures, contradictory or conflated entities, impossible beings, parodic types, and characters who know that they are fictional. There are a few salient disagreements within the unnatural movement. One is a difference in definitions (see Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2013, 5-7). Another major divergence concerns the status and function of unnatural elements. Alber attempts to comprehend and explain unnatural features, typically by placing them within an existing explanatory framework such as cognitive psychology, allegory, and the like; he writes: “we apply the general schema of human existence to [unnatural] texts: we

Unnatural Narrative Theory: The Poetics of Uniquely Fictional Texts

47

assume that even the strangest text is about human concerns” (2009, 82). While readily acknowledging that unnatural effects may well have psychological, ideological, aesthetic, or thematic functions, other unnatural theorists and I are content to appreciate unnatural elements on their own terms, simply as violations of mimetic conventions. We don’t have a “zenlike” approach or undue reverence for a work’s mystery or wonderproducing power; we are able to simply enjoy unnatural strategies as unnatural strategies. The anti-mimetic provides its own distinctive pleasures.

Contributions, Current Developments, and Future Work The most significant contributions that unnatural narrative theory has made so far to narrative theory appear in two areas: the study of narration and that of story, plot, and temporality. In my book, Unnatural Voices (2006), I provide a detailed account of several unnatural strategies of narration, including unnatural narration in second person, first-person plural, multiperson, and contradictory works; my studies on unnatural stories, sequences, temporality, beginnings, and endings appears in A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-first Century (2019). Alber (2016) has also done important work in these and adjacent areas, as have several other scholars (see Richardson 2019b). An essay of mine on unnatural character theory appeared in 2020 in a volume that includes studies of unnatural features in feminist, postcolonial, graphic, and autobiographical works. Unnatural digital narratives have been thoroughly explored by Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell (2021). The subject of reading and the role of the unnatural reader are currently being debated (see Patron 2020, Peel 2021). There are now several important essays on unnatural feminist narratology by Catherine Romagnolo, Katherine Weese, and Ellen Peel, The media analyzed by unnatural studies continue to expand. Studies of unnatural elements in drama, film, hyperfiction and other digital texts, and nonfiction have also recently appeared, some in a special issue of Frontiers of Narrative Studies 4.1, 2018 (Richardson 2018). No medium seems to be devoid of unnatural components, and unnatural narrative theory continues to expand it range and refine its analyses.

Conclusion To end this chapter, I offer a challenge and a parable. The goal of any narrative theory should be a theory of all culturally important or resonant narratives, not a single subset, such as the Anglophone novel from

48

Chapter Three

1700-1920 or any comparably limited grouping. It would be bad enough if unnatural narratives only existed in a few countries over a couple of decades; their occlusion would then be understandable, though still unfortunate and unnecessary. But new forms of unnatural figures, techniques, and worlds keep appearing—and succeeding in arresting critical attention and garnering international awards. They appear prominently in traditional narrative forms like the novel as well as in newer forms like film and graphic fiction and contemporary digital media. As narrative theorists, it is essential that we theorize these narratives, and this is what unnatural narrative theory is performing. We cannot expect sixty-year old models to be able to effectively handle a new world of narrative literature without some significant reconceptualization. Some years ago, I tried through interlibrary loan to obtain a copy of Hélène Cixous’ work, Partie. It is a text in two parts that is bound together in opposite ways, providing two intersecting discourses, that of Si,Je and Plusje, which might be translated “If,I” and “I-more” (or “the More-I”). The text both depicts and creates fluctuating feminist subjectivity; the material form of the book is part of this project. The copy that I received, however, was mutilated by the university that had bought it. Unable to imagine that its physical form was intentional—in fact essential—the people who put a hard cover on the original paperback copy assumed that its innovative design had to be the result of a printer’s error. They then literally cut it apart and physically re-arranged the text so it would look like a conventional book, even though that left two sections that went from page 7 to page 66 (fortunately, they didn’t throw one of the sets away). The binder’s blunder proves to be an all too apt image for the damage done by critics and theorists who distort, disfigure, or dismiss narratives that exceed the parameters of their formulations. It is my hope that my work and the work of my colleagues helps bring forth a more open, expansive, and comprehensive narrative theory.

CHAPTER FOUR THE POETICS OF LISTS AND THE BOUNDARIES OF NARRATIVE

Having discussed actual and implied authors and unnatural narratives, we may now explore the boundaries of narrative. I will examine the intriguing function of lists, especially lists of names, and their relation to narrative proper. By narrative, I mean the representation of a causally related series of events (see Richardson 2019a, 13-36). Many types of text are usually defined as nonnarrative and frequently contrasted with narrative per se. David Herman, for example, opposes narrative proper to entities like “a description, a syllogism, an exchange of greetings, and a recipe” (2002, 89); James Phelan opposes narrative to the portrait and the lyric (2005, 16166); for Porter Abbott, narrative is fundamentally different from description, exposition, argument, or lyric (2008, 13). Such nonnarrative elements often extrude from the rest of the text; as Philippe Hamon observes, “a reader recognizes and identifies a description without hesitation: it stands out against the narrative background, the story ‘comes to a standstill’” (1982, 147). Most narrative theorists and critics accept this basic division; furthermore, I believe it is generally understood that lists occupy the same general position as descriptions. As Stephen A. Barney notes, “We distinguish between a story or narrative and a list embedded in the story. A list is extruded from some principle and it intrudes into the story. Hence lists resemble other intruders in stories” such as digressive matter, prolonged descriptions, homilies and other extended comment, songs, apostrophes, and “anything that breaks the narrative thread” (1982, 190). I suggest that some lists produce a much more pronounced break than, say, descriptive passages, and nearly always force a break in the transmission of the narrative proper, while in other cases, lists create their own narrative momentum. They can be disruptive elements in other areas as well, as we will see, and such disruptions can either foreground or attempt to attenuate the essential otherness of the list. In the history of literature, starting with the catalogue of ships in the Iliad, lists and narrative are found together, almost always with a list or

50

Chapter Four

series of lists nesting within a narrative proper. In classical works, the narrative and the list seem to have opposite functions, as narrative is suspended while the list is unfolded. What Genette says about nineteenth century conceptions of description applies even more accurately to lists (which in fact are sometimes part of a description): “the extended and detailed description appears as a pause and an amusement during the narrative” (1976, 6). But this separation, though often stark, is not always maintained. The two genres of the list and the narrative can work in tandem or, at times, move closely together. Sometimes, the conjunction seems irresistible. On the internet and in some music and performance pieces, lists are emerging as a medium of interest, especially unusual lists that reveal character eccentricities or those that imply an intended set of events and thereby disclose a potential narrative, or provide a summary quasinarrative of events that may have already taken place. There are several websites devoted to just such weird lists. Some of these have a strong narrative component that quickly becomes evident as the list begins to suggest a causally connected sequence of events. We find this in a piece by slam poet Big Poppa E (Eirik Ott) called “Receipt Found in the Parking Lot of the Super Walmart” (2007, 45): “Anniversary Hallmark card. Flowers. Candles. Matches. Incense. . . . Block of white chocolate. Bottle of white wine. Barry White’s Greatest Hits cd. . . . Hersey’s chocolate syrup. Honey. Box of condoms, 32 count, extra large . . .” We may begin our inventory by observing how John Milton continued, extended, and partially transformed the tradition of the epic list; there are numerous such aggregations throughout Paradise Lost; some even seem to take on a life of their own. Here is a description of part of the vision that the archangel Michael shows Adam of the future history of mankind, as history is presented as a kind of visual chronicle, as key areas are presented at particularly salient moments. The list seems almost to be put in motion, as time historicizes space: His Eye might there command wherever stood City of old or modern Fame, the Seat Of mightiest Empire, from the destind Walls Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can And Samarchand by Oxus, Temirs Throne, To Paquin of Sinæan Kings, and thence To Agra and Lahor of great Mogul Down to the golden Chersonese, or where The Persian in Ecbatan sate, or since In Hispahan, or where the Russian Ksar In Mosco, or the Sultan in Bizance, Turchestan-born; nor could his eye not ken

The Poetics of Lists and the Boundaries of Narrative

51

Th’ Empire of Negus to his utmost Port Ercoco and the less Maritim Kings Mombaza, and Quiloa, and Melind, And Sofala thought Ophir, to the Realme Of Congo, and Angola fardest South; Or thence from Niger Flood to Atlas Mount The Kingdoms of Almansor, Fez and Sus, Marocco and Algiers, and Tremisen; On Europe thence, and where Rome was to sway The World: in Spirit perhaps he also saw Rich Mexico the seat of Motezume, And Cusco in Peru, the richer seat Of Atabalipa, and yet unspoil’d Guiana, whose great Citie Geryons Sons Call El Dorado: but to nobler sights Michael from Adams eyes the Filme remov’d Which that false Fruit that promis’d clearer sight Had bred Book XI, 385-413

We see Milton do several things at once in this passage: he provides the sweeping catalogue required of any genuine epic poem, recreates and revises Virgil’s scene depicting Aeneas’ vision of the future at the end of book six of his epic, and surveys major centers of world power at the times of their apogees. One of the most striking aspects of this list however is its verbal beauty, as he employs assonance and alliteration to produce particularly mellifluous effects. In 1920, André Breton published a poem called “PSST.” It consists entirely of a list of names (all Bretons), occupations, addresses, and phone numbers taken from a Paris telephone directory. The entries are straightforward: Neuilly 1-18 Nord 13-40 Passy 44-15 Roquette 07-90 Central 64-99 Bergère 43-61

Breton, vacherie modèle, r. de l’Ouest, 12, Neuilly. Breton (E.), mon. funèbr., av. Cimetière Parisien, 23, Pantin. Breton (Eug.), vins, restaur., tabacs, r. de la Pompe, 176. Breton (François), vétérinaire r. Rousseau, 21 (2e). Breton frères, mécanicien, r, de Belleville, 262. (20e). Breton et fils, r. Rougemont, 12, (9e).

This dada exercise attempts to demystify poetry rather than, in the case of Milton, make poetry out of a list of names. It is as anti-narrative as it is anti-art. Here, the list is merely a list; it resists any narrative function or possibility. The larger question it suggests, however, is one for the philosophy of art: can a found list of names be a poem if it is called a poem,

52

Chapter Four

just as Duchamp provoked the same question three years earlier concerning a urinal exhibited as a sculpture. At the same time, we can affirm that it is not a good poem, not even a good “found poem,” from the perspective of any aesthetics. The poetic function of lists of names as well as their evocation of a narrative trajectory appear again in the work of Vladimir Nabokov. Early in Lolita, Humbert Humbert finds a mimeographed list of the names of the students in Lolita’s class; he states “it is a poem I already know by heart” (1970, 53). It reads: Angel, Grace Austin, Floyd Beale, Jack Buck, Daniel Byron, Marguerite Campbell, Alice Carmine, Rose Chatfield, Phyllis Clarke, Gordon Cowan, John Duncan, Walter Falter, Ted Fantasia, Stella Flashman, Irving Fox, George Glave, Mabel Goodale, Donald Green, Lucinda Hamilton, Mary Rose Haze, Dolores Honeck, Rosaline Knight, Kenneth McCoo, Virginia McFate, Aubrey Miranda, Anthony Miranda, Viola Rosato, Emil Schlenker, Lena Scott, Donald Sheridan, Agnes Sherva, Oleg Smith, Hazel Talbot, Edgar Talbot, Edwin Wain, Lull

The Poetics of Lists and the Boundaries of Narrative

53

Williams, Ralph Windmuller, Louise

Humbert is delighted by the appearance of the names in the form of a list, in particular “Haze, Dolores, (she!) in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard of roses—a fairy princess between her two maids of honor” (1970, 54). He wonders whether he feels such delight in the list because he can “imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon, the haggard masturbator; Duncan, the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola, of the blackheads and bouncing bust,” and so on. In addition to its assonance and onomatopoetic suggestiveness, and its sheer delight in the list of names as an artistic medium, this document is also notable for the name Aubrey McFate which, as a personification of his destiny, will seem to pursue Humbert throughout the rest of the text. Alfred Appel also notes that the color red is regularly associated with those who oppose Humbert (in Nabokov: 1970, 362), so emblems of his antagonists (e. g., Rose Carmine) are well represented in this list. Jorge Luis Borges displays the central opposition and attraction of a single vision and a list of numerous entities, as well as narration and description, in his account of the Aleph, which has some resemblances to the vision shown by Michael to Adam: “in that unbounded moment I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; none amazed me so much as the fact that all occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency” (Borges 1998, 282-83). Borges the narrator goes on to explain that “what my eyes saw was simultaneous, but what I shall write is successive, because language is successive” (1998, 283). While the Aleph’s diameter was two or three centimeters, “universal space was contained within it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could see it clearly from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider web at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close” (1998, 283). Trying to depict what he saw when looking at the Aleph, Borges is faced with the dilemma of articulating a vision of space—all spaces—at a moment in time. The opposition between description and narration is here foregrounded, as the list of spaces disrupts the narrative form that seeks to embody it. Georges Perec has provided an interesting list descriptively entitled, “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four” (1997, 244-49). The archaic title is clearly playful, yet the

54

Chapter Four

contents are quite revealing. Its original publication in Action Poetique provides a literary contextualization that invites us to consider it as either literature or, in the tradition of Tzara, antiliterature. This list proves to be quite informative; we learn of his relative indifference to fish (only six servings all year) as well as his definite fondness for a wide range of cuts of beef: “one flank of sirloin, three flanks of sirloin with shallots, ten steaks, two steak au poivre, three steak and chips, one rump steak à la moutarde, five roast beefs, two ribs of beef, two top rumpsteaks, three beef grillades, two chateaubriands, one steak tartare, one rosbif, three cold rosbifs, fourteen entrecôtes, three entrecôtes à la moelle, one fillet of beef, three hamburgers, nine skirts of beef, one plate of beef” (1997, 245). His favorite desserts are evident: “one apple pie, four tarts, one hot tart, ten tartes Tatin, seven pear tarts, one pear tarte Tatin, one lemon tart, one apple and nut tart, two apple tarts” (247) as opposed to only twelve gateaus, three ice creams, and five sorbets (248). We also note his general neglect of beer (nine beers, two Tuborgs, four Guinesses) as we observe instead his Gallic preference for good Bordeaux and Burgundies (over fiftyfive, including a Lalande-e-Pomerol ‘67). His consumption of spirits is more generous concerning type and geographical origin, though AngloAmerican offerings are again slighted: “Fifty-six Armagnacs, one Bourbon, eight Calvadoses, six Green Chartreuses, one Chivas, four cognacs, one Delamain cognac, two Grand Marniers, one pink-gin, one Irish coffee, one Jack Daniels, four marcs, three Bugey marcs, one marc de Provence [. . . ] thirty-six vodkas, four whiskeys (1997, 248-49). We feel we definitely know the man better after reading all that he has consumed; to a certain extent, man ist was er ißt. We may even feel we know him nearly as well as his bartenders. We learn, that is, something about Perec’s character as well as the pattern of events that comprise his year. Novels in the tradition of Tristram Shandy regularly display a number of impressive or outrageous lists. One thinks above all of the numerous lists in Ulysses, a work in the Shandean, the epic, and the encyclopedic traditions. Especially relevant for us is the cluster of Rabelaisian lists in the Cyclops episode, a chapter devoted to gigantism. We don’t have space to examine these in depth here; however, a representative example is easily adduced: an exaggerated list of actual, unknown, and apocryphal Irish heroes: From his girdle hung a row of seastones which jangled at every movement of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity,

The Poetics of Lists and the Boundaries of Narrative

55

Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O’Neill, Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O’Donnell, Red Jim MacDermott, Soggarth Eoghan O’Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry Joy M’Cracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff, Peg Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain Boycott, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan, Marshal MacMahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the Maccabees, the Last of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castile, the Man for Galway, The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, The Man in the Gap, The Woman Who Didn’t, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, John L. Sullivan, Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, sir Thomas Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo Hayes, Muhammad, the Bride of Lammermoor, Peter the Hermit, Peter the Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez, Captain Nemo, Tristan and Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas Cook and Son, the Bold Soldier Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin, Ludwig Beethoven, the Colleen Bawn, Waddler Healy, Angus the Culdee, Dolly Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben Howth, Valentine Greatrakes, Adam and Eve, Arthur Wellesley, Boss Croker, Herodotus, Jack the Giantkiller, Gautama Buddha, Lady Godiva, The Lily of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye, the Queen of Sheba, Acky Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Don Philip O’Sullivan Beare. Joyce 1986, 244

In this passage Joyce is primarily having fun with the form of the list as well as mocking people who pad their own lists and, perhaps, the cultural authority that presumes that a longer list is ipso facto a better list. Patrick Colm Hogan writes that the passage “parodies the tendency of nationalist movements to associate all values with the home culture. For example, the list includes ‘Patrick W. Shakespeare.’ Additionally, the insert takes up the common idea that the nation is eternal and Edenic by including ‘Adam and Eve’ among the ‘Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity’” (2014, 127).1 Though not a narrative, it mocks the exaggerated episodes proposed by the over-zealous Irish nationalists in their reconstruction of the lost narratives of Irish history and culture. Like Achilles’ shield, these figures are presented as pictorial images, in this case graven on sea stones. Elsewhere in the text, it may be observed, Joyce cunningly transgresses the narrative/nonnarrative boundary that he keeps intact in this passage; it is not lists but descriptions that become narrative media in Ulysses. 1

In fact, Joyce’s web of allusion extends even further: as Don Gifford notes, the Shakespeare reference “echoes speculation about Shakespeare’s Irish background” (1988, 324); for a purely parodic example we may point to “Brian Confucius.”

56

Chapter Four

We may continue to look at some equally playful lists from a 1965 Latin American novel clearly influenced by Joyce: Tres tristes tigres by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. The book is a carnivalesque narrative that contains, in the tradition of Tristram Shandy, a number of curious typographical arrangements, including a page that mirrors and reverses the typography of the page next to it. Unsurprisingly, it contains some amazing lists; here are a couple that the author helped translate into English; they have minimal connection to the narrative proper and are mostly a celebration of lists themselves: A compilation of “Arstits” includes Le Murillo, El Grotto, Picabbio, Silver Dalli, Edgas, Mizarro, Purillo, and Gioya (1971, 281); “Famous Books” includes: Under the Lorry, by Malcolm Volcano In Caldo Brodo, by Truman Capone Against Impenetration, by Su Sanstag The Company She Peeps, by Merrimac Arty By Left Possessed, by Lord Brussell Ruined Vision, by Stephen Spent (1971, 280)

Though disrupting the work’s meandering narrative, these lists are perfectly integrated into work’s larger aesthetic, which not only allows for but seems to require frequent interruption, dilation, and embellishment. Lists take a self-reflexive turn in Italo Calvino’s enumeration of the many types of books the reader encounters in a bookstore, including Books You’ve Been Planning to Read for Ages, Books You’ve Been Hunting for Years Without Success, New Books Whose Author or Subject Appeals to You, Books Too Expensive Now and You’ll Wait till They’re Remaindered, Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time to Reread, and the Books You’ve Always Pretended to Have Read And Now It’s Time to Finally Sit Down and Really Read Them (1981, 5-6). Calvino’s novel itself, it might be noted, is a kind of analogue to such a list of books: it is primarily the collection of first chapters of very different novels, the continuations of which are never located. Calvino’s text clearly contests the claim made by Robert Belknap that “narrative in general may be conceived of as an elaborate listing of events in a sequence” (2004, 3); such a statement is more true of annals than a narrative; what it minimizes are precisely the causal connections that constitutes a narrative. It is this feature that must be understood if we are to appreciate the difference between lists and narratives; we need this opposition in order to comprehend and articulate its violation, as my final example should clarify. List, a 2004 short story collection by Matthew Roberson, uses the idea of the list to frame and inform many of its narratives and underscore its

The Poetics of Lists and the Boundaries of Narrative

57

critique of materialism. There are, however, very few actual lists in the volume. A more radical play with lists appears in an ingenious novel that is little more than a list of properties: Leanne Shapton’s 2009 Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. It is a catalogue of the possessions of a couple who are no longer together. The playbills, music programs, invitations, photos, gifts, and books together provide a thoroughly satisfying portrait of the two lovers, their personalities, and their social and professional circles. Though the book is composed exclusively of objects listed in the catalogue, bits of narrative seep out through the captions, words, notes, and letters that are included as part of the descriptions. Thus we find an ordinary lot offering twenty-four photographs of pieces of beef jerky taken by Morris, though just below it, in Lot 1103, the much more suggestive: “A small spiral notebook.” Its description states, “A small green spiral notebook kept by Morris during sessions with Dr Jay Zaretzsky. Reads in part: ‘July 26 ‘03: afraid of her reality? / bad temper / expresses in the way she is able / try to be interested.’ 4½ x 3 in. $12-25” (2009, 39). An especially powerful deployment of lists appears in Daša Drndiü’s novel Trieste (2007), a narrative about an older Jewish woman’s memories of the past, especially the Second World War and the persecution of the Jews in northeastern Italy, as she waits to be reunited with her son, who had been taken from her by the Nazis, and whom she has not seen for sixty-two years. Near the middle of the book we are given, in alphabetical order, the names of about 9,000 Jews who were deported from or killed in Italy and the countries Italy occupied between 1943 and 1945. The list takes up more than forty pages; it has no direct narrative function but provides a deep ethical resonance and a moving historical contextualization of the fictional events of the novel. There are also more narrative oriented kinds of list: instruction manuals and recipes. Essentially nonnarrative, how-to lists and recipes inform you of the series of steps to be taken if you are to do something. Naturally, such instructions readily lend themselves to comic treatments. Around 1730, Jonathan Swift wrote a satirical work called Directions to Servants which was a caustic parody of the conduct book genre of the period. It listed numerous admonitions, nearly all in the standard hypothetical or imperative form of the instruction manual, though many of them seem to edge toward a possible narrative, such as: “Whatever good bits you can pilfer in the day, save them to junket with your fellow-servants at night; and take in the butler, provided he will give you drink” (Swift: 1801, vol. 16, 104). It is easy to see how this kind of parody can easily be turned to

58

Chapter Four

narrative proper. We find this in many of the stories in Lorrie Moore’s collection, Self Help, which begin as instructions but soon turn into narratives, as we will shortly discuss. Something similar can happen to recipes, as suggested by various recipe narratives, as in Harry Matthews’ playful “Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farcie Double).” As many of the examples discussed above have suggested, the movement from these lists to narrative proper is a common practice in the history of lists in literature, as authors seem to use them to challenge or transgress the familiar distinctions between narrative and nonnarrative and literature and nonliterature. Lorrie Moore’s story, “How to Be an Other Woman” is a narrative of passion and adultery; it is also a story about lists. It begins in what I have called the hypothetical second person mode of many of her other stories and employs the imperative tense: “Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a peasoupy night. Like a detective movie. First, stand in front of Florsheim’s Fifty-seventh Street window” (1986, 3). Very soon, however, the text shifts into the present tense and a standard second person narrative ensues: “He tells you his wife’s name. It is Patricia. She is an intellectual property lawyer. He tells you he likes you a lot. You lie on your stomach, naked and still too warm” (4). The affair continues, at times awkwardly: “You meet frequently for dinner, after work, split whole liters of the house red, then wamble the two blocks east, twenty blocks south to your apartment and lie sprawled on the living room floor with your expensive beige raincoats still on” (1986, 5). Then, a troublesome bit of information is revealed. Patricia, it turns out, is “just incredibly organized. She makes lists for everything. It’s pretty impressive.” Say flatly, dully, “What?” “That she makes lists.” “That she makes lists. You like that?” “Well, yes. You know, what she’s going to do, what she has to buy, names of clients she has to see, et cetera.” “Lists?” you murmur hopelessly, listlessly, your expensive beige raincoat still on. There is a long, tired silence. Lists? (1986, 6).

It quickly becomes apparent that the protagonist feels inadequate and inferior, both in her job and as a rival for the love of the man she is with. The making of lists serves as a psychological indicator of clarity, organization, planning, and success. After all, the listmaking wife is a successful lawyer while the Other Woman is merely a secretary, employed by a company where her co-workers “are working in order to send their daughters to universities so they don’t have to be secretaries, and who,

The Poetics of Lists and the Boundaries of Narrative

59

therefore, hold you in contempt for having a degree and being a failure anyway. It’s like having a degree in failure” (1986, 6). Her first attempt at list making is a decidedly mixed one: CLIENTS TO SEE: Birthday snapshots Scotch tape Letters to TD and Mom

This enumeration is only a simple to-do list hiding beneath an impressing sounding title—secretaries have no clients to see. After another equally unimpressive list and more feelings of inadequacy, the following event is narrated: Make a list of all the lovers you’ve ever had. Warren Lasher Ed “Rubberhead” Catapano Charles Deats or Keats Alfonse Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make “mislaid” jokes to yourself. Make another list. (1986, 8)

This particular list has the potential to generate significant events if it is discovered and read. This does not happen, however. When his wife is out of town at a convention, the man brings the protagonist to his apartment. She feels a bit awkward; the kitchen is “tiny, digital, spare”; the chrome utensils are “hanging belligerent and clean as blades on the wall” (1986, 20). She also sees a photo of the wife in ski garb which makes her feel frightened. Unsurprisingly, she tries to make a list: Try to decide what you should do: 1. Rip open the front of your coat, sending the buttons torpedoing across the room in a series of pops into the asparagus fern; 2. Go into the bathroom and gargle with tap water; 3. Go downstairs and wave down a cab for home.

The next morning, she makes a mental list of the items in the wife’s bathroom closet. Back at work, her obsessive listmaking spirals out of control, as normal items become overwhelmed by narrative elements:

60

Chapter Four CLIENTS TO SEE: 1. Fallen in love (?) Out of control. Who is this? Who am I? And who is the wife with the skis and the nostrils and the Tylenol and does she have orgasms? 2. Reclaim yourself. Pieces have fluttered away. 3. Everything you do is a masochistic act. Why? 4. Don’t you like yourself? Don’t you deserve better than all this? (1986, 15)

And so on. The affair loses some of its steam; the man calls less frequently; the Other Woman is unhappy. She makes a list of things to tell him that bother her about their relationship (1986, 20). Later he calls her and says they need to talk. He confesses to her that Patricia is not his wife. He is actually separated from his real wife, Carrie. He is only living with Patricia. The protagonist, outraged, responds, “You mean, I’m just another one of the fucking gang?” (1986, 21). She realizes the affair is over; she senses she has become merely another repeated event in a sequence, in effect, just a name on a list. Back in the office, she returns to doodling. No more lists. In the end, Moore’s story shows how a list making activity, that is, identifying the steps to take in order to become an “Other Woman,” can be defeated by a woman who constructs more and presumably better lists, as well as by a man who turns out to be putting together his own very different kind of list. In conclusion, we see that lists serve many functions, some of them antithetical. They disseminate knowledge and establish the authority of the poet in an epic, though in Rabelais and Joyce, exhaustive list making is parodied; lists become a medium of satire. Accumulations of ordinary places, names, or items are invested with poetic cadences and effects in Milton and Nabokov, or they are stripped of any such possibility by Breton. The lists of Cabrera are playful and facetious; those of Drndiü chronicle a genocide. In Lorrie Moore, list making serves as an indicator of an individual’s abilities and success; being part of someone else’s list of sexual conquests is a sign of failure and signal of impending closure. We can affirm that we regularly find a dialectic between the list and narrative proper. Though these are and remain distinct aspects of the text, it is precisely because of their different functions that authors are tempted to create different forms in which they can move closer or even merge. Lists are not narratives, but often mimic them. Narrative seems to produce a kind of center of gravity that regularly promises to turn non-narrative elements like lists into narratives themselves, as individual independent elements seem to call out, often irresistibly, for their narrativization. The most extreme cases are those in which a collection of descriptions go on to engender and

The Poetics of Lists and the Boundaries of Narrative

61

animate the objects and events that have been named, as often found in the textual generators of Alain Robbe-Grillet, as outlined shapes in the dust produce objects that resemble them and a story that connects them together (see Richardson: 2019, 90-92; Ronen 1997). I suggest that this extreme case is an exemplary instance of a basic dynamic of fiction, and one that is also found in a distinctive form in hypothetical second-person stories like those of Lorrie Moore, where possible sequences that are listed in a temporal order are transformed into events that have occurred (Richardson 2019a, 108).

CHAPTER FIVE LINEARITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS: NARRATIVE FORM AND IDEOLOGICAL VALENCE

In the last decades of the twentieth century, it was often suggested that the form of the traditional novel, with its insistent linearity, causal chains, omniscient narrator, formal totality, and relentless closure is, by its very nature, conservative or reactionary, and that, by contrast, certain experimental narrative practices that reject conventional forms are in themselves progressive or liberatory. These original strategies include an open ending, nonlinear sequencing, causal gaps, decentered text, and a selfreflexive style that does not pretend to claim a specious naturalness.1 Though frequently asserted—it became something of a critical cliché in many circles—this doctrine was rarely examined in depth or pursued for nuance. These debates echoed (and at times inverted) earlier struggles over the ideological implications of narrative forms and continue to be found in the contemporary critical landscape and as such they remain pertinent. This identification of narrative strategies with ideological valences is unfortunate since it inevitably simplifies complex issues of narrative representation even as it fails to discern the full reach of a number of innovative techniques. Still worse, the general claims in many instances are simply false; when we actually sit down and examine a number of significant modern texts, we find that they do not begin to conform to any clear ideological opposition, but instead complicate it in interesting ways or fail to fit altogether. Sadly, this is not the kind of theoretical mistake that can be expected to correct itself, since it tends to preclude the very analyses that would yield more varied results. In what follows, I will examine how a number of modern innovative authors actually use chronological progression, causal connection, and narrative voice; and go on to analyze 1

For a valorization of nontraditional form, see Catherine Belsey (1985, 46-47, 52, 73). Gayle Greene has assembled several other such statements (1991, 14-17); for another articulation of this general stance, see Margaret Homans (1994).

