The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories 9781474424752

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The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories

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Edinburgh Companions to Literature

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The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories Edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol

The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts Edited by S. E. Gontarski The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts Edited by Stephen Prickett The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction Edited by David Brauner and Axel Stähler The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory Edited by Stuart Sim The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities Edited by Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton and Jennifer Richards The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman and Matthew Pethers The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts Edited by Frances Dickey and John D. Morgenstern

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Forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East Edited by Anna Ball and Karim Matar The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope Edited by Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton and Ortwin Graef The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music Edited by Delia da Sousa Correa The Edinburgh Companion to Elizabeth Bishop Edited by Jonathan Ellis The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English Edited by Adrian Hunter and Paul Delaney The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts Edited by Juliet John and Claire Wood The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts Edited by David Punter The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts Edited by Roxana Preda

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The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories

Edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol, 2018 © the chapters their several authors, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2474 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2475 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2476 9 (epub) The right of Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol

viii x xi 1

I. Mind-Centred and Cognitive Approaches to Narrative 1. What Does It Mean to Be Mad? Diagnosis, Narrative, Science, and the DSM H. Porter Abbott

17

2. The Nonhuman in Mind: Narrative Challenges to Folk Psychology Marco Caracciolo

30

3. Narrative and the Embodied Reader Suzanne Keen

43

4. The Fully Extended Mind Karin Kukkonen

56

5. Sense-Making and Wonder: An Enactive Approach to Narrative Form in Speculative Fiction Merja Polvinen

67

II. Situated Narrative Theories 6. Cosmopolitanism, Controversy, and Collectivity: Zadie Smith’s Networked Narration Claudia Breger 7. Race and Empathy in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica Sue J. Kim 8. Till Death Do Us Part: Embodying Narratology Susan S. Lanser

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83 99 117

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9. Digital Intimacies and Queer Narratives Sam McBean 10. The Cinema of the Impossible: Queer Theory and Narrative Valerie Rohy

132 145

III. Theories of Digital Narrative 11. Cinema and the Unnarratability of Computation Zara Dinnen

159

12. Plotting the Loop: Videogames and Narratability Rob Gallagher

174

13. Serial as Digital Constellation: Fluid Textuality and Semiotic Otherness in the Podcast Narrative Ellen McCracken 14. UI Time and the Digital Event Daniel Punday

187 202

IV. Theories of Television, Film, Comics, and Graphic Narrative 15. Continued Comics: The New ‘Blake and Mortimer’ as an Example of Continuation in European Series Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey

215

16. Operational Seriality and the Operation of Seriality Jason Mittell

227

17. Closer Than They Seem: Graphic Narrative and the Senses Katalin Orbán

239

18. Episode Five, or, When Does a Narrative Become What It Is? Sean O’Sullivan

256

19. Media Theory as Narrative Theory: Film Narration as a Case Study Christian Quendler

273

V. Anti-Mimetic Narrative Theories 20. Digital Fiction and Unnatural Narrative Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin 21. Lyric Poetry as Anti-Mimetic Bridging in Narratives and Motion Pictures: A Case Study of Affective Response to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) Stefan Kjerkegaard

291

305

22. Speculative Fiction, or, Literal Narratology Brian McHale

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23. Unnatural Endings in Fiction and Drama Brian Richardson

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contents

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VI. Philosophical Approaches to Narrative 24. Narrative and the Necessity of Contingency Mark Currie 25. Local Nonfictionality within Generic Fiction: Huntington’s Disease in McEwan’s Saturday and Genova’s Inside the O’Briens James Phelan 26. The Story of the Law Ruth Ronen

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362 375

27. The Centre for Narrative Gravity: Narrative and the Philosophy of Selfhood after Dennett Richard Walsh

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28. The Body as Medium: A Phenomenological Approach to the Production of Affect in Narrative Amy Shuman and Katharine Young

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Index

417

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Illustrations

Figure 4.1 Figure 7.1

Figure 7.2

Figure 7.3

Figure 7.4

Figure 7.5

Figure 7.6

Figure 7.7

Figure 7.8

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The three scales of the Fully Extended Mind Page 26 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved Page 208 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved Page 142 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved Pages 124–5 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved Page 251 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved Pages 262–3 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved Pages 50–1 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved Page 158 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved

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illustrations Figure 7.9

Figure 17.1 Figure 17.2 Figure 17.3 Figure 17.4

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Page 224 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved 20 July 2006 (drawn 18 July) © 2007, Mazen Kerbaj & L’Association 29 July 2006 © 2007, Mazen Kerbaj & L’Association 21 July 2006 © 2007, Mazen Kerbaj & L’Association 16 July 2006 © 2007, Mazen Kerbaj & L’Association

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Acknowledgements

Zara Dinnen would like to thank first of all Robyn Warhol. Robyn, you have been a wonderful co-editor – supportive and patient (and then supportive of my other projects which meant you needed to be patient), and fun, and I have learnt loads from you. I would also like to say thanks to Mark Currie for your encouragement early on in this project. Thank you to our brilliant contributors who write great work and have made the editing process a pleasure. Lots of people make a book possible. For me some of those people were colleagues at University of Birmingham and colleagues at Queen Mary University of London, where I now finish this book. To my friends and collaborators in both places, thank you. And finally thank you to my friends and family who make me happen. Robyn Warhol returns Zara Dinnen’s kind compliments and gratitude, with interest. Your patience in the face of multiple medical and domestic adventures at my end is much appreciated, Zara, and your next-age approach to the theories of narrative has made this a truly original and exciting book. I want to thank Mark Currie, too, for the initial concept behind this collection and for suggesting me and (especially) Zara as co-editors of the project. My enthusiastic thanks go out to all the contributors for their diverse – some might say eclectic – expertise and their collective eloquence. And as always I thank my friends, my colleagues in OSU’s Department of English, and my husband and sons for their support and forbearance. At Edinburgh University Press we would like to thank the supportive, enthusiastic editorial team of Jackie Jones, Adela Rauchova, and Ersev Ersoy – we have really appreciated your championing of this book and your patience when things went a little off schedule. The images in Chapter 7 appear with kind permission of Penguin Random House. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.

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Notes on Contributors

H. Porter Abbott is Professor Emeritus in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author of Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable (Ohio State University Press, 2013) and The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, soon to be in its third edition (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Jan Baetens is Professor of Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Leuven. He is author, with Hugo Frey, of The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and editor and translator, with Michael Kasper, of Correspondance: The Birth of Belgian Surrealism (Peter Lang, 2015). Recent essays appear in Authorship and Image and Narrative. Alice Bell is Reader at Sheffield Hallam University. Her recent publications include, with Astrid Ensslin and Hans Rustad, Analysing Digital Fiction (Routledge, 2014) and The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction (Palgrave, 2010). She is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded ‘Reading Digital Fiction’ which has resulted in WALLPAPER, a virtual reality narrative game. Claudia Breger is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Claudia is author of Nach dem Sex? Sexualwissenschaft und Affect Studies [After Sex? The Sciences of Sex and Affect Studies], Hirschfeld-Lectures (Wallstein, 2014) and An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature and Film in Contemporary Germany (Ohio State University Press, 2012). Marco Caracciolo is an assistant professor in English and Literary Theory at Ghent University. His most recent publications include Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers’ Engagement with Characters (Nebraska University Press, 2016) and, with Russell T. Hurlburt, A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science (Ohio State University Press, 2016). Mark Currie is Professor of Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is author of The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), The Invention of Deconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and the forthcoming Absolute Uncertainty.

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Notes on Contributors

Zara Dinnen is Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature at Queen Mary University of London. She is author of The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2018). Her recent essays appear in Journal of American Studies, Journal of Narrative Theory, and Social Media and Affect (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). Astrid Ensslin is Professor of Media and Digital Communication at the University of Alberta. She is author of Literary Gaming (MIT Press, 2014) and The Language of Gaming (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and is co-editor, with Alice Bell and Hans Rustad, of Analyzing Digital Fiction (Routledge, 2014). Other writing is forthcoming in Paradoxa and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017). Hugo Frey is Professor of Cultural and Visual History and Head of Department of History and Politics at University of Chichester. He is author of Nationalism and the Cinema in France (Berghahn Books, 2014), Louis Malle (Manchester University Press, 2004), and, with Jan Baetens, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Rob Gallagher is Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Ego-Media Project at King’s College London. He is author of Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity (Routledge, 2017), and his essays have recently appeared in Film Criticism, Loading, and Sex in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2017), and Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Game (Bloomsbury, 2016). Suzanne Keen is Dean of the College and Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English at Washington and Lee University. She is the author of Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (Ohio State University Press, 2014) and Narrative Form: Revised and Expanded Second Edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and co-editor of the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing with Emma Parker. Sue J. Kim is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She is author of Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race (Palgrave, 2009) and co-editor, with Meghan Marie Hammond, of Rethinking Empathy Through Literature (Routledge, 2014). Stefan Kjerkegaard is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Culture, Scandinavian Studies, Aarhus University. His recent writing has appeared in Auto/Biography Studies, Journal of Narrative Theory, and Så tæt på livet som muligt: Perspektiver på Karl Ove Knausgårds Min kamp (Hellerup, 2017). He is co-author of Fiktionalitet (Samfundslitteratur, 2013). Karin Kukkonen is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. She is author of A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel (Oxford University Press, 2017), Contemporary Comics Storytelling (Nebraska University Press, 2013), and Studying Comics and Graphic Novels (Wiley Blackwell, 2013). Susan S. Lanser is Professor Emerita of English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University. Susan is co-editor, with Robyn Warhol, of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (Ohio State University Press, 2015), and recent essays have appeared in European Journal of English Studies and The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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Notes on Contributors

xiii

Sam McBean is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary American Literature at Queen Mary University of London. She is author of Feminism’s Queer Temporalities (Routledge, 2016) and her recent essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Feminist Review, American Literature in Transition, 1970–1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and New Feminist Studies: Twenty First Century Critical Interventions (Cambridge University Press). Ellen McCracken is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is author of Paratexts and Performance in the Novels of Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), an enhanced iBook for iPad, May Days in Spain (iBooks, 2012), and editor of The Serial Podcast and Storytelling in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2017). Brian McHale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at The Ohio State University. His recent books include The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2016), The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature with Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons (Routledge, 2012). Jason Mittell is Professor of American Studies and Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. He is author of Narrative Theory and Adaptation (Bloomsbury, 2017), Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press, 2015), and Television and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2010), and co-author, with Christian Keathley, of The Videographic Essay (caboose books, 2016). Katalin Orbán is Assistant Professor, Institute for Art Theory and Media Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, and author of Ethical Diversions: The Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo, and Spiegelman (Routledge, 2013, 2005). Her recent work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and The International Journal of the Humanities. Sean O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He is author of Mike Leigh (University of Illinois Press, 2011). His recent and forthcoming essays appear in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, Storyworlds, and Media of Serial Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 2017). James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor of English at The Ohio State University. His most recent work includes Reading the American Novel, 1920–2010 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), and, with David Herman, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (Ohio State University Press, 2012). Merja Polvinen is Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki. She is co-editor of Rethinking Mimesis (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) and has recently published essays on cognitive approaches to literary representation in Poetics Today, Journal of Literary Semantics, and Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. Daniel Punday is Professor and Head of the Department of English at Mississippi State University. He is author of Computing as Writing (Minnesota University Press, 2015) and Writing at the Limit: Searching for the Vocation of the Novel in the Contemporary

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Notes on Contributors

Media Ecology (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). His recent essays have appeared in Narrative and Mosaic. Christian Quendler is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at University of Innsbruck. His most recent book is The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema (Routledge, 2016), and his recent essays have been published in Amerikastudien: American Studies a Quarterly and Word and Image. Brian Richardson is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland. He is author of Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice (Ohio State University Press, 2015), co-author of Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (Ohio State University Press, 2012), and co-editor of A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 2015). Valerie Rohy is Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is author of Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (SUNY Press, 2009). Recent essays appear in Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, differences, and Twentieth Century Literature. Ruth Ronen is Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University. She is author of Art before Law: Aesthetics and Ethics (University of Toronto Press, 2014), Aesthetics of Anxiety (SUNY Press, 2009), and in Hebrew, Lacan with the Philosophers (Tel Aviv University Press, 2015). She has recently published essays in Philosophy Today and Hurly-Burly. Amy Shuman is Professor in the English Department at The Ohio State University, and the co-coordinator of the Human Rights Working Group sponsored by the Humanities Institute. Her books include Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy (University of Illinois Press, 2005) and, with Carol Bohmer, Political Asylum Deceptions: The Culture of Suspicion (Palgrave, 2018). Richard Walsh is Reader in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is author of The Rhetoric of Fictionality (Ohio State University Press, 2007), and is a co-editor of the forthcoming Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives (Ohio State University Press, 2018). Robyn Warhol is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor and Chair of English at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, with David Herman, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and Brian Richardson (Ohio State University Press, 2011), and, with Helena Michie, of Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). She is co-editor, with Susan S. Lanser, of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (Ohio State University Press, 2015). Katharine Young is an Independent Scholar, and Visiting Lecturer at University of California Berkeley and San Francisco State University. Her recent work has appeared in Journal of American Folklore, Body and Society, Western Folklore, and the American Journal of Sociology.