Linearity and Its Discontents: Narrative Form and Ideological Valence

63

two modern short texts by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jeanette Winterson, noting the areas of connection and disjunction between the large, wellestablished theoretical claims and the actual practice of experimental authors. I will attempt to show not only the inaccuracy of some common ideological stances, but also how such claims may obscure some of the distinctive features of the oppositional literatures they intend to promote. We might reasonably begin our investigation with a look at some distinctive feminist authors over the course of the century, authors who did employ innovative approaches to time, causality, and narrative sequencing. An early experimental text with a distinct ideological thrust that immediately suggests itself is Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, a project intended from the beginning to “produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism” (in Scott 1990, 430). The work was praised by May Sinclair for its presentation of a largely unmediated series of impressions: “In this series there is no drama. . . . It is just life going on and on” (in Scott 1990, 444). The novelty of this distinctive effect—a single consciousness moving through time—actually necessitates a linear sequence; time and consciousness both move unidirectionally, and to mimetically recreate the flow of thoughts a chronological order is indispensable. On the other hand, the causal connection between the events represented is remarkably loose, as much as in a typical picaresque novel. The major novels of Virginia Woolf, though frequently tampering with time and cause, nevertheless include a rather surprising, almost shocking amount of linearity. The distinctive temporal features of To the Lighthouse, for example, include the play with conventional practices of what Genette calls duration, as numerous pages describe the events of a few minutes; there are also impressive representations of simultaneity, as events occurring at the same time are presented rather far apart in the text. And there is the celebrated “Time Passes” interlude, in which the novel’s earlier construction of duration is reversed, and the events of ten years pass by in some twenty pages in a tour de force of linearity. Each event of this section for which chronological indicators are given is entirely unidirectional, set forth in the pure yet empty linearity depicted in the text: “Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers” (1981, 127). Causal progressions once again prove quite interesting: the day trip to the lighthouse finally occurs ten years after it was planned, the original intention having become irrelevant to its ultimate end; it serves instead as a kind of largely abandoned or shadow teleology. This novel, like most of Woolf’s fiction, is largely linear (even Orlando’s differential chronologies, in which the protagonist ages at a different rate from those around her/him, are linear). Woolf

64

Chapter Five

frequently interrupts a linear sequence, but then regularly reinstates it. Though her construction of temporality is complex and fascinating, as several generations of scholars have attested to, the dyad of linear/nonlinear is inadequate to explicate it.2 Other texts offer equally interesting variations of unbroken chronological sequence, such as Jean Rhys’ After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, in which an almost obsessively linear narrative is revealed to have taken much less time to have occurred than either the protagonist or reader had suspected. Elizabeth Howard’s The Long View is a compelling account of a marriage that ends in a particularly painful separation. It is narrated in five segments situated in a linear but reverse chronological sequence with the chronologically last segment presented first; this arrangement produces a powerful sense of causal inevitability. The narrative of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, though containing some interesting temporal loops and warpings, nevertheless moves as relentlessly forward chronologically as the picaresque novels it parodies. Eva Figes’s Waking, which consists of seven chapters describing the first thoughts of a woman as she wakes on seven different mornings, each one occurring about a decade after the one before, takes the technique of “Time Passes” to a further extreme of naked sequence and minimal causal connection; here, linearity threatens to push beyond narrative and into the chronicle, as Hayden White has explained these terms, and the bonds of causality and personal identity are attenuated and diluted. Here, pure linearity—along with the enormous gaps between the scenes of narration— strips away the connections between the different stages of an individual life, showing (to borrow from the book’s repeated tropes) how we create or lose ourselves each day. At the same time, it reinforces certain minor but partially defining features of a personality, such as the repeated desire to linger in bed, looking at the scenery outside. The inescapable conclusion is that experimental feminists creating a literature of their own do not generally eschew linearity so much as intensify or reconstruct it, and in general remake narrative temporality in a variety of ways that cannot be reduced to a single formula or slogan. The same is also true of causal progressions. The “enemy” is not linearity or causality, but instead the confining teleology of conventional, repressive social narratives present in the larger culture. There is no fixed form or essence that reappears from work to work and writer to writer: the only constant feature is an absence of constant features. To fully appreciate the 2

For a thorough account of the various forms and uses of narrative time in this novel, see Richardson 2019a, 121-25.

Linearity and Its Discontents: Narrative Form and Ideological Valence

65

female difference, it is necessary to carefully analyze the diverse creative patterns that are there, rather than hypostatize a single type of temporal construction. To investigate pure sequence is to discover one of the most fascinating and unknown achievements of modern women writers, one which some theoretical constructs hardly allow us to even imagine. A more open-ended approach will instead recover compelling texts like Ilse Aichinger’s “Spiegelgeschichte” (“Mirror Story”) in which a lifetime is depicted in reverse, though the protagonist perceives it as a forward progression. She moves, that is, chronologically ahead into her past life, as time and causality move backward in a linear but inverted direction. Thus, drinking gin “makes” the abortionist sober (see Richardson 2015, 105-06). On the other hand, if you really only want nonlinear fiction, you should go directly to its most assiduous practitioners: writers like Proust, Ford, Nabokov, and Robbe-Grillet. Furthermore, it ought to be remembered that many feminists have chosen to employ the conventions of realism, including its substantially linear narrative progression, in order to reach a larger audience and better achieve their political goals (see Greene 1991, 20-22). Before leaving the subject of temporality, we might also recall that most traditional male literary narratives, from the Odyssey to the works of Balzac, are rarely entirely linear, but filled with flashbacks, flash forwards, successive accounts of simultaneous events, and extensive internal retrospective narrations; nor should this be surprising: the theoretical call for such a practice stretches back to Horace. For pure linearity, we have to look instead to the strikingly odd (and indeed rather Borgesian) group that consists of stream-of-consciousness fiction, Harlequin romances, oneiric and expressionist fiction, male pornography, folktales, mysteries, and experimental feminist fiction. We may conclude that the standard critical associations of both terms of the opposition linear/nonlinear are completely mistaken, and that most of what has been said about the ideological coding of linear narratives is false. Moving now to issues of narration, it may be recalled that the early avant-garde tried out a number of narrative stances and practices to complement its revolutionary politics. Nevertheless, for nearly half a century original deployments of unconventional and often unreliable narrators were denounced as decadent bourgeois subjectivism and contrasted unfavorably with the omniscient panorama provided by socialist realism. After the second world war, this argument was inverted and third person narration was discredited as a false, inauthentic, or duplicitous standpoint by Sartre, Roland Barthes, Robbe-Grillet, and others. In 1953 in Writing Degree Zero, Barthes even argued that, “since it represents an unquestioned

66

Chapter Five

convention,” the use of third person narration “attracts the most conformist and the least dissatisfied” (1977a, 35). Nearly a quarter century later, he would reiterate this position, stating: “‘he’ is wicked; the nastiest word in the language: pronoun of the non-person, it annuls and mortifies its referent [ . . . ] saying ‘he’ about someone, I always envision a kind of murder by language” (1977b, 169). This opposition was partially repeated and gendered by advocates of écriture féminine and other feminists, many of whom furthermore went on to question the primacy of the narrating “I”. Such animadversions of course go back to Virginia Woolf’s complaint in A Room of One’s Own: “Back one was always haled to the letter ‘I.’ One began to be tired of ‘I,’” (nd [1929], 103), and are also sounded by H.D.: “I will not let I creep into this story” (1992, 26). Other figures like Monique Wittig explicitly disavowed the narrating “je” in favor of several different pronominal choices: on (‘one”) in L’Opoponax, elles (“they,” female form) in Les Guérillères, and j/e (“I/I”) in Le Corps lesbien. The pronominal battles continued with modernist stances described as retrograde, this time as opposed to a putatively more uncompromising postmodernism that refuses to reassemble its narrative fragments into any totality, psychological or aesthetic. On the opposite front, some new historicists attacked third person narration for its imagined function as a kind of literary panopticon. (If true, this would mean that the novels of Dickens or Thackeray narrated in the third person are noticeably more retrograde than the first person novels by the same authors—a proposition that is clearly false.)3 Here too, a closer look at the actual practice of oppositional writers can dispel the sweeping claims of overgeneralizing theorists. Ideologically powerful narratives have been written from every point of view, and no pronominal choice is immune from triviality, quietism, or reaction. The political stance is as it were the base, while the formal techniques make up the superstructure. This is why it is not a paradox that we can all readily think of progressive African American writers that employ different practices of narration, and who made each type, whether first, second, third, multipersoned—or a postmodern, self-negating narration—serve their own ends quite well. A glance at the history of the use of second person narration leads us to a similar conclusion.4 Its first instance, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1833 sketch, “The Haunted Mind,” it is part of the same playful, darkly ironic 3

For a sound critique of these positions, see Cohn 1999, 163-80. For a sustained discussion of this mode of narration and its real and imagined ideological effects, see Richardson 2006, 17-36.

4

Linearity and Its Discontents: Narrative Form and Ideological Valence

67

romanticism that Poe employs in “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.” It reappears in the opening pages of May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier (1919) and again in Rhys’ After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (Pt 2, ch 12) to describe the thoughts of a small child. In Mary McCarthy’s 1941 short story, “The Genial Host,” it enforces a sense of solidarity with the set-upon female protagonist (“whenever this [look of commendation] happened, it was as if, in his delight, he had reached over and squeezed you” [149]). In Aichinger’s “Spiegelgeschichte” (1954) it depicts a rather existential dreamlike state moving between life and death. With the partial exception of McCarthy, these experiments are little known and rarely credited; instead, it is still widely believed that Michel Butor invented the practice with his 1957 nouveau roman, La Modification. The use and range of second person fiction proliferated in the sixties and seventies, and came to signify literary experimentation of a particularly serious order; soon after, it seemed something of an affectation and could be frequently found in fiction and poetry in The New Yorker; its sudden ubiquity caused one poetry critic to write a chapter denouncing “The Abuse of the Second-Person Pronoun” (Holden 1980, 38-56). Despite this, many women authors were able to make it serve feminist stances (Edna O’Brien, A Pagan Place; Margaret Atwood’s second person poems; Pam Houston’s “How to Talk to a Hunter”). Around the same time, it gained new power as a vehicle of a radically decentered postmodernism in Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler and, somewhat later, by Alasdair Gray (“You”); it also began to figure prominently in gay and lesbian narratives (Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples; Daphne Marlatt, ana historic). Later, its most notable use may well have been its powerful framing of postcolonial issues (Nuruddin Farah, Maps; Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place); possibly its most unexpected presence is in African American science fiction (Reginald McKnight, “Soul Food,” in The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas). More recently, we find it in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009). Clearly, there is no single, simple political stance that can be attributed to even this relatively new yet diverse narrative practice, which can indeed be genuinely disorienting and provocative—until one becomes habituated to it. It should also be clear how easily different authors can utilize it for divergent purposes, how its effect is circumscribed within the literary milieu that it arises from, and how over time it loses its intensity in some areas even as it brings new energy to others. In the rest of this chapter, I will analyze violations of some of the fundamental elements of narrative in two contemporary works of fiction,

68

Chapter Five

Robbe-Grillet’s “The Secret Room” and Jeanette Winterson’s “The Poetics of Sex.” These are analogous radical experimental works that nevertheless have opposite ideological valences. Robbe-Grillet’s story—if that is the proper word for this strange text—challenges the very notion of narrative itself. It is a very short work, only a few pages long, that consists simply of a series of slightly varied descriptions of what seems to be a single scene or tableau, each with very similar accounts of the floor, the columns, the shadows, the curtains, the steps, and the human figures. The reader is thus invited to view the ensemble as a collection of two dimensional images, such as paintings that might be called “variations on a theme,” and thus not narrative at all. Alternatively, the reader might arrange them into a single temporal sequence, adding the narrativity as it were to what is now rightly termed the story. This being the work of Robbe-Grillet, neither option is without its own contradictions (including temporal ones), and requires still other qualifications to be made. And, since the story that emerges is that (perhaps) of the ritualistic murder of a bound, semi-naked young woman, one must contest the claims of the author when he describes the ideological emancipation made possible by his anti-realistic texts.5 In particular, he has insisted that it is the reader rather than himself who “puts” the sadoeroticism into his work. Furthermore, he has argued that pornography demands a completely linear chronology; by taking the classical elements of a pornographic story and rearranging them into a completely different sequence, he claims to have deconstructed the pornographic—and inadvertently caused a riot in a Hamburg movie house where one of his temporally jumbled films had been misleadingly advertised as a blue movie. Nevertheless, in pushing the doctrine of art for art’s sake to its pathological conclusions, Robbe-Grillet forces open new questions on the intransigence of certain forms of representation, since the body of the dead woman will always be able to be read as something more than a mere component of an aesthetic design. (Although, since the figures take on clichéd, almost cartoon-like poses, one should question the propriety of taking the representational aspects of such parodic figures too seriously.) Nevertheless, regardless of how we ultimately interpret this text, it certainly reveals how easily avant-garde techniques can be used for regressive ideological effects. 5

He states: “The material which I use . . . is ideological [and] the elements are very recognizable . . . . [T]hey are fragments of society’s ideology which I turn away from their normal usage. In order to function correctly in society, ideology needs to be masked in order to hide its artificiality, and needs as well to be continuous, since ideology can only function as a totality” (Robbe-Grillet 1977, 10-11).

Linearity and Its Discontents: Narrative Form and Ideological Valence

69

Like Robbe-Grillet’s, Jeanette Winterson’s story similarly violates most of the basic categories of realistic narrative, including space, time, probability, and the law of non-contradiction. Narrative temporality is abridged, repeated, and reconstituted, and the text itself often seems to be a painterly series of variations on a theme. Perhaps most interesting are the textual and discursive frames which the central lesbian narrative must elude or defy in order to be told. That is, the narrator’s accounts of her relationship with her female lover, Picasso, are both framed and interrupted by a largefont text that asks hostile, rhetorical questions about same-sex unions. This produces a complex, dialectical relation between the personal lesbian story and the vulgar social text, in which the nonnarrative discourse at times engenders the story that it nevertheless refuses to comprehend. The text’s multiple transgressions of temporal laws are also paralleled by the unorthodox erecting and eluding of historical and geographical borders—in this case, an island called Lesbos that is at once figurative and literal. Unlike Robbe-Grillet’s open ending, this fiction has a remarkably traditional one that resolves all disharmonies. After a sequence of events that promises the familiar ending that entails tragic separation for extraordinary lovers, a different, happy end appears that provides a harmonious conclusion. This strategy is not however a trite, cowardly, or reactionary imposition of closure that pretends to resolve real problems by denying them. Rather, it defies the unspoken rule of conventional depictions of gays within the cultural master narrative that until very recently dictated that major gay characters must wind up dead by the end of the story; as one character in Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band states: “It’s not always like it happens in plays, not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the story” (1996, 81). In this context, Winterson’s otherwise ordinary final scene is not merely utopian, but arguably revolutionary. Here, to write beyond the traditional ending is, paradoxically, to reproduce that very ending with a crucial difference. One is reminded of Nabokov’s statement, in his epilogue to Lolita (another work in which anti-realist techniques fail to coincide with progressive norms), that the theme of the book was one of only three which were completely taboo for American publishers in the fifties, the others being “a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106” (1970, 316). (Note that a definitive closure with a happy resolution were essential components of these forbidden fictions.) Winterson’s amorous and experimental text with the scandalously placid ending could certainly be added to this list and could not have been published in America at that time.

70

Chapter Five

The analyses of the texts discussed in this chapter lead directly to a number of conclusions. One is to corroborate Mary Jacobus’ assertion that “Utopian attempts to define the specificity of women’s writing—desired or hypothetical, but rarely directly observed—either founder on the rock of essentialism (the text as body), gesture towards an avant-garde practice which turns out not to be specific to women, or, like Hélène Cixous . . . do both” (1982, 37); Jacobus’s position would be cited and elaborated on by Rita Felski (1989, 19-50). We may safely extend this position to include virtually all claims to the effect that any anti-realist poetics is essentially progressive or emancipatory. As Alison Booth states in a discussion of endings, “we do not find a clear correlation between disruption of formal convention and radical departure from social convention” (1993, 9). In fact, most narrative forms, strategies, and techniques are largely devoid of any inherent ideological valence.6 Much of a century’s passionate debates over the repressive or liberatory nature of a type of narrator, form of time, use of cause, or transparency of fictionality is, I suggest, fundamentally mistaken. It is also inevitably ahistorical, since it removes the formal technique from the horizon of expectation of its original reception—a horizon that is itself altered by the very appearance of the work. By extension, I suggest we treat with extreme skepticism any claims that large, multiform aesthetics such as those of modernism, or postmodernism, or realism, or romanticism are intrinsically progressive or regressive. I suggest instead that they are not intrinsically anything at all.7 Individual works of course may embody left or right wing ideas, or a combination of both, but complex literary movements are not and cannot be so facilely designated, since clever writers (unless of course they are operating under conditions of rigorous censorship) can always get their thoughts across whatever the style, form, or medium. Or, as Jay Clayton has said in a similar context, “narrative is equally able to confirm the bourgeois subject, disperse that subject, or reconstruct it in a postcritical formation” (1993, 48). And what are the effects of this erroneous critical zeal on creative writers? It is enough to recall Margaret Drabble’s objection to the predictable responses of naively prescriptive readers: “If I end with a marriage, it’s going to be seen as a mistake; if I end with a woman alone, 6 A partial exception to this statement is the kind of text that juxtaposes antithetical discursive and political realms, such as the opposition between the vulgar public clichés and personal lesbian narrative in Winterson’s text, or the cheery, middleclass Dick-and-Jane text that literally frames the painful story of Pecola in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, or the written narrative of the white chronicler and the oral discourse of the slave woman in Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose. 7 Greene articulates a similar stance (1991, 22).

Linearity and Its Discontents: Narrative Form and Ideological Valence

71

it’s going to be regarded as a triumph. All you can do is write about how it seems to you to happen at the time [ . . . . ] The truth is more important than ideology.”8 This statement is all the more compelling coming as it does from the author of The Waterfall, itself a reworking of many of the techniques of écriture féminine—though not always in the prescribed fashion. This is not to say that there are no compelling psychological or sociological associations between a narrative form and a political stance at given historical junctures. There is nothing more natural than for an oppressed or oppositional group to reject the cultural forms it identifies with the ruling power. But the grounds for such associations are often adventitious, and it is unwise to reify a temporary, functional relationship into an essential, necessary one. Thus, to take an example from an adjacent medium, the music of Theodorakis was banned in Greece by the military junta, not because of any socialist tendencies in the notes and cadences, but because he was a well known member of the Greek left and his music took on an iconic value of opposition. If all the examples I have adduced so far are dubious or false, it becomes necessary to answer the question of where then is the ideology in narrative? It certainly exists, and I believe it lies in agency, in satire, in articulating the voices of the oppressed, in the staging of the reception of those voices, and (dare I say it?) in content and thesis. Look at who speaks, who knows, who acts, and who wins (especially morally and epistemologically) in any given narrative, not which narrative elements and techniques are employed or dispensed with. The moral of the story is much more significant than whether its ending is open or closed; whether or not the previously silenced are allowed to speak is vastly more important than whether they speak in first-, second-, or third-person forms. The pedagogical implications of this analysis should be evident. The facile association of a narrative form with a political position, especially by inexperienced but overzealous instructors, should be discouraged, as should all other kinds of reductionism. Undergraduate students should instead be encouraged to examine on a case by case basis just what effect each technique actually creates. The more complex a text is, the more it tends to resist easy generalization of any kind. At the same time, it is extremely important not to conflate real ideological issues like racism or sexism with dubious or imaginary ones like those I have identified above. At the graduate level, we would do well to debate these issues fairly and openly, rather than preclude such discussions by branding a priori 8

This quotation is cited by Greene, who discusses it in relation to comparable statements by Margaret Atwood (1991, 2-3).

72

Chapter Five

certain writing practices as reactionary. A more open-ended investigation can on the other hand turn up some surprising genealogies, as the above account of feminist linearity should indicate. It is easy to imagine a number of comparable areas of exploration that could yield fascinating results: reflexivity in U.S. Ethnic fiction; narrative frames and embeddings in Western and Asian traditions; closure and its refusal in gay texts; a literary history of first person narration (When does it begin? In what periods does it thrive? Whose interests can it serve?). There is plenty of material for some compelling papers, theses, and dissertations here. I have argued against a commonly held view of the ideological valences of specific narrative techniques because I believe it is intellectually limiting and fundamentally mistaken. The binary oppositions imagined by Barthes and others between the “readerly” and the “writerly” are, like all binary oppositions, fundamentally false. The quest to find an easy symmetry between form and ideology should be abandoned, along with other comparably simplistic and undialectical claims made in the name of ideological commitment or purity. For some time now, assertions of the revolutionary nature of specific literary acts or stances have been vastly overstated. Again, it is precisely because the ideological analysis of literature is so important that it needs to be done well. García Marquez once observed that bad literature, however well-intentioned, will not help the cause of the oppressed, and I would add that mistaken literary theory will not help either.

CHAPTER SIX TOWARDS A NARRATOLOGY OF DRAMA

From the outset, narrative theory and drama have been closely linked. Aristotle’s Poetics, still the starting point for any narrative theory, devotes more space to drama than to epic. The topics he covers, including character, plot, beginnings and endings, poetic justice, and the goals of representation are equally relevant to narrative theory as to a poetics of drama. Classic statements in the history of narrative theory on these and other issues in the Renaissance, neoclassical, and Romantic periods are likewise filled with references to drama, as a look at the critical work of Castelvetro, Sidney, Corneille, Dryden, Samuel Johnson, and Coleridge makes clear. Quite simply, if you are going to discuss plot and character, you must take drama and its theorists into account. Strangely, while cinema was quickly brought into the fold of narrative theory, most notably in Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse, drama has lagged behind. Some recent theorists, following Genette, restrict the definition of narrative to stories that are told or narrated, rather than enacted (though even in this limited conception, as we will see, drama has important contributions to make). Many if not most theorists, however, follow Roland Barthes, who stated “narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula), stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation” (1972, 79). Non-Western traditions of narrative theory also focus on drama: Bharata’s third century treatise, the Natyashastra, centers on classical Sanskrit drama. Likewise, classical Japanese poetics is available in the treatises of Zeami, a seventeenth-century Noh playwright and performer. Samuel Beckett, the author of many of the most innovative works of narrative fiction, has also creatively utilized all of the major categories of narrative theory in constructing his plays. His dramatic work, especially Endgame, is thus a natural focus for this chapter. Below, I will outline the major categories of narrative analysis and apply them to drama in general and Beckett’s work in particular, paying particular attention to the distinctive differences that theatrical performance involves. By doing so, we

74

Chapter Six

will be able to better conceive of the utility and benefits of a narratology of drama.

Plot Aristotle argues for a concept of plot that is unified, a representation of a single action such that, if any of its parts is transposed or removed, “the whole will be disrupted and disturbed” (2010, 95). He does acknowledge that some authors erroneously present several largely unrelated episodes from the life of a man, and therefore falsely assume that since Herakles was one man, the story of Herakles must also be a unity. Many twentieth century theorists, building on a story grammar derived from Vladimir Propp, likewise aver that “the fabula that constitutes the global structure of the drama is a dynamic chain of events and actions” and “the series of distinct actions and interactions of the plot are understood to form coherent sequences governed by the overall purposes of their agents” (Elam 1980, 120, 123). This approach to plot lends itself best to classical tragedy, which typically builds toward a single resounding conclusion. This model is implicit in Chekhov’s famous pronouncement on the inevitable narrative economy of drama which asserts that if a pistol is introduced at the beginning of a play, it must be fired by the final act. The sequence of events that occur in non-tragic dramatic forms and genres, however, are often less tightly conjoined. Elizabethan histories, Brechtian epic theater, many types of comedy (especially Aristophanic), and symbolist, avant garde, and modernist plays (including Chekhov’s own) all employ a much more lax structure of events, often replacing direct causal connections with thematic or metaphorical ties. Perhaps the most thoroughgoing negation of the Aristotelian concept of plot is the kind enacted in the theater of the absurd. In Endgame, there is no single, unified action, no dynamic chain of events, but merely a series of largely gratuitous doings. The play is rather an assault on the teleology implicit in much traditionally plotted drama than an embodiment of it. As one arbitrary or meaningless event follows another, the question is not how tightly they are all connected, but whether there is any connection there at all. To interpret this play, one does not follow the trajectory of its plot but attempts to determine whether it has any substantial plot at all. Early on, Hamm asks Clov whether or not he has “had enough.” Clov responds he has always had enough, to which Hamm responds, “then there is no reason for it to change” (1958, 5). With this, Beckett seems to be challenging the basic premise of drama, transformation, and instead constructs a static drama, devoid of all that makes a story “narratable,” or worth telling. There is a disequilibrium, even a conflict—Clov’s continued subservience

Towards a Narratology of Drama

75

to his blind, immobile master. But as we quickly realize, this too will not change. When Hamm asks, “Why do you stay with me?” Clov replies, “There’s nowhere else” (6), a statement that may just be literally true, as we will see. For characters and audience, this amounts not to a plot but to a refusal of plot. Despite repeated claims that “We’re getting on” (9) and “Something is taking its course” (32), there is no unified, coherent aggregation of events, but rather an arbitrary conglomerate of random actions that lead nowhere. In this respect, Endgame is a defiantly anti-Aristotelian drama. The play frequently alludes to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but even these allusions and re-enactments do not provide an alternative pattern for the unfolding of this set of events but rather a negation of Shakespeare’s themes of restoration and regeneration. On stage, the audience can also interact with the represented events in certain limited cases, as when in an experimental work the audience votes to determine which direction the plot will take (Michel Butor’s libretto, Votre Faust), or at the end of a masque (or Amiri Baraka’s “Slave Ship”) where the characters are joined by the audience in a final dance. When performed in a small space, the audience can likewise feel part of the story world, especially if, as is sometimes the case, the spectators walk out a few feet from Hamm, who remains on stage and in character.

Beginnings and Endings For the most part, beginnings and endings occupy privileged positions in drama. A compelling beginning is often a practical necessity to keep spectators in their seats, while an unsatisfactory ending can bring on boos and catcalls after the performance as well as negative reviews by theater critics. Aristotle sensibly defined the beginning as “that which itself does not of necessity follow something else, but after which there naturally is, or comes into being, something else” (2010, 94). Beginnings in drama are often abrupt, plunging the audience into the middle of the action (“Who’s there?” in Hamlet). Other times, the first words are devoted to exposition, as in Sheridan’s The Rivals where a servant and a coachman meet up and one asks the other how it is that he has come to Bath? In a few cases, one finds deceptive beginnings, as in Jean Genet’s Les Bonnes or Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, in which the audience believes it has entered the story world only to learn that it is observing a play enacted within the story world. In Pirandello’s Tonight We Improvise, the play starts with actors sitting in the audience pretending to be unruly spectators criticizing the show and later arguing over whether the play has begun. As is only to be expected given Beckett’s rejection of traditional

76

Chapter Six

plot, beginnings and endings are similarly skewed in his work. Endgame commences, rather than begins; there is no action initiated and no resolvable disequilibrium is announced. Instead, Hamm’s first speech announces not a beginning but an ending: “Enough, it’s time it ended, in the shelter too. (Pause.) And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to . . . to end. Yes, there it is, it’s time it ended and yet I hesitate to—(he yawns)—to end” (3, Beckett’s ellipsis). The play, that is, begins with the announcement of its impending end, and then continues more or less statically until Clov packs his bag, stands near the exit, and refuses to respond to Hamm. At this point the play ceases. Clov has not left the room; nothing is resolved; there is no closure; there is no reason why the entire play might not begin again at its starting point, as happens in Beckett’s Play and seems to be the likely future of the characters in Waiting for Godot. As Hamm states, “The end is in the beginning and yet you go on” (69). This refusal of beginnings, development, and closure is emblematized in the discussion surrounding the earlier ringing of the alarm clock: Clov states, “The end is terrific!” while Hamm counters, “I prefer the middle” (48). Of course, there is typically no variation in the sound of an alarm clock, at one point it simply ceases, as does this play. Aristotle has described what he felt were the best and worst kinds of ending, denigrated the deus ex machina, and observed that many dramatists develop the plot well, but resolve it badly (2010, 103). Beckett here refuses to resolve anything.

Time Genette’s categories of order, duration, and frequency can be fruitfully applied to drama as well as narrative fiction, but one will find some significant differences in the ways in which they function. In most plays, there is no significant difference between the sequence of events in the story (fabula) and the sequence in which they are performed on stage (sjužet). Gaps between events, however, can be prominent, as when a figure representing Time enters the stage between the third and fourth acts of The Winter’s Tale to announce to the audience that sixteen years have just elapsed. More serious discrepancies between the order of the story and its presentation, or what Genette calls “analepses,” can also occur, as when the narrating Voice of Cocteau’s La Machine infernale announces at the end of the first act: “Spectators, let us imagine that we can wind back the last few minutes and relive them elsewhere” (1963, 33). The clock is reset as it were, and the play moves backward in time, just as the fourth chapter of Ulysses takes us back to the moment (8:00 AM) when the first chapter began. More extreme cases are also possible, as in Armand Gatti’s La Vie imaginaire d’eboueur Auguste G (1962) in which the protagonist’s life is presented in

Towards a Narratology of Drama

77

a series of interpolated scenes from several different time periods. Pinter’s Betrayal presents nearly all of its scenes in a reverse chronological order. In narrative fiction, temporality is largely a fabricated construct. The reader can often only estimate the time that elapses as events unfold and dialogues are spoken, and the time of reception will vary considerably from reader to reader. In drama, however, things are different. The entire length of a performance can be clocked, and the duration of specific scenes can be measured with precision. The typically linear trajectory of the play can be directly compared to the time experienced by the audience. Aristotle famously noted that the amount of represented time in Greek tragedy rarely exceeded a day; this comment was hypostatized by neoclassical critics into a powerful injunction. Many playwrights, such as Ben Jonson or Jean Racine, worked comfortably within these parameters; in Volpone or The Alchemist, there is a complete correspondence between the time that is represented and the time it takes to enact the play. Historically, this injunction has proven to be a most compelling challenge to the playwright; even after its authority was overthrown by a series of commentators beginning with Samuel Johnson, the most unlikely cluster of authors continued to work within its parameters, including Lord Byron (of whom Goethe said he broke every other rule of society except the unities of time and space in his plays), Oscar Wilde, and numerous absurdist and avant garde writers, including Beckett: the story of Endgame is entirely coextensive with its enactment. Curiously, however, time is seemingly unknowable or irrelevant in this play; near the beginning, Hamm asks what time it is, to which Clov responds dubiously, “The same as usual” (4); later on, “yesterday” is oddly defined as “that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day” (43). Where Waiting for Godot offers contradictory temporal indicators between its two acts, Endgame simply presents continuous events in a largely indeterminate temporal setting. It is also the case that many playwrights manipulated neoclassical conventions to suit their own ends. Corneille’s L’Illusion comique presents the events of many years through the medium of a magic mirror that is observed by the main group of characters in a single continuous sitting. Byron’s Cain travels around the universe in a lengthy, alternative temporality as the simultaneous events on earth take up only a few hours. Shakespeare often creates thematically apposite temporal contradictions in his works, as the time in the magical forest passes at a different rate of speed than it does in the corrupt city. Even in the one mature play that seems to conform to neoclassical strictures, there is some interesting play with time: at the end of The Tempest, the boatswain discloses that the events have only taken three hours to transpire—and not the more than four hours Prospero

78

Chapter Six

had earlier reckoned on (I.ii.240); as time seems to contract unnaturally. More extreme is the final soliloquy of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, in which an hour is said to pass while the protagonist speaks uninterruptedly and without any temporal elision for fifty extremely dramatic lines (see Richardson 2015, 101-110).

Space Space is especially interesting in drama. The area represented on stage may be a nearby locale, a distant realm, or an entirely fictitious world. More intriguingly, a stage may represent a stage; in which case of course it is presenting, rather than representing fictional space. Endgame has a particularly problematic spatial setting since it does all of these at once. Indeed, investigation of the setting is an essential component of any interpretation of the work and a central interpretive drama in itself. At different points in the play, Clov goes up a ladder to look out of each window; his reports on what he has seen and what lies outside the room are always ambiguous. At some points the play seems to take place in a part of the world we inhabit where places are three days away by horseback; at other times we seem to be in a postapocalyptic version of this world, or a representation of purgatory, or even a different, parallel world where there is no nature. With Beckett, there are always other possibilities as well. It has frequently been remarked the shape of the room, with its two high windows, suggests the outlines of a human skull, in which case the “space” would be a mental rather than a physical one. A postcolonial reading would suggest that the area on stage is also an allegorical space that represents Ireland under British rule. Finally, we can also note that the space is also explicitly affirmed to be a stage, as when Hamm knocks on the wall and says, “Do you hear? Hollow bricks” (26) or, still more flagrantly, when Clov trains his telescope on the audience and says he sees “a multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy” (29, Beckett’s ellipses). We might further observe that, since the play has no intermission, the audience can easily feel enclosed within the same compressed space as the characters, especially during a production in a small theater. Beckett thus evokes all of the possibilities of represented space, as well as the nonrepresentational place of the performance. By refusing to indicate which of these usually mutually contradictory spaces is the “correct” one, he maintains the drama of an endlessly applicable model that can never be reduced to any of its possible components. He suggests multiple possible worlds without having to indicate which is the actual world of the play (see Richardson 2000c). As with character and time in this drama, where it is most unrealistic is where it often feels most familiar.

Towards a Narratology of Drama

79

Cause Just as every play has a temporal and a spatial setting, so too does it have canon of probability to which it adheres. The causal laws governing the story world may be supernatural (Oedipus Rex), naturalistic (Miss Julie), chance (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead), or metafictional, where the events of the play can be altered by an authorial agent (The Beggar’s Opera). In many cases, the determination of the causal laws governing the world is a central concern of the characters. In Oedipus Rex, both Laius and Oedipus believe that they can elude fate through will and planning, while Jocasta asserts at one point that chance (tyche) rules all. Obviously, these interpretations are proven false by the end of the play as fate demonstrates its inevitability. The causal laws governing the world of Endgame are never fully spelled out; like its temporal and spatial setting, its causal laws remain vague, unfixed, and largely unknowable.

Character The most comprehensive theories of character emphasize its multiple facets: fictional characters have a mimetic relation to the individual human beings and recognizable types of human behavior they are modeled on; soldiers or businessmen on stage are deemed “realistic” insofar as they resemble soldiers and businessmen in life. Aesthetic: characters can also be functions or part of an abstract design that constitutes the plot or forms a symmetrical pattern; Restoration comedy typically pairs the amorous adventures of a romantic couple with that of a more practical or sensual couple as the two co-plots reflect each other in both analogous and opposed manners. Characters can represent ideas or embody ideological positions (including positions the playwright may be unaware he or she is endorsing); characters in Medieval or Brechtian allegories represent easily identifiable concepts of Christian or Marxist doctrine, and an author like George Bernard Shaw reinscribes patriarchal values even in plays that purport to do the opposite.1 Finally, performed narratives like drama also contain an enacted “fourth dimension” where the physical body of the actor may alter the status of the character he or she portrays: in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, the cast list states that a man should play the female role of Betty in the first act since “she” is entirely the creation of the dominant male 1

James Phelan (1989, 1-14) uses this tripartite model (the terms of which he calls “mimetic,” “synthetic” and “thematic.” For a study that applies this model to drama and includes a fourth, “enacted” category, see Richardson 1997b.

80

Chapter Six

Victorian sensibility. For the most part, theater of the absurd seems to depart radically from mimetic conventions, as unusual figures say and do outlandish things. But one cannot escape entirely from a mimetic framework: even if there is no discernable psychology in place, in every instance there are always crucial points of congruence: one readily perceives the systematic miscommunication between many married couples in the preposterous dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Martin in Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve. The display of very general representations of key aspects of human behavior is no doubt why Waiting for Godot received such a sympathetic reception when it was performed at the penitentiary at San Quentin in 1957. The central figures of Endgame, Hamm and Clov, are engaged in an exaggerated but ultimately psychologically accurate relation of codependency. Hamm acts as a man who loves displays of his own power, while Clov exhibits a dependence that will not allow him to escape his servitude even though he is physically able to do so. The other two characters, Nagg and Nell, are aged, legless grotesques living in ashcans. Nagg’s character is deliberately inconsistent as his speech alternates between puerile whining and the eloquence of a seasoned raconteur. Here again we see Beckett creating seemingly impossible individuals only to reveal their uncomfortable similarity to all-too-human models. At the aesthetic level, we may see the largely supernumerary characters Nagg and Nell as slightly distorted mirror images of the main characters’ relations. Just as Clov threatens to but cannot leave Hamm, so Nell threatens to but cannot leave Nagg (1958, 19). Their physical dependence on Hamm parallels Clov’s psychological subordination to him. Finally, their pathetic existence further exemplifies the larger theme of the futility of generation that runs throughout the play. At the ideological level, it is widely affirmed that Hamm and Clov are personifications of Hegel’s “Master-Slave dialectic”; recent criticism further postulates that the two protagonists are part of a national allegory and stand for England and Ireland (see Pearson 2001). This last interpretation would be underscored in performance if the actor playing Clov would give an Irish lilt to his pronunciation (to accompany his more Hibernian vocabulary) while the actor portraying Hamm speaks in upper class British intonations. The difference that enactment can make on characterization is evident when one considers the different effects that actors of difference races or genders would produce on stage; this is why Beckett and his estate have been keen on policing such possible stagings. Another effect of enactment is triggered by the sudden appearance of two actors hidden in standard sized ashcans, which always startles the audience

Towards a Narratology of Drama

81

and makes the physical component of their desperate situation painfully evident.

Narration For many years, it was widely assumed that fiction was narrated, while drama was merely enacted. The twentieth century, however, is filled with compelling examples of narration in drama, both on and offstage. Narratology can be especially useful in providing conceptual tools to theorize narration in drama and has already started producing impressive accounts.2 Building on the recent work of Seymour Chatman, Manfred Jahn has argued that every film and play has a narrator; this is the “agent who manages the exposition, who decides what is to be told, how it is to be told, [ . . .] and what is to be left out” (2001, 670). Jahn goes on to postulate further that “the enunciating subject of the stage directions is not (or is not initially) the playwright but a narrator” (2001, 672). Such a concept is readily applied to the agent behind Endgame. There are several types of narration in drama. The simplest case is when a character in a play tells a story or recounts a group of events to other characters. This can be part of a theatrical convention, as in Greek drama, which precludes the enactment of death and thus makes its narration essential (typically at the end of the play). In Endgame, Hamm narrates several events, including the arrival of Clov at his domain—a narrative that evokes Prospero’s account to his daughter of how the two arrived on the island in The Tempest. The history of drama also provides a number of other possibilities. Many traditional works from antiquity to the eighteenth century employ a “frame narrator” or prologue who introduces the play that is about to be performed—for example, the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. There is also the genre of the monodrama, a narrative of the thoughts and experiences of a single character on stage. This rare form emerged briefly during romanticism and has been reinstituted and transformed by Beckett. His play “Not I” is a powerful narration spoken by an illumined mouth that keeps telling the same story about another individual and who keeps insisting, increasingly unconvincingly, that it is not the story of herself. We are presented with, that is, a “pseudo-third person” narration. More intriguing is the “generative narrator,” the character who comes on stage and narrates events which are then enacted before the 2

An important account of Brechtian “epic” narration in drama has been provided by Manfred Pfister 1988, 71-76, 120-31. See also Richardson 2001b, 681-94; Fludernik 2008, and Nünning and Sommer 2008.

82

Chapter Six

audience. We may differentiate two types of generative narrator, one who is part of the storyworld he or she describes, as in Tennessee Williams’ memory play, The Glass Menagerie; the other more resembles a third person narrator and exists outside (or above) the story world that the narration creates (the offstage voice in Simone Benmussa’s La Vie singulière d’Albert Nobbs or the storyteller in Bertolt Brecht’s Der kaukasische Kreidekreis). Postmodern variants are also possible: Tom Stoppard’s Travesties is an utterly unreliable memory play, and Beckett’s “Cascando” employs a generative narrator who is exhausted and defeated by his narration; he cannot control the voice and music he conjures up.

Frames and Reflexivity Most dramas of the last two centuries are unframed, and the demands of exposition are taken care of in the dialogue. Looking at the history of drama, however, we find that the narrative events of a play can be framed in a number of ways, many of them presented or enacted on stage. These include the introduction by the chorus in Greek drama, the summary in Plautine comedy, and the formal prologue of Restoration and eighteenth century drama, spoken by an actor who is not yet in character. Framing devices can also be miniature plays in themselves, as in the frame play that circumscribes the main drama (Christopher Sly’s scene at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew), or the kind of dramatized introduction in the theater that appears in some Elizabethan plays (the “inductions” to Ben Jonson’s comedies) and classical Indian theater (also used in Goethe’s Faust), as characters such as the poet and the director discuss the play that is about to be performed. In some modern dramas, the narrator or an offstage voice provides the function of the traditional prologue: “I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties [. . . . ] I am the narrator of the play and a character in it” (Williams: 1970, 23). Beckett tends to avoid framing devices, preferring instead to plunge his audience into a maelstrom of words and acts that the spectators must contextualize themselves. A comprehensive narrative theory should include a space for reflexivity. This is perhaps especially true of the poetics of drama where framing slides easily into issues of reflexivity. Considerable work was done on the subject of metadrama, or drama about drama, in the last third of the twentieth century (see Hornby 1986). There are a number of ways a play can refer to itself or its status as a play; as might be expected, Beckett employs a wide range of self-referential styles, from the representation of the rehearsal of a scene (“Catastrophe”) to dramas involving the production,

Towards a Narratology of Drama

83

repetition, and rewriting of a basic narrative (“Cascando”). We may also note that Hamm is a kind of playwright figure, ordering the events and characters around him, and generally dramatizing his existence: his first words are “Me—to play!” (2). Another type of reflexivity is simple framebreaking, a dramatic analogue of Genette’s notion of metalepsis, as the characters recognize they are figures in a play, as when Clov trains the telescope on the audience or, when moving toward the door, he announces like a vaudeville actor, “This is what we call making an exit” (81). The next type is what might be called a polysemic reflexivity, in which statements are made that can be part of an ordinary dialogue and at the same time refer to the play as a play. We find this in Nell’s lament, “Why this farce, day after day?” (14), which could refer to the meaningless actions repeated over and over or the daily repetition of the actors’ performance. There is also Clov’s question, “What is to keep us here?” which Hamm answers, “The dialogue” (58). Near the end of the play Hamm states the he is “warming up for” his “last soliloquy” (78). We find in addition what is called the mise en abyme, or miniature reproduction of the central situation dramatized in the play, here presented in a narrated story: I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. . . . I used to go and see him in the asylum. I’d take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! . . . All that loveliness! (Pause) He’d snatch away his hand and go back to his corner. Appalled. All he’d seen was ashes. (44).

As Hamm goes on to remark, this case is not unusual, which suggests a complementarity between this narrated vision and the many attempts Clov makes to see something other than the “corpsed” world outside the room (30). Finally, we may point to the text’s sustained rewriting (and negating) of The Tempest, another play that contains embedded dramas and a playwright figure as protagonist, and where minor scenes are staged to produce specific effects on the characters who observe them. When Hamm quotes, “Our revels now are ended” (56), it carries the resonances of Prospero’s famous metadramatic continuation of those line: “These our actors,/ As I foretold you, were all spirits and/ Are melted into air, into thin air. . . . We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep” (4.1.148-58).

84

Chapter Six

Conclusion It is evident that drama provides a great number of compelling examples that can considerably enrich our concepts of the elements of narrative theory, especially in the areas of character, time, space, frames, and reflexivity. Likewise, bringing narratological concepts directly to the drama can also greatly enhance its study, especially in the areas of plot, time, and narration. Like Aristotle, we would do well to analyze drama side by side with the narrative fiction of Homer and his descendants. Such a practice allows the complementary aspects and distinctive differences of drama to move to the foreground, particularly those that involve performance, the physical stage, and the actors’ bodies. A narrative analysis is especially useful for comprehending the dramatic work of Beckett, whose narrative innovations in fiction are equally present in his work for performance, and whose challenges to the conventions of realistic representation are perhaps even more powerful when presented on the stage.

CHAPTER SEVEN FICTION VERSUS FACTUALITY: THE REPRESENTATION OF HISTORICAL CHARACTERS IN WORKS OF FICTION

Michael Frayn’s historical drama, Copenhagen, produced in London in 1998, speculates on what might have transpired during a meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in September 1941, a meeting at which the atomic bomb was possibly discussed. The play has generated impassioned debates concerning the accuracy of the depictions of the historical figures. Frayn himself affirmed the play’s general fidelity to the historical events and personalities in a lengthy postscript to the work in which he also indicates the points at which his speculations went beyond the historical record. Concerning the invention of dialogue for scenes that were unrecorded, he refers to Heisenberg’s own defense of this practice when reconstructing conversations in his personal memoir. The physicist cited the example of Thucydides as a model: in the case of conversations far in the past, “I have found it impossible to remember their exact wording. Hence I have made each orator speak as, in my opinion, he would have done in the circumstances, but keeping as close as I could to the train of thought that guided his actual speech” (Frayn 2000, 96-97). Such good intentions proved to be insufficient. Unsurprisingly, not everyone was convinced of the play’s accuracy. Historian Paul Lawrence Rose, who had written a book on Nazi attempts to build an atomic bomb, denounced the work. Though he acknowledged the dramatic power of the piece, “the price we pay for the dramatic thrill Frayn has concocted—the sacrifice of historical and scientific truth—is simply too great. [ . . . . ] Frayn perverts the moral significance of the meeting as well as distorting and suppressing its scientific and political agenda” (2000, B4-B6). Many others have also commented on the work’s historical material; these include

86

Chapter Seven

historians, literary theorists, drama critics, and physicists.1 Such responses themselves raise larger theoretical questions, specifically what is the nature of historical representation in literature and what does it mean to represent or misrepresent a historical personage on stage? At what point do we say of a personage, that that’s not Heisenberg, and, more importantly, what are the implications of such a claim? We may begin with some clarifications about the relation between fiction and drama in this area. First of all, they are not symmetrical, despite the fact that almost all dramas implicitly invoke the poetic license and nonfererential privileges of fiction. It is therefore not surprising that many normally consider drama to be an analogue of the genres of fiction and poetry. But such a conception is incorrect, since it categorizes a genre distinguished by its style of representation (prose narrative) and the referential status of the represented events (fictional), while the other two simply refer to the mode in which the work is produced. The proper analogue for drama is thus prose narrative; both genres include fictional and nonfictional works—in the case of drama, documentary plays which can be falsified by external sources. One is typically written on a page, the other enacted on a stage.2 Both represent a series of connected events, either may present itself as fictional or as nonfictional and, in the latter case, is thus subject to being falsified. By this formulation I mean both practical falsifiability by comparison to external nonfictional evidence and, following the ideas set forth by members of the Wiener Kreis concerning verifiability, falsifiability in principle, including cases that cannot currently be falsified given the current state of our knowledge or technology. Thus, the statement, “Homer was born in Ithaca” is currently unverifiable given our present knowledge of ancient Greece, though it could be verified (or falsified) if we had (or if we discover) more relevant documentary evidence (see Ayer 1952, 36-39). This is perhaps most evident concerning documentary drama (or film): the author may make mistakes, get facts wrong, make false assertions, or even lie: such works can be falsified by reference to other nonfictional works, documents, and evidence. It is the question of falsifiability that differentiates nonfictional from fictional works, and therefore divides works like autobiographies and documentaries from autobiographical novels or traditional historical dramas that can include invented scenes and characters.3 1

See for example the accounts online at Complete Review: http://www.completereview.com/reviews/fraynm/cophagen.htm 2 This relation between fictionality and nonfictionality does not change in the cases of oral narrative or unperformed drama. 3 Again, I wish to emphasize that I am referring to falsifiability by external sources. One may of course make statements about a work of fiction that are falsifiable within

Fiction versus Factuality: The Status of Historical Characters in Works of Fiction

87

I will now offer some general comments on the nature of characterization. In the last chapter I observed that characterization involved three fundamentally different components: I call these a mimetic drive that seeks to present typical or actual persons or person-like entities, an ideological component that treats characters as instances of competing ideological positions, and an aesthetic design that produces a narrative economy and aesthetic symmetry among the actions of the figures on the stage. In enacted narratives, there may also be a performance component that further adds to characterization (see Herman et al. 2012, 132-38; Richardson 1997b).4 Thus, in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, the character of Hotspur can be compared to historical accounts of the actual Henry Percy. We find however that, instead of being about the same age as Prince Hal, he was in fact older than Hal’s father, King Henry IV, and he was certainly less colorful and less honor-driven than Shakespeare’s version of the man. His ostensible ideological function is to dramatize the folly of impetuosity that is untempered by wisdom, while the deeper ideological thrust shows the uncomfortable parallels between the rebel leader and the sitting king, who had deposed his predecessor, Richard III. The main aesthetic function of the figure of Hotspur is to provide, through an elaborate system of parallels and oppositions, a suitable foil for his double and rival, Prince Hal. Indeed, Shakespeare no doubt changed the age of his Hotspur and made him decades younger not because he was ignorant of the historical facts but to produce more effectively this aesthetic and thematic pairing of comparable opposites. We might also note that the scene in which Falstaff pretends to be King Henry scolding Hal probably occupies exactly the same stage space as the later scene in which the king does scold his son. Such parallel scenes produce a kind of “visual rhyme” that inflects the later event, making the king’s figure seem considerably less royal (see Mark Rose 1974).5 These are the kinds of interpenetrating concerns we need to bear in mind when discussing any characterization, historical or otherwise. August Strindberg’s historical dramas are often at considerable variance from the facts of history; his play Gustav III is almost as reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Richard II as it is of biographical depictions the text or its textual world. The statements “Hamlet dies in the second act” or “Claudius didn’t know he killed his brother” can be quickly and easily refuted by reference to the text of Hamlet. 4 James Phelan had earlier pioneered the tripartite model. See Phelan 1989, 1-14. 5 Furthermore, when a single actor portrays two characters, as when King Duncan is played by the same one who represents Macduff, such characterological conflation may be even more pronounced (see Stephen Booth 1979, 129).

88

Chapter Seven

of the Swedish king. Still more wayward is his misogynistic depiction of the monarch in his play Queen Christina, about Sweden’s 17th century lesbian queen, a figure about whom Strindberg felt extreme fascination and repulsion. “Christina was so genuine a woman that she was a woman hater,” he wrote in his Open Letters to the Intimate Theater (1967, 3). This gives a fair view of the nature of Strindberg’s artistic detachment. Some fifty years ago, the life of Queen Christina was again performed on stage, this time in Pam Gems’ play. Though it covers much of the same historical territory it is perhaps equally inaccurate, setting forth a character that sounds much more like an early 1970’s feminist than a figure from the 17th century. In both plays, ideological concerns overwhelm mimetic pretensions. In what many might consider an appropriate act of literary revenge on the playwright who so thoroughly violated the known facts of the historical figures he depicted, modern Swedish author Per Olov Enquist constructed a play about the historical Strindberg, his estranged wife, Siri von Essen, and her lesbian lover, Marie Caroline David. The play, The Night of the Tribades, centers on a difficult rehearsal of Strindberg’s short play, “The Stronger,” which the three were in fact mounting in 1889 in Copenhagen. Enquist drew extensively on Strindberg’s writings, especially his autobiographical volume, A Madman’s Defense, as well as—most interestingly for this analysis—Strindberg’s partially autobiographical play, The Father. After Enquist’s play opened in 1973, criticism was intense over the accuracy of the portrayal of the historical Strindberg; extremely old men who had known the playwright wrote letters to newspapers claiming that the Strindberg they had known was not at all like the figure in the play. Based on my own knowledge of the character of the historical Strindberg, I tend to agree with the old men. The actual Strindberg was more ambitious, powerful, overreaching, and audacious than the frustrated, hamstrung, neurotic figure created by Enquist. When confronted by these charges, the modern playwright made the interesting but revealing claim that he was not attempting to portray the historical Strindberg but rather his personal conception of Strindberg. I would say that the play—and it is a very good play—attains its aesthetic balance and ideological effectiveness in a contemporary era in part because of its elision of historical accuracy. Another paradoxical example suggests itself at this point. Jean Anouilh narrates the story of his finding a copy of Augustin Thierry’s History of the Norman Conquest of England; he was especially impressed by the chapter on the struggle between Thomas Becket, the Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury and his Anglo-Norman antagonist, King Henry II. He rapidly turned the material into a play, Becket, and gave it to a historian to read. Later, when they met again, the historian roared with

Fiction versus Factuality: The Status of Historical Characters in Works of Fiction

89

laughter and informed him that for over fifty years they had had proof that Becket was not a Saxon but a good Norman who came from Rouen and was called “Bequet.” Since a large part of drama revolves around Becket being of the vanquished ethnicity, the play would have had to be entirely rewritten for it to be accurate at all. But Anouilh had grown to like the structure and development of his story even more than its pretensions to historical verisimilitude; “for this drama it was a thousand times better that Becket remained a Saxon,” he wrote. “I changed nothing; I had the play performed three months later in Paris. It was a great success and I noticed that no one except my historian friend was aware of the progress of history” (1960, viiviii). Matthew Wikander, in his study of the subject, observes that “creating great historical drama is a tightrope act; the strain of balancing the warring demands of dramatic form and historical data soon begins to tell” (1986, 238). We may go still further and state that in the historical dramas by Shakespeare, Strindberg, Gems, Enquist, and Anouilh we find an unresolvable tension between unquestioned historical facts and theatrically effective narrative depictions; the successful playwright invariably betrays the former to serve the latter. To return to these and related issues raised by Frayn’s characterizations: first of all, the figures are clearly fictional; the scene is set after they are all dead. Furthermore, Frayn acknowledged altering the characters somewhat in the service of a more compelling drama. Niels Bohr, for instance, “was as notorious for his inarticulacy and inaudibility as he was famous for his goodness and lovability” (2000, 103); the first two characteristics had to be jettisoned for the play to be successfully performed before an audience. Frayn admits to probably slandering Bohr’s wife, again in the interests of effective drama: “I suspect she was more gracious and reserved than she appears here” (2000, 103). And “the problem with Heisenberg was his elusiveness and ambiguity” (2000, 104); Frayn had to partially construct a recognizable character for him out of the indeterminate historical materials that he consulted. In Copenhagen, many different aspects of Heisenberg’s character are set forth, and numerous possible motives are explored. But one indisputable facet of his actual character has wisely been left out: his deep nationalism and affinity for many of the same Romantic causes and topoi that the Nazis also enjoyed. Given the type of play Frayn decided to write, these options, however historically accurate they may have been, could not be presented on stage. A zealously nationalistic Heisenberg, who felt Germany’s bellicosity was understandable and who was confident about its ultimate victory would not work; in all probability, it would be booed off

90

Chapter Seven

the stage, and rightly so. To reiterate, once Frayn decided on the type of drama he would construct, much genuine historical material ceased to be available to him for this kind of play. And we may ask ourselves the question posed most dramatically by Anouilh: what should Frayn do if, when the last of Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s letters and papers are finally made public, it turns out that his characterization of Heisenberg is all wrong? The author may well feel no need to rewrite his successful play; he could claim that this is a set of possible events, rather than actual ones, or, perhaps ingenuously, that it is an accurate representation of the historical situation as understood at the time of its writing. Or he could simply say that this is what his Bohr and his Heisenberg are; if they diverge from history, then so be it. The issues raised in this chapter have also been incarnated in a work of fiction that itself contests the veracity of nonfictional events within another work of fiction. As such, it can help us clarify the accuracy of rival positions on fictional referentiality and point to the stakes involved. Juan Gabriel Vásquez’ novel, Historia secreta de Costaguana (The Secret History of Costaguana), purports to offer the “true” story of the material that Joseph Conrad fictionalized in Nostromo. Vásquez’ work, set in Colombia, tells the story of José Altamirano, a Colombian national whose family had been involved in the construction of the Panama Canal and the secession and creation of the new state of Panama. The novel’s protagonist visits a bar in Colón where, unknown to him, are the seamen Józef Konrad Korzeniowski (Conrad) and Dominic Cervoni, a Corsican who would later become the model for the character, Nostromo. Many years later, the narrator meets Conrad in London as he is writing Nostromo and offers him details of his own life and experience in Colombia. This material continues and extends Conrad’s own critique of Latin American corruption, demagoguery, romanticism, and paid journalistic fabrications. Even more intriguingly, the text also engages in a debate on the nature of historical fiction. Later, Altamirano is appalled when he reads the first installment of Nostromo; he confronts Conrad by saying “This is false. This is not what I told you.” Conrad responds, “This, my dear sir, is a novel.” The dialogue continues: “‘It’s not my story. It’s not the story of my country.’ ‘Of course not, said Conrad. ‘It’s the story of my country. It’s the story of Costaguana’” (2011, 275).

Altamirano further complains that he himself has been written out of the narrative of his own life. Conrad, affirming what Dorrit Cohn calls the distinction of fiction, is unmoved. He explains: “Right now, as you and I

Fiction versus Factuality: The Status of Historical Characters in Works of Fiction

91

speak, there are people reading the story of the wars and revolutions of that country, the story of that province that secedes over a silver mine, the history of the South American Republic that does not exist. And there is nothing you can do about it’” (2011, 277). Altamirano, believing in the primacy of the material that inspired its fictional re-creation, responds, “‘But the republic does exist,’ I said, or rather beseeched him. ‘The province does exist. But the silver mine is really a canal, a canal between two oceans. I know because I know it. I was born in that republic. I lived in that province’” (2011, 277). In the end, the narrator has no recourse but to write his own narrative of the history of his country, Colombia, and in that manner attempt to restore the representation of the original events. The novel leaves open the question of who is finally right; we however are able to affirm that, as we saw in the example of Nabokov’s autobiographical stories, an account of events in a work of fiction cannot be refuted by an appeal to any nonfictional material. Conrad is correct. This conclusion raises two seemingly contradictory responses. Looking at the conceptually larger issue of the ontological status of fictional characters, we find there is no insistent and unambiguous referential claim to be made. Nonfictional works are falsifiable in a way that fiction cannot be. If we read in a biography that Napoleon died in 1805 or 1851, we know that statement is false since all other accounts indicate he died in 1821. In a work of fiction, he can die in any year, and be as bold or timid as the author wants him to be (or henpecked, as George Bernard Shaw presents him in “The Man of Destiny”).6 Similarly, while new historical discoveries may have to be taken into consideration, no statement from a work of fiction can require us to rework any biographical account. As we saw in chapter one, Marie-Laure Ryan’s answers the question, how “can the imaginary Natasha in War and Peace lose her fiancé in a war against a historical Napoleon?” by explaining that “the attribute of fictionality does not apply to individual entities, but to entire semantic domains: the Napoleon of War and Peace is fictional because he belongs to a world which as a whole is fictional” (1991, 15). Lubomir Doležel affirms essentially the same position: “As nonactualized possibles, all fictional entities are of the same ontological nature. Tolstoy’s Napoleon is no less 6 In his preface to Saint Joan, a quasi-historical drama with numerous anachronisms, Shaw declared that “it is the business of the stage to make its figures more intelligible to themselves than they would be in real life”; in order to provide “sufficient veracity,” he had to incur what he calls a “sacrifice of verisimilitude” and make his characters say “the things they actually would have said if they had known what they were really doing” (1971, 52-53). These lines and Shaw’s play with the representation of the historical are discussed in Hernadi 1985, 17 and 19-30.