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Introduction Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol

T

he Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories captures the state of contemporary narrative theory and narratology, demonstrating some of the rapid changes in the field that have resulted from the transformation of narrative itself in the contemporary world. This volume represents cutting-edge thought, placing emphasis on new developments rather than the backstory of contemporary narrative theory. It does not confine itself to particular national traditions in narratology and theory, or to the work of particular schools and tendencies, and tries to represent the breadth of contexts in which narrative theoretical research is currently conducted. The volume has three interrelated commitments: (1) to ‘situated’ narratology, or narrative theory that rejects the universality and neutrality that originally animated classical narratology as a scientific project; (2) to a recognition of the emerging contexts and settings for narrative writing in the digital age, and to the transformation of thinking that this has produced in theoretical approaches; and (3) to the inseparable connection of narrative theory to the major philosophical, social, and political thinking of the present. Theories of narrative and the technical approaches to narrative that have developed under the name of ‘narratology’ have a close historical relation to the development of theory and critical method in literary studies. The major ambition of this volume is to show the current state of that relationship by demonstrating the extent to which the perspectives of narrative theory and the analytical expertise of narratology have found their way outwards from literature into larger contexts of storytelling in culture. The essays collected here explore the cultural politics of narrative form by offering diverse accounts of the many new intersections between feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, transnationalism, and other approaches to race, class, and nation that have developed in the contemporary critical scene. In addition, the collection seeks to trace the reciprocal influence of ideas about time, space, and ethics in philosophy and social theory on the one hand, and experimental narrative structures on the other, as well as describe the impact of technology, digital culture and emergent media on contemporary theoretical approaches to narrative both inside and outside of literary studies. This book aspires to serve as a map of the reach of the work being done with narrative theory today – accounting for interventions in science, philosophy, and law, as well as literary, digital, and visual culture. The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories does not aim to compete with, but rather to build upon the important collections that have, over the last decade, established the history and practices of the field. Two definitive books came out in 2005, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman,

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2

zara dinnen and robyn warhol

Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, and Blackwell’s A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. The Encyclopedia is still the standard reference work outlining the terms and concepts of narrative theory and narratology.1 For comprehensive histories of narrative theory’s origins and its links to structuralist and poststructuralist theories – by David Herman and Monika Fludernik, respectively – Phelan and Rabinowitz’s A Companion to Narrative Theory remains the standard source.2 That magisterial collection includes thirty-three other essays spanning the current questions in the field at a moment when ‘digitality’, introduced in a piece by Marie-Laure Ryan as a new challenge to narratological methods, still counted as a revolutionary development in literary and cultural studies. The present volume picks up the conversation a little more than a decade later, at a moment when new media are firmly established as a subject for narrative-theoretical analysis. For a more systematic survey of approaches, David Herman’s Cambridge Companion to Narrative (2007) collects definitive essays by experts on such primary categories of narrative analysis as story, plot, and narration; time and space; character; dialogue; and focalisation, while also surveying theories of the role of narrative in conversation, film and television, drama, and digital media. The Cambridge Companion establishes ‘further contexts for narrative study’ that comprise gender; rhetoric/ethics; ideology; language; cognition, emotion, and consciousness; and identity/alterity, but the overlap between the central concerns of these contexts (where, for instance, are the lines between gender, ideology, and identity?) shows the difficulty even in 2007 of dividing narratological approaches up by topic or even emphasis. Now, in 2018, these approaches have combined and recombined with others to produce narrative-theoretical questions that could not have been anticipated ten years ago. In its emphasis on the narrative theories circulating at the present moment, The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories updates the issues raised by these previous scholarly efforts while acknowledging that it must, as they did, represent a transient moment in a rapidly changing field. Our hope is that readers of this book will find inspiration to move narrative-theoretical inquiry in ever-broader and less predictable directions. This collection brings together new research from a mix of established and emerging scholars working in narrative theory; the essays, commissioned for this volume, have not been published before. Together they represent a wide-ranging exploration of the cultural politics of narrative form, drawing particularly but not exclusively on cutting-edge work in critical studies of race, and feminist and queer studies. The essays in this volume work with, and from, recent critical turns – themselves inspired by feminist and queer studies – most notably, the nonhuman turn and affective turn (see Grusin 2015; Gregg and Seigworth 2010). In collecting these essays, we have tried to enact a comprehensive engagement with contemporary cultural forms as well as the range of narrative theories being practised today. The book includes examples of narrative theory in dialogue with other newer scholarly methods such as cognitive and digital humanities, as well as related disciplines including linguistics, philosophy, and critical legal theory. Many of the essays in this volume model different approaches to a shared concern. For example, it is clear from the work represented here that contemporary narrative theory has a stake in thinking about the production of time in contemporary knowledge paradigms, elucidating aspects of intersecting disciplines such as philosophy, or new media studies. Each of the volume’s essays takes up in its own way the question of how theories of narrative are being, and can be, put to use to better understand contemporary cultural life.

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introduction

3

The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories is divided into six parts, each of them containing essays that could well have appeared in another section. This overlap is intentional and the dividing rubric is merely pragmatic, as we acknowledge the integration of concepts and arguments within narrative theoretical inquiry today. Still, some methodologies in contemporary narratology are distinct from (and arguably incompatible with) others, and our organisation of essays is meant to indicate our own sense of family resemblance among the pieces in each part. Readers of David Herman et al.’s Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012) will recognise groupings of three of the approaches laid out in that demonstration of contending methodologies, namely cognitive, feminist, and anti-mimetic (or ‘unnatural’) narrative theories; the influence of that book’s fourth category, rhetorical narrative theory, is evident in essays across the parts of this book. The Edinburgh Companion seeks to smudge – if not altogether to erase – the lines drawn between approaches in Narrative Theory, offering multiple examples of ways that they complicate and complement one another. Our first part presents the latest developments in cognitive or mind-centred narrative theory, which is certainly the dominant approach in Europe and is widely practised by a range of American scholars, as well. The second part of this Companion takes advantage of this opportunity to rename what has too narrowly been called ‘feminist’ or even ‘queer and feminist’ narratology, proposing ‘situated narrative theories’ as a more suitable descriptor of approaches attending to narrative manifestations of intersections and assemblages of identity categories beyond gender and sexuality. Calling these approaches ‘situated’ acknowledges their definitively historical contextualism, which tends to counter the generalising impulses of mind-centred theories by attending to differences in narrative born of specific times and places. The next two parts – theories of digital narrative and theories of television, film, comics, and graphic narrative – group essays by their subject matter: genres and media that have not heretofore received as much narrative-theoretical attention as literary fiction. Examples of these genres and media are included in other sections of the book, as well. To be sure, there are no rules as to which approaches within narrative theory can pertain to non-literary texts. The fifth part, on anti-mimetic narrative theories, updates the ‘unnatural’ narrative theory of the last decade, continuing to explore the limits of classical narrative theory that was derived mainly from realist European fiction. The final part was difficult to name: we call it ‘Philosophical Approaches to Narrative’ because it brings contemporary debates among philosophers of law, time, and ethics into the conversation. We might have called it ‘interdisciplinary approaches’, but that would have falsely implied that the theories played out in all the other sections of The Edinburgh Companion were not also profoundly interdisciplinary. We do not mean to suggest that the essays in Part VI exhaust the possibilities for philosophy and narrative theory to come together; rather, we want to underline the interdisciplinarity of the entire narrative-theoretical enterprise.

Summary of Contents The essays in the first part, ‘Mind-Centred and Cognitive Approaches to Narrative’, consider narrative at the far reaches of what we might think of as literary narrative studies. Working from research taking place in cognitive humanities, psychology, and affect theory, these essays explore the efficacy of narrative theory within new humanities discourses. Here mind-centred and cognitive approaches to narrative are a means

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to better understand the embodied reader – sensing, sweating, dreaming – as part of narrative process. Porter Abbott, in ‘What Does It Mean to Be Mad? Diagnosis, Narrative, Science, and the DSM’, discusses the ways mental disorders bring into view the limitations and strengths of narrative as a means to understand consciousness. The essay considers both the function of narrative in diagnosing mental disorder, and the representation of mental disorder in narrative culture more broadly. Appropriating Simon Baron-Cohen’s term ‘mindblindness’, Abbott illustrates the human inability to mindread, and stubborn commitment to narrate otherwise. Sticking in the mind, in ‘The Nonhuman in Mind: Narrative Challenges to Folk Psychology’, Marco Caracciolo asks ‘how narrative fares when confronted with realities that elude or even challenge the human-scale world of social interaction’. Reading for instances of the nonhuman in stories of the human mind, Caracciolo outlines how narrative may upset our folk-psychological assumptions regarding how we make meaning, and in doing so render untenable the mind–matter dualism which, Caracciolo argues, underlies previous work on folk psychology as a narrative mode. Asserting that the limits of folk psychology-as-narrative and vice versa is also the limit of dualism, this essay turns to narratives in which the human is also nonhuman; where the ‘human figure’ confounds folk psychology because it is also always, or is becoming, nonhuman. Suzanne Keen’s essay, ‘Narrative and the Embodied Reader’, follows recent work on narrative and empathy studies by bringing together studies of human cognition, affect, and embodied consciousness, to consider the impact of feelings of personal distress in narrative process. ‘Narrative personal distress’ (NPD) is a problematic mode of ‘empathy’; a self-centred and visceral bodily reaction. Investigating NPD, Keen asks whether a blend of narrative empathy and narrative distress might ‘hold off, delay, or diminish the rejection and avoidance of the emotion-provoking Other’ or whether NPD is actually harmful. Working from a survey conducted into narrative experiences that were so distressing readers had to temporarily, or permanently, halt reading, Keen offers a series of hypotheses on the workings of NPD. The essay concludes by positioning the discussion of NPD within broader debate on trigger warnings and the value of ‘discomfort’ in the reception of culture. Narrative studies as a means to understand the reading process also informs Karin Kukkonen’s work in ‘The Fully Extended Mind’. Here Kukkonen takes on the ‘furthest’ reach of research into embodied cognition: the ‘extended mind’. In other words, Kukkonen asks what is happening when cognition leaks out of the body into the world. For Kukkonen, ‘The extended mind hypothesis leads the narratologist to train his or her attention on the way in which characters perceive the fictional world as “available” to them, the way in which they interact with the world and manipulate its material constitutedness in an extended process of cognition.’ Kukkonen reads Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s graphic narrative 100 Bullets (1999–2009) to better understand the operation of embodied cues of bodies and the ways these interpolate a situated reader. A related interest in the way narrative studies can account for the movement of energy between material texts, bodies, and environments drives Merja Polvinen’s work, in the final essay of this part, ‘Sense-Making and Wonder: An Enactive Approach to Narrative Form in Speculative Fiction’. Polvinen works with science fiction to consider how cognitive narratology can help us to deal with what is happening in self-reflective

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and explicitly artificial narrative forms – the essay explores the ‘cognitive-imaginative potential of narrative form’. Working with models of ‘enactive cognition’, science fiction is useful to Polvinen for the unique ways it enacts cognition as a literalising narrative convention; it renders visible enactive cognition as such, ‘an environment enacted in the process of reading’. Polvinen’s work echoes with the inquiries of the part as a whole: interrogating the limits of representation to ask what is happening when narrative fails to make meaning, to be human, to be sane or plausible or palatable – how and why do we read on anyway? As we mentioned above, situated narratives are one of the key concerns of this Companion. In the first part, the work on embodied and mind-centred narratives figures the situated narrative in terms of biosocial embodiment as discussed in the cognitive humanities; in the second part, ‘Situated Narrative Theories’, discussions of embodiment and narrative are informed by gender, queer, critical race, and affect studies. Claudia Breger’s essay, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Controversy, and Collectivity: Zadie Smith’s Networked Narration’, works at a similar question to Merja Polvinen’s essay, wondering how narrative environments are felt. However, whereas Polvinen turned to cognitive theory, Breger puts forward a model of ‘narrative as affective worldmaking’ and demonstrates this with a detailed reading of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005). Working primarily from Bruno Latour’s thinking on networks and the social, and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) (with reference to work on affect and narrative by Robyn Warhol, Sara Ahmed, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), Breger articulates nonsovereign affective assemblages as narrative, to better think ways out of the static modes of intersectionality that can be practised as narrative theory. For Breger, Smith’s novel practises ‘networked narration’ and, in its synthesis of the polarised political/apolitical artistic debates it stages, offers assemblages of political phenomenology. Sue J. Kim also mobilises narrative theory to counter potentially facile claims about the operations of empathy and representation. In ‘Race and Empathy in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica’, Kim argues that graphic narrative is an important counter site to facial affect recognition technologies recently popularised in policing (as well as animation). In Kim’s work situated narrative is a discourse through which we can resist the problematic politics of facial affect recognition. Through a detailed analysis of GB Tran’s Vietnamerica (2010), Kim argues that graphic narrative can elicit ‘a kind of “structural empathy” for individuals and groups located within complex, highly racialised systems of power’. Working with the materiality of graphic narrative, Kim offers a situated analysis that vitally challenges dominant discourses of what it is to ‘read’ facial expression and to inscribe expression onto individuals and communities. If Kim’s work highlights how the face operates as an affective register, and how narrative studies might elucidate that operation, Susan S. Lanser, in ‘Till Death Do Us Part: Embodying Narratology’, argues for the timeliness and overdue nature of such work, asking, where is the body in narratology? Why even in feminist narratology has it been so absent? Lanser offers in response ‘a corporeal scholarly method, a way not so much of theorising the body as of theorising from the body’. In this essay Lanser starts from the position that textual bodies are not necessarily present at all, or always – a character ‘is a set of words and narrative practices that trick us into mimetic illusions’. From this point Lanser reads into the disembodied or queer trick of narration, of free indirect discourse or omniscience, ‘narratology as a project of resistance’. This essay revisits