92

Chapter Seven

fictional than his Pierre Bezuchov, and Dickens’ London is no more actual than Carroll’s Wonderland” (1998, 18). He goes on to explain that “actualworld (historical) individuals are able to enter a fictional world only if they become possible counterparts, shaped in any way the fiction maker chooses” (1998, 21); thus, “the actual Napoleon can be transformed into an unlimited number of alternate [fictional] incarnations, some of them differing essentially from the actual world prototype” (1998, 225).7 Anna Whiteside similarly points out in her summary of philosophical theories of reference, “when Stendhal refers to Napoleon, Baudelaire to Paris, Chekhov to Moscow, . . . however realist or naturalist their art, they refer not so much to the extratextual primary referent mentioned but to their own highly connoted intertextual and intratextual literary artifact” (1987, 179). In short, there is no actual ontological commitment in fictional works; they cannot be falsified the way a work of nonfiction (including documentaries) can be. This is equally true of historical fiction as historical drama. The creative author can always legitimately say, as Enquist did, that the figure is only their idea of the person in a way that biographers can’t when confronted with incontrovertible evidence that contradicts their claims. Thus, even in the representation of historical individuals, there is a fundamental, sweeping poetic license that sets the work apart from nonfictional accounts. The kind of radical transformation Doležel discusses appears prominently in Tom Stoppard’s postmodern documentary television film, Squaring the Circle, an account of the Solidarity labor movement in Poland that was made without the necessary historical materials being available at the time of the work’s composition. Stoppard deals with this limitation in a playful manner. As the camera reveals Polish leader Gierek, dressed in a suit, hat, and overcoat, walking on a beach, the narrator states: “Towards the end of July 1980 Edward Gierek, First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, which is to say the boss of Communist Poland, left Warsaw for his annual holiday in the Soviet Union by the Black Sea. There he met [. . .] Leonid Brezhnev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR” (1984, 21). Brezhnev, similarly dressed, walks toward Gierek. The two exchange stilted greetings in the official phraseology of the Communist Party, until the narrator comments: “That isn’t them, of course,” and speaking into the camera, adds, “and this isn’t the Black Sea. Everything is 7

Bohumil FoĜt similarly affirms there is “an essential difference between fictional and historical entities—in spite of the fact that they both arrive via semiotic channels and therefore can be viewed as mere possible counterparts of real people” (2016, 55). He further states that “fictional entities simply do not refer to actual entities, nor do they refer across the ontological border between fictional and actual worlds” (2016, 56).

Fiction versus Factuality: The Status of Historical Characters in Works of Fiction

93

true except the words and the pictures. If there was a beach, Brezhnev and Gierek probably didn’t talk on it, and if they did, they probably wouldn’t have been wearing, on a beach in July, those hats and coats and lace up shoes” (1984, 21-22). The scene now changes, revealing a cheery beach; “Brezhnev and Gierek are now wearing brightly coloured Hawaiian shirts and slacks. They wear sunglasses. They drink from pink drinks with little purple paper umbrellas sticking out of them” (1984, 22). This time, Brezhnev talks like a gangster in a Hollywood movie: “What the hell is going on with you guys?” (1984, 22). After a bit more of this kind of speech, the scene changes again. The beach is now deserted and the narrator states: “Who knows? All the same, there was something going on which remains true even when the words and pictures are mostly made up” (1984, 22-23). Stoppard is thus giving a number of demonstrably incorrect versions of an actual historical event, thereby demonstrating the ontological independence of any (and every) fictionalized presentation of historical events. At the same time, he points to a real set of occurrences that generated his literary attempts even as he acknowledges the limitations of our historical knowledge on this and related points. As he explains in the introduction to the work, a central problem was to determine the actual character of Poland’s leader at the time, General Jaruzelski, a question on which there were several different positions. “Some saw him as a hard liner, Moscow’s Man; others saw him as a ‘patriot’ forced into a tough Polish solution to stave off a tougher Russian one. We tended to think of him as a ‘moderate.’ I recall that the judgement was based on one concrete fact that kept cropping up in the research material: Jaruzelski, as Minister of Defense, had once refused to order Polish soldiers to fire on Polish workers” (1984, 8). Stoppard goes on to note that two years later, after the film was completed, he “learned that new information tended to consign the ‘fact’ to myth” (1984, 8). Now that the ontological issue seems to be settled—that every character in fiction, whether invented or historical, is equally fictional—we may go on to ask what then does it mean for an author to strive for and even succeed in accurately depicting historical characters? Here we may turn to Dorrit Cohn: “when we speak of the nonreferentiality of fiction, we do not mean that it cannot [correspond] to the world outside the text, but that it need not refer to it” (1999, 78). There may be a correspondence, or there may not be one. This is not to say that authors should not attempt to be as accurate as possible, or that the audience should not value such accuracies, but only that the full range of issues involved are multivalent and, as we

94

Chapter Seven

have seen, often mutually exclusive. Truth and beauty are not one, and historical reference is one point where they routinely diverge. On the one hand, as any producer will tell you, it’s no good to have a perfectly accurate historical play if none of the spectators will stay around for the second act. But this is perhaps only to reiterate that the mimetic is only one of the three mainsprings of characterization, and that even here, as Aristotle noted, history occupies a substantially different order of discourse than does poetry or literature. Despite the fact that it can seem to be of extreme importance to many audiences, those who insist on the importance of accurate representations can always be answered with the phrase, “But it’s only a play (or a novel); if you want fidelity to what happened in all its detail and complexity, read the historians.” On the other hand, there are many authors of realist and historical works who are justly proud of the accuracy of their minimally fictionalized versions of actual persons. Setting aside the ontological issue for a moment, we can indeed note the success or failure of the correspondence between the fictional and historical counterparts. Tolstoy was extremely proud of the accuracy of his depiction of Napoleon in War and Peace; even granting that it is part of a fictional domain, we may go on to judge its veracity. It is also the case that serious authors may also feel extreme embarrassment if their realist fiction depicts an impossible scenario. One finds many such errors in fictional works. In a discussion of such mistakes, James Forrester observes: “my particular favourite historical error appears at the end of Braveheart, where it is suggested that the future Edward III (born in 1312) was the product of a union between the Scottish rebel William Wallace (executed in London in 1305) and Princess Isabella of France, who was nine at the time of Wallace’s death” (2010, np). What are we to make of such blunders? From the perspective of the ontological status of the figures, it doesn’t matter, any more than Anouilh’s historical error did. But it is a mistake, and I suggest that it is a mistake against generic constraints of realism. I would put it in the same category as an unintended contradiction in a realist novel. There are a number of minor inconsistencies in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, such as Susan having written a crucial letter and also being depicted as essentially illiterate, only able to write her own name. In a nouveau roman this would not be a mistake, but in Hardy it is, as it violates the realist poetics he is employing. Such an inconsistency does not damage, destroy, or transform the fictional world of the text; it is simply a mistake caused by hurried composition to meet the deadlines of serial publication. Historical errors in fictional texts that are set forth as historically accurate can be treated the same way: as violations of the implicit contract of the genre.

Fiction versus Factuality: The Status of Historical Characters in Works of Fiction

95

I wish to articulate an additional caveat concerning historical representation: in the reception of a work of fiction, it is usually impossible to entirely bracket one’s historical knowledge. In the case of a sympathetic portrait of Hitler or Stalin, the fictional figure is contaminated by what we might call “the stain of the real,” as our psychological response is at variance with the logical principles outlined above. Such a portrait of a ruthless historical dictator will naturally seem to whitewash some of their crimes, and thus is worthy of censure, but ontologically (and only ontologically) any avowedly fictional description, whether close to or distant from the historical record, positive or negative, parodic or postmodern, belongs to a possible fictional world, not the one we inhabit. A fictional portrait will never change the facts about a historical individual, and judgments about the former are logically irrelevant to the evaluation of the latter (though of course the uninformed may be led into false judgments by assuming the fictional portrait is credible). To summarize our discussion of this most elusive subject, we may affirm that ontologically speaking, fictional characters, whether or not based on historical individuals, inhabit a fictional realm and may diverge considerably from their real world counterparts. Aesthetically, we should assume that a number of distortions of the historical record are typically committed in order to provide a better narrative; poetic license demands a certain degree of historical elision and fabrication even in works that attempt to hew closely to the historical record. In a genre like realism, largely defined by its mimetic component, we see that aesthetic, ideological, and theatrical aspects play a significant role in the representation of historical characters. Psychologically, however, we cannot always fully treat historical characters as mere fictional creations: certain historical resonances are impossible to erase. One more important point is to be discussed before leaving this topic: whether a work of fiction can make any falsifiable claims about the real world. Though the characters and setting must be fictional, can a work’s ideas or Weltanaschauung legitimately claim to be nonfictional? This question will be taken up in the discussion of realism in the next chapter.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE PARADOXES OF LITERARY REALISM

Having just established the ontological status of fictional characters and events (including historical characters, places, and events within a work of fiction), we still need to discuss the more general possibility of some form of accurate representation of the real world, especially the type that is claimed by realist authors. Peter Lamarque, building on the work of Kendall Walton and John Searle, quotes the opening sentence of the novel, The Quiet American, and observes: “we need to distinguish between the status of the immediate fictive ‘report,’ as in the example from Graham Greene, which is clearly not asserted, and some further assertive purpose of the story-teller by way of ‘making a point.’ Descriptions at subject level—the level of the story itself—are distinct from wider reflections and purposes at a thematic level” (2009, 179). That is, even though it is not making a referential assertion about the fictional character, Alden Pyle, and his activities, this does not mean that the work may not express larger ideas about the world, ideas that may be true or false. An examination of some of the claims of literary realism will help us resolve this situation. The past seventy-five years have not been very accommodating to the concept of realism, which has been assaulted by formalists and poststructuralists alike. Tzvetan Todorov, for example, archly states that a work is described as having verisimilitude insofar as it tries “to make us believe that it conforms to reality and not its own laws. In other words, the vraisemblable is the mask which conceals the text’s own laws and which we are supposed to take for a relation to reality” (cited in Culler, 1975, 139).1 Robert Scholes asserts “it is because reality cannot be recorded that realism is dead. All writing, all composition, is construction. There is no mimesis, only poesis. No recording, only constructing” (1975, 7). A number of French theorists of the period similarly affirm that “reality” is “only a tissue of socially agreed conventions as to what is the case; thus the 1

See also Nuttall (1981, 33) and Foley (1986, 11), two scholars who, along with Jerome McGann, move beyond what Foley calls modern theory’s “anxiety of reference” (1988, 267).

The Paradoxes of Literary Realism

97

correspondence of a text with reality turns out to be only the correspondence of [ . . . ] one sort of text with another” (Nuttall, 33). Fredric Jameson states that “the very choice of the form [of realism] itself is a professional endorsement of the status quo” (2013, 215). It should not be surprising that realism has little place in recent literary theory. Almost every type of formalism denies any connection between the world and the literary text and many varieties of poststructuralism deny the distinction between factual and fictional narratives: every text is for them necessarily fictional. Given such presuppositions it is only to be expected that realism is disavowed: these paradigms, as we have already noted, cannot in principle comprehend even the theoretical possibility of realism. To be sure, many aspects of the critiques of the concept of realism are impossible to deny. Pictorial analogies to the contrary, literary realism is never an unambiguous reproduction of the external world, but always entails numerous discursive mediations, interpretive strategies, and ideological self-situating. In the early Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti painted a view from a window and then hung his painting next to that window. Spectators could glance back and forth between the representation and the reality, and judge exactly how realistic the painting was. There is however no comparable, unmediated slice of reality that any fictional narrative can be juxtaposed to. There are at best a more or less contradictory set of texts and fragments that may be repeated or altered. A realistic novel or play never reflects but instead reconstitutes its object; no text or performance can ever attain the status of a definitive reproduction of the real. As René Wellek has pointed out, literary realism strives to be “‘the objective representation of contemporary social reality.’ It claims to be all-inclusive in subject matter and aims to be objective in method, even though this objectivity is hardly ever achieved in practice” (1963, 253). One thing we have learned in the twentieth century is that nothing is more subjective than individual notions of objectivity. Does this mean then, as the majority of theorists aver, that literary realism is merely another mode of fabrication or narrative convention, neither more nor less accurate a depiction of experience than any other mode, neither more nor less realistic than a fairy tale, a gothic romance, or an account of a journey to Hades? It is difficult to acquiesce to such a position for a number of reasons. First, unlike most other modes, literary realism situates itself as verisimilar: unlike the tale of chivalry, it purports to depict salient features of the world of our experience. This implicit truth claim is frequently averred and systematically defended in realist works, and for this reason deserves our scrutiny. Second, since the origin of the drama, playwrights have regularly critiqued what they perceived to be

98

Chapter Eight

unrealistic scenes and conventions precisely because of their implausibility. In his Elektra, Euripides parodies the unlikely scene of the tokens’ recognition in Aeschylus’ Choephoroi, and Aristophanes in the Thesmophoriazusae mocks the wildly improbable Euripidean device of sending a message written on oar blades. Such deflations are a hallmark of modern realism; in A Doll’s House, Krogstad knows that Nora won’t commit suicide because, as he points out, such things happen only in books. Here again, a set of plausible expectations drawn from experience (and presumably shared with the audience) is contrasted with implausible behavior predicated of literary characters in conventional situations. This kind of contest is also frequently staged by Joseph Conrad and other authors of modern realist fiction. Finally, it should be noted that the compelling power of realism is and always has been its ability to expose and demystify impoverished and inaccurate world views. As James Joyce stated, in realism you are down to facts on which the world is based: that sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp. What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism, some unrealizable or misconceived ideal [ . . . . ] Nature is quite unromantic. It is we who put romance into her, which is a false attitude, an egotism, absurd like all egotisms. (Power 1974, 98).

Realism can contest and perhaps refute a variety of dubious or inaccurate world views and ideologies, especially those based on some form of idealism. In this, it provides a kind of epistemological elenchus. Just this kind of interpretive drama is frequently staged in many of the most celebrated works of American realist drama, as one character’s romantic or sentimental vision is shown to be contradicted by the recalcitrant world of facts that only another, darker version of experience is able to comprehend. This leads us to the paradox of realism. It is a Weltanschauung that can never be fully confirmed, though any of its examples can always be contested or denied (unlike works which make no direct claims about the real world, such as pastorals or fairy tales). It exposes false ideologies even as it is necessarily ideologically coded itself. It claims to depict life as really lived even though the artifactuality of the conditions of its own production precludes so close a correspondence; even the dialogue of “superrealistic” drama is extremely artificial when compared to actual human conversation. In short, it can expose certain falsehoods, but cannot reveal the truth. This, I believe, is why realism has provoked such heated and contradictory theoretical debate, why successive authors can legitimately feel they are being more realistic than their immediate predecessors in the mode, and why the methods of realistic depiction undergo continuous transformation.

The Paradoxes of Literary Realism

99

I argue that literary realism should be viewed not as a mirror, and not as a delusion, but as a synechdoche, a model that attempts to reconstruct in an abbreviated but not inaccurate manner the world that we inhabit. It offers models that can be determined to be more or less adequate, accurate, and comprehensive, and one model can be seen to be more effective than another. Thus, even though there never was a person named Charles Gould or a country called Sulaco, we can appreciate and evaluate Conrad’s claim that his novel Nostromo was more true than any history book he had ever read. Its model of the structure and effects nineteenth-century EuroAmerican capitalism in South America can be evaluated and determined to be either more or less accurate. Many have found such a correspondence between the social structures and their transformations in the novel and in the world it depicts, a correspondence notably absent in the novels of Walter Scott. At the same time, it must be recognized that in adjudicating between rival models of human experience presented in fiction, three elements emerge as signally important: the function of interpretation, the construction of the typical, and the status of probability. None of these terms is unproblematic, and all carry with them certain metaphysical and ideological assumptions. False notions of the typical, especially concerning women, minorities, and others, have wrought significant damage to vulnerable individuals. This indicates how urgent the study of realism may be. Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, a play whose story was also published in the form of a short story called, “A Jury of Her Peers,” is I believe an exemplary realist text, and one that can fully reveal both the great potential and the significant stakes of the realist enterprise. It also contests the location and the value of the typical. Glaspell’s work begins with the investigation of a murder, as the sheriff and the county attorney examine the farmhouse of John Wright, the murder victim, in an attempt to discover evidence. A male neighbor, his wife and the sheriff’s wife are also present. The men search upstairs, examine the outside of the house, and check the barn. Their examination of the kitchen (where the play is set) is cursory; they are convinced that nothing of any importance could exist among the conventional implements of a woman’s domestic space. Once the men are gone, the two women tidy up the kitchen, and in the process uncover some items that appear curious to them. One of these is a quilt that Mrs. Wright, wife of the murdered man and the primary suspect, was in the process of knitting. One of the women, Mrs. Hale, observes an abrupt series of false stitches: “It’s all over the place! Why it looks as though she didn’t know what she was about!” (1987, 41). Mrs. Hale goes on to rip out the offending

100

Chapter Eight

pattern and re-stitch the piece. Later, they find a bird cage with a broken door; then they find a dead bird, its neck broken. Soon they are able to reconstruct a series of events to explain these oddities. Though this narrative remains unspoken, it is clear to the women that Mrs. Wright had been driven to desperation by her husband’s sullen indifference and rigid domination. The one source of joy for her, the canary, appears to have been killed by the husband, who had ripped open its cage and throttled the bird. At this point Mrs. Wright was so distraught she could not knit properly. That night, she prepared a little coffin for the bird, strangled her husband with a rope, and washed her hands. It is the women who are able to determine what actually constitutes evidence, who are able to deduce this series of events, and, because they so keenly appreciate the motivation of Mrs. Wright—the very motive sought in vain by the county attorney—they decide to keep their knowledge to themselves. This probably ensures that Mrs. Wright will go free; as the puzzled attorney notes: “It’s all perfectly clear except a reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women. If there was some definite thing. Something to show—something to make a story about—a thing that would connect up with this strange way of doing it” (1987, 44). But the men never will understand, and consequently will be unable to apply their laws to the woman. The struggle for interpretation in this play is both an instance and an emblem of a characteristic feature of the enterprise of realism. Rival hermeneutic stances find themselves in conflict over the reading of a set of events. Each attempts to generate a narrative model to explain what they believe to be the relevant facts. The play does not end in an epistemological impasse, but validates one reading over the other—the superior model can explain more, and explain more convincingly. More precisely, the women’s account of the entire sequence of events, including the range of social and psychological elements that form the unfortunate causal skein and lead to a more lenient judgement of the fatal act, is a more complete and accurate interpretation than the men can muster. More importantly, insofar as the male characters’ views of women are representative of the attitudes of the period (and there is no evidence to suggest that this is not the case), the play provides an epistemological critique of the casual chauvinism at work—on the stage and in the audience. In European realism, the hermeneutic battles are frequently between an idealistic and a realistic model of the structure of events, as characters espousing some variety of the former stance (Ibsen’s Gregers Werle and Hedda Gabler, Candida’s Marchbanks, and almost all of the characters in Chekhov’s plays) are shown by the course of events to have misperceived the world they inhabit. The paradigmatic example of this might be what

The Paradoxes of Literary Realism

101

Raymond Williams termed “Strindberg’s definition of naturalism as the exclusion of God” (1972, 582); indeed, the depiction of the cunning yet slavish pastor in The Father is a quintessential expression of the realists’ attack on the possibility of supernatural agency. John Millington Synge’s ineffectual and all-too-human priests continue this paradigm. In American realist drama, the focus is often less metaphysical and more directed to social and psychological issues, as playwrights contest the official optimistic master narratives of American society, including different versions of the romance of “the American dream”—perhaps most blatantly in Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, in which a visitor to a Midwestern family farm first laughingly describes it as being “like a Norman Rockwell cover or something” (1981, 83), but rapidly discovers the multiple horrors and degradations that lie just beneath the surface. It is significant that the most celebrated American realist playwrights —Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, and the later Sam Shepard—all confront major aspects of this mythic vision of American society and offer instead rival versions of experience that are presented as not merely different but more realistic, that is, more accurate versions of social existence. O’Neill is particularly adept in chronicling the vast range of self-serving illusions his characters delude themselves with— The Iceman Cometh is a kind of sustained deflation of twelve popular varieties of self-deception, or “pipe dreams,” as Hickey calls them. At the same time, O’Neill invariably points out the larger social structures that influence or determine the characters’ failures and concomitant delusions. This conflict—and it seems to be fundamental in American realist drama—is starkly presented in the dialogue of A Streetcar Named Desire. As Mitch removes the paper lantern from the light bulb, Blanche asks, “What did you do that for?” He responds, “So I can take a look at you good and plain!” She counters, “Of course you don’t mean to be insulting!” He answers, “No, just realistic.” To this Blanche responds, “I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!—Don’t turn the light on!” (1986, 117). Realism is the exposure of beautiful illusions. Williams is notable for giving explicit voice to the specifically ideological claims of realism. The narrator at the beginning of The Glass Menagerie states that the ensuing memory play “is sentimental, it is not realistic” (1970, 23). Its temporal setting is furthermore stated to be “the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes . . .” (23). Not surprisingly, the illusions that nourish the main characters are

102

Chapter Eight

thoroughly exposed by the drama’s end. What is perhaps an even more sustained struggle for the real occurs in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Surrounded by characters either consumed by self-delusions or constantly intriguing to improve their fortunes, Brick and Big Daddy stand out as figures who will not lie and cannot be lied to. Their common struggle against the dishonesty all around them brings them together just long enough for each to expose the one illusion that the other harbors. As Brick states: “Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other” (1955, 94).2 It might be noted that a similar pattern of deception and self-deception permeates Hellman’s The Little Foxes. As Gerald M. Berkowitz observes, the Hubbard siblings, given the opportunity to become rich, “stop at nothing—theft, blackmail, doublecrossing, murder—to succeed” (1992, 52), all beneath the polite veneer of Southern cordiality. William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba similarly exposes the repressed underside of middle class marriage rites. Thoroughgoing deconstructions of celebrated versions of the American dream also underlie much of the work of Arthur Miller, as Berkowitz documents (77-82); a particularly powerful critique may also be found in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. For much of the twentieth century, African Americans were largely excluded from all but the most tawdry versions of the American dream; consequently, it is important to observe how modern African-American playwrights negotiate this theme. In August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, set in the 1920’s, the major characters express radically different views concerning the situation and possibilities of Blacks in the United States. The character Slow Drag tends to accept social reality more or less uncritically and without seeming to be able to imagine an alternative vision of how things might be. Cutler has a profound belief in Christianity, and feels that eventually God’s justice will be done. Toledo espouses a vaguely separatist, proto-Pan African nationalism, and suspects that the best future prospects for Blacks lie in developing their own community. Levee is an ambitious individualist and a firm believer in his potential to rise to success through entrepreneurial capitalism; he has no doubt that the system will fully reward his talent and vision. Ma Rainey is utterly cynical, convinced of the ruthless and predatory nature of the unjust society that surrounds her. Referring to the record producers that Levee believes will help make him rich, Ma states:

2

In this context, it might be also noted that Summer and Smoke contains a particularly stark materialist critique of religion, illusion, and decorum in the eighth scene’s “anatomy lesson.”

The Paradoxes of Literary Realism

103

They don’t care nothing about me. All they want is my voice. Well, I done learned that, and they gonna treat me like I want to be treated no matter how much it hurt them. They back there now calling me all kind of names . . . But they can’t do nothing else. They ain’t got what they wanted yet. As soon as they get my voice down on one of them recording machines, then it’s just like if I’d be some whore and they roll over and put their pants on. Ain’t got no use for me then. I know what I’m talking about. You watch. (1985, 79)

By the end of the play, Ma Rainey’s explanatory abilities prove all too successful as Levee, after being mercilessly exploited by the white record producers, vents his rage by killing Toledo, and the pattern of exploitation completes its full vicious circle. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, set in Chicago in the nineteen fifties, documents the tremendous struggle of a Black family to achieve what whites would consider to be an ordinary, even typical existence. Here the barriers are predominantly racist, with one crucial exception—Walter Lee’s attempt to better the family’s prospects through capital investment. This ends in a financial fiasco and makes the family’s struggle all the more difficult. At the same time, by offering a range of sympathetic and believable African American characters almost entirely absent from Euro-American drama of the period, Hansberry succeeds in transcending, via realism, the impoverished conceptions of popular stereotypes. Taken together, these two works should help to indicate a distinctive African-American contribution to realism’s contestation of the master narrative of American culture as they disclose how fragile, limited, or illusory that narrative has been. Other works critique an equal and opposite illusion, that white supremacy is either insurmountable or ubiquitous. In Wilson’s Fences, Troy Maxson cautions his son Cory not to aspire too high, not to hope for example for a college education, since white America would only crush such extravagant ambitions. But Cory feels that Troy has misread the evolving social code; a series of transformations were underway in the fifties that not only allowed but demanded such desires he argues, and the events of the play validate Cory’s interpretation. To return to another drama of the investigation of a murder, we may conclude this section with a glance at Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play. The setting is an army base in the deep South in 1944, the victim is the black sergeant of an all Black unit. Every character in the play is convinced that the Klan is behind the murder, but the hypothesis fails to fully explain all the available evidence. In the end, it is revealed that Sergeant Waters was killed by one of the Black enlisted men he commanded, as the drama uncovers numerous layers of stereotyping,

104

Chapter Eight

misprision, retribution, and dubious identity construction. Running through all of these plays is the clash of incompatible interpretations of the social world—the world jointly inhabited, according to the realist postulate, by both characters and spectators. In each case, the more conventional and, usually, more rosy-tinted Weltanschauung is demonstrated to be inadequate, to be in other words an insubstantial dream, if not a systematic lie. The problem of course is that one can never definitively prove the validity of an image of society; to test the theory of gravity, one may conduct any number of experiments, but to document O’Neill’s vision one can at best marshal additional corroborating evidence, narratives, and theories. Such dramas can set forth vivid, incontrovertible counter examples that defy and confound more idealistic world views, though they can never definitively establish a totalized alternative. They counter ideologies even as they are steeped in opposing ideologies; they claim to be true but can never be neutral. Their objectivity is perhaps comparable to the strained disinterestedness of a jury during an emotional trial, from whom much important information has been withheld, but who must pass judgement on the few incontrovertible facts and the many contested interpretations of the case. Additional paradoxes are inherent in realism’s basic claim to represent the world as it is: one concerns the stability of the world, the other attaches to the depiction of that world. Our conceptions of what really exists continue to evolve, and a wide array of divergent techniques steadily emerge to reproduce it, each claiming greater fidelity and verisimilitude. As David Shumway has recently argued, a key feature of realist aesthetics is that of plausibility (2017, 189-92). The hidden source of the strength of realism’s appeal is that it attempts to accurately reproduce the same canon of probability that also governs everyday existence. This is perhaps the foundation of concepts like “the typical” and “the lifelike” that, from Friedrich Engels and William Dean Howells to contemporary reviewers, have seemed indispensable parts of the critical idiom of realism. Since the invention of realism in the middle of the nineteenth century, causal concerns have been foundational. A large part of the original appeal of realism was its disavowal of the excessive improbable trajectories and happy coincidences that vitiated both Romantic plays and nineteenth century melodrama. Ibsen’s works were intended to depict an unbreakable chain of causally connected actions.3 A 3

Though even here one can perceive a few carefully buried yet utterly improbable juxtapositions of unlikely correspondences that do wonders for the work’s emplotment even as they undermine its pretentions to verisimilitude: think, for example, of the melodramatic timing if the events surrounding letter-box episode in A Doll’s House.

The Paradoxes of Literary Realism

105

few years later, Zola would attempt to further tighten the screws of a totally naturalistic determinism in Thérèse Raquin. In 1888, Strindberg argued for a much more expansive and what we might call overdetermined notion of cause in the preface to Miss Julie.4 Tightly connected sequences of causes and effects, in the name of an accurate representation of reality, served as the cornerstone of realistic drama. In 1941 Vladimir Nabokov, in his essay “The Tragedy of Tragedy,” articulated the feelings of a number of modernists when he observed that modern drama is “so hypnotized by the conventionally accepted rules of cause and effect that it will invent a cause and modify an effect rather than have none at all” (1984, 326). He attacks this strategy not only on aesthetic grounds but in the name of verisimilitude as well: “The tragedies of real life are based on the beauty or horror of chance—not merely on its ridiculousness. And it is the secret rhythm of chance that one would like to see pulsating in the veins of the tragic muse” (340-41). Modern developments in philosophy, physics, probability theory, and chaos theory have tended to confirm this modernist perspective, and mechanistic, billiard-ball notions of causation are being modified. Recent playwrights like Sam Shepard, who routinely incorporate apparently unlikely infusions of chance events, can now do so in the name of the real. Recent drama has provided some exemplary instances of vital reinventions of the realist project that ironically point to the necessary limitations of every realist undertaking. The first is the phenomenon of superrealism, dramatic spectacles that strive for a minimum of artifice or mediation. For the superrealist playwright, such as Terry Curtis Fox, Edward Bond, Wolfgang Bauer, or Franz Xaver Kroetz (and, we should add, David Mamet and Michel Tremblay), “the only way to see the world as it is, is to render it with as little distortion and personal overlay as possible,” writes Carol Gelderman (1983, 358).5 She affirms that the most noticeable difference between this and earlier kinds of realism lies in the dialogue. The language of the superrealistic play “is not a convention; it is real in the sense that it is based on actual speech with all of its repetitions, silences and pauses, [and] the slips in language which reveal ignorance and lack of thought” (Gelderman, 360). Gelderman’s general description of the 4 For additional discussion, see Brenda Murphy’s excellent survey of the varieties of early realist theory and practice in American Realism and American Drama, 18801940 (24-49). 5 Gelderman uses the terms hyperrealism and superrealism more or less interchangeably; I will use the latter only, to preclude its conflation with Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal. See Renate Usmiani (1990) for a much more thorough study of this mode.

Chapter Eight

106

superrealist project, it will be observed, is entirely consonant with Zola’s claims concerning the naturalistic playwright: “the facts are produced, in order to be absolutely thorough, and so that his inquiry may belong to the world’s comprehensive view and reproduce reality in its entirety” (11). Likewise, Gelderman’s depiction of superrealist speech brings to mind Strindberg’s remarks on dialogue in the preface to Miss Julie.6 And, as the rhetoric of realistic theory remains largely constant, its practice has many fundamental similarities as well. The dialogue Gelderman adduces to display the superrealist difference, speeches from the beginning and end of Edward Bond’s Saved, is in fact much better ordered, more coherent, and less redundant than ordinary conversation. Keir Elam has discussed this subject quite convincingly in his Semeiotics of Theatre and Drama where he contrasts a superreal snatch of Sam Shepard’s dialogue with a transcript of actual cafe conversation. We may substitute some passages from Bond cited by Gelderman and compare it to Elam’s example of actual, spontaneous conversation: Len: Somethin up? Pam: Can’t I blow me nose? Len: Wass yer name? Pam: Wass yourn? Len: Len Pam: Pam Len: O... Len: ‘Ow often yer done this? Pam: Don’t be nosey. (Bond: 1977, 22)

Here is the transcription of an actual conversation: C. S. C. D. C. 6

Excuse me. I hate to do this but I’m bringing it back ‘cause it’s stale. Ow well I’ll make you another one OK. Thanks a lot. I kinda feel bad doing this but I guess so eh (laughter) Well it’s your own fault I do

Strindberg writes: “In regard to the dialogue, I have departed somewhat from tradition by not making my characters catechists who ask stupid questions in order to elicit a smart reply. I have avoided the symmetrical, mathematical construction of French dialogue, and let people’s minds work irregularly, as they do in real life where, during a conversation, no topic is drained to the dregs, and one mind finds in another a chance cog to engage in. So too the dialogue wanders, gathering in the opening scenes material which is later picked up, worked over, repeated, expounded, and developed” (178).