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and critiques Lanser’s own contributions to narrative studies and feminist narratology, to ask that we, as scholars of narrative, ask not only who speaks, who sees, but who is embodied, and that we see narratology as necessarily a production from the body. The question of ‘who is embodied’ is again at stake in the essay, ‘Digital Intimacies and Queer Narratives’, by Sam McBean. This essay turns to thinking about networks, narration, affect, and bodies in order to ask how ‘queer emerges in narratives about intimacy and new media technologies’. In an analysis of the Spike Jonze film her (2013), McBean follows Judith Roof, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant in asking how queer narrative gets in the way of happy heterosexual conclusions, but moves this project into thinking explicitly about the analogous operations, or structural proximity, between queer and technological representations. For McBean, her is full of ‘queer interruptions’, where technology is aligned with the potential for queer disruption of heterosexuality as narrative. Arguing that the film struggles with the tension of new technologies as generators of normative affects and intimacies, and new technologies as ‘interruptions’, McBean further works through queer narrative theory to show how early computing experimentation and development comes to bear on a contemporary representation of computing such as her. In the final essay of this section, Valerie Rohy’s ‘The Cinema of the Impossible: Queer Theory and Narrative’, cinema is a technological site which – like new media – is formed through the ambivalent functions of narrative and spectacle. For Rohy, ‘narrative and spectacle, though distinctly different elements of cinema, are both pressed to disguise, if incompletely, the vacancy of meaning in sexuality itself’. In this essay Rohy discusses Tony Scott’s 1983 film The Hunger as a film that was received as more spectacle than narrative but which is committed to both, and as such illuminates the work that spectacle and narrative both do in disguising and creating fantasy for ‘a fundamental impasse of signification’. Working from Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ ([1975] 2009), Rohy considers this film another sort of queer interruption, bringing to light the ‘schism between the futural myth of sexuality and its purposeless facticity’ as a ‘queer ligature to the Real’. The third part, ‘Theories of Digital Narrative’, accounts for the ways new media, as interruption, and as everyday life, demands new methods of narrative studies. Essays in this section are attuned to the ways distributed digital computing produce affectively distinct temporalities, and social affordances. Resonating with McBean’s and Rohy’s interest in new media and cinema, Zara Dinnen’s essay, ‘Cinema and the Unnarratability of Computation’, considers how we tell stories about complex computational systems. It argues that in mainstream digital cinema that purports to tell stories of digital media – action hero hacker films – the audience is becoming attuned to the ineffable, ephemeral, complexity of computation. Here, Garrett Stewart’s provocation that digital cinema studies embrace the ‘narratographic’ and Robyn Warhol’s concept of the ‘supranarratable’ as that which is unnarratable, are leveraged to name the challenge that computation poses to narrative genre. What we learn from watching, and reading about, digital cinema that thematises digital media is that narrative cinema’s depictions and materialisation of digital media are always also a failure to depict and materialise the processes of digital media. In ‘Plotting the Loop: Videogames and Narratability’, Rob Gallagher also takes up the issue of narratability, after situated narrative theory, to consider how different videogames become narratable for different players and kinds of play. For Gallagher,

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gaming is a situated time-bound practice, which demands we address the terms on which different games become narratable for different players. In this essay Gallagher historically situates the ludology/narratology founding myth of game studies and insists instead on understanding contemporary gaming culture as ‘part of a networked culture of data capitalism, in which our interactions with digital devices, whether playful or professional, have become a source of profit’. Gallagher frames narrative time – as game time and the time of the gamer – in terms of impasse (Berlant’s Cruel Optimism) and affect (Warhol’s work on cultural genres), articulating the socio-economic conditions of gaming in a post-Fordist culture. Accounting for the conditions of a shifting attention economy (see also Jason Mittell’s essay in this volume), Ellen McCracken offers a close analysis of transmedia texts as expanded texts. In ‘Serial as Digital Constellation: Fluid Textuality and Semiotic Otherness in the Podcast Narrative’, McCracken examines the ‘multidirectional flow’ of National Public Radio’s wildly popular podcast Serial (2014–present). For McCracken, twenty-first-century textuality is made up of ‘expanded narrative paths’ that complicate previous analysis of flow and temporality in serialised narrative culture. The essay follows a method of ‘reverse directional flow’, beginning with the paratexts (here, Reddit) and working back into the ‘main’ text. In this way McCracken demonstrates how fans produce complex storytelling strategies because of the non-complex storytelling in Serial; desiring to both ‘solve’ and ‘amplify’ narrative. Working from the paratext suggests that the strategies of ekphrasis deployed by the narrator/orator in Serial are undermined by the multimedia online discourse mediating its reception. Working from many of the same questions as the other essays in this part, Daniel Punday addresses the new temporal conditions of digital media. In ‘UI Time and the Digital Event’, Punday discusses computer processing in terms of the ‘digital event’. Figuring through the lag between the time of users interfacing with a program, and the time of the digital event, Punday suggests we work with formal narrative studies to account for ‘idleness’ in processing. User interface (UI) time cannot be accommodated in story-discourse models of narrative time. Punday describes the way different styles of digital literature afford different encounters with UI time. Like Gallagher, Punday is interested in digital media as a dynamic of loops and stasis, which can be rendered palpable through games and electronic literature; and like Dinnen’s, McCracken’s, and McBean’s contributions to this volume, Punday puts narrative theory to work at better understanding the mediational experience of living with digital media. Throughout this volume comics, novels, podcasts, plays, TV shows, and film have been discussed as narrative culture. In this fourth part TV, film, and comics are considered with respect to media-specific analysis. Carrying on the work of the third part in attending to media as narrative, technical, imaginary, and material, the essays in ‘Theories of Television, Film, Comics, and Graphic Narrative’ more particularly interrogate the formal and situated narrative affordances of distinct media. In ‘Continued Comics: The New “Blake and Mortimer” as an Example of Continuation in European Series’, Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey examine continuation in comics as a narrative strategy. Although this approach is not new, Baetens and Frey turn their attention to the Franco-Belgian system where continuation is less common than in mainstream US superhero comics, and argue that thinking with continuation generates new ways of understanding how comics operate in local and global cultures. The essay discusses continuation narratives as ‘active nostalgia’ and asserts that in the local context of

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their study, this narrative affect places particular emphasis on ‘the depoliticising force of postcolonialism’. With reference to narrative, auteur, and legal frameworks for comics production, Baetens and Frey consider the changing role of fandom in the production of ‘new’ work, fan sites as forums for testing narrative ‘success’, and the political efficacy of such modes of narrative reception. The operations of continuation are also the subject of Jason Mittell’s essay, ‘Operational Seriality and the Operation of Seriality’. For Mittell, ‘Serialised gaps are structured and unavoidable fissures that force readers or viewers to disengage from the narrative before moving onward.’ In this essay Mittell defines seriality as an operational logic of mandated gaps, durations between segments; seriality is therefore not a permanent status of a text. Things that are serials may not be in the future, for example a TV serial that becomes a box set. Even if the works themselves are stable, seriality as an affordance of the text, as a logic of a text, will change over time. Mittell suggests that narrative studies pay attention to the gaps between text as pressing on the narrative world of the text – considering how stories are told, rather than the stories themselves. Most significantly, Mittell suggests that we abandon ‘serial’ as a noun, to name a genre, or category of text. Instead, we may think of seriality as a pervasive and understudied dynamic of cultural production, reception, and circulation. Katalin Orbán’s contribution to this volume, ‘Closer Than They Seem: Graphic Narrative and the Senses’, attends to comics – an embodied material, a situated narrative, becoming with an embodied, situated reader – as a haptic medium. Orbán argues that the relations of the intertwined narrative and sensory order are distinctive in comics, which have unique ‘capacity for combining alternative orders, paces, scales, and stimulated and simulated sensations’. Reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012), and Mazen Kerbaj’s Beyrouth, juillet-août 2006 (2007), Orbán examines comics objects in terms of their ‘haptic visuality’, displacing ‘ocularcentric’ approaches. This essay offers a way to read complex comics texts that nonetheless offer ‘diminished narrative progression’ through play with time as haptic – stasis and slowness, or impending cut-off-ness. In this way, the essay chimes with much of the work elsewhere in the collection thinking about the temporal affordances of contemporary media. Like Mittell’s essay, Sean O’Sullivan’s ‘Episode Five, or, When Does a Narrative Become What It Is?’ is interested in operational seriality, and in mandated gaps of a sort. O’Sullivan argues that in contemporary American television – in what McCabe and Akass (2007) term ‘Quality TV’ – the fifth episode of a first series functions as a narrative caesura, offering ‘the opportunity to turn hesitation or shifts or possibly even mistakes into cores values’. As with Mittell’s work the seriality of a season is here taken as a processual dynamic. For O’Sullivan, narrative texts such as The Sopranos, Deadwood, or Breaking Bad necessitate a discourse of ‘becoming’. The trajectory of these narratives is neither fixed nor chance, but rather undergoes ‘gradual testing’ and the ‘acquisition of operative codes’; unfolding tensions that can be most readily apprehended in the genre’s convention of the defining fifth episode. In ‘Media Theory as Narrative Theory: Film Narration as a Case Study’, Christian Quendler examines ‘narrative theories of film as a series of attempts at coming to terms with the medium of film’. For Quendler, the mechanics of film in various ways are the foundation of much narrative theory; premised as it is – and in ways related to Mittell’s work on seriality – on the process by which narrative materialises, is made and experienced. Quendler argues that the surface of film, the ‘camera-eye’,

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and edit are ‘general figures of narration’. Film here is an explicitly narrative medium (even ‘ex negativo’ – as a ‘narrator figure’ organises the image). In turning to film media theorists (Tom Gunning, David Bordwell, and Robert Burgoyne), and general narratologists, Quendler articulates the vital intersections of both discourses to assert cinema theory as narrative theory. Part V, ‘Anti-Mimetic Narrative Theories’, builds on the ‘unnatural’ narrative theory made popular in the last decade by scholars such as Brian Richardson and Jan Alber who are interested in narrative texts that do not display the formal characteristics associated with realism. As these theorists have pointed out, classical narratology used realist novels as its main corpus from which to extrapolate the models of narrative. Focusing on postmodernism, postcolonialism, and post-print texts, anti-mimetic narrative theorists posit the forms that emerge when realism is neither the guiding principle nor the goal of a narrative text. Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin’s ‘Digital Fiction and Unnatural Narrative’ identifies unnatural textual features that have paradoxically become conventional in digital fiction, namely contradictions in hypertext fictions that follow multiple narrative lines and ‘interactional metalepsis’ in literary games. Their essay usefully traces the genesis and development of ‘unnatural narratology’ and of ‘digital fiction’ before launching into analysis of examples from digital fiction and literary games. Bell and Ensslin show how the affordances of the medium in Gavin Inglis’s Web-based fiction Same Day Test (2002) and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl; Or, a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley, & Herself (1995) lead to contradictory outcomes that are, by definition, unnatural. They use videogames such as The Path and The Stanley Parable to demonstrate that metalepsis – the crossing of diegetic boundaries within a text – has become ubiquitous in literary games, thus naturalising what qualified as unnatural in a strictly literary context. In ‘Lyric Poetry as Anti-Mimetic Bridging in Narratives and Motion Pictures: A Case Study of Affective Response to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014)’, Stefan Kjerkegaard considers the role that voice-over poetry on a movie soundtrack plays in shaping the affective impact of a filmic text. Kjerkegaard offers Interstellar as one among many movies that use the poetry of Dylan Thomas to achieve what he calls anti-mimetic bridging, a connector between mimetic and unnatural elements in a movie that profoundly engages the audience in an affective and aesthetic response. Kjerkegaard asserts that the traditional opposition between lyric poetry and narrative is not useful, explaining that time in poetry is ‘vertically felt’ within the sequential structure of a narrative, adding an extra dimension to narration that is not accounted for in mimetically grounded theories. Lyric poetry is also the entry Brian McHale takes into a consideration of narratives that are not intended to be mimetic, in his chapter, ‘Speculative Fiction, or, Literal Narratology’. In this essay science fiction (sf) is itself imagined as an expression of narrative theory; McHale argues that the forms typical of speculative fiction enact many of the concepts that constitute classical narratology. McHale asserts that speculative fictions often literalise metaphor, both on the local level of description and on the global levels of temporal structure, narrative perspective, and world-building. If, for example, as Mark Currie (2007) and David Wittenberg (2013) have argued, all narratives travel through time, speculative fiction’s frequent recourse to time-travel stories is an especially vivid example of the ways sf presents a working model of many of narratology’s most fundamental assumptions.

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Brian Richardson, whose early work on anti-mimetic and unnatural narratology has been field defining, offers a taxonomy of ways that narratives eschewing mimesis can end in his chapter, ‘Unnatural Endings in Fiction and Drama’. As Richardson has argued elsewhere, ‘anti-mimetic’ is a better modifier for ‘narratology’ than ‘unnatural’, which metaphorically describes the theory’s narrative objects rather than its adherents’ practice. Classical narratology’s Aristotelian account of narrative endings emphasises closure or resolution, but – as Richardson argues here and elsewhere – postmodernist and postcolonialist fiction resist ‘realistic’ closure even more strenuously than D. A. Miller (1989) has shown that the classic realist novel actually does. Here Richardson touches on ‘unnatural’ endings in performance as well as in prose fiction, proposing an inventory of models that includes parody, circularity, contradiction, metafictional and metadramatic gestures, and combinations of some or all of these strategies. Richardson also draws on his own theory of denarration, the narrative gesture that erases something that has been told earlier in the same story, in describing a typically postmodern way of undoing closure. The final part, ‘Philosophical Approaches to Narrative’, presents narrativetheoretical research that addresses worlds beyond the mainly representational concerns of the theories presented in Parts I–V. Medical ethics, legal theory, phenomenology, disability, contingency, the relation between fictionality and nonfictionality, and the philosophy of selfhood all come into focus in the work of the theorists represented in this section. While James Phelan’s chapter addresses the ethical efficacy of two contemporary novels, the other objects discussed here are less literary, and in that sense more unexpected in a companion to narrative theories. The profound interdisciplinarity of these chapters is, of course, a characteristic that has run through narrative studies for at least three decades; the research displayed here is a sign that the ‘narrative turn’ has persisted in disciplines beyond literary, media, and cultural studies. Mark Currie, whose work on time in narrative has greatly enriched the concepts of temporality laid out in structuralist narratology, takes up ‘Narrative and the Necessity of Contingency’ in contemporary philosophical thought. Currie is interested in the insights of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers who focused on the ways that random or unforeseen events change our way of conceptualising what might have happened. Those same philosophers, according to Currie, have sought to de-centre language as the locus of philosophical inquiry, presenting special challenges to narrative theory by moving away from those ‘categories such as writing, difference, and narrative’ which have been the medium of classical and postclassical narratologies. Currie tackles three challenges to the foundations of narrative theory – the idea that contingency cannot be narrated, the association between writing and necessity or fate, and the question of whether contingency is ontological or epistemological – and proposes strategies for narrative theory to respond to those challenges. In ‘Local Nonfictionality within Generic Fiction’, James Phelan looks at the representation of Huntington’s disease in Saturday by Ian McEwan and Inside the O’Briens by Lisa Genova to raise questions about the ethical implications of fictional and nonfictional accounts of illness. Phelan identifies moments in the two novels where Huntington’s disease is described in more or less nonfictional ways, considering the interpretive implications of the two novels’ presentations of characters who have Huntington’s. Phelan’s purposes are twofold, as he explores the interplay between rhetorical narrative