The Paradoxes of Literary Realism S. C. D. S. C. S. C. S.

107

Is that more to your liking? Yeah okay well I fell rotten bringing it back Well no Well if you’re not satisfied you should why should why should you eat something you’ve paid for I know If you I know Don’t want it cause it’s not . . . fresh. (1980, 179)

One hardly needs Elam’s scrupulous linguistic notations and analyses to see at once how different any stage speech, however realistic, is from actual conversation and to determine why this must be the case: so much of actual conversation is vacuous, repetitive, contradictory, redundant, and most importantly, inconsequential that a dramatist succeeds in being realistic at the expense of being interesting. That is, insofar as drama is an artefact intended for an actual audience, it must work against the boredom of ordinary existence; to succeed, it must be more than merely realistic. Generally, pure verisimilitude is inadequate. This points to another paradox: the term “realistic drama” must always be something of an oxymoron. That is, insofar as a performance is a drama (say, with fairly coherent dialogue, significant issues, dramatic pace, and some semblance of closure), it ceases to be perfectly realistic—life is not really like this at all.7 On the other hand, too much realism may harm drama (who would want to pay to see an enactment of the café dialogue transribed above?); total realism may indeed fail to be drama at all. One is reminded of Howells’ warning, cited by Brenda Murphy, that “realism becomes false to itself when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it” (1987, 28). Another interesting development in contemporary drama is present in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, a play that, like The Glass Menagerie, investigates a number of realism’s traditional concerns from the framework of a psychodrama. Ignoring Aristotle’s judicious observation that what is impossible but can be believed is preferable to what is possible but unconvincing (2010, 111), Hwang has constructed a play out of the most improbable of events—a Frenchman cohabiting for several years with a Chinese man whom he believed was a woman. Here two of the cornerstones of realism—the actual and the probable—are placed in opposition. Hwang 7

Brenda Murphy rightly observes that realism is fundamentally antigeneric, dissolving established genres into “the larger rhythms of life” (1987, 114); this is also true of its encounter with any established form or convention, however basic these may be to a successful (or even possible) production.

108

Chapter Eight

also states, perhaps paradoxically, that “given the degree of misunderstanding between men and women and also between East and West, it seemed inevitable that a mistake of this magnitude would one day take place” (1988, 98). Interestingly, Hwang’s text begins with an account of the situation from the New York Times that authenticates the relationship and situates it historically. The unfolding drama thus becomes a kind of archeology of cupidity, as the audience marvels at Gallimard’s vast capabilities of selfdeception, while perceiving the cultural forces that dictate his blindness. At the play’s conclusion, however, the illusions can no longer be maintained; Gallimard must choose between his beatific vision and the real thing. He tells his imaginary Butterfly “Get away from me! Tonight I’ve finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy.” When his partner asserts that he is Gallimard’s fantasy, the Frenchman responds, “You? You’re as real as hamburger” (1988, 90). The epistemological drama ends as Gallimard finally identifies himself as the dying Butterfly, and Hwang’s interrogation of the limits of the improbable is finally circumscribed by a compelling dramatic form. In Sam Shepard’s later work, in addition to the superrealism of its dialogue and sets (including olfactory effects), there is a continuing fascination with and probing of favorite American myths.8 One of the most compelling is the interrogation of the concept of the West in the ironically titled True West, where the most impoverished and cliché-ridden notions of this imaginary space jostle incongruously with the frustrating experiences of life in suburban Los Angeles. The quest for an authentic image of this elusive vision in regularly derided as foolish: “There’s nothing real down here” (1981, 49). Nevertheless, Lee, a poorly educated hustler, is convinced he can write a screenplay that is different, that is real: “true-to-life-stuff” (15), “Based on a true story” (18), “too much like real life!” (21). His scenario is little more than a vague vision of a couple of guys chasing each other around Texas’ Tornado Country. Ironically, this simplistic scene, which is little more than a failed Hollywood cliché, captures the imagination of a Hollywood producer who offers to bankroll the project, “the first authentic Western to come along in a decade” (30). Here, we are in the presence of what Baudrillard calls the “hyperreal”: “the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced [ . . . .] The hyperreal transcends representation [. . . ] only because it is entirely in simulation [. . . . ] Hyperrealism is made an integral part of a coded reality that it perpetuates, and for which it changes nothing” (Baudrillard’s italics, 8

See Zinman for a lucid account of these aspects in a number of Shepard’s later plays.

The Paradoxes of Literary Realism

109

1983, 146-47). The simulation displaces the real, the representation consumes and negates its referent. Shepard’s critique of popular culture’s mythmaking then takes an unusual turn: the protagonists of the play True West end up in pursuit of each other, locked in a bitter struggle, resisting any form of closure, exactly like the two characters of Lee’s unfinished script, as life comes to mimic a debased version of art. These examples of what might be called postmodern realism demonstrate the vitality and innovation of contemporary writers’ quest for the real. It is now a more self-conscious and audacious enterprise, scrutinizing a wider range of potential fictions and ruthlessly interrogating residual devices of mediation inherent in even those dramatic forms born of suspicion. Perhaps most remarkable is that so vast an array of playwrights choosing to contest society’s master narratives select realism as the mode in which to stage their critiques. It is not a coincidence that generations of African-American playwrights, from Langston Hughes to August Wilson, regularly employed realism to give voice to previously suppressed words, acts, and histories.9 It is equally true that, as Sheila Stowell has pointed out, early twentieth-century writers and spectators found in realism a literary strategy well suited to feminist political struggles; female playwrights like Wendy Wasserstein and Tina Howe also used this form to explore women’s issues. When Puerto Rican playwright Miguel Piñero decided to depict the brutal facts of prison life in Short Eyes, he choose employ a realist poetics. This in turn suggests that realism has a power and efficacy far beyond that of the mere “fabrication” that much modern theory insists on calling it. Though utilizing fictional characters and plots, realism makes factual claims about our social world by challenging existing models and offering alternative ones. Nevertheless, realism as we have seen can never be definitively embodied. There will always be struggles over the means and the content of dramatic representation. Realism will continue to strive for objectivity, typicality, and totality, and it will always fail to achieve these goals. It will never cease to attempt to provide a more plausible model of the world than that set forth by idealist programs, but will always be susceptible to a still more thoroughgoing realist critique.10 Realism will 9

As Patricia Schroeder notes, early twentieth-century practitioners and advocates of African American drama viewed the realist theater “as a place where the prevailing stage stereotypes of African Americans (the demeaning legacy of minstrel shows) could be replaced by representations of human beings” (1996, 92). 10 See George Levine (1981, 4-15) for an excellent account of the repeated cycle of innovative realistic strategies ossifying into stubborn conventions that must themselves be dismantled in the name of realism.

110

Chapter Eight

continue, and so will the conflicts that invariably—and necessarily— surround it. It will project a model of the social world it depicts, and that model may be able to be rejected, though it will always be challenging to confirm. And the way it can be validated is the same way we validate similar statements in nonfictional works of history, sociology, or other disciplines: by determining how well such claims model real world events.

CHAPTER NINE MULTIPLE IMPLIED READERS AND ACTUAL AUDIENCES

In narrative theory and literary analysis, it is regularly assumed that a text has a single implied author and a single implied reader. This is no doubt generally the case, but there are a number of interesting examples that cannot fit within this simple framework. In the second chapter of this book, I argued the case for multiple implied authors; in this chapter I would like to examine the other side of the narrative transaction and investigate the multiple implied readers who are inscribed within the same text. Perhaps the most obvious class of works written for two distinct audiences is one well known to all parents: children’s literature. Many works of this genre appeal both to the child’s mind and sensibility and at the same time to the very different interpretive frameworks of adults. In a stimulating essay on this subject, Per Krogh Hansen quotes Hans Christian Andersen on his intentions to address both groups simultaneously (2005, 101) and goes on to discuss the dynamic of the shifting child-adult audiences in Andersen’s fairy tales, noting cases where “a game of make-believe from the perspective of the child is to be considered a variant of romantic irony seen from the adult perspective” (2005, 110). For a notorious example from American popular culture, we may point to the Betty Boop cartoons of Max and Dave Fleischer, which are filled with brazen sexual innuendo that a child cannot begin to comprehend. Defining the implied reader [implizierte Leser], Wolfgang Iser stated that the implied reader “incorporates both the prestructuring of the potential meaning of the text, and the reader’s actualization of this potential through the reading process” (1974, xii). But much children’s literature has two different prestructurings, one for the simple child and the other for the knowledgeable adult. And both are equally privileged, though in very different ways. And when literary authors like Lewis Carroll get into the act, yet another reader may be prestructured in the text as well, adding the highbrow sophisticate who understands the playful references to logic and parodies of Wordsworth (“The White Knight’s Tale”) to the more ordinary parent and, of course, the child

112

Chapter Nine

audience of the Alice books.1 Political censorship produces its share of double codings. To take one notorious example, a conservative Irish newspaper, Irish Society, printed an unsigned poem called “An Ode of Welcome” to celebrate the return of the Royal Navy ships from South Africa in June 1900 during the Boer War. Its stanzas are appropriately patriotic and indeed jingoistic: The Gallant Irish yeoman Home from the war has come Each victory gained o’er foeman Why should our bards be dumb. How shall we sing their praises Our glory in their deeds Renowned their worth amazes Empire their prowess needs. So to Old Ireland’s hearts and homes We welcome now our own brave boys In cot and Hall; neath lordly domes Love’s heroes share once more our joys. Love is the Lord of all just now Be he the husband, lover, son, Each dauntless soul recalls the vow By which not fame, but love was won. United now in fond embrace Salute with joy each well-loved face Yeoman: in women’s hearts you hold the place. (Gogarty 2012)

The amorous turn toward the end of the poem further enhances the praise of the warriors by affirming their status as heroes in a gendered national allegory as well as promising each the love awaiting them in “women’s hearts.” The poem, however, turned out to have been was written by Oliver St. John Gogarty, and the first letters of each line form an acrostic that produces an entirely opposite assessment of the virtues and rewards of British imperialism from that inscribed in the poem proper. Conditions of political censorship have produced such compositions for some time; one thinks of Milton secreting his radical republican politics within the story of the Fall of Man in Paradise Lost, perhaps the only way 1

On the different audiences in Thackeray and Carroll, see Alan Richardson 1990. Other essays that explore this phenomenon, often called “crosswriting,” are collected in Knoepflmacher and Myers.

Multiple Implied Readers and Actual Audiences

113

he could get them into print after the restoration of the monarchy (see Hill 1978, 341-412, esp. 380-90). Similarly, one may point to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s rousing depiction of Hindu nationalists’ victorious struggle over British forces in Anandamath (1882) by framing the text with antiMuslim rhetoric and a pacifistic epilogue. As Sangeeta Ray notes, “critics have explained the discrepant conclusion [to the novel] as Bankim’s lipservice to the pressures of censorship” (2000, 33). Not surprisingly, the basic divisions in society (gender, race, class, and sexual orientation) regularly produce opposed readers, and these oppositions are regularly inscribed within texts. Historically, African American fiction has been directed to two different audiences. As James Weldon Johnson wrote in 1928: “The Aframerican faces a special problem which the plain American author knows nothing about—the problem of the double audience. It is more than a double audience; it is a divided audience, an audience made up of two elements with differing and often opposite points of view” (1995, 409; see also Adam David Miller, 1987). Raymond Hedin, commenting on Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, explains that “in the post-Reconstruction era, a white listener cannot plausibly be asked to embrace the full implication of [these] tales; but he can become a strategically placed misreader [ . . . ], through whose gaps in perception the tales seep, damaged but recoverable” (1993, 193). The persistence of this issue can be seen by the rhetorical question posed by Mary Helen Washington in 1990: “Is it possible to tell a ‘black’ story without taking the sensitivities of the white audience into account and somehow trying to assuage their fears and anxieties?” (1990, 58-59). Most of the African American writers who published before the 1960’s have had to negotiate this issue, often quite explicitly, as is evident from the subtitle of Ed Bullins’ drama, “The Theme is Blackness: A One-Act Play to be Given Before Predominantly White Audiences.” What has usually resulted in the past is the construction of a dually textured narrative that unfolds one meaning to the majority audience and another, deeper one to the minority community. Sexual orientation has also produced a large number of doublycoded texts. Paula Bennett has convincingly shown how lesbian readers are able to recover a Sapphic subtext in many of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is a masterpiece of homosexual innuendo, starting with the name of the wicked Mr. Bunbury. As Jack explains, “A man who marries without knowing Mr. Bunbury has a very tedious time of it” (1988, 357).2 Nella Larsen’s novel Passing is 2

See Christopher Craft (1990) for a witty and thorough account of the work’s homosexual allusions.

114

Chapter Nine

extremely interesting in this context. Peter Rabinowitz has pointed out that this secretive text actually has “two different authorial audiences, two assumed, intended and necessary targets for the text”; the first one is ignorant of the work’s lesbian subtext, while the other “realizes, and even relishes, the ignorance of the first audience” (1994, 203). Since Judith Fetterley articulated the concept of the “the resisting reader,” it has been clear that reading as a woman often produces a different response from that routinely made from a conventional male standpoint. More relevant to my thesis is gender difference present in reading texts by women where traditional female concerns, such as historically gendercoded domestic activities, take on particular import. As we saw in the preceding chapter, this difference is explicitly thematized in works like Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of her Peers,” where the men in power cannot interpret the crime scene or understand the motives behind the homicide precisely because they cannot understand the sensibilities of the women around them and cannot read the genuine evidence—all familiar domestic items—as anything but innocent “trifles.” Ellen Peel, in a rhetorical approach to feminist utopian narratives, has discussed the ways in which multiple implied readers are addressed in such novels, and shows how effective this strategy can be in transforming the beliefs of actual readers (2002, 27-34, 39-41, 94-97).3 Susan Sniader Lanser has also identified opposed implied readers present in an anonymous nineteenth century poem, “Female Ingenuity,” a verse epistle by a woman who praises her recent marriage and new husband. I know my husband loves nothing more than he does me; he flatters me more than the glass, and his intoxication (for so I must call his love) Often makes me blush for the unworthiness of its object, and I wish I could be more deserving of the man whose name I bear. (Lanser 1992, 9-10)

However, if one reads only the alternate lines, a very different poem emerges as the domestic censor is removed: I know my husband loves nothing more than the glass, and his intoxication 3 Peel writes, “Although critics tend to neglect the possibility of multiple implied readers, in fact it is one way a text can influence a large number of people, since a real person who does not match one implied reader may instead match another” (2002, 29).

Multiple Implied Readers and Actual Audiences

115

often makes me blush for the unworthiness of the man whose name I bear. (Lanser 1992, 11)

Postcolonial writers are often acutely conscious of the implied reader in a different way as they address the ideological implications of audience construction. In a dialectic informed by concepts of authenticity, universality, local respect, and international sales, most authors from the former colonies wish to be perceived as writing for an indigenous audience but do not wish to needlessly alienate the larger Anglo-, Franco-, or Lusophone world. Thus, a Guyanese novelist may well refuse to provide a glossary of the Guyanese terms in the text, since such an appendix would suggest that the implied reader is in fact a middle class individual in or near a metropolitan center: after all, no Englishman feels the need to explain the meaning of Fleet Street, Big Ben, or “the tube,” why then should a postcolonial author employ the British frame of reference? The problem deepens in the case of Maghreb authors who write in French, rather than Arabic; not surprisingly, they are regularly accused of targeting a European or North American audience instead of the society they depict. It is also the case that the Arabic versions of many of these works have been banned in some countries of North Africa and the Middle East. Nevertheless, one suspects that few successful books fail to address in some substantial way each of these different (and even opposed) actual reading communities: the goal of postcolonial literature is not usually to create a different, distinct corpus but to produce a more knowledgeable and democratic readership. The implied reader of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is familiar with both Tristram Shandy and the Ramayana, South Asian history and Bollywood movies, modern European fiction and Indian English idioms. It might be added that the historical audience that approximates this implied reader is continuing to grow. I also want to suggest that high modernism often plays with its audiences in a number of ways, including directing its text to two or more types of reader. Elsewhere, I have argued that Nabokov directs Lolita to a middle brow audience which he scolds, a highbrow audience which he rewards, and a lowbrow audience which he frustrates in its desire for pornography (2014-15). Melba Cuddy-Keane has shown how Virginia Woolf addresses and engages with very different audiences in her prose (2003 138-46). An early modernist like Conrad is also illustrative in this respect. “Heart of Darkness” was first published in the conservative Blackwood’s magazine; Conrad had to couch his denunciation of colonialism in a way that would allow the more imperialistic members of his audience to be able to miss the more stinging aspects of his critique. And it worked: a contemporary reviewer for the Manchester Guardian reassured

116

Chapter Nine

his readers that “It must not be supposed that Mr Conrad makes attack upon colonisation, expansion, even Imperialism” (in Sherry 1973, 142-43). Other texts also seem to be directed to different, incompatible audiences. In “The Secret Sharer,” Conrad seems to be constructing a text that can be effectively read by either of two opposed interpretive stances: one conventional and middle class, the other available only to very skeptical readers or those that listen to the suppressed voices of the sailors (see Richardson 2001a). In addition, as James Phelan (1997) and others have shown, there is yet another hidden text that is only discernible to readers able to detect a gay perspective. Many unnatural narratives are, at least in part, directed to two readers: one who brings traditional realist expectations to the work, and another who appreciates the violations of realism and of conventional narration. Robbe-Grillet describes one form of this duality: “the reader overly concerned to know the story” may feel justified in skipping the descriptions while reading a novel, thinking they are only part of the novel’s frame. But “when this same reader skips the descriptions in our books, he is in danger of finding himself, having turned all the pages one after the other with a rapid forefinger, at the end of a volume whose contents will have escaped him altogether” (1965, 147). At other times the implied reader is a dual figure, one who perceives the generic system of the mimetic framework and enjoys the antimimetic assaults on those conventions. Thus, the implied reader of Beckett’s Molloy or Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow will be aware of the modernist paradigm of unreliable narrators and confusing temporal arrangements evoked by these texts and accept that neither Beckett nor Pynchon will deign to answer the many modernist questions that their works unmistakably raise. Instead, we get an unnatural collapsing of the narratological framework central to modernist fiction. Most of the works I have discussed so far are intended for two distinct implied readers, and both are, in Iser’s term, “prestructured” in the text. It is also evident that there is often a distinct hierarchy among these readers, and that it is an epistemological one: one reader knows both what the other perceives and what it alone can know. Thus, the Black, antiimperial, or unnatural reader can comprehend everything the White or conservative reader does, as well as the deeper meaning and the inside jokes that the other cannot get. Umberto Eco has also commented on the triumph felt by the “critical reader” when she or he enjoys the assumed defeat of less perceptive readers (9-10). The point I wish to stress is not that one of the implied readers is superior or inferior, but that both are prestructured in the same text. Indeed, in the case of Gogarty’s poem and many other such works, if it weren’t for the conventional implied reader in the text, there

Multiple Implied Readers and Actual Audiences

117

would be no published text for the more knowing reader to decode. It is also important to affirm that other relations are possible as well. Though the adult audience of children’s literature understands things that the child cannot, it is not always clear that the older group is the privileged one. If children don’t like it, the author’s sales will suffer. Hansen identifies points in Andersen’s fairy tales where the child reader is primary and the adult is ignored (2005, 110-11). Although the skeptical reader can perceive and explain more than the conventional reader of “The Secret Sharer,” just what is the status of the elusive gay reader of that text? Another interesting case of multiple implied readership is present in Joyce’s Ulysses. The book’s aesthetic alters after the ninth episode, and becomes more expansive, unruly, and, by the time we reach “Eumaeus,” the sixteenth episode, even self-negating. Karen Lawrence writes that in the dead prose of this chapter, “Joyce chooses the ‘wrong’ word as scrupulously as he chooses the right one in the earlier chapters” (1981, 167). The differences are so vast that I have argued in chapter two that we may plausibly posit a different implied author for most of the later episodes of the book, and I will now add that we are equally enjoined to acknowledge at least one other implied reader for the later episodes of the text. To a certain degree, this is a matter of interpretation: formalists who view the novel as an organic totality will strain to find a single implied author and a single implied reader, however difficult it may be to fabricate these unified entities. Poststructuralists who see Ulysses as more decentered, fragmented, and heterogeneous will have no trouble constructing more than one implied author and reader. It is worth noting here that Wolfgang Iser was himself unable to construct a single implied reader from the text of Ulysses: “The reader is virtually free to choose his/her own direction, but he/she will not be able to work his/her way through every possible perspective, for the number of these is far beyond the capacity of any one reader’s naturally selective perception [ . . . . ] There is no overriding tendency, and the mass of details presents itself to the reader to organize in accordance with his/her own acts of comprehension” (1998, 125). Ulysses has succeeded in making Iser sound like an interpretive relativist like David Bleich. Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters is a compelling text that should be of interest to narratologists and theorists of reader response. It is a postmodern epistolary novel that is composed of forty numbered but undated letters. At the beginning of the book, the reader is warned not to read the book in the usual sequence, but rather to follow one of the author’s proposed options (1992, 9); these are partial sequences of most of the letters designed, respectively, for the conformist, for the cynic, or for the quixotic

118

Chapter Nine

reader. Thus, the conformist is the only one who reads letters 39 and 40, only the cynic reads letter 38, and the first letter is intended only for the quixotic, and it is to be read after all the others. Each reading yields a different resolution to the narrative, and each reader selects in part the type of response he or she is to experience. The reading that is produced is thus determined by the sequence of letters one chooses to read.4 Shakespeare famously addresses a number of different audiences, “the great Variety of Readers, from the most able, to him that can but spell,” as the testimony of the first editors of his works affirmed. The plays have passages designed to admonish or flatter the court, tease the merchants, challenge rival playwrights, and amuse “canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake,” as Stephen Dedalus calls them in Ulysses (154). Gary Taylor (1985) has also shown that the published text is directed to a different audience than the one presupposed by the performance text. Perhaps more than any other author, this fountainhead of negative capability is able to compellingly address several antithetical audiences. The number of discrete implied audiences in Shakespeare is substantial. In the cases where clearly different authors write distinct sections of a single text, the case for multiple implied readers is unambiguous. The anonymous journeyman author (George Wilkins?) of the first part of Pericles is addressing a very different and less discriminating authorial audience than Shakespeare did when he completed the play. The same is true of serious, mature Hollywood films that abruptly produce an unmotivated, gratuitously happy ending, and thereby cater to a very different, more timid, and rather craven implied spectator. As we saw in chapter two, one of the most extreme examples of the phenomenon of multiple implied authors is the novel, The Whole Family, written in 1912 by twelve idiosyncratic American novelists of differing temperaments, aesthetics, and abilities. Each wrote a single chapter of the work but, as editor Elizabeth Jordan commented, “Almost every author seemed to consider the chapters before his merely as material leading up to his own work, and to judge it solely in relation to his own plans” (cited in Bendixen 1986, xxvi). The vague implied reader addressed by the genial implied author in the first chapter written by William Dean Howells is entirely displaced by the irreverent implied reader addressed by Mary Wilkins Freeman’s outrageous feminist chapter that followed it. It was so different in spirit and intent that Howells implored Jordan to suppress it: “Don’t, don’t let her ruin our beautiful story!” (Bendixen 1986, xxiii). Similarly, 4

It might be noted that simply reading all the letters in numerical sequence leads to an inconclusive, contradictory ending.

Multiple Implied Readers and Actual Audiences

119

the sentimental implied reader of Edith Wyatt’s chapter is incompatible with the satirical implied reader addressed by John Kendrick Bangs or the supersubtle reader implied by Henry James in his chapter. As one reviewer remarked, “One fancies Mr. James hypnotically persuaded to take his place in the circle between facetious Mr. Bangs and soulful Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and caused to produce an excellent parody of himself” (Bendixen, 1986, xxxvi). This work is addressed to at least six and possibly as many as twelve distinct implied readers. Still other kinds of multiple implied readers can also be adduced. Some texts are written for two different implied readers that inhabit the same body: the first time reader and the re-reader. In an essay on re-reading, Thomas Leitch states that Hitchcock’s “Psycho premises two contradictory audiences. Its narrative structure, presenting a mystery complete with false clues [ . . . ] works best for a first-time audience. But its dialogue [ . . . ] is filled with sardonic jokes that make sense only to an audience who knows how the film will turn out” (1987, 506). Among the examples he provides is Norman Bates’ apologetic statement to his guests, “My mother . . . isn’t quite herself today” (1987, 506). If the first reading gradually discloses the hidden meanings of the text, the second allows us to enjoy the ingenuity with which they are cached. Similar assessments could be made of many modernist works: both Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust indicated that their masterpieces were intended to be first read, and then re-read. Margot Norris has provided a scintillating analysis of the many traps laid for the “virgin” reader of Ulysses. Comparable snares also figure prominently in much of Nabokov’s work; he even went so far as to say, “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader” (1980, 3). He would regularly take this theory to extremes; David Cooper has argued that Lolita cannot be read correctly on a first reading: “An analysis which traces a hypothetical first reading of Lolita can only illuminate the ways in which the text deceives the reader while hiding the solutions to its enigmas in plain sight” (1997, 41). Most reader response theory limits itself to the postulated responses of a reader encountering a text for the first time (a rare exception is Iser 1978, 149-50); a more supple and expansive notion of the implied reader can help us better theorize this phenomenon. 5 Finally, we should also note the case of “private readers,” or deliberate prestructuring that can only be recognized by a few initiates, as when an author discreetly slips the nickname of his or her child into the text 5

For a comprehensive study of rereading and the problems it poses for both indeterminist and for linear, “first time” readings, see Calinescu 1993.

120

Chapter Nine

or otherwise covertly addresses an individual. Or, to return to an example from the beginning of this chapter, the personal associations that would be evident to young Alice Pleasance Liddell when Charles Dodgson read Alice in Wonderland to her.6 Though sometimes trivial and not requiring the attention of literary theorists, this practice can nevertheless assume a substantial import. For decades, critics wondered why Ulysses takes place on June 16, 1904, though a very few always knew its significance. It is now evident the date was chosen because it was the time of Joyce’s first extended encounter with Nora Barnacle, the woman he would live with until his death. As Richard Ellmann observes, “To set Ulysses on this date was Joyce’s most eloquent if indirect tribute to Nora, a recognition of the determining effect upon his life of his attachment to her” (1982, 156). This, I suggest, is one more implied reader we want to be cognizant of. Joyce is following the model of Dante’s La Vita Nuova by inscribing his life and his love into the center of his work, a practice that Stephen Dedalus discusses in his theory of Hamlet. This last reference suggests an even more important private reader: the primary historical addressee of Shakespeare’s sonnets. For centuries, there has been widespread and often highly charged speculation over the possible identity of this young man and the precise nature of his relationship to Shakespeare. A word of caution is now in order. I believe that the presence of multiple implied readers in a single text should not be confused with other, more familiar kinds of ambiguous, polysemous, or multivocal texts.7 Just because a work may legitimately foster several incompatible readings does not mean that we must evoke multiple implied readers to account for this situation. As García Landa has explained (2004), many texts are “overheard” by actual readers who differ considerably from the work’s implied reader. Additionally, a large number of works contain persistent 6

Certainly, Dodgson’s personal prestructuring of the historical Alice Liddell’s response is further evident in the acrostic that forms her full name in the poem at the end of Through the Looking Glass, the first lines of which are: A boat beneath a sunny sky, Lingering onward dreamily In an evening of July Children three that nestle near, Eager eye and willing ear,

7

Meir Sternberg provides an excellent analysis of the variable implied readers of the Bible (1985, 48-56).

Multiple Implied Readers and Actual Audiences

121

coding that may or may not be perceived by the ordinary reader and which do substantially affect the overall interpretation of the text. This is true of most allegories, romans á clef, and intertextual works that rewrite earlier narratives. In the majority of cases, one implied reader is all we need: it is the one we infer from the text that is able to comprehend the full range of the work’s intended meanings. The implied reader gets the allusions, follows out the allegory, and fills in the gaps. In many such works, however, multiple implied readers do exist. Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible had to appear to be a pro-Russian historical narrative and not a parable of Stalinism (which it was) or the director might well have been killed. Hence it had to be directed to two distinct, antithetical implied readers. There is also a subgenre that seems to be consistently directed to two incompatible kinds of readers, and that is what Tzvetan Todorov has identified as the fantastic tale, which presents a narrative of uncanny events that are susceptible either to a naturalistic or to a supernatural explanation. The point of such a narrative is to maintain this interpretive tension as long and as convincingly as possible; it prestructures both an otherworldly reader and a skeptical reader for the duration of the text. Many of these wind up validating a skeptical reader, while others retain their ambiguity. In this latter group we may include E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der goldene Topf, Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” These texts construct and reward more than one implied reader.8 At a more local level, we should not rush to assign different implied readers whenever there is a shift in tone, voice, or style. Bakhtin’s notions of heteroglossia and polyphony are more than adequate to comprehend the rich range of multiple voices that authors love to employ. One only needs a single implied reader even for that extremely polyphonic novel, Moby Dick; its multiple voices, jargons, and perspectives imply a protean but ultimately single implied reader—even for the passages that were written by different historical authors. Similarly, just as we don’t postulate distinct implied authors or readers for the different narratives comprising Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, we don’t need to do so for shorter sections of a work that exhibits distinctive tones. Furthermore, one should not normally expect to find additional implied readers inscribed within a text: after all, one of the purposes of revision and editing is to alter or remove jarring or unharmonious passages. Having said this, I will add that, again at significant moments in 8

For additional discussion and further applications of this model see B. Richardson: 1997a, 44-45 and 85-88.