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theory and narrative medicine while also considering the function of nonfictional facts in novels that use a character’s illness as central or pivotal to their plots. Phelan lays out a set of seven claims about fictionality and nonfictionality, and articulates the ways authors use nonfiction in fictional contexts in order to persuade or influence their readers. The chapter concludes by raising the question: which of these two novels would be a better text to teach in a medical humanities course? Phelan’s answer is grounded in the ethics of fictional rhetoric. Turning from medical humanities to philosophical legal studies, Ruth Ronen’s chapter, ‘The Story of the Law’, discusses laws in terms of Aristotelian closure, a property she claims they seem inevitably to lack. As Ronen argues, laws ‘tend to appear with indeterminate thresholds and boundaries’ because the law itself – despite its formal claims to totality and unlimited applicability – ‘structurally lacks closure’. Ronen uses the Aristotelian concept of closure to interrogate this paradox in the ontological status of the law. Drawing primarily on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception (2005), and Sigmund Freud’s ‘Moses and Monotheism’ (1939), Ronen shows what it would mean to think of the law as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Ronen’s introduction of psychoanalysis into her narrative-theoretical discussion marks an important but uncommon convergence between approaches than can also be found in this volume in the chapters by Porter Abbott, Karin Kukkonen, and Valerie Rohy. In ‘The Centre for Narrative Gravity: Narrative and the Philosophy of Selfhood after Dennett’, Richard Walsh conceives of the self in implicitly anti-psychoanalytic terms, challenging received notions of the relationship between narrative and the self. Walsh contends that while ‘there is good reason to give narrative a crucial role in the constitution of selfhood’, as so many contemporary theories tend to do, ‘this does not mean the self is in any sense narrative in form’. Walsh’s title puns on Daniel Dennett’s (1993: 429) definition of the self as ‘your center of narrative gravity’, playing with the idea that received notions about interdisciplinarity might suggest bringing cognitive scientists, philosophers, and evolutionary biologists together under one institutional roof to find out what the ‘self’ actually is. His project, however, is to interrogate what the metaphor of ‘centre’ means in Dennett’s formulation, in the interest of understanding the self as ‘an implicit effect of narrative cognition’. The final chapter, Amy Shuman and Katharine Young’s ‘The Body as Medium: A Phenomenological Approach to the Production of Affect in Narrative’, is profoundly different in its methodology and content from any other chapter in this volume: the subject of the research is a real person, Shuman’s intellectually disabled son Lino, and the argument about how narrative produces and expresses feeling is structured on a detailed linguistic analysis of an actual conversation. And yet the chapter is grounded in feminist narratology, proceeding from the conviction that the structure and meaning of any narrative depend in part on the situatedness of the body producing or receiving that narrative. In this case, the body plays two important roles in constructing a narrative: first, through the narrator’s gestures and second, through co-creation, or the action of narrating to an audience whose active, in-person responses contribute to making the narrative a story. Their description of the approach as ‘phenomenological’ places Shuman and Young under the rubric of the philosophical for our purposes, but the chapter might as easily have been placed among the mind-centred, situated, or even anti-mimetic pieces in this volume. We end the collection here, as a reminder that

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contemporary narrative theories are, in conception and in practice, profoundly interdisciplinary, and that the organisation of The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories is meant to be suggestive, rather than definitive, in its groupings of projects. We hope that the twenty-eight chapters will be combined and recombined through individual readers’ experiences of using the theories represented here, as critical theorists continue developing new insights into the many and significant functions of narrative in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1. In 2009, de Gruyter published another important collection of thirty-two essays on key terms in narrative theory, the Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert. That volume is now available and continually being updated on an open-access website, The Living Handbook of Narratology. Abbott (2002; 2nd edn 2008) is also a comprehensive account of the key terms and concepts in the field, and Prince (2003) helpfully defines classic terminology. 2. Illuminating histories of narrative theory and narratology can also be found in James Phelan’s substantial afterword to the revised and expanded edition of The Nature of Narrative by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg (2006), and in Kent Puckett’s ambitious Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (2016), which traces the development of narrative theory from Aristotle through Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud; from novel theory as conceived by James, Lukács, Bakhtin, and Auerbach; to structuralism in Shklovsky, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Genette.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter (2008), The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Currie, Mark (2007), About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dennett, Daniel C. (1993), Consciousness Explained, London: Penguin. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds) (2010), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grusin, Richard (ed.) (2015), The Nonhuman Turn, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Herman, David (2007), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herman, David, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol (2012), Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Herman, David, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds) (2005), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, New York and London: Routledge. Hühn, Peter, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert (eds) (2009), Handbook of Narratology, Berlin: de Gruyter. Hühn, Peter et al. (eds) (n.d.), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, (last accessed 12 September 2017). McCabe, Janet and Kim Akass (eds) (2007), Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, New York: I. B. Tauris. Miller, D. A. (1989), Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Mulvey, Laura [1975] (2009), ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl (eds), Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 432–42. Phelan, James (2006), ‘Narrative theory, 1996–2006: A narrative’, in Robert Scholes, James Phelan, and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative, revised and expanded, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Phelan, James and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds) (2005), A Companion to Narrative Theory, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Prince, Gerald (2003), A Dictionary of Narratology, revised edn, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Puckett, Kent (2016), Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittenberg, David (2013), Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative, New York: Fordham University Press.

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I. Mind-Centred and Cognitive Approaches to Narrative

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1 What Does It Mean to Be Mad? Diagnosis, Narrative, Science, and the DSM H. Porter Abbott

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his is a chapter about four interlocking ways in which mental disorders throw into relief broader issues in the understanding of consciousness. The first of these issues is the urgency of our human need to know what goes on in the minds of other humans. The second is the existence of two realities – the physical world and the world of consciousness – and the vexed problem of understanding the latter by the former. The third issue is how and in what form nonfiction narrative can or should be deployed in describing mental states. And the fourth is how narrative fiction can play an ethical role with regard to the irreducible particularity of individual human beings. As Blakey Vermeule wrote, ‘the unconscious cannot be seen directly or even indirectly. The way to catch it is slant, by noticing how consciousness makes patterns and [trying] to figure out what motivates those patterns’ (2015: 471). This is hard enough to do, in science as in life. But mental illness compounds the challenge, especially when it generates thoughts and behaviour that are radically unpredictable, and that in turn make motivation radically opaque. Narrative has done and will continue to do good work in both therapy and in the cooler, less cluttered narratives of biomedical research. But our craving for narratable certainty is strong, so it is important to appreciate the limits of narrative in understanding mental illness and the harm that can be done when we do not.

Madness and the Need to Diagnose In Act III, scene i, Hamlet tears into Ophelia with such cruel and blistering and bewildering language, that Ophelia can only conclude ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’er-thrown!’ (Shakespeare 1961: III, i, 158). She is hurt of course, Hamlet having heretofore wooed her with sweet language. But what she chooses by way of redescribing the man she thought she knew – that his mind is ‘o’er-thrown’ – is best described as an emergency placeholder. It is a temporary category for someone like Hamlet whose behaviour has become so erratic and whose language so unpredictable that he can only be described as mad. ‘O heavenly powers’, cries Ophelia, ‘restore him!’ (III, i, 147). Ophelia’s inability to see the Hamlet she wants to see is an interesting mirror inverse of the problem that afflicts Hamlet, who is unable to see the mother he wants to see. He had thought his mother to be one kind of person and has suddenly learned that she

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is another – and so, by extension, are all women, including Ophelia. ‘God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp. . . . Go to, I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad’ (III, I, 149–53). This pairing of characters afflicted by characters who are acting out of character is in turn compounded, because all this time Ophelia has been acting as bait in a trap set by her father and the King, who have bestowed themselves in ‘lawful espial’ behind an arras. What they hope for is confirmation of a particular diagnosis: that Hamlet suffers ‘an affliction of his love’ (III, I, 36). This would explain why he has not been himself and might even lead to a cure. As his mother says, if Ophelia’s ‘good beauties be the happy cause / Of Hamlet’s wildness’, then perhaps her ‘virtues / Will bring him to his wonted way again’ (III, I, 39–41). What this scene demonstrates is the way madness afflicts the beholders as well as the madman they behold. The affliction of the beholders registers as an urgent need for a diagnosis that will sufficiently explain the frightening combination of unpredictability and obscurity of intention that signifies madness. In other words, in 1603, as now, madness and its many synonyms mark a void that needs filling. In contrast to other medical afflictions, and for that matter most other mysteries of causation, madness afflicts its onlookers with the sensation of being mindblind. The problem is that madness disables their mind-reading capability or, to word this more carefully, it challenges their confidence that they can actually read minds. It makes diagnosis critical, since madness is an extreme threat to the kind of cognitive control that we all depend on in negotiating the vast web of social interaction that is inseparable from our lives. All four observers in this scene – Ophelia, her father, the King, the Queen – may have a vested interest in a particular diagnosis that depends on a certain version of Hamlet, but lacking any secure diagnosis, Hamlet’s unreadability is especially scary. As his mother says, he’s as ‘Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend’ (IV, i, 7–8). And indeed, it was his ‘brainish apprehension’ that led Hamlet to kill Polonius. Even if he were not a danger to people’s lives, the fact that Hamlet’s mind cannot be read is in itself a big problem. As noted, the illusion that we can read someone’s mind is a necessity of our social nature. But what if Hamlet’s ‘not being himself’ is disruptive because it threatens to lay bare the existential truth that we really cannot read minds? Never could. If so, it is possible that for these people the deep problem is that they have never known Hamlet – not because he is a complex fellow, but because not knowing people is the norm. It is a norm which for important evolutionary reasons is kept from consciousness. For as long as we all act in our ‘wonted way’, the illusion that we can read minds is sustained. And well it should be, for it preserves an order necessary to animals as socially complex as ourselves.1 Within that order we are ‘characters’ equipped with roles, familiar ways of being that are constantly reinforced in popular narrative. This resource is what Hamlet depends on when he chooses the popular play The Murder of Gonzago, ‘to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (III, ii, 23–6). And in this he succeeds, trapping his mother and uncle into seeing, mirrored in the characters of the play, the roles that they themselves have played. But when behaviour gets so weird that the placeholder of madness is necessary, alarm bells are set off and a diagnosis becomes a matter of some urgency. When Ophelia comes on stage for her own mad scene, the strange speech that is one of the signs of her madness is delivered largely in song. By singing and in other ways, she like Hamlet

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abandons what Grice called the ‘cooperative principle’, without which conversation fails. So the alarm bell rings, and the King trundles in a diagnosis: ‘this is the poison of deep grief; it springs / All from her father’s death’ (VI, v, 76–7). Certainly there is much in her songs that invites this reading. But there is much, too, that does not: Young men will do’it, if they come to’t; By cock, they are to blame. Quoth she, before you tumbled me, You promised me to wed. So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun, An thou hadst not come to my bed. (IV, v, 59–66) And so, did Hamlet tumble Ophelia? And if so in what spirit? And with what consequences? Or is this her fantasy? Indeed, there is such verbal riot in her madness that, as the one who reports it tells the Queen, we can only ‘botch the words up fit to [our] own thoughts; / Which, as her winks, and nods, and gestures yield them, / Indeed would make one think there might be thought, / Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily’ (IV, v, 10–12). To see the term ‘madness’ as a performative deployed by those who use it is not new. After Michel Foucault asked in 1961 what it means to be mad, and what the qualitative distinction is between ‘sanity’ and ‘insanity’, he and many others have shown in great detail how the distinction works as an enabling performative, particularly in social and legal contexts (Gilbert and Gubar 1979; Feder 1983; Sass 1994; Felman 2003; Thiher 2004; Cross 2010). But as social and legal performatives, the terms are designed to classify within a closed system in which they operate as designated certainties. My focus is on the way insanity and its synonyms, both vernacular and diagnostic, act as signs not of certainty within a system of understanding but uncertainty within a complex dynamic of indeterminacy, psychological need, and linguistic inadequacy. As such, these terms have no real currency but are rather like blank cheques, waiting to be denominated, as they invariably are – and, invariably, with a cost.