122

Chapter Nine

the history of literature, we clearly find segments in one work that are so heterogeneous that they seem to have been written by another individual with a different style, goal, and ideology and addressed to a very different implied reader. An example adduced earlier in this book is Chaucer’s “Retraction” at the end of the Canterbury Tales which, we recall, speaks to a glumly moralistic reader, very different from the ribald one that is implied by the tales themselves. For a modern instance we might point to the following passage that describes a verbal exchange between two men during the Napoleonic Wars, one of whom has just declared that he had always done his duty: The blood drinker had listened profoundly. The high arches of his eyebrows gave him an astonished look. He came up close to the table and spoke in a trembling voice. “You may have! But you may all the same be corrupt. The seamen of the Republic were eaten up with corruption paid for with the gold of the tyrants [ . . . . ] Treachery stalks in the land, it comes up out of the ground, sits at our hearthstones, lurks in the bosoms of the representatives [ . . . . ] There has not been enough killing. It seems as if there could never be enough of it. It’s discouraging.” 1925, 26-27

This unfortunate passage, written at about the level of an inferior novel of the swashbuckling genre as found for sale in drugstores, was actually penned by one of the masters of modern English prose. It is not just the decline in his powers but his disgust for revolutionaries that allowed Conrad to write so poorly that it seems to be the work of another, inferior writer and intended for a very different, unsophisticated reader than the one who relishes the subtleties of the prose, dialogue, and characterization in “Heart of Darkness,” Nostromo, or, indeed, the better passages of this novel, The Rover. I suspect that the implications of the preceding analyses for narrative and critical theory are clear. While it remains the case that for most works all that is needed is the standard concept of a single implied reader or authorial audience, it is also true that in many works multiple implied readers are evoked and addressed. Frequently, we may hierarchize them on the basis of knowledge: although the text is addressed to two or more audiences, only one knows all that the other knows as well as what it alone is able to discern. But in other examples this is not the case, and different, non-hierarchized audiences jostle each other uncomfortably. If we construct an image to model this range of implied readers, I suggest we devise a spectrum: on one side, there will be a single, undivided authorial audience.

Multiple Implied Readers and Actual Audiences

123

The next major distinction will identify dual audiences that clearly construct a primary and a secondary implied reader. Here we might also situate the reader and rereader of texts designed to be experienced twice. After this we move on to non-hierarchized dual and triple or quadruple implied readers (e. g., Lewis Carroll’s), the three inscribed reading sequences recommended by Ana Castillo for her novel, and then the multiple implied readers of a novel like The Whole Family. A fertile ground for future analysis is the highly interactive role-playing computer game such as Avatar which requires the player to assume an “avatar” or character; the kinds of events that ensue will vary considerably depending on the kind of persona that is chosen. Finally, we reach the realm of Roland Barthes’ notion of the text, a writerly construct that is legitimately able to be processed from a large number of equally valid positions; the author provides fragmented and disjointed material that the reader is then invited to shape, such as in the more indeterminate works of Gertrude Stein, like “Tender Buttons.” (I would argue, however, that there are far fewer of such thoroughgoing “texts” than Barthes suggests.) Only with such a spectrum, I believe, can we do justice to the great variety of readers inscribed within these singular narratives.

The Actual Reader and the Ethics of Fiction Is it now time to visit the status of actual readers and their place in the narrative transaction. Formalists, in their attempts to valorize the text, tried to make illegitimate the responses of actual readers. It was only natural that Wimsatt and Beardsley, having denounced authorial interpretation in “The Intentional Fallacy” (2020a) should go on to delegitimize actual readers’ responses in their complementary essay, “The Affective Fallacy” (2010b). Two decades after that essay was published, however, reader response studies began to erupt. A good starting point for an account of the return of the reader is the relationship between the implied reader and actual audiences that was postulated by these theorists. Almost all of the conceptions strongly differentiate the two (see Iser, 1978, 27-38); above all, they regularly note that actual readers are vast, their acts of reading highly disparate, they vary over time and across cultures, and their documentation is extremely limited. The notion of an implied reader, by contrast, is none of these. Not surprisingly, many of the earlier theorists of the role of the reader were largely indifferent to or dismissive of empirical accounts of actual readers’ experiences. Wayne Booth had always argued for a close connection between reading, writing, and ethics, and he often made ethical judgments about

124

Chapter Nine

different types of narration. He wrote that “when I read I become the self whose beliefs must coincide with the author’s [ . . . . ] The author creates, in short, an image of himself and another image of his reader; he makes his reader, as he makes himself, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement” (1961, 138). Booth does not divorce the implied reader from the actual reader with the same thoroughness that he separates the implied author and the actual author; later theoretical work in both areas would continue to drive ever larger wedges between them. Booth also mentions his own inability to fully inhabit the implied reader created by D. H. Lawrence in his texts. It is just this opposition, however, that is crucial to literary response: it frames our reading of older authors and those from different cultures and it is frequently invoked by twentieth-century fiction writers who write against the grain of popular attitudes and conventional beliefs. Above all, oppositional reading by actual readers is the goal of what Judith Fetterley calls the feminist “resisting reader” who refuses to be interpolated into a misogynistic text. Phelan states that “within the model of rhetorical reading the flesh-and-blood reader will attempt to enter the authorial audience, but that entrance can be affected by the reader’s own set of beliefs and values” (2005, 59). Recognizing this situation is a reason why Phelan’s approach does not privilege the implied author, the text, or the reader’s response but instead “proposes a feedback loop” among these components of the rhetorical exchange (59). One must go further, however. It is not enough for the actual reader to determine how the implied reader of a narrative would respond; one must also negotiate with that implied reader or, in some instances, reject it. In these cases, the actual reader must oppose the implied reader. Here it is useful to establish that aesthetic and ideological concerns often run on largely separate tracks. One may, and should, despise the political beliefs and/or religious fanaticism of any number of writers—Dante, Celine, etc.—and still admire their rhetorical or formal achievements. At the same time it should be acknowledged that for some texts—and for some readers—the distance is too close and it is not possible to bracket their ideological disgust. It is also the case that many authors—especially politically engaged ones—are more directly concerned with reaching the actual reader rather than constructing a distant or elusive implied reader. As Robyn Warhol notes, “writing to inspire belief in the situations their novels describe, [many nineteenth-century] novelists used engaging narrators to encourage actual readers to identify with the ‘you’ in the text” (1989, 29). Didactic or ideologically driven fiction is intended to change the minds of

Multiple Implied Readers and Actual Audiences

125

actual readers. We are also invited to speculate on the role and identity of the actual reader of unnatural narratives. In the third chapter, I noted that such works tend to dissolve the distinction between the narratee and the implied reader. Unnatural works can destabilize standard categories still further: insofar as they contain impossible events, like time flowing backwards, or parodies of realism, they are clearly fictional. We do not need an author to attest to their fictionality since the reader knows it is impossible for them to be nonfictional. Conventional readers are regularly fascinated or frustrated by unnatural fiction; they often cannot imagine what the implied reader of a work by an author like Robbe-Grillet should do or look for. In such cases, the actual reader cannot (or, at times, will not) imagine how to become an implied reader or member of the authorial audience. There can be an unbridgeable chasm between them. Still other media congratulate themselves on erasing the gap between author and reader. This was often predicated of hyperfiction, in which the actual reader selects the events that will ensue and thereby is said to become a co-creator of the text. However, as Espen Aarseth has pointed out, since the author determines the options and sequences available for the reader to choose from, “the reader’s freedom from linear sequence, which is often held up as the political and cognitive strength of hypertext, is a promise easily retracted and wholly dependent on the hypertext system in question” (1997, 77). The same is largely true of gaming narratives. Fan fiction, the creative work by fans of a narrative, however, is different. It is on the other hand one of the most engaged arenas of actual readers’ presence and, at times, influence. Bronwen Thomas has noted that while scholars have bemoaned the paucity of evidence in the past for interactions between creative artists and their readers, fanfiction sites ensure that this process is “open and available for inspection” (2011, 205). Here we have real readers responding to and developing plotlines and backstories of the work of actual authors, as readers become authors of parallel texts. The circle grows still tighter when we note, as Thomas points out, authors like J. K. Rowling indicate she has drawn on ideas from her readers to develop the storylines of her work. In such a case, actual readers are producing work used by actual authors. The opposite sides of the narrative transaction, author and reader, are here brought together as Booth and Chatman’s linear schema folds back on itself. It should be evident that a thorough account of readers and the model of the narrative transaction must include actual readers, both for the accuracy of the model as well as for recognition of the ideological stakes involved in establishing both concepts. Chatman’s brackets need to be

126

Chapter Nine

removed and discarded, as real readers take their rightful place in narrative and critical theory. We go on to affirm that the various categories of reception are more varied and more fluid than usually conceived. At times, the narratee can merge with the implied reader, there can be multiple implied readers, and the actual reader can be directly addressed by the author.

CONCLUSION: THEORIZING NARRATIVE AND FICTIONALITY TODAY

In this book I have attempted to make a number of contributions to narrative theory, beginning with an argument for the significance of the author in the narrative transaction and in issues of interpretation. I made a case for the implied author, the career implied author, and multiple implied authors. This is balanced in the end of the volume by a correlative appeal for the recognition of multiple implied readers and a note on the significance of actual readers. Throughout these chapters, I have argued for a more inclusive narrative theory that moves well beyond the limited parameters of most conventional narratology and that can embrace antimimetic narratives in all their unruliness. I make a comparable case for a greater utilization of the practices and poetics of drama. In between, I explored the status of lists in narrative and examined claims for the ideological implications of certain narrative forms, arguing for a more nuanced treatment of the former and a more skeptical approach to the latter. Running through the volume is a theory of fictionality that I announce in the first chapter and develop in the seventh and eight chapters on historical characters in works of fiction and on the paradoxes of realism. At the ontological level, the representation of historical figures is no more referential than that of any other fictional characters. Here, historical dramas are the analogues of historical novels, and both take place in a fictional domain. Thus, no reference to extratextual sources can ever falsify material presented under the rubric of fiction. At the same time, works of fiction, especially realist fiction, can make claims about the social world, and can present theses about its structure and movement, and can argue against the “great man” theory of history or the validity of supernatural beliefs. By offering and testing models of society, it can argue that one conception is more accurate than another. The paramount importance of the question of fictionality is repeatedly and insistently being demonstrated. Recently there have been a series of scandals involving fiction disguised as nonfiction and vice versa. As we noted earlier, David Leavitt wrote a novel, While England Sleeps, that is based in part on incidents from the life of poet Stephen Spender;

128

Conclusion

Spender sued Leavitt’s British publisher for plagiarism and was able to get the book suppressed. His U. S. publisher also pulled the novel out of bookstores and pulped several thousand copies. A number of ostensible autobiographers have been exposed as having invented the lives they purported to have lived, most theatrically James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (also known as A Million Little Lies), and most egregiously, Stolen Soul by Bernard Holstein, the story of the Jewish man’s escape from the holocaust—-except that his last name was not Holstein, but Brougham, he was not Jewish, and he wasn’t in Germany during the war but lived in Australia. There have been many more scandals involving fabrication in which a number of athletic coaches at major universities turned out to have falsified parts of their resumes, often claiming to hold advanced degrees which they had never earned. And then there is the case of Ronald Reagan. As Luke Brinker reported in Salon on February 7, 2015 During Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s November 1983 visit to the U.S., Reagan told Shamir that during his service in the U.S. Army film corps, he and fellow members of his unit personally shot footage of the Nazis’ concentration camps as they were liberated. Reagan would tell this story again to others, including Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal. But Reagan was never present at the camps’ liberation. Instead, he spent the war in Culver City, California, where he processed footage from the liberation of the camps.

These examples from literature and film clearly demonstrate the importance of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction as well as the stakes that are involved in making that distinction. If that weren’t enough, the insurrection following the 2020 U. S. presidential election, based in large part on the falsehood that the Democrats had won because the actual number of votes was falsely obtained, again demonstrates the importance of the truth/falsehood distinction. Lives were lost because a falsehood was believed by the rioters. In the real world, there are no “alternative facts.” We have also witnessed a number of theories that attempt to move beyond traditional conceptions in a number of ways. Among academic critical theorists, there is the widespread doctrine of what Marie-Laure Ryan (1997) calls “panfictionality,” or the notion that all statements are essentially fictional. Poststructuralist accounts aligned with or derived from Roland Barthes’ identification of historical with fictional narratives in “The Discourse of History” (1981), vigorously disputed by Lubomir Doležel (1999), are widespread. Hayden White affirms that narrative histories are invariably emplotted with structures taken from fiction, and implies that the narratives they present are largely fictionalized. The cases enumerated above that misidentify fictional and nonfictional works, however, cannot be

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

129

adjudicated by reference to any of the poststructuralist accounts.1 One needs a differentiation between fiction and nonfiction in order to have concepts like falsehood, exaggeration, lie, mistake, accuracy, and slander. In everyday life, all of us—including poststructuralists—insist on the fiction/nonfiction distinction. We do not allow students to receive degrees for plagiarized work or encourage them to add fictional entries to their cv’s. We do not countenance Holocaust deniers, and we help small children differentiate between fiction and reality by telling them that monsters and other night terrors are “only pretend.” We demand a correct accounting of the food we order at a restaurant. We cannot live in society for a day without relying on basic notions of accurate and inaccurate narratives, of truth and falsehood. In our daily practice we do indeed recognize crucial differences between fiction and nonfiction; the panfictionalists are simply incapable of theorizing the beliefs that their behavior shows them to hold in practice. We need to theorize the beliefs we act on, rather than those we merely and inconsequentially profess. In chapters one and seven I have utilized a pragmatic theory of fictionality, an early element of which was first broached by Sir Philip Sidney (the poet “nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth” (2010, 271) and fully developed in the work of John R. Searle and Gregory Currie. This approach focuses on “the activity of fiction making, including the intentions and conventions involved” (Gorman 2005, 164); the position affirms that the criterion of fictionality is that which is designated by its author. A work that is identified as fiction is intended to be read in a different way and is not subject to the rules that bind nonfictional discourse. In particular, I have stressed that works of fiction cannot be falsified by extratextual information. By this formulation I mean both practical falsifiability by comparison to external nonfictional evidence and, following the ideas set forth by members of the Wiener Kreis concerning verifiability, falsifiability in principle, including cases that cannot currently be falsified given our present state of knowledge or technology. I also affirm that there is no impermeable division between fiction and nonfiction, as we have seen in chapter one. Lubomir Doležel states there is an “open boundary” between the two realms; he assets that “the relationship between fiction and history” is primarily “a semantic and pragmatic opposition [. . . . ] Possible worlds semantics has no quarrel with the idea of an open boundary, but couples this acknowledgment with a curiosity to know what happens when the boundary is crossed” (1999, 264). 1

It should be noted that Annjeanette Wiese has recently argued ingeniously for a concept of “truthiness,” as she explores hybrid forms of discourse, which play with the expectations we associate with fiction and nonfiction (2021).

130

Conclusion

Marie-Laure Ryan agrees that there is an “open border” between the two realms (1997, 165). In chapter one, we saw some ways in which this border has been breached, as well as how rare such breaches are. Recently, Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh have engaged in an interesting attempt to expand our concept of fictionality by showing that fictional elements pervade factual discourse just as nonfictional elements are present throughout many works of fiction (2015). We have already noted that any seemingly factual material in a work of fiction may but need not correspond to the actual world; that is a key aspect of the difference of fiction. Moving on, I will observe that what is especially interesting to me and potentially problematic for this new approach is the curious status of some forms of what they call fiction, such as allegory and metaphor. But these cases are not so simple. Typically, an allegory like Plato’s cave is literally false; however, it also makes truth claims and can be falsified. Thus, it is inappropriate to object to Plato that there is no cave in there, and no men were chained. It is appropriate to object, for example, that this is a bad metaphor for our knowledge of the external world and that a cloudy mirror, a film seen from a distance, or an imperfect translation from a difficult language would be a more accurate one. The same is true of some kinds of metaphors: if someone says “That person has the intelligence of a grapefruit,” the statement is literally false yet makes a point that can be contested; one might respond, “No, he just seems slow; actually, he’s quite bright.” This is very different from an authorial narrator saying that a character is mentally challenged: if it is said to be the case, it is the case. Such a statement cannot falsified. In short, not all ostensibly fictional statements are equally fictional. A simple opposition of fiction and nonfiction remains adequate for our purposes, even as we note other kinds of relations between narrative and fictionality. That is, we have deliberate, intended fictions like novels and jokes on the one hand and nonfictional narratives like histories and biographies on the other. There are also falsifiable claims expressed in language that is literally false, like allegories, hyperbole, and many metaphors. We also have deliberate lies, unintended falsehoods, absurd statements, plagiarism, irony, and nonfictional works that are presented as fiction. A narrative that too closely resembles actual events cannot successfully pretend to be fiction; the disclaimer of the characters’ noncorrespondence with any living person only holds if it is in fact the case, as David Leavitt learned. In short, the kind of analysis offered by Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh can help identify the status of fiction beyond the realm of storytelling; on the other hand, we also note the hesitation that many feel

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

131

about considering satirical statements as fiction. Obama claimed his presidential opponent had a bad case of “Romnesia”; such statements are literally false yet make a clear, nonfictional point about events in the world, in this case, Romney’s refusal to discuss the health care plan he had implemented once it became politically useful for him to be silent about it. It is not clear to me that examples like these require us to make any changes in our account of fictionality. My discussion of fictionality can be clarified and exemplified by a comparison of fictional and nonfictional narratives of the same general set of events; this will help identify some of the features of narrative fiction as opposed to a narrated life story. I will juxtapose Deborah Eisenberg’s short story, “Twilight of the Superheroes” (2006) about the 9/11 attack and its aftermath, to a pair of interviews with Christina Pan, a person whose natural narrative describes her own experience of 9/11 attack near the World Trade Center; the interviews were done on October 31, 2001 and March 19, 2003 (Pan 2006). There are a number of obvious differences in the discourse and the construction of each narrative. The prefatory note to the interview in fact acknowledges some of these differences: it asks us to bear in mind that we are reading a verbatim transcript of spoken words, rather than revised, written prose. Pan’s narrative can be powerful and effective even though it has some imperfectly formed and self-corrected sentences: “It was a very scary view, huge smoke. And the sound was so loud it was like the— Niagara Falls was coming down on us” (Pan 2006, 1-8). There are unnecessary repetitions and a few errors (“I have grown up a lot from that experience” 2006, 2-54; surely she means she has “grown a lot” from it); and the inclusion of extraneous information that any novelist would eliminate: the fact that the interview was done before but that audio problems necessitated a re-do is the kind of thing that happens in life but would be never appear in a work of fiction (unless it happened to produce some interesting complication later in the plot).2 By contrast, the literary fiction is a carefully constructed and highly polished piece; one admires sentences like: “Private life shrank to nothing. All one’s feelings had been absorbed by an arid wasteland—policy, strategy, 2 Let me confirm that the purpose of these comparisons is to identify some distinctive

features of fiction, and not to denigrate ordinary conversational storytelling by contrasting it to written prose; one might just as easily compare a mediocre short story with an oral tale related by a brilliant raconteur and end up with an opposite aesthetic evaluation, though here too the difference of fiction would be equally pronounced.

132

Conclusion

goals. One’s past, one’s future, one’s ordinary daily pleasures were like dusty little curios on the shelf” (Eisenberg 2006, 36). Whereas the oral narration is largely linear, the fiction is filled with anachronies. Its unusual sequencing invites the reader to speculate on the purpose of this organization, rather than assume, as one would in real life, that the narrator is a sloppy or confused storyteller who, rather like Tristram Shandy, simply cannot tell a linear narrative. The details of the setting of the oral narrative are often absent or left vague and need to be clarified to the interviewer. Eisenberg, by contrast, often deliberately places her readers into a kind of temporal or spatial limbo as events unfold without their knowing just where or when, but in each case she goes on to provide the requisite information and thereby creates specific rhetorical effects. Despite focusing primarily on the character Nathaniel, Eisenberg has a larger social subject. The events of 9/11 are also set in counterpoint to the partially parallel story of Lucien’s trauma over his wife’s untimely death from cancer. These two plotlines are themselves framed by the older stories of trauma and death in Europe before and during the Second World War that caused Nathaniel’s grandparents to emigrate. By contrast, the parallels in Christina Pan’s story, the Japanese invasion of China experienced by her parents and her own repressed memories of the Vietnam-China war are, narratively speaking, unlucky episodes of her family’s personal history, not a series of events planted by an author to better differentiate characters and create an architectural or thematic symmetry. Causality is necessarily different in fiction and life, as I have discussed at length elsewhere. When we learn that Christina’s husband, while looking for her father, just happens to run into him on a street corner, we see that life has provided a convenient coincidence that no good novelist would ever stoop to utilize (see Richardson 1997a, 157-75). Finally, the conversational narrative is generated by the promptings of the interviewer, while the work of fiction is narrated from a third person, omniscient stance; Eisenberg can reveal the actual contents of her characters’ minds while in life, we can only guess what others may be thinking. The construction of beginnings in each text is significant. In the oral history, the interviewer wants the subject to “go back to the beginning,” “to the beginning where you were born, how you found out—how you came to be where you are, how you came to America, how you met your husband, and so forth” (2006, 1-1). Christina Pan clearly has a different view of beginnings and the relevant sequences of events that follow from them. She gives cursory answers or ignores these questions, and after a mere three lines of speech she brings her story up to the job she holds at the time of the interview. For Pan, everything begins on the morning of 9/11, and is almost

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

133

entirely focused on her family: specifically, where each family member was just prior to the attack and how far they were from the towers. While the interviewer keeps trying to bring out relevant aspects of Pan’s personal history, Pan is concerned with the familial situation on that day. One seems more concerned with time, the other with space; one with the individual, the other with the family. This contrasts quite vividly with the beginnings of Eisenberg’s story. The syuzhet begins with an imagined, future retelling of the “miracle” of the new millennium—the day that nothing happened; a day that marked no significant new beginning—the world’s computers did not crash on Y2K. But what is the beginning of the story or fabula that the text discloses? What is the story’s first relevant narrated event? Most readers will have to pause to try to remember it. During what is called by the characters “airing their dreary history” (13), we learn that Nathaniel’s parents “sailed as tiny, traumatized children in separate voyages right into the Statue of Liberty’s open arms.” The grandparents, we are informed, “never recovered from their journey to the New World, to say nothing of what preceded it” (2006, 13). What preceded it is left almost entirely unnarrated, as Eisenberg both gestures toward yet refuses to provide the same backgrounds and origins that the interviewer wanted Christina Pan to produce. The novelist will not offer up a definitive beginning and carefully ordered causal sequence; instead, she gives us a layered series of semi-connected events, each of which is a continuation of earlier events. I feel Eisenberg would readily endorse the statement by Sartre’s Roquentin “Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out. That’s all. There are no beginnings” (1964, 39). The question of endings is equally fraught. In the second interview eighteen months after the attack, one sees Christina Pan repeatedly attempt to bracket off 9/11, to relegate it fully to the past, to insist on an ending to this episode in her life. She even suggests that she is somehow better off for having experienced it: “I think I am better than before September 11th” and “I think I have grown [. . .] a lot from that experience, [. . . ] I would feel the positiveness that I have gained” (2006, 2-54). She rates her positive feeling now at 1.5, while before the attack she rated herself at 1.0. Personally, I can only read this as a desperate attempt to impose a positive teleology on all the events that make up one’s life, however awful those events might be. The interviewer, however, keeps asking leading questions to draw out some recognition of the continuing effects of 9/11, and it is evident that these effects are considerable. In this case the interviewer is right; the story is not over. Pan turns out to be very concerned about larger future consequences: the possibility of another attack, and what she fears are the ominous

134

Conclusion

implications of the impending war with Iraq. Eisenberg’s story resolutely refuses any gesture of closure; the central characters are left in medias res and with a number of significant issues to confront, as the characters’ general “holding pattern” reflects the larger image of United States in a period of significant transition. The final section of the text is tellingly called, “Waiting”; in it Lucien watches a dream-like vision of his dead wife recede far away: “From farther than the moon she sees the children of some distant planet study pictures in their text: there’s Rose and Isaac at their kitchen table, Nathaniel out on Mr. Matsumoto’s terrace, Lucien alone in the dim gallery—and then, the children turn the page” (2006, 42). This preternatural, temporally conflated, fabricated focalization compositionally balances the opening scene’s imaginary looking back to the present from a time in the future. The aesthetic symmetry only underscores the unresolved nature of the characters’ situations, a practice that seems to exemplify Russell Reising’s postulate in Loose Ends of the impossibility of effective closure in American literature that deals with larger, irresolvable issues in American society. We may also suggest that Eisenberg’s narrative can function as an implicit critique of social scientists and historians who operate with too simple, crisp, and definitive notions of beginning and ending. In any nonfictional narrative, the author is the narrator; in a work of fiction, there is always a difference, whether small or vast, hidden or obvious (see Cohn 1999, esp. 1-17). The narrator of “Twilight of the Superheroes” is not Deborah Eisenberg. More importantly, a work of fiction is not falsifiable the way nonfiction is. Christine Pan can make factual mistakes in her account that can be corrected by reference to the historical record. Fictional narrative is different and, as we have seen, cannot be falsified the same way. It makes no sense to check phone directories, property deeds, or birth records to determine whether Eisenberg’s characters actually lived in lower Manhattan at the time; these are invented individuals, and thus only live in the fictional world created by the writer (any correspondence is coincidental, as prefatory authorial blurbs routinely insist). Their ontological status is fundamentally different from that of actual persons. In sum, we see that there are profound distinctions between fiction and nonfiction in the areas of language, narration, sequence, causal relations, the selection and ordering of events, and real world reference— and this is with a fairly realistic text whose storyworld is a largely a historical one. It is essential to acknowledge and explore fiction’s distinctive alterity, and to observe the fundamental difference between fiction and nonfiction. It is essential for criticism and theory, for a functioning democracy, and for everyday existence. We neglect it at our peril.

APPENDIX I TEACHING STORY, PLOT, TIME, AND NARRATIVE PROGRESSION WITH TO THE LIGHTHOUSE AND OTHER TEXTS

I regularly include discussions of narrative theory in undergraduate classes on the modern novel, modernism, and twentieth century literature, as well as in more theory-oriented classes. The best general overview that I have found is Suzanne Keen’s Narrative Form (2015). This can be usefully supplemented with Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (Herman et al, 2012), which contains short sections on several areas of narrative theory by leading practitioners of four different approaches. The areas covered include authors and narrators, story and plot, character, space, value, and reading and reception. The authors are James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (rhetorical narratology), Robyn Warhol (feminist), David Herman (mind-oriented), and myself (unnatural). For classes that are substantially devoted to issues of story and plot, I recommend my anthology, Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames (Richardson 2002). The first thing I do when teaching story, plot, and narrative progression to undergraduates is to explain the crucial distinction introduced by the Russian Formalists in the early part of the twentieth century: that between fabula and syuzhet, or what I term (following the usage of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan) “story” and “text,” that is, the difference between the full story that we are able to reconstitute in its chronological sequence and the way that the events are actually set out page by page. I give the students a simple sequence like 1) John died today. 2) He fell sick a year ago. 3) In his youth, he seemed to have much promise. 4) He was often sick as a child. 5) He was born in 1961.

The text presents the events in a reverse chronological order; we rearrange them to get the sequence of the story, that is, 5), 4), 3), 2), 1). I mention that

136

Appendix I

many kinds of works like folktales, myths, histories, traditional plays, expressionist fiction, and thrillers tend to be told in a linear fashion where story and text follow the same general trajectory. I note that even in these cases there are always differences between the two due to the “duration” or pacing of the events in the text; I encourage the students to identify which ones are compressed, stretched out, or left largely untold. Such differences are particularly noticeable in works that contain a large temporal ellipsis, such as Father Time’s announcement that “I slide/ O’er sixteen years and leave the ground untried/ Of that wide gap” at the beginning of the fourth act of The Winter’s Tale or the gap of several years that signals closure at the end of a novel like Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education. It is important to mention that nonlinear works, in which the sequence of the story and the text don’t match up, are common from Homer’s epics to daily accounts of professional competitions described in the sports section of the newspaper (the ending is usually presented first, especially if it is a dramatic one). I historicize the practice by noting that some of the most extensive divergences between story and text sequences can be found in Romantic narratives (Wordsworth’s The Prelude) and modernist fiction and film (Ford, Proust, Faulkner, Kurosawa). Passages of reverse chronological narrative (Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow) or films that employ antilinear sequencing (Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, Christopher Nolan’s Memento) are great to display at this point since they help show how “unnatural” or defamiliarizing this kind of narrative sequencing is as well as how much causal connection is already present in most sequences of events. Students are often intrigued to learn that some works of experimental fiction, following the lead of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a novel disguised as a commentary to a poem, present an ostensibly nonnarrative text from which a compelling story can be derived; such textual forms include dictionaries, an art exhibition catalogue, liner notes to a record album, an auction catalogue, a multiple choice exam, and a suggestive shopping list (see Richardson 2019a, 136-39). Michèle Robert’s 1993 “Une Glossaire/A Glossary” is an especially teachable example of this form, which also raises interesting issues of story and gender (see Page 2003). At this point we are ready to move on to plot proper. I start with some basic questions that I encourage the students to ask of each text: What are the major and minor stories being told? How many are there? How are they connected to each other? In what sequence are they arranged? Do the subplots mirror the main plot? Are there miniature sequences that mirror the whole (mises en abymes)? Are there seemingly unnecessary parts or sequences that could be deleted or that don’t fit the overall pattern of the

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

137

text? Are there any temporal oddities in the narrative? We go on to some working definitions: Aristotle considered plot (mythos) to be the most important aspect of a narrative, more important than character, language, or spectacle, and most critics coming after him have tended to agree with this assessment. In its most general sense, plot refers to the way a group of related events are organized together. (Handouts of material from Prince’s Dictionary or introductory volumes by Suzanne Keen or Porter Abbott will provide sound definitions, well-chosen examples, and clarifications of differing usages. The online Living Handbook of Narratology (ed. Hühn et al.) is also very useful.) According to many accounts, the organization of events, when considered at its largest level, generally follows a basic pattern of a state of harmony, a disruption of that harmony, and an attempt to restore the original harmony. Plot emanates from what D. A. Miller calls a condition of “disequilibrium, suspense, and general insufficiency from which a given narrative appears to rise” (1981, ix) or, more simply, a problem appears at the beginning of the story: Odysseus wants to return to his home, a plague is ravaging Thebes, a ghost tells Hamlet to avenge his father’s murder. Even before the characters are introduced or the setting is established, the general trajectory of the events of Pride and Prejudice is suggested by its first sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” The initial disequilibrium leads to a desire to rectify the situation; for most of the narrative the protagonist seeks to alter the problematic situation; the end is signaled when the problem is resolved (or, in some cases, shown to be unresolvable). This basic pattern is found in many works, as popular formulas attest: the Broadway musical comedy schema is often described as “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl”; a “whodunnit” is a shorthand depiction of the basic trajectory of nearly all detective novels: a corpse turns up, a detective is brought in to investigate, and the plot concludes with the revelation of the identity of the killer; in these cases, we typically follow a linear text in order to determine the starting point of the story. Peter Brooks states that plot is “the dynamic shaping force of the narrative discourse” (1984, 13) and “the organizing line and intention of narrative” (1984, 37); he suggests that its basic trajectory is a stimulation out of quiescence that seeks to regain equilibrium through a discharge of its accumulated energy. I ask the students whether they can think of any exceptions to this general position as a way of preparing them for some of the texts to come. I introduce the ideas of Vladimir Propp, who devised a “morphology” of the Russian folktale by analyzing basic structural components or “functions” common to seemingly disparate tales. For Propp, “The king

138

Appendix I

sends Ivan after some marvel; Ivan departs” and “The stepmother sends her daughter for fire; she departs” have the same structure: the dispatch and the departure on a quest are constants. In later stages of the quest, obstacles impede the protagonist’s progress; these too are, in terms of structure, the same, though the form they take may be very different (Richardson 2002, 73-75). This general model of plot was expanded by a number of French structuralists in the 1960’s and 1970’s to try to embrace all narratives; it is now employed in some cognitive sciences. Students find it especially useful and even illuminating to analyze short stories, Hollywood films, television shows, genre fiction, and the homiletic narratives told by their parents. Of course, many stories don’t quite resemble the tightly connected Oedipus Rex model favored by theorists like Aristotle, Forster, Crane, and Brooks. “Marcel becomes dissatisfied with his life; he then decides to become a writer” is not a very useful description of the plot of In Search of Lost Time. Aristotle was fully aware of alternate methods of story construction and condemned the episodic plot, in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence (2010, 94-95). Many modernist novels, as will be discussed further below, eschew conventional notions of plot and scorn suspense; they have an attenuated trajectory of events that frequently dispenses with causal connection in favor of connections provided by symbolic descriptions, thematic associations, or a parallelism of situations and events. A plot summary of Ulysses or To the Lighthouse will not begin to suggest the extraordinary richness of the actions, events, and perceptions in each work. I take care to point out that there are also many works that draw on nonplot-based orders to arrange events. Novelists may use many different kinds of scaffolding that complements or even supersedes and replaces a conventional, plot-driven arrangement (see Richardson 2019a, 83-97). This can occur when a work follows the order of an antecedent text (Joyce’s Ulysses), is ordered in the form of a musical composition (the Sirens episode of Ulysses), presents events to illustrate a thesis (Johnson’s Rasselas), or is designed to produce a geometrical shape or numerical pattern such as a circle (Wittig’s Les Guérillères), a triad (Dante’s Commedia), or an hourglass shape (James’ The Ambassadors). More radical are the pictures that precede and seem to generate the subsequent events in a work like Goethe’s “Novelle” or the alphabetical generation of texts like Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa. Then there are the words or concepts that generate the events of many nouveau romans: thus, the title page of Jean Ricardou’s La Prise de Constantinople displays the name of the publisher, Les Éditions de minuit. These words in turn produce the characters, Ed and Edith, and the setting—the hill of Sion. The

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

139

temporal setting of the first episode, naturally, is during the night. And concerning that most famous of anti-novels, Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie (Jealousy), the author has indicated that his method of composition was first to write a single scene and then to construct a series of variations on that scene, variations that taken together suggest but whose contradictions preclude a single, consistent story line. Hyperfictions provide still other possibilities. A useful exercise for extra credit is to invite students to trace out the pattern of one of these alternative orderings in an unconventional text. The instructor may choose to establish a general pedagogical arc during the course of the semester by moving from the more straightforward traditional works to the apparently plotless works of modernism and going on to contradictory narrative possibilities and concluding with the dynamics of serial narrative. In what follows, I will offer descriptions of five pedagogical applications of the theory of plot and narrative progression to two stories by James Joyce, a novel by Virginia Woolf, a text by Alain Robbe-Grillet, and the final episodes of the popular television series, “Sex and the City.” “Araby” is a fairly straightforward narrative, indeed a naturalistic version of a traditional quest narrative, which begins with a basic disharmony, the youthful narrator’s unexpressed infatuation with his neighbor, identified only as Mangan’s sister. When they finally speak, she asks whether he will be going to the bazaar, “Araby,” which she is unable to visit. He mentions that if he does go, he will bring her back a present. Here we have a decision to alleviate the disequilibrium, a plan to enable its achievement and the initial act to set the plan in motion. The boy must wait for his uncle to return home to give him the money to pay for the journey and present; the uncle is late but offers him a florin. The “test” ensues. Unfortunately, the hour is late, boy has too little money, and the saleswomen are more interested in flirting with some Englishmen than in serving him. He realizes his quest will end in failure; gazing up into the darkness, he sees himself “as a creature driven and derided by vanity” (Joyce 1996, 35). By paying close attention to the narrative’s themes and images, we can also infer other social and ideological narratives at work: the fact that the boy is ultimately stymied by the immovable presence of the Englishmen is a miniature allegory of the disempowerment of the Irish under the British occupation and sets this narrative within the larger patterns of Irish history. Furthermore, symbolic and imagistic associations equate unrealistic childish infatuation with the fictitious nature of the progressions common to the genre of romance and with the illusory beliefs of Christianity. Each

140

Appendix I

is an idealistic fiction that has no application in the real world. Finally, it is a narrative of desire and a narrative driven by desire, the object of whose quest in almost entirely deindividualized, little more than the object of a young male gaze. “The Dead,” by contrast, is a much more elusive narrative. I encourage students to apply James Phelan’s account of narrative progression to help clarify the dynamics at work in this piece (Richardson 2002, 21116). Phelan’s is a rhetorical approach and is concerned with the ways in which authors generate, sustain, develop, and resolve readers’ interest in a narrative. He differentiates between two kinds of instabilities; the first kind are those that arise within the unfolding of the story in the text, and include instabilities between characters; these are created by situations and are complicated through actions. They include the familiar disharmonies described above by D. A. Miller. Phelan also includes another class of instabilities that are located within the discourse of the work; they arise between authors and/or narrators, on the one hand, and readers on the other. He calls these “tensions” and identifies them as instabilities of value, belief, opinion, knowledge, and expectation. If two characters desire the same object, we have an instability; if the narrative takes a very strange turn, we have a tension. As the text of “The Dead” begins to unfold, the reader is quickly presented with an instability: his aunts’ annual party is well under way, but Gabriel has not yet arrived. His presence is especially important for the supervision of another guest, Freddy Malins, who is notorious for turning up drunk. Gabriel quickly arrives, however, and the aunts are relieved. Malins is in passable shape, is handed a glass of lemonade, and behaves himself the rest of the evening. The anticipated instability proves to be a nonissue. Gabriel has a failed conversation with Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, who is helping out at the event; this scene looks forward to Molly Ivors’ later castigation of Gabriel for writing book reviews for a conservative newspaper that is opposed to Irish home rule. This is the first genuine instability in the story. Gabriel is annoyed and flustered, and can come up with no satisfactory answer to her accusations. She then takes his hand and says “in a soft, friendly tone” that she was only joking (1996, 188); shortly after, she departs. Despite the fact that she has attempted to ensure that there would be no instability between them, Gabriel keenly feels the sting from her attack. In both cases, Gabriel is much more affected by his interactions with the women than the text suggests is appropriate; this in turn sets up an interpretative tension: why is Gabriel’s judgment of himself so much more severe than Joyce’s seems to be?

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

141

More potential instabilities emerge as Gabriel continues to expect things to turn out badly; he fears he has chosen the wrong tone for his speech, that its allusions will backfire, and that it will be a failure. However, it is enthusiastically received: his apprehensions concerning its success turn out to have been unfounded. The party continues without incident; finally, the guests start to leave. The text is now two thirds done; up to this point, we have had no significant instability, with the sole exception of Gabriel’s private resentment of Miss Ivors’ words. This fact in turn provokes the work’s most important tension (one which has been present for some time): why are we being given such a detailed account of an inconsequential chronicle of minor events? Many first time readers legitimately wonder: where is the plot? Gabriel then sees his wife listening to a song. She is quite moved by it, though Gabriel mistakenly thinks she is becoming sexually aroused. The final pages dramatize a series of misunderstandings and suspicions in the mind of Gabriel as his wife unfolds the story of her affection for a young man, Michael Furey, many years before in Galway. Though very ill, Furey sang the same song to her in a cold rain as she was about to leave for Dublin; he died a few days later. Gabriel is miserable; he feels his affection is pathetic compared to a love that is happy to risk death. He questions the basis of their marriage, the pattern of his life, and his sense of self, as tears fill his eyes. This summary of events reveals that, in a modernist work like “The Dead,” an analysis based on plot or instabilities alone is inadequate to explain the dynamics of narrative progression. It needs to be supplemented by a focus on the tensions in the text as well as other forms of progression, including the parallelism of the positioning of the three scenes which depict Gabriel’s unsuccessful encounters with women associated with the West of Ireland, the area least affected by English conquest and, by implication, Ireland herself. Though not connected by the succession of events, they form a structural design that helps explain the totality of the work and its movement toward ever more powerful and personal expressions of repressed Irish culture and history. This in turn underscores and clarifies the mythological trajectory of the vengeance of the Eumenides in the form of Michael Furey on the man who would deny or evade the history and culture that his death represents. Architecturally, allegorically, and thematically, all sequences come together in Gabriel’s final act of recognition. It is also important to show how the material of the story can be inflected by and even stretch beyond the text of “The Dead.” This novella is the final piece in Dubliners, a series of stories that collectively reflect and reproduce key events. The repeated image of Dubliners living a “death-in-

142

Appendix I

life” is given a final resonant image in the snow that lies upon all the living and the dead. Similarly, the swooning of Gabriel’s soul is the final variation on the theme of paralysis that figures in all the stories. The coin that Gabriel tries to give to Lily recalls the gold coin that the predatory Corley extracts from another servant girl in “Two Gallants”; Lily’s statement that “the men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” (Joyce: 1996, 178) is an effective summary of most of the male/female relations depicted in the collection. Gabriel’s story also echoes that of the narrator in “Araby” as both end as amorous failures, impeded by British rule, their harsh epiphanies coming at night, causing tears and excessive selfrecrimination. I also inform the students of the later mention of Gretta Conroy in Ulysses, which is set several years after the events depicted in “The Dead.” This mention suggests that no major transformation has occurred in the Conroy household, and simultaneously shows how a story can continue across texts. In my graduate classes, I encourage the students to speculate on the theoretical implications of such expandable stories, transtextual characters, and the persistence of the storyworld from work to work. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is an excellent text to discuss a wide range of narratological concepts, starting with beginnings. Some undergraduates are surprised to learn that the author has to select the point at which to begin her novel, and intrigued that this choice can have repercussions that directly affect what is to come. The opening sentences of the novel, “‘Yes, of course, if its fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added” (1981, 3), perfectly fulfill Horace’s injunction to start in medias res. At the same time, it eludes Aristotle’s notion of a story being an organic whole with a starting point that does not itself follow anything by causal necessity (2010, 94). There is clearly plenty of relevant backstory which we will never learn, though we can make a number of plausible inferences. What is at stake in beginnings is readily disclosed by comparing this one to the opening sequences of other works like The Mayor of Casterbridge: “One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village if Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot,” Beckett’s “The Calmative”: “I don’t know when I died. It always seemed to me that I died old, about ninety years old, and what years, and that my body bore it out, from head to foot,” and Midnight’s Children: “I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947.”

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

143

Woolf goes on to thematize beginnings much later in To the Lighthouse as Lily Briscoe works up the nerve to start her painting: “One line placed on the canvass committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions” (1981, 157); we then discuss with the help of Edward Said (Richardson 2002, 256-66) what some of these decisions might be. I often add the biographical facts that Mrs Dalloway, the novel Woolf had written just before To the Lighthouse, had proven fairly difficult to begin and only commenced properly after numerous false starts, while To the Lighthouse flowed quickly and magisterially from first to last. It is clear that texts of high modernism are often extremely useful for discussing the basic elements of plot, if only because they frequently distort, attenuate, or seem to lack them altogether. In fact, an effective essay assignment is the question “What exactly happens in To the Lighthouse?” Much of this work can appear to be seemingly “plotless,” that is, devoid of standard elements of intrigue or, for many, obvious human interest. I ask the students to determine what constitutes a good plot, and a minimal plot. I then ask whether any of those elements are gender inflected. We trace together the numerous challenges to reception, paragraph by paragraph, then page by page and section by section. Students are able to show exactly how they are surprised by the text and to determine the assumptions that allowed them to become surprised. We go on to talk about the work’s dubious teleologies and attenuated causal trajectory, and ask what it means for Woolf to represent her plot with the curious geometrical shape of a fluffy H, as she noted in her diary. That is, what does it say about this novel and what does it say about the concept of plot? We also discuss the positions of Nancy K. Miller on plots and plausibilities in women’s fiction (Richardson 2002, 110-29) and, looking ahead to Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Richardson, 2002, 282-99), talk about the “marriage plot” that decrees that almost every female protagonist in world literature before 1960 ends up either married, dead, or in painful isolation. In some cases, this discussion changes students’ entire approach to reading fiction. Many students admire Peter Brooks’ treatment of plot in a narrative as an analogue of human sexual experience and of the general trajectory of all life forms that conclude in the final release of death (Richardson 2002, 130-37). To the Lighthouse of course does not fit this pattern well at all; the major deaths occur in the middle of the book; the major personal and interpersonal issues are not resolved at all; and Mrs. Ramsay’s personality and influence live on many years after her physical demise. This engenders discussions of the modernist difference as well as a feminist difference in narrative construction. Lily Briscoe does not receive a substantial answer to the question of the meaning of life. “The great

144

Appendix I

revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one” (1981, 161). This leads seamlessly to Susan Winnett’s incisive critique of Brooks’ relentlessly androcentric model and assumptions, and to speculation on what a theory of plot based on human rather than male sexuality might be like (Richardson 2002, 13858). We might also note that Woolf’s is an ideal text to illustrate Genette’s categories of order, duration, and frequency (Richardson 2002, 25-34) as well as to see how such a work might play with or transcend these categories, and even offer a kind of cubist temporality for the space of a few chapters. We discuss Woolf’s creation of simultaneity within a narrative as well as her production of an accelerated version of linearity (one which she would go on to parody in Orlando, a text that has a differential chronology: 350 years pass while Orlando only ages a few decades) and then go on to discuss the work’s engagement with historical chronology, deep time, and time of its original reception (see Richardson 2019a, 121-25). Closure is in many respects the perfect subject of narrative theory for undergraduates, even those who are the most ardently antitheoretical: everyone has many times been disappointed by an ending in a novel or a film. I ask the students to reflect on the reasons why they have experienced this disappointment, and they are nearly always able to give reasons for it. In doing so, they are doing narrative theory, and have been all their adult lives. We then discuss which options are most suitable for which kind of narrative: a decisive conclusion that wraps up all the loose ends is most appropriate for a tragedy, though it may be much less important for a picaresque novel or many kinds of comedy. And for a serial fiction like a roman fleuve, an ongoing television drama like The Sopranos, or a soap opera, it may be undesirable or largely impossible, as Robyn Warhol points out in her masterful study of the genre (Richardson 2002, 229-48). Before the students have finished reading To the Lighthouse, I usually ask them to write up a scenario that discloses how they think the novel will (or should) end. I collect these but do not grade them, and pass them back once we reach the actual ending of the book. This allows the students to compare their possible endings—some of which are delightfully outrageous—with the one that Woolf finally decided on. We then discuss the consequences of her choice, both what it does and what it refuses to do. Here I introduce the terms “completeness” and “closure” as articulated by David Richter and James Phelan (Herman et al. 2012, 60-61). In this text we clearly see a typical modernist strategy (which Woolf herself theorizes in her discussion of Chekhov in “The Russian Point of View”): the major

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

145

conflicts between the characters subside briefly, but remain unresolved and the final fates of all are largely left up in the air; nevertheless, an unambiguous aesthetic closure is attained as Lily’s vision and her painting are completed as the boat is landing on the island after a ten year gap between intention and action—during which time the original motivation has been forgotten. Just before this point the children in the boat come to a brief uneasy peace with their father. They soften while he is reading, an event that mirrors the peaceful act of reading done by his wife and himself at the end of part one. This time there is a difference: we see the father turning the ever diminishing number of pages in his volume as we readers do the same to the book in our hands, thus reenacting his completion of his reading as the boat completes its journey. Likewise, the attainment of Lily’s completed vision and artwork takes place simultaneously with our reception of the final words of the text. It is as if author, character, and reader are united in unprecedented act of fusion. Robbe-Grillet’s “The Secret Room” is an illuminating example of an unnatural narrative which requires a different kind of story analysis and helps to reveal the fundamental elements of all narratives. The reader is presented with several depictions of what superficially appears to be the same scene at different times. I ask the students just what is being represented. Some say a series of actions, scrambled in time; others suggest the story shows several visual images, presumably paintings, that either can form a narrative or else are merely variations on a theme. Both interpretations are right and wrong: characters are described as moving, which indicates the presence of a narrative, though other images are depicted as painted. We then trace out the apparent temporal sequence of the images. The reader is invited to construct a narrative of a gothic murder and the escape of the killer from the pieces of the text. However, because of contradictions in the descriptions of the setting, it remains a quasi-narrative that ultimately parodies rather than embodies the fabula/sjužet distinction. I then ask the class what pattern is described by the strange sequence of events. They are usually stumped at this point. I inquire whether any of the many descriptions in the text can act as a mirror of this sequence of events, and whether there is any geometrical shape we might use to describe this pattern. If necessary, I go on to add that these two questions have the same answer. The governing (or generating) figure is the spiral, which is manifested in numerous spatial patterns as well as in the work’s temporality. It becomes clear that the text we have been reading is not a realistic representation of a series events that could occur in the world, but rather a uniquely fictional creation that can

146

Appendix I

only exist as literature. I go on to ask how Robbe-Grillet achieves closure in such an antimimetic text; the answer is surprisingly simple: the final image is largely static: the wound has congealed, the killer has vanished, the only sign of motion is the complicated spirals of smoke from the incense burner. Finally, I ask whether this text transgressively disrupts or unwittingly embodies familiar cultural stereotypes of the pattern of male aggressor/female victim, and note that Robbe-Grillet has asserted that pornography demands a linear chronology. We go on to discuss the interconnected dynamics of story, closure, and culture. I remind them that the ending is where we look to find the moral of the story, explain the traditional critical valuation of closure in literary studies from Aristotle to Peter Brooks, and note that closure is also the site where ideological issues are most forcibly present. I ask the students to note whether endings are open or closed, expected or surprising, credible or contrived, and tightly connected or arbitrarily conjoined to the rest of the narrative. Do Phelan’s concepts of completeness or closure best describe the ending of the narrative? I also ask whether a given ending embodies or contests culturally sanctioned resolutions. I explain that Russell Reising has argued that many works that dramatize major unresolved social contradictions seem compelled to leave the fates of the protagonists similarly unresolved, and note that the ending is the point where an ideological closure may require an ending in conformity with official social doctrine (Richardson 2002, 314-28). Masculinist societies insist on a very limited range of possible options for female protagonists, and I remind them of Rachel Blau duPlessis positions in her important study, Writing beyond the Ending. Virginia Woolf praised unresolved endings in the name of realism and, as we noted in chapter five, for many years it was postulated that an open, inconclusive ending was more socially progressive than a fixed, closed conclusion, though it has become clear that no narrative form has any inherent ideological valence—especially now that open endings have become rather conventional. These theoretical tools prepare us to analyze several types of stories, including those presented in serial form. If possible, I assign the class to analyze critically the plot developments and narrative trajectories of a popular serial on television. One semester I was teaching a class on critical and narrative theory as the final episodes of “Sex and the City” were being aired. I asked the class to predict the fates of the various principals and we discussed what would be most likely, most appropriate, and most satisfying. I also discussed the narratological and ideological implications of different possible endings, beginning with E. M. Forster’s quip that if it weren’t for death and marriage, he didn’t know how the average novelist would

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

147

conclude. Would the show’s writers dare to present a largely open ending without resolving the central characters’ dilemmas, as would seem appropriate to the general logic of the show? And how much would it resist cultural master narratives? While on this subject, we also note how other social plots have historically produced a narrow range of possible conclusions, such as the frequent deaths of homosexual characters at the end of works by heterosexual authors, the ultimately sacrificial status of many working class or minority characters in White middle class fiction (what we might call the “Gunga Din effect”), and the inevitable deaths of women who have been raped in traditional Bollywood films. Scrutiny of the ways narratives embody existing social scripts can help students see how and why they progress to a given ending, and why a text that eludes the expected development can be so affecting. With these conceptual tools in place, we were ready to analyze the final episode of “Sex in the City.” The show’s conventional concluding episode, with its glorification of the marriage plot, proved a disappointment to most—though a very instructive one. The class was especially annoyed at the “taming” of Samantha. She had been one of network television’s most transgressive characters, a successful upper middle class woman who had plenty of sex with numerous partners without any negative consequences. Late in the series, when it was determined that one of the four women would develop a serious illness, it came as no surprise to those attuned to the cultural master narrative that Samantha would be the one stricken with breast cancer. Her uncharacteristic conversion to a monogamous lifestyle was solidified in the final episode, which further heightened the ideological closure that was made to contain the story line. Students participating in this class felt they learned a considerable amount about the poetics and ideology of narrative progression. The theoretical analysis of story, plot, and narrative progression provide essential tools for the understanding of narrative in all its forms, popular, classic, modernist, avant garde, and nonfictional. This investigation discloses the shifting dynamics of narrative beginnings, middles, and endings, their respective relations in different works, and the ideological forces they can be harnessed to. Such analysis enriches students’ understanding of the narratives that circulate around them and provide useful theoretical frameworks that they are able to successfully apply in their other classes in literature and the humanities.

APPENDIX II DEFINITIONS OF KEY TERMS

Character: an agent in a work of fiction; not a person, but may resemble one. Fabula: the chronological story or stories that can be derived from the text of a narrative. May also include multiple, circular, contradictory, hypothetical, and self-negating stories. Fiction: a narrative, usually of prose, that presents imaginary characters and events and indicates their fictionality. Works of fiction cannot be falsified by reference to any work of nonfiction. Literature: usually 1) a member of the class of traditional or contemporary genres of composition, such as lyric, epic, drama, essay, autobiography, graphic fiction, hyperfiction, etc. The term may also refer to 2) works that display features generally considered to constitute literary value such as stylistic eloquence, formal symmetries, and elaborate but unobtrusive structuring. Analogous to Jakobson’s poetic function. Narrative: the representation of a causally related series of events Novel: an extended fictional narrative in prose Story, general: a synonym for narrative; Story, technical: a synonym for fabula Tale: a synonym for a work of prose fiction, oral or written, often narrated in a conversational tone, typically of moderate length Text: a general term used to depict any piece of writing or, occasionally, oral performance

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

149

Work: a general term to describe an entity of prose or verse; ie, a work of criticism, a work of fiction, a work of history. Many of these terms are super- or subdivisions of another. Thus, short stories, novellas, and novels are all fiction, both fictional and nonfictional narrative are narratives, narratives as well as lyric poems are texts and works, and may be literature 1) if they adhere to conventional rules of recognized genres. These relations are hierarchical and not reversible: not all texts are literature, not all literature is narrative, not all narratives are fictional, and not all fictions are novels. Some distinctions may cut through the others. T. S. Eliot once sniffily asserted that many people write verse, though few write poetry. He is referring here to verse possessing literary quality; literary quality can be found in any medium, from epics to detective novels (Dashiell Hammett’s) to biographies (Boswell’s, Churchill’s) and histories (Gibbon’s), philosophical works (Hume, Russell), to superior works of advertising.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aarseth, Espen J. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Abbott, H. Porter. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2011. “Reading Intended Meaning Where None Is Intended: A Cognitivist Reappraisal of the Implied Author.” Poetics Today 32 no. 3: 461-487. Adelson, Leslie A. 2018. Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense: Alexander Kluge’s Literary Experiments in German Culture and Narrative Form. Berlin: de Gruyter. Alber, Jan, 2009. “Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them,” Storyworlds 1: 79-96. —. 2016. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Alber, Jan and Rüdiger Heinze, eds. 2011. Unnatural Narratives— Unnatural Narratology. Berlin: de Gruyter. Alber, Jan and Brian Richardson, eds. 2020. Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. 2010. “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models.” Narrative 18, no. 2: 113-36. —. 2013. “Introduction.” Alber, Jan, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson, eds. 1-15. Alber, Jan, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson, eds. 2013. A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative. Ohio State University Press. Anouilh, Jean. 1960. Becket, or the Honor of God. Translated by Lucienne Hill. New York: Signet. Arnavas, Francesca. 2021. Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” and Cognitive Narratology. Berlin: de Gruyter. Ayer, Alfred Jules. 1952. Language, Truth and Logic. New York: Dover. Bal, Mieke. 2009. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 3rd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Barney, Stephen A. 1982. “Chaucer’s Lists.” In The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield,

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

151

Eds. Larry D, Benson and Siegfried Wenzell, 187-223. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1972. Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. —. 1976. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Translated by Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang. —. 1977a. Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. —. 1977b. Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. —. 1981. “The Discourse of History,” Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook, vol 3, edited by E. S. Shaffer, 7-20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2010. “The Death of the Author.” In V. Leitch, 1322-26. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Phillip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e). Beckett, Samuel. 1958. Endgame. New York: Grove. Beckett, Sandra. 1999. Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults. New York: Garland. Bédier, Joseph. 1965. The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. Retold by Joseph Bédier. Translated by Hilaire Belloc. New York: Random. Begnal, Michael. 1996. “The Fledgling Fictionalist.” https://thenabokovian.org/node/49457 [Internet] Belsey, Catherine. 1985. Critical Practice. London: Methuen. Belknap, Robert E. 2004. The List. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bendixen, Alfred, ed. 1986. The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors. New York: Ungar. Bennett, Paula. 1990. “The Pea That Duty Locks: Lesbian and FeministHeterosexual Readings of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.” In Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, edited by Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, 104-25. New York: New York University Press. Berkowitz, Gerald M. 1992. American Drama of the Twentieth Century. London: Longman. Bond, Edward. 1977. Plays: One. London: Methuen. Booth, Alison, editor. 1993. Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press. Booth, Stephen, “Speculations on Doubling in Shakespeare’s Plays.” In Shakespeare: The Theatrical Dimension, edited by Philip C. McGuire and David A. Samuelson, 103-31. New York: AMS. Booth, Wayne C. 1983. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd Ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

152

Bibliography

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. 1990. Film Art. 3rd Ed. New York: McGraw Hill. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1998. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin. Breton, André. 1920. “PSST” http://www.geocities.ws/dadatextes/psst.html www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/begnal.htm Brinker, Luke. 2015. https://www.salon.com/2015/02/07/ronald_reagans_wartime_lies_the_ president_had_quite_a_brian_williams_problem/ Brooke-Rose, Christine. 1975. Thru. London: Hamish Hamilton. Cabrera Infante, Guillermo. 1971. Three Trapped Tigers. Translated by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: Harper and Row. Calinescu, Matei. 1993. Rereading. New Haven: Yale University Press. Calvino, Italo. 1981. If on a winter’s night a traveler. Translated by William Weaver. New York: HBJ. Carroll, David. 1971. “Introduction.” George Eliot: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul. Castillo, Ana. 1992. The Mixquiahuala Letters. New York: Doubleday. Chambers, Ross. 1998. Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. —. 1990. Coming to Terms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/257/257-h/257-h.htm Clayton, Jay. 1993. The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cocteau, Jean. 1963. The Infernal Machine and Other Plays. New York: New Directions. Cohn, Dorrit. 1999. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Conrad, Joseph. 1925. The Rover. New York: Doubleday. Cooper, David L. 1997. “Lolita: A Text for Rereading,” The Reader 37: 2742. Couturier, Maurice. 1995. “I, X Does Not Equal Nabokov,” www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/outnar.htm Craft, Christopher. 1990. “Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest,” Representations 31: 19-46. Crowley, Mart. 1996. Three Plays by Mart Crowley. Los Angeles: Alyson, 1996. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. 2003. Virginia Woolf, The Intellectual, and the

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

153

Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. de Jong, Irene. 2009. “Metalepsis in Ancient Greek Literature.” In Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature, edited by Jonas Grethlein and Antonios Rengakos, 86-116. Berlin: de Gruyter. Diengott, Nelli. 1993. “The Implied Author Once Again.” Journal of Literary Semantics 22: 68-75. Doležel, Lubomir. 1998. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —. 1999. “Fictional and Historical Narrative: Meeting the Postmodernist Challenge.” In Narratologies: New Essays on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman, 247-73. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Doolittle, Hilda (HD). 1992. Paint It Today. New York: New York University Press. Drndiü, Daša. 2015. Trieste. Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursaü. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Eco, Umberto. 1979. The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eisenberg, Deborah. 2006. Twilight of the Superheroes. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. Elam, Keir. 1980. Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. New York: Methuen. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In V. Leitch, 955-961. Ellmann, Richard. 1982. James Joyce. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ernaux, Annie. 1993. Simple Passion. Translated by Tanya Leslie. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Ensslin, Astrid and Alice Bell. 2021. Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Felski, Rita. 1989. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Field, Andrew. 1986. VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Crown. Finn, Ed and Kathryn Cramer, eds. 2015. Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future. New York: HarperCollins. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London and New York: Routledge. —. 2008. “Narrative and Drama.” In Theorizing Narrativity, edited by John Pier and José Ángel García Landa, 355-84. Berlin: de Gruyter.