The Science of Madness To denote the psychological need that would have madness be a placeholder rather than a classification, I have appropriated Simon Baron-Cohen’s (1996) term ‘mindblindness’, understood not as a disease but as a condition that afflicts us all.2 According to this view, mindblindness is as much a part of our nature as the need to think it is not, that is, our need to think that we can actually read minds. Encountering madness, we are thrown momentarily out of this confidence. ‘Madness’, then, serves as a minimal placeholder that, given our need, implies the existence of an explanatory narrative diagnosis that would lead to a definitive classification, an endpoint, no longer holding a place but indicating the thing in itself. As such, invoking a term for mental illness is the first step in restoring the confidence that even these strange, erratic individuals have minds that are, finally, readable. If I am right, then there is rich irony, as Ralph Savarese and Lisa Zunshine have implied, in making mindblindness part of the diagnosis of autism. It works like much ethnic stereotyping: we off-load our own weakness onto those we apply it to and thus maintain the illusion that we do not have it ourselves.3

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Such a move for such a reason might imply that most of us are, at some buried level of the mind, aware that our mind-reading is fallible. But whether we are or not, the truth is that we will never know what it feels like to be some particular person other than ourselves. Moreover, what goes by the term ‘mind-reading’ is actually a process of reading signs. To quote Donna Williams, neurotypicals ‘live primarily by the system of interpretation’ (qtd in Savarese 2015: 395). We abstract meaning from speech, gestures, expressions, and other bodily actions within ongoing contexts. It is a semiotic capability that has certainly served us well enough as a species, and well enough is all that is needed. But the minds we ‘read’ remain inviolate. We are permanently locked out or, if you will, locked in. If there is a deep shared awareness that we are all mindblind, the necessities of social intercourse would require that this awareness be quarantined from ordinary consciousness. It would follow from this that madness, undiagnosed, puts that quarantine at risk. Little wonder, then, that tackling the daunting challenge of reading the insane was central to Freud’s project of developing a comprehensive system by which we all could, with confidence, read one another. Likewise the categories of insanity can be understood as instruments designed to regularise the irregular by slotting the insane into their places in a diagnostic typology (a nosology). They are acts of scientific domestication applied to individuals who nonetheless have, in Savarese’s apt phrase, ‘irreducible particularity’ (Savarese 2015: 395). This particularity, which not only separates every one of us but lies beyond reach of the finest scientific instruments, is one of the things that make even the most seemingly settled psychiatric classifications necessarily unstable – as witness the constant definitional tinkering in successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The term ‘placeholder’ that I have used above recurs frequently in defence of the DSM. Carol A. Bernstein, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association, wrote that, in DSMs III and IV, diagnostic classifications are ‘best understood as useful placeholders, based on careful description’ (qtd in Vanheule 2014: 73). The understanding is that, as placeholders, diagnoses are applied in the confidence that biomedical research will eventually lead us to the objective roots of the labelled disorders. That is, the symptoms gathered under the placeholder will prove to indicate a common causal condition. As such, the disorder can be considered a ‘natural kind’ in roughly the same way as appendicitis, however much more complicated the biomedical conditions may be that give rise to disorders of the mind.4 The dark side of the diagnostic placeholder is that the placeholders themselves can acquire a kind of sufficiency. Like the vernacular catch-alls of ‘mad’ or ‘crazy’, they can become reified in a way that Nietzsche called ‘mythological’ and Foucault called ‘magical’.5 When Robins and Guze (1970: 983) famously wrote that ‘classification is diagnosis’, they came close to demonstrating the end-product of the process Nietzsche described in Joyful Wisdom – names growing over time ‘onto-and-into things’ until they ‘become their very body’. ‘Let us not forget this’, Nietzsche goes on, ‘it suffices to create new names and valuations and probabilities, in order in the long run to create new “things”’ ([1882] 1960: 96–7). Theorising humanists have been down this road into a land where no referent is above suspicion, and I do not wish to re-enter such well-trodden ground. But it is nonetheless true that a diagnostic label can indeed acquire a thing-like quality that can act like a stone, making it difficult – especially for the over-worked practitioner – to question its quasi-empirical status. This is even more

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true for the patient whose diagnosis ‘provides a name for what [he or she] is living through in terms of a hidden disease-thing’ (Vanheule 2014: 23). Since 1980, the hopeful assumption guiding successive editions of the DSM has been that ‘psychiatric research . . . would lead to a more objective delineation of the disorder categories’ (Vanheule 2014: 73). But, increasingly, the organisation by disorder category has itself been considered counter-scientific. In fact, by using the traditional categories at all, the editors of the DSM were proceeding from the top down: from linguistic category to assumed biomedical cause. On this score, the latest edition, DSM-V (2013), was subjected to a withering critique by Thomas Insel, then director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Insel’s primary point is that, instead of basing its diagnoses on the causes of mental disorders, the manual continues to base its diagnoses ‘on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms’ (Insel 2013). In their defence, the DSM editors point out that at present we do not yet have anything like the kind of causal understandings for mental disorders that we have for disorders like AIDS, heart disease, prostate cancer, and so on. What this means is that, if the manual is going to be of any use, it must often, of necessity, deploy placeholders simply to navigate the diagnostic no-man’s land between insanity and its causes. In other words, to say that someone suffers from Depressive Disorder may not yet be like saying ‘this is the poison of deep grief’, but it gets us a certain distance from saying she is ‘crazy’. For the opposition, this defence was no defence at all, for it still gave pride of place to diagnostic classification – and it did so even as the editors, in their own words, ‘have come to recognize that the boundaries between disorders are more porous than originally perceived’ (APA 2013: 6). But the need to know that, ultimately, we can and will fully understand the causes of mental disorder is as deep in this field as it is on Shakespeare’s stage. The tacit assumption is that, if we can begin to sort madness into kinds, we have made a good start. In the words of Tanya Luhrmann: Our current diagnostic system – the main achievement of the biomedical revolution in psychiatry – drew a sharp, clear line between those who were sick and those who were well, and that line was determined by science. The system started with the behaviour of persons and sorted them into types. That approach sunk deep roots into our culture, possibly because sorting ourselves into different kinds of people comes naturally to us. (Luhrmann 2015) In a radical overturning, Insel led the NIMH to abandon the DSM altogether and with it over thirty-five years of research validated, regulated, and funded according to diagnostic categories (anxiety, schizophrenia, ADHD) and to replace it with science that begins not by proceeding downward from diagnostic categories but upward from the biological, genetic, neurological substrate: in short, to ‘define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms’. To this end, the NIMH ‘launched a Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science, and other levels of information to lay the foundation for a new classification system’ (Insel 2013).6 More power to them. And though the RDoC has had a rough go of it so far, the overarching scientific enterprise is already proving itself. Moreover, by going down this road the branding effect of diagnostic classification can be temporarily mitigated.

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But the problem of understanding causation of subjective phenomena, a problem given salience by most mental disorders, will remain. This is because, though mental disorder manifests in behaviours, which may be assessed through empirical measurement, it also manifests in consciousness, which eludes empirical measurement, except by external indicators (galvanic skin response, fMRI of blood flow). There is a barrier here to what E. O. Wilson called ‘a seamless web of cause and effect’ in which all phenomena ‘are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics’ (1998: 266). The problem is that subjective states are invisible and, in every instance, internally registered in a single, singular sensorium. And though there may be a demonstrable biomedical connection for a mental illness, full causation is beyond translation. There are, for sure, those like Christof Koch who label any talk of never reaching the goal of such full understanding as ‘pontificating’ and ‘defeatist’. For Koch, science is actually zipping along toward the day, ‘not far off’, when we will achieve ‘a naturalized, quantitative and predictive understanding of consciousness and its place in the universe’ (qtd in Gifford 2016: 68).7 It is not out of the question that something like this day may come, though I doubt it will be any time soon. But to argue, as Francis Crick does, that we ‘are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’ (1994: 3; emphasis added),8 dismisses the deep difference between the measurable world of material interaction and the immeasurable internal world of consciousness, even as the latter depends on the former for its existence. It is a world not only of feeling and thought, but of symbols and language – a world that inhabits us and that we inhabit, collectively. And, as Yuval Harari points out, ‘the truly unique feature of our language’, as compared with whatever came before it, ‘is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions’, but rather its ‘ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all’ (2015: 24). Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations, and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google. (Harari 2015: 34)9 Terrence Deacon, in Incomplete Nature, puts this as a question: ‘How can something not there be the cause of anything?’ (2013: 45). Beneath this question is the primary one he addresses in his long and densely argued book: how does this powerfully causative absence come into being? Everyone knows, without even thinking about it, that consciousness is a reality every bit as real as material reality. One knows it without invoking the supernatural: it simply is, though in a very different way than material reality simply is. And unlike material reality, it does not yield to reductive analysis. What is not there ‘is what is left out of reductionistic analyses. What is not there or not exemplified is not anything that is reducible, because there are no components to what is absent’ (Deacon 2013: 204). It will still be as real and as absent and missing from our results when we arrive at ‘no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’ (Crick 1994: 3).

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Narrativising Madness The publication of DSM-III in 1980 was a landmark event in twentieth-century treatment of mental disorders. Featuring ‘robust, empirical research-based diagnostic categories’ (Berkenkotter 2008: 142), it consolidated a revolution in a field that had been up to then dominated by psychoanalytic theory and practice, and ushered in an era of biomedical dominance, predicated on the assumption that the causes of mental disorders are organic in nature. Paralleling this development was a sharp decline in the fortunes of the individual case history as a scientific resource. As the primary instrument in a narrativebased psychology, the case history had been the central resource within the integrated, mutually supportive, fields of therapy and research, for the roughly seventy years leading up to DSM-III. As Carol Berkenkotter has shown in her excellent study of the case history, this tool almost disappeared from published research in the years that followed. In 1980, roughly 100 of a total 350 research articles published in The American Journal of Psychiatry deployed case studies in achieving their results (Berkenkotter 2008: 137–8). By 1991, the number had dropped to zero. In part, this disappearance of the case history was owing to a change in AJP editorial policy, begun in 1985, that relegated such submissions to the letters section, a shift in policy that formalised a field-wide shift toward empirical research often involving large-n studies and relying heavily on statistical evidence.10 Berkenkotter and her team also found a corresponding shift in the genre of the research article from the dominance in 1965 of an eclectic mix of formatting to the overwhelming dominance by 2001 of articles conforming to a four-part format: Introduction – Method – Results – Discussion. Within the implicit reassurance of a repeatable form of exposition is a corresponding regulation of the language applied to the classifications of mental suffering that in turn find their way into successive editions of the DSM. Notable here is the way the DSM has in turn become ‘the hub of the distribution of human services’ (Madsen and Leech 2007: 153), the medical/ economic complex in which funding, billing, insurance, liability, and the like require a certifiable system of labels in order for the system to work. And where the consequences of this inflexibility of the system were felt most acutely was in the mismatch between it and the psychodynamic practice of therapy. As Berkenkotter and her co-researcher, Doris Ravotas, put it, the therapist finds herself having to translate ‘the client’s concerns into a set of meanings compatible with the classifications of psychopathology’ in the DSM. Moreover, the ‘hierarchical distribution of disease entities’ in the DSM has ‘the effect of pathologizing the client’, labelling her ‘as an instance of a particular pathology . . . and thus reducing the complex, multidimensional problems’ that a client presents ‘to a one-dimensional typification’ (Berkenkotter 2008: 146–7). One notable aspect of the shift from narrative particulars to descriptive classification is the increase in nominalisations by which, for example, ‘I never had a good relationship’ translates to ‘probable adjustment disorder’ and ‘I’ve been screwed up by trying to get my dad’s attention’ translates to ‘client presents w/ predominant dysphoric mood’ (2008: 155). In short, the result is narrative almost entirely lacking in narrativity: Ct. presents w/initial complaints of problems in an intimate relationship . . . She has primarily reacted w/series of depressive sx [symptoms]. These include: predominant dysphoric mood, difficulty concentrating, social w/drawal, loss of interest in usual

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h. porter abbott activities, initial insomnia, and frequent crying spells. Denies anergia, changes in appetite or eating habits, & feelings of worthlessness. There are no psychomotor abnormalities. There are occasional transitory thoughts of suicide w/out rumination, plan or intent. (Berkenkotter 2008: 154)

Some narratologists would argue that this steady decline toward narratives thick with ten-dollar nominalisations and at the same time a general release from the actual narratives people tell about their afflictions is a departure from narrative altogether, since these lack, in both subject and appeal, the engagement of human thought and feeling that is integral to legitimate narrative. If your definition of narrative is broader, requiring only the bare minimum of events bound in chains of cause and effect, then such case histories would qualify as narratives even as the least traces of narrativity have been beaten out of them. But they would fall into what Peter Hühn has called narratives of Type I events, governed not by plot but by ‘more descriptive and neutrally informative way[s] of tracing and communicating developments, processes, and changes’ (2008: 145 n.30). Scientific discourse abounds in Type I narratives. And for good reason: expunging narrativity is essential if there is to be anything like an objective representation of phenomena as they occur sequentially in time. As Martin Kreiswirth puts it, story, for ‘many in the human sciences, . . . is at bottom false, fictive – “literary”, imaginative, not scientific’ (2000: 312). And certainly Insel’s robust scientific derivation of diagnoses based on ‘objective laboratory measures’ will get us further than King Claudius in diagnosing what poisons the mind. That said, the deep problem remains that among the necessities of a reductive scientific method is the absolute abandonment of narrativity and with it any vestige of the felt, complex, internal particularity of what these dedicated scientists, in their biomedical way, are seeking to understand. This deep problem, of course, is a version of the ancient conundrum: how does mind arise from matter? The provocation of madness, I believe, throws this problem into high relief, but by the same token appears at least to open a door to insight. What I have been attempting here is to use the challenge of madness to reformulate the problem from a narratological perspective.

What Fiction Can Do But then there is narrative fiction, a mode that has its own special status in the context of my subject, since one of the things that fictional narrative can do is to let us actually know, without a doubt, what a character is thinking. This is because authors, not life, are in control of the people they create. That this is a special distinction of fiction has been debated by many, both for and against.11 But given our craving to diagnose or, more broadly, our need to know what is going on in the minds of others, fiction, as Lisa Zunshine has persuasively argued, is just the instrument to arouse this craving and then satisfy it. Fiction, she argues, exercises our mind-reading muscles and in so doing gives us the pleasing ‘illusion . . . that we will be all right out there in the real world, where our social survival depends on attributing states of mind and constantly negotiating among those bewildering, approximate, self-serving, partially wrong or plainly wrong attributions’ (2006: 18). Whether in the long run this illusion is helpful or harmful is hard to say.12 But the only way to replace the illusion with certainty requires the freedom that only authors can exercise in their fictional worlds.

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After all, do we not, as privileged spectators, really know what is wrong with Hamlet? Surely, it is bad enough that, within six weeks of the death of your beloved father (the King no less), the Queen, your mother, should marry your uncle. But, then, to have the ghost of your father tell you – a bookish student of a nonviolent, meditative disposition – that your mother and your uncle killed him in his sleep, and that he, the King, requires vengeance, and that he will not sleep till he gets it! Plus he says all this with a big voice, rattling chains in the middle of the night. Really, is there any need for high-powered diagnosis should you ‘bend your eye on vacancy / And with the incorporal air . . . hold discourse’ (Shakespeare 1961: III, iv, 18–19) with a real ghost that we can see quite plainly, even though the other characters cannot? But there is an opposite thing that writers of fiction can do for us and this is where I want to put my emphasis here at the end of this chapter. It is a rarer but arguably more important effect, and the works of fiction that pursue it generally resist the reader to a greater degree. These are the works of fiction in which verisimilitude depends on the failure of narrative to allow full access to the minds of their characters. One of these works is Graham Swift’s Waterland, narrated by a historian, Tom Crick, whose disenchantment with the power of stories to explain is rivalled only by his need to tell them. Accordingly, the emplotment of his narrative is an exemplary demonstration of Viktor Shklovsky’s standard that the function of plot is to resist the clarity of story. In discussing this rich novel, I shall have to limit myself, as I did in my discussion of Hamlet, to two mad scenes. In the last pages of the novel, Tom and his father race after Tom’s older (half-) brother, a ‘potato-head’ named Dick, who can barely speak. He has fled to the dredger where he usually works, though it is a Sunday, and fired up the engine. Tom and his father roust up the dredger’s captain from a pub and then struggle with ‘the mammoth task of explanation’: I open my mouth. I review in my mind a dozen possible starting-points; I foresee confusion and incredulity; I realize the utter impossibility of encapsulating the causes of my brother’s . . . presence . . . ‘He’s gone barmy’. And then, parenthetically, (Forgive me, Dick. To malign your final gesture, your last recourse, with the taint of madness, to rob it of reality). (Swift 1992: 264) ‘He’s gone barmy’, his father echoes, settling for the same placeholder. ‘We d-don’t know . . . what he might do.’ ‘Ah’, Tom, interjects parenthetically, ‘truthfulness at last!’ And this is the truth, they do not know, even as Tom, in retrospect, tries to disown ‘the taint of madness’. Tom does have a hunch though, as do we with the full retrospect of the novel. But the staging of this scene nonetheless compounds the sense of how great the distance is that separates these people, including ourselves, from Dick. They pile into a boat along with two drunk American lunkheads who really, really want to help and insist on coming along, overweighting a rowboat made for three. Airmen from Arizona, they serve as a drag on the boat but also as baffled assistant focalisers while Dick, alone above them all on the dredger and out of earshot, makes his final dive and disappears. The staging of this distance of sound and space between the irreducible particularity of the single man on the deck and the felt frustration of his observers is, as

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I have argued elsewhere, ethical work (Abbott 2013). It remains to point out that this distance between the would-be mind-reader and the mind that will not be read is a separation of minds that also lies within ourselves. It is the ancient problem of what Stanley Klein has called ‘the ontological self and the epistemological self’: the self that acts and the self that observes the self that acts (Klein 2014). Here, too, the placeholder of madness can apply, for as Tom Crick puts it, ‘inside every madman sits a little sane man saying “You’re mad, you’re mad”’ (Swift [1983] 1992: 176). In the chapter titled ‘Unknown Country’, Tom comes home to find his wife, Mary, on the sofa with somebody’s child in her arms. Trying to be calm and somehow to comprehend, Tom says to himself: Now tread carefully, history teacher. Maybe this isn’t your province. Maybe this is where history dissolves, chronology goes backwards. That’s your wife over there; you know, Mary, the one you thought you knew. But maybe this is unknown country. ‘Mary, what on earth – ?’ . . . ‘Look. Come and look’. ‘Where did you get it?’ ‘From God. I got it from God’. (Swift [1983] 1992: 199–200) In the tug of war that follows, Tom eventually manages to gain possession of the baby. He continues with his questions and Mary continues with her fantasy until suddenly the sane Mary, who may have been observing her other self all along, speaks: ‘All right, all right. I got him from Safeways. I got him from the Safeways in Lewisham’ ([1983] 1992: 202), where she took him from a pram. My final point is not that we do not gain understandings of the characters in this novel. We learn a lot about them, just as biomedical research will continue to teach us a lot about the way we as a species think and feel. But at the same time we are reminded that there is an unknown country that we shall never get to despite all the stories we tell ourselves to make us think we can.

Notes 1. Hence the common theme of madness arising from an excess of sanity, a diagnosis frequently applied to Hamlet, and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man applies to himself: the curse of seeing the actual game, sub specie aeternitatis, played out in the social order. In both cases, the inability to shake such awareness makes it impossible to act normally or, for that matter, to justify any course of action. The exemplary fictional representation of sanity diagnosed as madness is Chekhov’s Dr Andrey Yefimitch Ragin in ‘Ward # 6’, the Superintendent of an asylum who winds up a patient within it. Like Hamlet, he suffers from an onset of cosmic awareness that leads him, also like Hamlet, to suffer the ailment of ‘not being himself’. It is a change in character that, by exceeding social norms, generates a diagnosis – he is mad – that in turn permits putting him safely in quarantine. As Dr Ragin says, once you are diagnosed, you fall into ‘an enchanted circle from which you will not escape’ (Chekhov 1959: 99). In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker made essentially the same case when he argued that the problem with neurotics is not that they are out of reality but too much in it. ‘This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality’ (Becker 1973: 178).

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2. However much Baron-Cohen may have missed the mark in treating autism as an organic deficit in theory of mind, I think he was on the right track when he controversially extended a scalar condition of mindblindness down into the neurotypical male demographic (Baron-Cohen 2003). But if I am right in my own analysis, then one could say that he did not extend it far enough. 3. ‘The profound irony of this situation is that it is the neurotypical observer who is “mindblind” (i.e., incapable of reading the other person’s mind) yet the label of mindblindness or “impaired” theory of mind is firmly attached to the individual exhibiting the unconventional behavior’ (Lisa Zunshine in Savarese and Zunshine 2014: 22). 4. For a good introduction to the hotly contested issue of classifying mental disorders as natural kinds, see Kincaid and Sullivan (2014). 5. ‘It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed “in itself”, we act once more as we have always acted – mythologically’ (Nietzsche [1886] 1966: 29); ‘From the very beginning, objectivity was a reification of a magical type, which could only be accomplished with the complicity of the patients themselves, starting out from a transparently clear moral framework which was slowly forgotten as positivism imposed its myth of scientific objectivity’ (Foucault 2009: 509). 6. The RDoC was from the start controversial, but the spirit behind it has been vigorously endorsed by Insel’s successor at the NIMH, Joshua Gordon, who considers it ‘something I am likely to keep – although it may need a few tweaks to extract the most value out of it’ (Abbott 2016). 7. ‘Some philosophers, mystics and other confabulators nocturne pontificate about the impossibility of ever understanding the true nature of consciousness, of subjectivity. Yet there is little rationale for buying into such defeatist talk and every reason to look forward to the day, not far off, when science will come to a naturalized, quantitative and predictive understanding of consciousness and its place in the universe’ (Koch, qtd in Gifford 2016: 68). 8. ‘You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’ (Crick 1994: 3). 9. The ingenuity of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens is that this ‘brief history of humankind’ takes its start not from the beginning of recorded history, nor even 11,000 years ago with the beginnings of agriculture and animal husbandry, but instead 60,000 years before that when, in a comparatively short period of time, anatomically modern humans underwent the ‘cognitive revolution’ and language as we know it came into being. 10. In 1997, the AJP began including one case history per month in a special section titled ‘Clinical Case Conferences’, introduced ‘as a means to maintain contact with the clinical aspects of psychiatry’ (Berkenkotter 2008: 139). 11. For a good account of this issue and how the disputants have gone back and forth, see Schaeffer (2013). 12. This is a point worth stressing. It is certainly the case that our evolved capacity for a theory of mind has worked sufficiently in our social lives to abet our survival as a species. But the object of the evolutionary game is not knowing the truth about what people are thinking but species survival, which means that sometimes it can even be an advantage to be dead wrong about what someone is thinking. In fiction the game is played differently, and Zunshine has been careful to keep her focus on how fiction engages our evolved needs and capabilities without attributing any necessary evolutionary advantage or disadvantage to this engagement.

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Works Cited Abbott, Allison (2016), ‘U.S. mental health chief: Psychiatry must get serious about mathematics’, Scientific American, (last accessed 28 October 2016). Abbott, H. Porter (2013), Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. American Psychiatric Association (APA) (2013), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edn, Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing. Baron-Cohen, Simon (1996), Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — (2003), The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain, London: Penguin. Becker, Ernest (1973), The Denial of Death, New York: Macmillan. Berkenkotter, Carol (2008), Patient Tales: Case Histories and the Uses of Narrative in Psychiatry, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Chekhov, Anton (1959), Great Stories by Chekhov, ed. David H. Greene, trans. Constance Garnett, New York: Dell. Crick, Francis (1994), The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, New York: Scribner’s. Cross, Simon (2010), Mediating Madness: Mental Distress and Cultural Representation, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Deacon, Terrence W. (2013), Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, New York: W. W. Norton. Feder, Lillian (1983), Madness in Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Felman, Shoshana (2003), Writing and Madness, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Foucault, Michel (1965), Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, New York: Random House. — (2009), History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, New York: Vintage. Gifford, Bill (2016), ‘Living to 120: Will we defeat aging?’, Scientific American, 315: 3, 62–9. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar (1979), The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven: Yale University Press. Harari, Yuval Noah (2015), Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, New York: HarperCollins. Hühn, Peter (2008), ‘Functions and forms of eventfulness in narrative fiction’, in John Pier and Javier Á. García Lanza (eds), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 141–63. Insel, Thomas (2013), ‘Director’s blog: Transforming diagnosis’, NIMH blog, (last accessed 10 September 2016). Kincaid, Harold and Jacqueline A. Sullivan (eds) (2014), Classifying Psychopathology: Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Klein, Stanley B. (2014), The Two Selves: Their Metaphysical Commitments and Functional Independence, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kreiswirth, Martin (2000), ‘Merely telling stories? Narrative and knowledge in the human sciences’, Poetics Today, 21: 2, 293–318. Luhrmann, Tanya M. (2015), ‘Redefining mental illness’, New York Times, 18 January, p. 5. Madsen, Kristie and Peter Leech (2007), The Ethics of Labeling in Mental Health, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Nietzsche, Friedrich [1882] (1960), Joyful Wisdom, trans. Thomas Common, New York: Ungar. — [1886] (1966), Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. Robins, Eli and Samuel Guze (1970), ‘Establishment of diagnostic validity in psychiatric illness: Its application to schizophrenia’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 126: 7, 983–7.

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Sass, Louis A. (1994), Madness & Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Savarese, Ralph (2015), ‘What some autistics can teach about poetry: A neurocosmopolitan approach’, in Lisa Zunshine (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 393–417. — and Lisa Zunshine (2014), ‘The critic as neurocosmopolite; or, what cognitive approaches to literature can learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in conversation with Ralph James Savarese’, Narrative, 22: 1, 17–44. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie (2013), ‘Fictional vs. factual narration’ (revised), in Peter Hühn et al. (eds), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University, (last accessed 11 October 2016). Shakespeare, William (1961), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Hardin Craig, Chicago: Scott, Foresman. Swift, Graham [1983] (1992), Waterland, New York: Vintage. Thiher, Allen (2004), Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Vanheule, Stijn (2014), Diagnosis and the DSM: A Critical Review, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Vermeule, Blakey (2015), ‘The new unconscious: A guided tour’, in Lisa Zunshine (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 463–82. Wilson, Edward O. (1998), Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, New York: Knopf. Zunshine, Lisa (2006), Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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2 The Nonhuman in Mind: Narrative Challenges to Folk Psychology Marco Caracciolo

Introduction

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here is a clear consensus in narrative theory and related fields that narrative is geared towards social interaction. On the one hand, social dynamics figure prominently in the stories that circulate in human cultures (Mar and Oatley 2008); on the other hand, narrative is ubiquitous in our social interchanges, allowing us to project a personal identity (Bamberg 2005) and work out explanations for other people’s actions (Hutto 2008). Narrative, put otherwise, is central to ‘folk psychology’, our pre-scientific understanding of how minds work (see Churchland 1991). One of the upshots of this idea is that storytelling is grounded in the human-scale world of everyday experience – the world in which human social interactions unfold. Thus, when Aristotle argued that plot is ‘the mimesis of the action’ in the Poetics ([ca. 330 bce] 1995: 49), he had in mind human – or at least anthropomorphic – action. Fast-forward to 1996, and Monika Fludernik’s ‘natural’ narratology also acknowledges narrative’s ‘anthropomorphic bias’, noting that this bias underlies ‘the fundamental story parameters of personhood, identity, actionality, etc.’ (1996: 13). However, we may wonder how narrative fares when confronted with realities that elude or even challenge the human-scale world of social interaction. Consider the phenomena that have attracted attention in recent literary and cultural studies under the heading of the ‘nonhuman’, a broad notion encompassing animals, climate change, and geological processes (see Grusin 2015; Clarke 2016). These nonhuman realities have been at the forefront of many distinct but closely intertwined discussions, in the environmental humanities (Morton 2010; Iovino and Oppermann 2012) as well as posthumanism (Braidotti 2013) and object-oriented philosophy (Harman 2002; Bogost 2012). The common denominator of these discussions is that they take the human out of its comfort zone, forcing us to question entrenched notions about our separateness from, and perhaps even our superiority to, the wide world beyond us. Because of its anthropomorphic bias, narrative is not completely at home with the nonhuman; yet its forays beyond the human scale are all the more productive because of the tensions and paradoxes that they inevitably create. In narrative theory, various commentators have started exploring this link between narrative and the nonhuman by cross-fertilising narrative theory with animal studies (Herman 2014) or ecocriticism (Easterlin 2012: ch. 3; James 2015; Weik von Mossner 2017). In an article co-authored with Lars Bernaerts, Luc Herman,