154

Bibliography

Foley, Barbara. 1986. Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Forrester, James. 2010. “Books Blog” The Guardian 6 Aug 2010. FoĜt, Bohumil. 2016. An Introduction to Fictional Worlds Theory. Frankfurt: Lang. Frayn, Michael. 2000. Copenhagen. New York: Random. Gabriel Vásquez, Juan. 2011. A Secret History of Costaguana. Trans. Anne McLean. New York: Riverhead. Gallop, Jane. 2011. The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time, Durham: Duke University Press. García Landa, José Ángel. 2004. “Overhearing Narrative.” In The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology, edited by John Pier, 191-214. Berlin: de Gruyter. —. 2005. “Hindsight, Intertextuality, and Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov’s ‘Christmas,’” Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 5: 265-91. Gelderman, Carol. 1983. “Hyperrealism in Contemporary Drama: Retrogressive or Avant-Garde?” Modern Drama 26: 357-67. Genette, Gérard. 1976. “The Boundaries of Narrative,” New Literary History 8: 1-13. —. 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —. 1990. “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative,” Poetics Today 11: 75574. Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman. 1988. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for Joyce’s Ulysses. Rev ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Glaspell, Susan. 1987. Plays by Susan Glaspell, edited by C.W.E Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gogarty, Oliver St John. 2012. https://www.best-poems.net/oliver_st_ john_gogarty/ode_of_welcome.html Greene, Gayle. 1991. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grishakova, Marina. 2011. “Narrative Causality Denaturalized.” In Alber and Heinze, 127-44. Hafez, “Ode 487,” translated by Richard Le Gallienne, nd, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50489/ode-487 Hamon, Philippe. 1982. “What is Description?” In French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, edited by Tzvetan Todorov, 147-78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hansen, Per Krogh. 2005. “A Real Story? On Hans Christian Andersen’s Sense of Narrativity and his Double Narratee.” In When We Get to the

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

155

End: Towards a Narratology of the Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, edited by Per Krogh Hansen and Marianne Wolff Lundholt, 99-118. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark. Hedin, Raymond. 1993. “Probable Readers, Possible Stories: The Limits of Nineteenth Century Black Narrative.” In Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response, edited by James L. Machor, 180-208. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. —. 2011. “Introduction,” The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, edited by David Herman, 1-40. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Herman, David and James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol. 2012. Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Herman, Luc and Bart Vervaeck. 2019. Handbook of Narrative Analysis. 2nd Ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hernadi, Paul. 1985. Interpreting Events: Tragicomedies of History on the Modern Stage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hill, Christopher. 1978. Milton and the English Revolution. New York: Viking. Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2014. Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition. New York: Routledge. Holden, Jonathan. 1980. The Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Homans, Margaret. 1994. “Feminist Fictions and Feminist Theories of Narrative.” Narrative 2, no. 1: 3-16. Hornby, Richard. 1986. Drama, Metadrama, and Perception. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press. Hwang, David Henry. 1988. M. Butterfly. New York: New American Library. Iser, Wolfgang. 1974. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —. 1998. “Patterns of Communication in Joyce’s Ulysses,” A Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses, edited by Margot Norris, 108-28. Boston: Bedford. Iversen, Stefan. 2013. “Unnatural Minds.” In Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson, 94-112. Jacobus, Mary. 1982. “The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss.” In Writing and Sexual Difference, edited by Elizabeth

156

Bibliography

Abel, 37-52. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jahn, Manfred. 2001. “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama,” New Literary History 32, no 3: 659-80. James, M. R. 2005. “Preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary,” Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories: The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Volume 1, edited by S. T. Joshi, 255-56. New York: Penguin. Jameson, Fredric. 2013. The Antinomies of Realism. New York: Verso. Johnson, James Weldon. 1995. The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, edited by Sondra Kathryn Wilson. Volume 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joyce, James. 1986. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Random. —. 1996. Dubliners. Edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin. Keen, Suzanne. 2015. Narrative Form. 2nd edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. 2006. The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy. Berlin: de Gruyter. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2015. “What is an @uthor,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 6 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/uthor/ Klaiber, Isabell. 2011. “Multiple Implied Authors: How Many Can a Text Have?” Style 45, no. 1: 138-52. Knoepflmacher, U. C. and Mitzi Meyers, eds. 1997. Cross-Writing Child and Adult, special issue of Children’s Literature 25. Kukkonen, Karin and Sonja Klimek, eds. 2011. Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Berlin: de Gruyter. Lamarque, Peter. 2009. The Philosophy of Literature. Malden MA: Blackwell. Lanser, Susan S. 1992. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —. 2001. “(Im)plying the Author.” Narrative 9: 153-60. Lawrence, Karen. 1981. The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leitch, Thomas M. 1987. “For (Against) a Theory of Rereading,” Modern Fiction Studies 33: 491-508. Leitch, Vincent B. et al., editors. 2010. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd edition. New York: Norton. Lejeune, Philippe. 1982. “The Autobiographical Contract.” In French Literary Theory Today, edited by Tzvetan Todorov, 192-222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levine, George. 1981. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

157

Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leyner, Mark. 1995. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. New York: Random. Livingston, Paisley. 1996. “From Work to Work.” Philosophy and Literature 20, no 2: 436-454. Mäkelä, Maria. 2006. “Possible Minds: Constructing—and Reading— Another Consciousness as Fiction,” FREE Language INDIRECT Translation DISCOURSE Narratology: Linguistic, Translatological and Literary-Theoretical Encounters. Tampere Studies in Language, Translation and Culture, Series A, Vol 2. Edited by Pekka Tammi and Hannu Tommola, 231-60. Tampere: Tampere University Press. —. 2013. “Realism and the Unnatural.” In Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson, 142-66. Masur, Kate. 1999. “Edmund Morris’s Dutch: Reconstructing Reagan or Deconstructing History.” Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, December 1999. http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectiveson-history/december-1999/edmund-morriss-dutch-reconstructionreagan-or-deconstructing-history Mathews, Harry. 1999. “Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farcie double),” The Way Home: Selected Longer Prose, 9-25. London: Atlas. McCarthy, Mary. 1942. The Company She Keeps. New York: Harcourt, Brace. McGann, Jerome J. 1988. Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgement of Literary Work. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Miller, Adam David. 1987. “It’s a Long Way to St. Louis: Notes on the Audience for Black Drama.” In The Theatre of Black Americans, edited by Errol Hill, 301-6. New York: Applause. Miller, D. A. 1981. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Miller, Nancy K. 1981. “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction,” PMLA 96: 36-48. Moore, Lorrie. 1986. Self Help. New York: New American Library. Moraru, Christian. 2005. Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism. Madison NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Murphy, Brenda. 1987. American Realism and American Drama, 18801940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1957. Pnin. New York: Doubleday. —. 1959. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. New York: New Directions. —. 1962. Pale Fire. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

158

Bibliography

—. 1964. Bend Sinister. New York: Time. —. 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. —. 1970. The Annotated Lolita. Edited by Alfred Appel. New York: McGraw Hill. —. 1973. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill, —. 1974. Look at the Harlequins! New York: McGraw Hill. —. 1980. Lectures on Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch. —. 1984. The Man from the USSR and Other Plays. Translated by Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1995. Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Knopf. Nelles, William, 1993. “Historical and Implied Authors,” Comparative Literature 45, no. 1: 22-46. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh. 2015. “Ten Theses on Fictionality,” Narrative 23.1: 61-73. Norris, Margot. 2011. Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nünning, Ansgar. 2005. “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, 89-107. Malden MA: Blackwell. Nünning, Ansgar and Roy Sommer. 2008. “Mimetic and Diegetic Narratology: Some further Steps toward a Transgeneric Narratology of Drama.” In Theorizing Narrativity, edited by John Pier and José Ángel García Landa, 331-54. Berlin: de Gruyter. Nuttall, A.D. 1981. “Realistic Convention and Conventional Realism in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Survey 34: 33-37. Otsuka, Julie. 2012. The Buddha in the Attic. New York: Random. Ott, Eirik R. 2007. “Receipt Found in Parking Lot of the Super Walmart.” Greatest Hits: Poems to Read Out Loud. 45. Austin TX: Sanctum Sanctorum Productions. Ovid. 2001. Amores. Book I, translated by A. S. Kline. https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/AmoresBkI.php#an chor_Toc520535270 Page, Ruth. 2003. “Feminist Narratology? Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on Gender and Narrativity.” Language and Literature: Journal of the Poetics and Linguistics Association 12 no. 1: 43-56. Pan, Christina J., 2006. “The Reminiscences of Christina J. Pan,” September 1, 2001 Narrative and Memory Project. Oral History Research Office, Columbia University.

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

159

Patron, Sylvie. 2020. “Anima by Wajdi Mouawad: Unnatural or Naturalized?” In Alber and Richardson, 31-52. Pavel, Thomas. 1986. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pearson, Nels C. 2001. “‘Outside of Here It’s Death’: Co-dependency and the Ghosts of Decolonization in Beckett’s Endgame,” ELH 68 no.1: 21539. Peel, Ellen. 2002. Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. —. 2021. “Unnatural Narratology and the Return of the Repressed Reader,” Narrative 29 no. 1: 71-90. Perec, Georges. 1997. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Translated by John Sturrock. New York: Penguin. Pfister, Manfred. 1988. Theory and Analysis of Drama. Translated by John Halliday. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phelan, James. 1989. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1997. “Sharing Secrets.” In Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, edited by Daniel Schwarz, 128-44. Boston: St. Martins. —. 2005. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —. 2011. “The Implied Author, Deficient Narration, and Nonfiction Narrative: Or, What’s Off-Kilter in The Year of Magical Thinking and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?” Style 45 no. 1: 119-37. Power, Arthur. 1974. Conversations with James Joyce. New York: Barnes and Noble. Proust, Marcel. 1984. Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, edited by Terrence Kilmartin, translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner. New York: Carrol and Graf. Punday, Daniel. 2020. “Metalepsis and Emotion in Unnatural Stories.” In Alber and Richardson, 99-114. Rabinowitz, Peter. 1987. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —. 1994. “‘Betraying the Sender’: The Rhetoric and Ethics of Fragile Texts.” Narrative 2 no. 3: 201-13. —. 2011. “‘The Absence of Her Voice from That Concord’: The Value of the Implied Author,” Style 45 no. 1: 99-108. Ray, Sangeeta. 2000. En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

160

Bibliography

Richardson, Alan. 1990. “Nineteenth Century Children’s Satire and the Ambivalent Reader,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 15: 122-26. Richardson, Brian. 1987. “‘Time is Out of Joint’: Narrative Models and the Temporality of the Drama,” Poetics Today 8 no. 2: 299-309. —. 1997a. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative. Newark DE: University of Delaware Press. —. 1997b. “Beyond Poststructuralism: Theory of Character, the Personae of Modern Drama, and the Antinomies of Critical Theory,” Modern Drama 40 no. 1: 86-99. —. 2000a. “Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression: Theorizing the Collapse of Time, Voice, and Frame,” Narrative 8 no. 1: 23-42. —. 2000b. “Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory,” Style 34 no. 2: 168-75. —. 2000c. “Theatrical Space and the Domain of Endgame,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 14 no. 2: 67-76. —. 2001a. “Construing Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer”: Suppressed Narratives, Subaltern Reception, and the Act of Interpretation,” Studies in the Novel 33 no. 3: 306-321. —. 2001b. “Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama.” New Literary History 32 no. 3: 681-94. —, ed. 2002. Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. —. 2006. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. —. 2014. “Fictional Minds: Natural and Unnatural,” Proceedings of the 7th Narrative Matters Conference: Narrative Knowing. https://hal-univdiderot.archives-ouvertes.fr/ NARRATIVE_MATTERS/hal-01111077. —. 2014-15. “The Use and Abuse of Reading in Lolita,” Nabokov Studies 13: 195-202. —. 2015. Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. —, guest editor. 2018. Unnatural Narratives: Theories and Practices. Frontiers of Narrative Studies. 4, no. 1: 1-122. —. 2019a. A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-first Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. —. 2019b. “Recent Work in Unnatural Narrative Studies,” Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 9: 37-46. —. 2020. “Unnatural Characters in Fiction, Drama, and Popular Culture: Beyond Humanist and Cognitive Models.” In Alber and Richardson, 3563.

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

161

Richardson, Dorothy. 1990. “Foreword to Pilgrimage.” In The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Edited by Bonnie Kime Scott, 42932. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Richter, David. 1984. “Narrative Entrapment in Pnin and ‘Signs and Symbols.’” Papers in Language and Literature 20: 418-30. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 1983. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen. Roberts, Michèle. 2003. “Une Glossaire/A Glossary.” In During Mother’s Absence, 131-81. London: Virago. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1965. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove. —. 1968. “The Secret Room,” Snapshots. Translated by Bruce Morrissette, 63-72. New York: Grove. —. 1977. “Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction,” Critical Inquiry 4: 120. Rohy, Valerie. 2015. Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Romagnolo, Catherine. 2020. “(Un)Natural Connections: Feminist Experimentation and Unnatural Narration in Nights at the Circus.” In Alber and Richardson, 13-30. Ronen, Ruth. 1997. “Description, Narrative, and Representation,” Narrative 5 no. 3: 274-286. Rose, Mark. 1974. Shakespearean Design. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rose, Paul Lawrence. 2005. “Frayn’s ‘Copenhagen’ Plays Well, at History’s Expense,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 5, 2000, B4-B6. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 1997. “Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality,” Narrative 5 no. 2: 165-87. —. 2011. “Meaning, Intent, and the Implied Author,” Style 45 no.1: 29-47. Sarris, Andrew. 1962-63. “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture 27: 1-8. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1964. Nausea. Translated by Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions. Schmid, Wolf. 2013. “Implied Author,” Living Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/implied-author-revised-versionuploaded-26-january-2013. Scholes, Robert. 1975. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of

162

Bibliography

the Future. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, Schroeder, Patricia R. 1996. “Remembering the Disremembered: Feminist Realists of the Harlem Renaissance.” Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, edited by William Demastes, 91-106. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Searle, John. 1979. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William. 2004. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 5th Edition. Edited by David Bevington. New York: Longman. Shang, Biwu. 2019. Unnatural Narratives across Borders: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Shapiro, Gavriel. 1999. “Setting His Myriad Faces in the Text: Nabokov’s Authorial Presence Revisited.” Nabokov and His Fiction, edited by Julian W. Connolly, 15-35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shapton, Leanne. 2009. Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Shaw, George Bernard. Saint Joan. 1971. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1954. “A Defense of Poesy,” in Shelley’s Prose, or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy. Edited by David Lee Clark, 275-297. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Shepard, Sam. 1981. Seven Plays. New York: Bantam. Sherry, Norman, editor. 1973. Conrad: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul. Shumway, David. 2017. “What Is Realism?” Storyworlds 9.1-2: 183-96. Simion, Eugen. 1996. The Return of the Author. Translated by James W. Newcomb and Lidia Vianu. Chicago, Northwestern University Press. Sinclair, May. 1990. “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson.” In The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Edited by Bonnie Kime Scott, 44248. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Spivak, Gyatri Chakravorty. 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge. Sternberg, Meir. 1985. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stoppard, Tom. 1984. Squaring the Circle. London: Faber. Stowell, Sheila. 1992. “Rehabilitating Realism,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 6: 81-88. Strindberg, August. 1961. “Author’s Foreword to Miss Julie,” translated by Elizabeth Sprague. In Playwrights on Playwriting, edited by Toby Cole, 171-82. New York: Hill and Wang.

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

163

—. 1967. Open Letters to the Intimate Theater. Translated by Walter Johnson. University of Washington Press, Swift, Jonathan. 1801. The Works of the Reverend Jonathan Swift, ed. Thomas Sheridan. London: Hansard. Taylor, Gary. 1985. To Analyze Delight: A Hedonist Criticism of Shakespeare. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Thomas, Bronwen. 2011. “‘Update Soon!’ Harry Potter Fanfiction and Narrative as a Participatory Process,” New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age, edited by Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas, 205-19. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Tillotson, Kathleen. 1959. The Teller and the Tale. London: Rupert HartDavis. Tynjanov, Jurij. 1971 (1927). “On Literary Evolution.” In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, edited by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, 66–78, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Usmiane, Renate. 1990. The Theatre of Frustration: Super Realism in the Dramatic Work of F. X. Kroetz and Michel Tremblay. New York: Garland. Vonnegut, Kurt. 1991. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Random. Walsh, Richard. 2007. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Washington, Mary Helen. 1990. Black Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds. New York: Doubleday. Weese, Katherine. 2014 “‘Tú no Eres Nada de Dominicano’: Unnatural Narration and De-Naturalizing Gender Constructs in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Journal of Men’s Studies 22 no. 2: 89-104. Wellek, René. 1963. Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Whiteside, Anna. 1987. “Theories of Reference.” In On Referring in Literature, edited by Anna Whiteside and Michael Issacharoff, 175-204. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wiese, Annjeanette, 2021. Narrative Truthiness: The Logic of Complex Truth in Hybrid (Non)Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Wikander, Matthew H. 1986. The Play of Truth and State: Historical Drama from Shakespeare to Brecht. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilde, Oscar. 1988. The Plays of Oscar Wilde. New York: Random. Williams, Raymond. 1972. “Realism and the Contemporary Novel.” In Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: A Reader, edited by David Lodge, 581-91. New York: Longman.

164

Bibliography

Williams, Tennessee. 1955. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: New American Library. —. 1970. The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions. —. 1986. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: New American Library. Wilson, August. 1985. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. New York: Penguin. Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe C. Beardsley, 2010a. “The Intentional Fallacy.” In V. Leitch, 1230-46. —. 2010b. “The Affective Fallacy.” In V. Leitch, 1246-61. Winterson, Jeanette. 1993. “The Poetics of Sex,” Granta 43: 309-20. Wood, Michael. 1994. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Woolf, Virginia. nd [1929]. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt. —. 1942. “The Novels of E. M. Forster” In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, 162-75. New York: Harcourt. —. 1981. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt. Wordsworth, William. 2010. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” In V. Leitch, 559-79. Zenith, Richard. 2001. “Introduction.” In Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, edited and translated by Richard Zenith, xi-xviii. New York, Penguin. Zinman, Toby Silverman. 1986. “Sam Shepard and Super-Realism,” Modern Drama 29: 423-30. Zola, Emile. 1961. “Naturalism on the Stage.” Translated by Samuel Draper. In Playwrights on Playwriting, edited by Toby Cole, 5-14. New York: Hill and Wang.

INDEX

Aarseth, Espen, 125 Abbott, H. Porter, 24, 49 African American texts and poetics, 67, 102-04, 113 Alber, Jan, 39, 44, 46-47 Alberti, Leon Battista, 97 Amico di Sandro, 30 Amis, Kingsley, 30 Andersen, Hans Christian, 111 Anouilh, Jean, 88-89 Aristophanes, 6, 98 Aristotle, 73, 74, 77, 94, 137, 138 Atwood, Margaret, 22-23 auteur, 30 author, 1-8; death of, 2-4, 5 author, implied. see implied author autofiction, 15-16 Bal, Mieke, 24 Barney, Stephen A., 49 Barthes, Roland, 2-4, 5, 65-66, 73, 123, 128 Beardsley, Monroe, see Wimsatt and Beardsley Beckett, Samuel, 73-83 beginnings, narrative, 75-76, 13233, 142-43 Begnal, Michael, 10 Bendixen, Alfred, 28 Bennett, Paula, 113 Berenson, Bernard, 30 Berkowitz, Gerald M., 102 Bharata, 73 Bond, Edward, 106 Booth, Alison, 70 Booth, Wayne, 21, 22-23, 28, 29, 31, 123-24 Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thomson, 30 Borges, Jorge Luis, 22, 53

Bradley, A. C., 2 Breton, André, 51-52 Brinker, Luke, 128 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 33 Brooks, Peter, 137, 143-44 Bullins, Ed, 113 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 77 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 56 Calvino, Italo, 56 Campin, Robert, 30 Carroll, David, 25 Carroll, Lewis, 111, 120 Carter, Angela, 64 Castillo, Ana, 117-18 causal laws of fictional worlds, 79, 132 censorship, 112-16 Chambers, Ross, 3-4 character theory and analysis, 7981, 87 Chatman, Seymour, 7, 23-24, 29, 125-26 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 113 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 6, 11, 29, 122 Chekhov, Anton, 144 Chesnutt, Charles W., 113 Churchill, Caryl, 79-80 Cixous, Hélèn, 48, 70 Clayton, Jay, 70 Cocteau, Jean, 76 Cohn, Dorrit, 15, 66, 93 Conrad, Joseph, 9, 10, 26, 99, 11516, 122; as character, 90-91 Cooper, David, 119 Corneille, Pierre, 77 Couturier, Maurice, 18 Crowley, Mart, 69 “crown jewels” test of valid authorial interpretation, 4

166 Cuddy-Keane, Melba, 115 Defoe, Daniel, 1 denarration, 37 'ROHåHO/XERPLUQ, 91-92, 128, 129 Dowden, Ernest, 21 Drabble, Margaret, 70-71 'UQGLü'DãD Eco, Umberto, 116 écriture féminine, 66, 70 Eisenberg, Deborah, 131-34 Eisenstein, Sergei, 121 Elam, Keir, 106-07 Eliot, George, 25 Eliot, T, S. 1, 2 Ellmann, Richard, 120 Endgame (Beckett), 73-84 endings, 69-71, 76, 133-34, 144-47 Enquist, Per-Olov, 88 Ernaux, Annie, 15-16 Euripides, 98 “Exquisite Corpse,” 27 fabula and syuzhet, 135-36, 145 falsifiability criterion, 86, 129 fanfiction, 125 Felski, Rita, 70 feminist theory and practices, 7, 40, 62-66, 67, 70-71, 99-100, 11415, 143-44 Fetterley, Judith, 114, 124 fictionality, 12-15, 86-95, 127-34 Field, Andrew, 10 Fielding, Henry, 12, 29 Figes, Eva, 64 Fludernik, Monika, 34 Ford, Ford Madox, 26 Forrester, James, 94 Forster, E. M., 146 )RĜW%RKXPLOQ frames, 82 Frayn, Michael, 85-86, 89-90 Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 28, 118 Fuller, Charles, 103-04 Gabriel Vásquez, Juan, 89 Gallop, Jane, 3 García Landa, José Ángel, 10, 120

Index García Marquez, Gabriel, 72 Gelderman, Carol, 105-06 Gems, Pam, 88 Genette, Gérard, 12, 15, 23, 26-27, 34, 36, 50, 73, 76 Gifford, Don, 55n1 Glaspell, Susan, 99-100 Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 112 Gorman, David, 129 Gunga Din effect, 147 Hafiz, 6 Hamon, Philippe, 49 Hansberry, Lorraine, 103 Hansen, Per Krogh, 111, 117 Hardy, Thomas, 94 Hedin, Raymond, 113 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 80 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 29 Heinze, Rüdiger, 39 Heisenberg, Werner, 85-86, 89-90 Hellman, Lillian, 102 Hemingway, Ernest, 28 Herman, David, 7, 24, 25, 38, 46, 49 Herman, Luc and Bart Vervaeck, 36 historical dramas, 85-95 Hitchcock, Alfred, 119 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 31, 55 “Holstein,” Bernard (Brougham), 128 Howard, Elizabeth, 64 Howells, William Dean, 28, 107, 118 Hwang, David Henry, 107-08 hyperfiction, 125 hyperreal, 108-09 Ibsen, Henrik, 98, 104-05 ideology, 62-72, 98-104, 107-09, 112-16, 124-25, 143, 146-47 implied author, 21-32; analogues in other arts, 30-31; career implied author, 28-30; multiple implied authors, 26-29; nonfictional, 3132 implied reader, 111-23, 126 Iser, Wolfgang, 111, 117, 119 Iversen, Stefan, 39, 41-42, 46 Jacobus, Mary, 70

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts 167 Jahn, Manfred, 81 James, Henry, 21, 28, 119 James, M. R., 35 Jameson, Fredric, 97 Johnson, James Weldon, 8, 113 Jordan, Elizabeth, 118 Joyce, James, 4, 8-9, 19, 29, 54-55, 98, 117, 119, 120; “Araby,” 139-40; “The Dead” 140-42 Kindt, Tom, and Hans-Harald Müller, 25 Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 5 Klaiber, Isabell, 28 Lamarque, Peter, 96 Lanser, Susan Sniader, 21, 114-15 Larsen, Nella, 113-14 Lawrence, Karen, 117 Leavitt, David, 127-28 Leitch, Thomas, 119 Lejeune, Philippe, 8, 12, 13, 16, 17n5 Lessing, Doris, 29-30 Leyner, Mark, 33-34 linearity, narrative, 63-65 lists, 49-64 Livingston, Paisley, 3 Loki principle, 43 Mäkelä, Maria, 44, 46 Mann, Thomas, 25 Marlowe, Christopher, 78 Masur, Kate, 15 McCarthy, Mary, 34, 67 Miller, D. A., 137 Miller, Henry, 11n1 Millet, Catherine, 15 Milton, John, 50, 112-13 Moore, Lorrie, 34-35, 57-60 Moraru, Christian, 15 Morris, Edmund, 15 Morrison, Toni, 70n6 Murphy, Brenda, 107 Nabokov, Vladimir, 4, 8-19, 69, 105, 119; Bend Sinister 11-12; “First Love” 12-14; Lolita 8, 16, 52-53, 115, 119; Look at the Harlequins! 17-19;

“Mademoiselle O” 12-14; Pale Fire 4; Pnin 11; Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 9-10, 16-17; Speak Memory 12-15 narration, 33-35; in drama, 81-82; second person, 34-35, 66-67; we narration, 35 narrative, definition of, 49 narrative forms, politics of, 62-72 Nelles, William, 22, 28-29 Nielsen, Henrik Skov, 39, 130-31 nonmimetic narrative, 35 Norris, Margot, 119 Nünning, Ansgar, 24 Nuttall, A. D., 96-97 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 79 O’Neill, Eugene, 101 Otsuka, Julie, 35 Ott, Eirik, 50 Ovid, 6 Pan, Christina, 131-34 panfictionality, 128-29 Pearson, Nels, 80 Peel, Ellen, 114 Perec, Georges, 53-54 Pessoa, Fernando, 30 Phelan, James, 7, 16n4, 24, 25, 31, 36n2, 49, 79n1, 116, 124, 13031, 140, 144-45 plot, 74-75, 136-39, 143-44; marriage plot, 143; non-plot based orderings, 138-39 postcolonial narratives and poetics, 67, 77, 80, 112, 115 probability, 104, 107-08 Propp, Vladimir, 74, 137-38 Proust, Marcel, 2, 22 queer texts and poetics, 69, 113-14 Rabinowitz, Peter, 7, 24, 31, 40, 114 Ray, Sangeeta, 113 reader, reading, 46; 111-126; actual reader, 123-26 Reagan, Ronald, 128 realism, 96-110 reflexivity, 82-83 Reising, Russell, 134

168 Rhys, Jean, 64 Richardson, Alan, 112n1 Richardson, Dorothy, 63 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 24, 33 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 51, 68, 116, 145-46 Rohy, Valerie, 8 Romance of the Rose, 27 Romagnolo, Catherine, 40 Rose, Paul Lawrence, 85 Rowling, J. K., 125 Rushdie, Salman, 115 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 11, 24, 40, 91, 128, 130 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 2 Sarris, Andrew, 30 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 133 Schmid, Wolf, 22, 26, 29 Scholes, Robert, 96 Schroeder, Patricia, 109n10 science fiction, 45 serial fiction, 146-47 “Sex and the City,” 146-47 Shakespeare, William, 27, 75, 7778, 82, 83, 87, 118 Shang, Biwu, 41 Shapton, Leanne, 57 Shaw, George Bernard, 91 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1 Shepard, Sam, 101, 108-09 Shumway, David, 104 Sidney, Sir Philip, 129 Simion. Eugen 3 transparent voices, 16-17 Sinclair, May, 63 space, narrative, 78 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 3, 4 “stain of the real,” 95 Stanzel, Franz, 34 Stoppard, Tom, 92-93 Strindberg, August, 87-88, 101, 106 supernatural fiction, 35, 44-45 superrealism, 105-07 Swift, Jonathan, 57 Tarantino, Quentin, and Richard Rodriguez, 30

Index Taylor, Gary, 118 Thomas, Bronwen, 125 Tillotson, Kathleen, 21 Time, narrative, 35-36, 76-78, 13134, 136, 144 Todorov, Tzevetan, 96, 121 Tristan and Iseult, 35 Tynjanov, Jurij, 22 Unnatural narrative, definition, 33; in literary history, 43-44; readers of, 116, 125 Unnatural narrative theory, 33-48; history of, 38-39 urfiction, 12-14 Vinogradov, Viktor, 22 von Tschudi, Hugo, 30 Vonnegut, Kurt, 12 Wakefield Master, 30-31 Walsh, Richard, 7, 130-31 Warhol, Robyn, 7, 45, 124, 144 Washington, Mary Helen, 113 Wellek, René, 97 White, Hayden, 128 Whiteside, Anna, 92 Whole Family, The, Howells et al., 28, 118-19 Wiese, Annjeanette, 129n1 Wikander, Matthew, 89 Wilde, Oscar, 17, 113 Williams, Raymond, 101 Williams, Tennessee, 82, 101-02 Wilson, August, 102-03 Wilson, Edmund, 11n1 Wimsatt, William, and Monroe Beardsley, 2, 4, 7, 123 Winnett, Susan, 144 Winterson, Jeanette, 69-70 Wittig, Monique, 66 Wood, Michael, 9 Woolf, Virginia, 17, 21, 63-64, 66, 115; To the Lighthouse 142-45 Wordsworth, William, 1 Zeami, 73 Zenith, Richard, 30 Zola, Emile, 106