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and Bart Vervaeck (Bernaerts et al. 2014), we charted the interpretive dynamics triggered by confronting first-person narrators who exhibit nonhuman qualities, such as narrating animals or even objects. In this chapter I want to change tack and look for the nonhuman where one would least expect to find it – namely, in the representation of human mental processes. I thus position my argument at the intersection of cognitive approaches to narrative and approaches that focus on stylistic or thematic aspects of story that are not, prima facie, mentalistic – that is, that do not appear to involve human or human-like thought processes. I would like to show that narrative’s confrontation with the nonhuman is at its most troubling when it takes place within the human, suggesting that our psychology is entangled with processes and things that lack human-like agency. As I will argue, this revelation proves counterintuitive and disturbing because it short-circuits readers’ folk-psychological assumptions. The embedding of the nonhuman in the human is, of course, not something that can be seen at work in all or even most narratives. It remains, to a large extent, the province of experimental texts such as ‘Headache’, the short story by Julio Cortázar I will comment on in the last section of this chapter. For the purposes of this chapter, I will call a narrative ‘experimental’ when it overturns established ideas and conventions – in this case, about the dualistic separation between human life and nonhuman processes. Yet I offer this close reading in the spirit of developing a sensitivity for human–nonhuman entanglements in all narratives, including narratives that are far less overtly experimental. For instance, writing about the pervasiveness of metaphorical language in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Kay Young notes that Eliot’s metaphors tend to bring together human subjectivity and inanimate objects. Young adds: ‘To understand our feelings and thoughts in terms of objects makes it possible to subject them to objective analysis – to reference, categorization, grouping, quantification – in essence, to empirical understanding’ (2010: 101). Perhaps the objectification of feelings in Eliot’s novel is not merely a rhetorical device, but one that reveals an unsettling truth about the imbrication of mind and inanimate objects – the kind of imbrication that has been explored by scholars working within posthumanism and the nonhuman turn (see, e.g., Braidotti 2013). Whether this is a tenable interpretation of Daniel Deronda or not, the theoretical framework I will develop in this chapter makes it possible to raise this kind of question, reading literary texts in light of what philosophers call ‘physicalism’ – namely, the notion that mind can be reduced to matter, human subjectivity to biochemical (that is, inanimate and nonhuman) processes. Physicalism denies the dualistic distinction between mind and matter – a distinction that is often associated with Cartesian philosophy but is, in fact, extremely basic in developmental terms (Johnson 2000): from a very early age, we ascribe mind to certain entities and not to others, driving a wedge between minded subjects and physical objects. Thus, dualism is part and parcel of our folk-psychological attributions of mental states to other subjects; as Edward Slingerland puts it: The dualism advocated by Plato and Descartes was not a historical or philosophical accident, but rather a development of an intuition that comes naturally to us, as bearers of theory of mind [or folk psychology, in my terminology]: agents are different from things. (Slingerland 2008: 394)

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Because of cultural as well as evolutionary biases, we assume that there is a fundamental difference between mental and material events. Narratives like Cortázar’s ‘Headache’ challenge this assumption, explicitly foregrounding and interrogating the limits of mind–matter dualism. To fully understand how this is possible, we need to look into the ways in which narrative normally builds on our folk psychology. That is the task of the next section. In the following section, paving the way for my reading of Cortázar, I will explore how metaphorical language may bridge between psychological phenomena and the world of nonhuman things and processes.

Narrative Pathways to Folk Psychology Why do we act the way we do? A considerable portion of our life is spent discussing reasons and motivations for other people’s actions. We say things like ‘he did this because he’s a selfish man’, ‘he was so rude that I couldn’t help snapping at him’, and so on. We understand behaviour by leveraging our folk psychology – that is, by ascribing beliefs, desires, and more stable personality traits. Narrative and folk psychology are closely linked, as narrative scholars and philosophers have repeatedly pointed out (Hutto 2008; Palmer 2004; Zunshine 2006). Not all of these writers use the term ‘folk psychology’; some prefer to talk about ‘theory of mind’, which is more widespread in psychology than in philosophy. We can consider the two phrases interchangeable: they both refer to the skills we use to make sense of other people’s intentional actions. The link between these skills and narrative can be demonstrated through two distinct, but ultimately convergent, pathways: first, we bring to bear folk psychology on individual narratives, by attributing beliefs and desires to narrative agents (that is, characters); second, narrative as a practice participates – and, for some commentators, even plays a key role – in folk-psychological attributions of intentions to other individuals. Let us start by looking at how narrative theorists have thought about folk psychology in connection to the reading (listening, watching, etc.) of individual narratives. Lisa Zunshine has pioneered this approach to character in Why We Read Fiction (2006). For Zunshine, readers of narrative keep track of characters’ beliefs, desires, and other mental states by drawing on their folk psychology – or ‘theory of mind’, as she calls it. In Zunshine’s words: our Theory of Mind makes it possible for us to invest literary characters with a potential for a broad array of thoughts, desires, intentions, and feelings and then to look for textual cues that allow us to figure out their states of mind and thus predict their behavior. (Zunshine 2006: 60) The originality of Zunshine’s claim lies in the fact that, unlike previous accounts of consciousness representation in narrative (see, e.g., Cohn 1978), she draws attention to the continuity between engaging with real people in social interaction – through folk psychology – and engaging with fictional characters. Indeed, summarising recent developments in cognitive narrative theory, Liesbeth Korthals Altes (2014: 128–31) has labelled the view advanced by Zunshine (and others) ‘continuity thesis’. Another advocate of folk-psychological continuity is Alan Palmer, whose Fictional Minds (2004) shares Zunshine’s concern with how readers ascribe mental states to

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characters. Palmer, unlike Zunshine, places a premium on mental states that are not explicitly referred to by the text, but that can be inferred from characters’ external actions and behaviour. Put otherwise, a narrator does not need to state a character’s feelings for readers to be able to work out such feelings, because folk psychology assists them in their inference-making. In narrative representation as well as in real life, overt behaviour and ‘inner’ states are closely bound up, allowing interpreters to move seamlessly – and often unconsciously – from the former to the latter. Palmer (2004: 212–14) calls this phenomenon the ‘thought-action continuum’. Finally, David Herman has made a compelling case for the continuity thesis (although he does not use this term) in refuting what he calls the ‘exceptionality’ of fictional minds – namely, the idea that ‘readers’ experiences of fictional minds are different in kind from their experiences of the minds they encounter outside the domain of narrative fiction’ (2011a: 8). On the contrary, for Herman readers experience fictional minds in ways that are fundamentally analogous to real minds – again, because they leverage their folk psychology in making sense of narrative texts. These ideas have faced criticism from scholars affiliated with other areas of narrative theory. Brian McHale (2012), for instance, takes issue with how, by insisting on the centrality of folk psychology in reading narrative, cognitive theorists tend to downplay – or even ignore – the role of literary conventions in defining the fictional ‘beings’ that we call characters. ‘Unnatural’ narrative theorists – who have been building a theory of narrative geared towards antimimetic texts – similarly balk at the continuity thesis advocated by scholars such as Zunshine, Palmer, and Herman (see Alber et al. 2010; Iversen 2013). In broad strokes, these objections depend on the privileging, in cognitive narrative theory, of what James Phelan (2007: 19–20) would call the ‘mimetic’ dimension of character, which builds on an analogy between real people and fictional beings. This focus on the mimetic comes at the expense of Phelan’s ‘synthetic’ and ‘thematic’ dimensions – respectively, characters as literary and largely conventional (‘synthetic’) constructs and characters as participating in broader, thematic meanings. McHale and unnatural narrative theorists foreground, in different ways, these nonmimetic aspects of character, and therefore see folk psychology as less central to readers’ engagement with narrative than cognitive theorists do. It is undeniable that cognitive accounts of character tend to be one-sided, either because they emphasise certain (mimetic) texts over other kinds of narratives or because they ignore how readers’ engagement with characters can fuelled by nonmimetic interests as well. But it is equally problematic, and counterproductive, to completely uncouple character from folk psychology. The mimetic dimension of character may be foregrounded to varying degrees by different narratives (and different readers); yet evacuating it would make the notion of character itself irrelevant. Take, for example, Stefan Iversen’s (2013) account of ‘unnatural minds’ in fiction. Iversen discusses Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis from this perspective, proposing that its protagonist – Gregor Samsa – is a prototypical case of unnatural mind. Iversen defines this concept as follows: ‘An unnatural mind is a presented consciousness that in its functions or realizations violates the rules governing the possible world it is part of in a way that resists naturalization or conventionalization’ (2013: 97). The point, however, is that the very idea of ‘violation’ presupposes readers’ familiarity with the rules that are being violated. Even if the hybrid consciousness

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that results from Gregor’s metamorphosis into a bug is ‘unnatural’ in the sense that it challenges distinctions between humans and nonhuman animals, it is still a form of consciousness, and readers will interpret Gregor’s beliefs and desires on the basis of their folk psychology. Consider the famous scene in which Gregor peeks out from his room to listen to his sister’s violin playing: no matter how unnatural Gregor’s mind and the situation in which he finds himself, readers would be unable to make sense of this episode without ascribing to Gregor a desire to listen to the beautiful music. The character’s behaviour is thus interpreted on the basis of readers’ familiarity with auditory perception (what listening to music is like), the close integration between desire and action, and so on. This brief example shows why it is so difficult to get rid of folk-psychological assumptions in approaching character. Yet it would be misguided to claim that folk psychology exhausts the range of meanings brought into play by Kafka’s text. It is precisely because there is more than just folk psychology at stake in narratives that folk psychology may be called into question or enriched by the minds of characters such as Kafka’s Gregor Samsa. This is the main point I raise in Caracciolo (2016). Along similar lines, in critiquing the mimeticism of cognitive approaches to narrative, Maria Mäkelä argues that by ‘reducing fictional minds into exempla of actual human cognition we miss the essential dynamics between verbal art and real-life experientiality’ (2013: 130). Conceptualising readers’ engagement with characters as a multifaceted interpretive process allows us to capture this ‘essential dynamics’ as it plays out in narratives that, like Cortázar’s ‘Headache’, challenge folk psychology and particularly the dualistic separation between mental processes and physical matter. In order fully to understand narrative’s complex interrelation with folk psychology, however, we need to shift the focus from individual texts to narrative as a sociocultural practice. So far I have discussed how readers bring to bear folk-psychological competencies on the characters that inhabit stories. But philosopher of mind Daniel Hutto (2008) has convincingly argued that narrative itself serves as a folk-psychological tool in engaging with real people. In social interactions, we ascribe intentions to other people by telling stories about them – stories that are able to relate, in causal terms, people’s mental states (including their beliefs, desires, personality, etc.) to their overt behaviour. A convenient way of explaining why someone acts the way he or she does is to tell a story about him or her, detailing past experiences and present circumstances. To make a case for this, Hutto builds on a body of psychological research according to which ‘[exposure] to stories is a critical determiner of [folk-psychological] abilities . . . [It] has been shown that this relation is stronger than mere correlation. Apparently narrative training at least causally influences the basic theory of mind skills for the better’ (2008: 254). If Hutto is right, storytelling plays a central role in explaining behaviour and establishing psychological causality. This allows us to bring the ‘essential dynamics’ outlined by Mäkelä into sharper focus. Not only does narrative take folk psychology on board, it is an integral part of folk psychology: by being exposed to certain narratives, we become acquainted with new ways in which inner life and external actions can be causally related. This link explains why experimental narratives such as the Cortázar short story analysed below can be so unsettling: these stories destabilise the notion of folk-psychological causation itself, an effect achieved by challenging the cognitively basic distinction between subject and object, mentalistic agency and inanimate things. I will have more to say about this distinction in the next section.

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Naïve Physics and Metaphorical Language So far we have seen how causation works in psychological terms. But consider the action of kicking a ball: while my action exhibits intentionality (I want to kick the ball in a certain direction, etc.), I do not attribute intentionality to the ball itself. The ball is a thing that moves according to physical laws: if I kick it, I know I will cause it to move over a certain distance; in normal circumstances, the ball will neither remain stuck on the ground nor fly away into outer space. I know all this because I am in possession of a set of skills, which philosophers have labelled ‘naïve physics’ (Smith and Casati 1994). Naïve physics allows me to form expectations about small-scale interactions with things on Earth. Just as folk psychology operates via common-sense ascriptions of psychological causes, naïve physics involves a form of physical causality, which may (or may not) coincide with scientific physics. Roughly, the distinction between these two forms of causality overlaps with the already discussed dichotomy between mind and matter: we apply folk psychology to animate entities that – we think – possess mind (humans and other animals), naïve physics to inanimate objects. Yet, despite this fundamental distinction, naïve physics is often used as a model for folk psychology. Everyday language, and particularly conventional metaphors for mental phenomena, are evidence for this. John Barnden (1997) has identified two widespread conceptual metaphors for psychological processes: ‘ideas as external entities’ and ‘mind as physical space’. In both cases the apparently immaterial events occurring within our minds – including psychological causation – are understood in terms of physical interactions. Here are some examples from Barnden (1997: 314): ‘That belief was firmly fixed in his mind’; ‘George put the idea that he was a racing driver into Mary’s mind’; ‘In the recesses of her mind, Cynthia knew she was wrong.’ In all these sentences mind is conceptualised as a physical space, in which object-like (and therefore inanimate) ideas afford or do not afford interaction: a belief cannot be displaced, a thought can be inserted into another person’s mind, awareness of being wrong can be hidden away. In short, a metaphorical link is created between folk psychology and naïve physics, and we understand psychological phenomena on the basis of small-scale scenarios of embodied engagement with the physical world – what Mark Turner, in The Literary Mind (1996), calls ‘small spatial stories’. This link reflects one of the main tenets of cognitive linguistics – namely, that we tend to understand the abstract and intangible (how the mind works) on the basis of the concrete and material (how we can manipulate objects in space). I suggest calling ‘physicalist metaphors’ all kinds of figurative expressions for mental phenomena that draw on the embodied interactions of naïve physics (such as ‘That belief was firmly fixed in his mind’, which evokes the scenario of a person trying – and failing – to dislodge an object). Two things are worth pointing out in this regard. First, I use the word ‘metaphor’ in an extended sense, for any device that involves a comparison or, more technically, a ‘mapping’ across two semantic domains. Thus, there can be physicalist similes as well as metaphors proper. Second, the term ‘physicalist’ refers to a philosophical position known as ‘physicalism’ (see Stoljar 2009), which is the opposite of Cartesian dualism: from a physicalist perspective, mental phenomena are physical phenomena. Physicalism asks us to abandon the illusion, ingrained in our folk psychology, of a fundamental difference between mind and matter: the life of the mind comes down to biochemical processes unfolding within our brains and bodies.

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What I call physicalist metaphors are superficially reminiscent of physicalism, since they translate mental phenomena into a world of concrete objects and interactions. However, this translation is normally only a figurative device: most of the time, physicalist metaphors do not imply genuine physicalism, because the association between mind and matter remains metaphorical. When I say ‘That belief was firmly fixed in his mind’, I do not typically conceive of the belief as a physical thing or event (say, a pattern of brain activation); I am just comparing the mental to the physical without calling into question the difference between them, or without implying that the former can be reduced to the latter. This is precisely the point challenged by experimental narratives such as Cortázar’s ‘Headache’: as we shall see, Cortázar moves beyond metaphor and embraces physicalism by collapsing distinctions between inner life and external events. Lisa Zunshine has called attention to violations of basic ontological categories, and explored their narrative potential, in Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible (2008: 65–72). Building on and extending Zunshine’s account, I aim to show how narrative can embed material (and therefore nonhuman) processes in the mental life of characters, with effects that are more unsettling the more narrative exposes the inherent dualism of folk psychology.

‘We aren’t feeling well’ Originally published in 1951 in the collection Bestiario, Julio Cortázar’s ‘Headache’ is a story about a herd of animals named ‘mancuspias’. We know little about the physical appearance of these animals, but we are told that they are extremely finicky, which makes tending them a real ‘headache’. The narrative is told in the first-person plural; it becomes clear from language such as ‘one of us . . . the other . . . ’ that the narrators are two characters who are jointly responsible for looking after the animals. This is the first of a number of textual features that undermine folk psychology, because the narrative is both in the present tense and in the ‘we’ form, suggesting a counterintuitive ‘merging’ of minds. Take, for example, the following passage: We aren’t feeling well. It’s been coming on since the morning, maybe caused by the hot wind that blows every day at dawn, before the rising of a sun that pours down on the house all day like a rain of hot pitch. It is hard for us to attend to the sick animals – this at around eleven – and check up on the young ones taking their naps. Walking is getting to be more difficult, keeping up the routine; we suspect that one solitary night of neglect could spell doom for the mancuspias, and irreparably ruin our lives. (Cortázar 2014: para. 2) The very first sentence announces the onset of the titular headache. If this sentence was in the past tense (‘We weren’t feeling well’), it would be easy to interpret it as a retrospective account: after communicating to each other that they were not feeling well, one of the two characters wrote down this sentence in the ‘we’ form. The present tense complicates this reading, however: while it is theoretically possible to naturalise the text by taking the tense as a case of historical present, the suspicion of a shared consciousness cannot be cast aside. This is a more puzzling scenario than what Alan Palmer (2010) calls a ‘social mind’, insofar as the sharing involves not

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concepts, beliefs, or intermental reasoning but a bodily state of feeling unwell that is normally thought to be intimate and private. The same applies to the sentence that starts with ‘we suspect that’. Indeed, the whole narrative is rich in psychological language that presupposes unlimited access to the other narrator’s mental life. This interpretation becomes more likely at the end of the story, when we read a sentence such as ‘One of us thinks that we can sell [the mancuspias], that we must go to town. The other is getting together these notes and he doesn’t think much about anything’ (para. 24). These words suggest a sense of simultaneity between the narrated events and the act of narration (‘getting together these notes’), a simultaneity compounded by the apparent discrepancy between the two characters’ thoughts: it is as if they could instantaneously read each other’s minds despite being apart. This feat violates folk-psychological expectations about the privacy of one’s own thought processes. Whatever we make of the narrative’s ‘we’ form, this is only the first – and perhaps the least radical – challenge that the text raises to readers’ folk psychology. The narrative starts with a reference to a homeopathy handbook by Margaret Lucy Tyler, from which – we are told – ‘the most beautiful images in this story’ are drawn (epigraph). In fact, the text is scattered with the italicised Latin names of plants commonly used as homeopathic drugs. The first of these allusions is relatively unproblematic: ‘We’re not feeling well. One of us has to take Aconitum’ (para. 3). Feeling unwell is a state of consciousness, and taking Aconitum influences (or aims to influence) the subject’s inner feelings: this is the underlying logic of any drug-taking, and we all accept it implicitly as a matter of course. Yet the narrative begins destabilising this logic, in a series of steps. First, the psychological effects of taking Aconitum are described as follows: ‘Aconitum is a violent thunderstorm, that passes quickly’ (para. 3; italics in original). This sentence deploys a physicalist metaphor associating a certain kind of inner experience with an external, meteorological event (a violent thunderstorm). Perhaps less noticeably, these words also contain a metonymy, because it is not the plant itself, Aconitum, to be compared to a thunderstorm, but the inner state caused by taking Aconitum. Metonymy, unlike metaphor, does not rely on comparison but on an existing relation between two objects or states – particularly, for our purposes, causal relations (see Bredin 1984: 48). From this point onward, what the text does is take this metonymic logic to the extreme: if a physical substance is causally related to a certain feeling, then the name of the former can be used as a label for the latter. All subsequent references to homeopathic drugs work towards this metonymic conflation of inner, conscious states and external causes. Consider, for instance, the passage immediately following the Aconitum reference: The other one of us . . . is thoroughly Nux Vomica. After bringing the mancuspias their malted oats, maybe after doing too much bending down to fill the bowl, one experiences a rush as if the brains were suddenly spinning, not that everything around one spins – as is the case with vertigo – rather it is the vision itself that spins, such that the inner consciousness rotates like a gyroscope in its hoop, while the exterior is all tremendously immobile, it is only that which is fleeing, and impossible to grasp. We have wondered if it might not be a case of Phosphorus, because one is terrified by the perfume of flowers (or of the little mancuspias, that smell weakly of lilacs) and it physically resembles the phosphorus box: tall, thin, craving cold drinks, ice cream and salt. (Para. 4)

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The ‘is’ of the first sentence flatly equates a physical substance (Nux Vomica) and the inner feeling that is described in detail later in the passage. This is clearly a physicalist move, insofar as the narrative suggests that there is no difference between the mental and the physical: the language we use to categorise the external world (in this case, plant species) can be unproblematically extended to the psychological domain, building on the apparent causal link between material substances and mental events. Crucially, this physicalist metonymy has a domino effect on the metaphorical language that follows. When reading about the ‘rush as if the brains were suddenly spinning’, we are less inclined to take it as a mere simile for an inner, immaterial process, because the narrative has already called into question the dualistic framework. We are invited, in other words, to imagine this inner feeling as if the brains were actually spinning. The same happens with the other simile, that of the consciousness rotating ‘like a gyroscope in its hoop’: the text is asking us to go beyond a shallow reading of this figure, confronting the physicalist reality of consciousness as a material event, just like a rotating gyroscope. The last sentence develops this logic. Not only is Phosphorus equated with an emotion (being terrified by the perfume of flowers), but it is compared to a physical object – a match box – of which phosphorus is a key ingredient. The semantic associations involved are already quite incongruous: it is unclear how one can be terrified of perfume, or how an inner state can ‘resemble’ a match box. But the final clause raises the bar of the absurdity even further, because the text attributes a ‘craving’ for ‘cold drinks, ice cream and salt’ to an inanimate object. In short, the passage criss-crosses the folk-psychological dichotomy between mental and physical entities; it creates a sense of psychophysical unity in which mental predicates and material existence can be ascribed, nonchalantly, to entities of any kind. The apparent absurdity of this strategy, or (put otherwise) the ‘strangeness’ of the narrative, is only an affective symptom of the fact that readers’ folk psychology is being challenged at a fundamental level: physicalist metaphors are being literalised by the text, psychological causation is blended with physical causation, and ultimately dualism itself – a cornerstone of folk psychology – is overturned. A nonhuman element is thus injected into the narrators’ minds, or rather it is shown to have been there in the first place: our mental processes are, the story suggests, more similar to thunderstorms or a rotating gyroscope than we would like to (or have been taught to) think. The second half of the short story is even more explicit in embracing physicalism: Exploding pain; as if it were driving into the brain; worse when bending forward, as if the brain were dribbling outward, as if it were shoving its way out the front, or the eyes were being forced out. (Like this, like that; but the truth is never like anything.) (Para. 16; italics in original) Pain is here described in terms of physical forces acting on the brain, which results in a conflation of conscious states and the dynamic interactions (bending, dribbling, and shoving out, being forced out) typical of naïve physics. Further, the parenthetical comment undercuts any attempt at reading the previous lines as purely metaphorical: comparisons fall short because these are real brain events, not mere rhetorical figures.1 This realisation offers an interpretive key to the narrators’ puzzling relationship with the mancuspias. The narrators’ mental condition (the ‘headache’ that led them to

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take Aconitum) seems to deteriorate as the story progresses. It gets to a point where ‘a little nod-off is enough to make us feel vertigo crawling, swinging in the skull, as if the head were full of living things spinning around and around inside. Like mancuspias do’ (para. 10). The closing simile works similarly to the match box analogy seen above, except that inner feelings are compared not to a hypothetical nonhuman object but to the actual nonhuman animals the protagonists are looking after. This strategy short-circuits the distinction between inner (mental) life and the external entities that populate the storyworld. It is, for now, only a simile, but the final paragraphs of the text destabilise the status of the mancuspias even further. By the end of the story, the narrators are incapacitated by the headache to the point of being unable to tend to the mancuspias, which start dying one after another. Because the narrators’ psychophysical breakdown mirrors the death of the mancuspias, the whole storyworld seems about to collapse – to the extent that we start wondering whether the opposition between a psychological ‘inside’ and the material ‘outside’ occupied by the animals really makes sense. Are not the mancuspias but an allegory of the narrators’ mental condition? Or is it rather the other way around, the narrators’ headache serving as a psychological equivalent to the disease affecting the mancuspias? Ultimately, these questions are undecidable. We read that ‘something living roams in circles within the head . . . it’s just like that, something living that roams in circles. We are not worried, it is worse outside, if there is an outside’ (para. 25). The exact ontological status of the mancuspias is thus left uncertain. This, after all, is the logical consequence of the physicalist stance taken by the narrative: just as the physical enters and pervades the mind of the narrators, the mental is projected outward, into the physical world, with the mancuspias seemingly becoming part of the narrators’ thought processes. In the end, the text undermines any conclusive interpretation of the mancuspias and their relationship to the narrators’ mental illness – an indeterminacy that strengthens the narrative’s physicalist message by pointing up the inadequacy of dichotomies between the mental and the material, folk-psychological and physical causation, the ‘inner’ life of the mind and ‘external’, worldly happenings.

Conclusion As my analysis has shown, ‘Headache’ is a narrative of increasing convergence between mind and matter, human subjectivity and a range of nonhuman entities (animals, chemical substances, brain events). Its power lies in the way it targets and unsettles assumptions that are at the core of human folk psychology. It thus serves as a demonstration of how storytelling may not only build on folk-psychological skills, as argued by Zunshine, Palmer, and others, but substantially call into question the dualism that comes with these skills – because of cultural presuppositions (à la Descartes), evolutionary hardwiring, or more plausibly a combination of both factors. ‘Headache’ is not an isolated case. It is one of many texts that, in David Herman’s words, ‘allow the mind to be imagined as a kind of distributional flow, interwoven with rather than separated from situations, events, and processes in the world’ (2011b: 255). In the chapter from which this passage is lifted, Herman makes a case for the centrality of mind–world interactions to modernist fiction, but a similar tendency can be seen at work in other literary-historical periods as well, especially in texts that foreground the embodied dimension of characters’ engagement with the storyworld (see Bolens 2012).

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Because it is in itself a folk-psychological tool, narrative helps shape the concepts and psychological models that underlie ascriptions of mental states to other subjects. Sometimes this feedback loop between narrative and folk psychology reinforces culturally circulating (dualistic) assumptions about the mind; in other cases – as in modernist fiction or Cortázar’s ‘Headache’ – it questions or at least puts pressure on those assumptions by advancing a physicalist view of mental processes. Here narrative runs up against its own limits, since it cannot demonstrate (in a scientific way) anything conclusive about how mind and world are intertwined. But it can effectively reveal a background of presuppositions and build on them in order to have a certain affective impact on its interpreters. The critique of dualism implicit in Cortázar’s short story goes hand in hand with recent debates on what Timothy Morton (2010) calls ‘the mesh’ – namely, the intimate relation between human culture and nonhuman animals, things, and processes. As I argued in the introduction, the nonhuman has become an important focus for research in literary studies and neighbouring fields (see again Grusin 2015; Clarke 2016). But this body of work has tended to move away from human psychology and subjectivity, implying that these notions are too closely bound up with a sense of metaphysical distinction of the human to be viable in theorising about the nonhuman. Adopting a physicalist framework allows us to bring the mental into the picture, because the mind itself – we realise – is based on material processes and therefore, in an important sense, ‘nonhuman’. This is what experimental narratives like Cortázar’s reveal, and this is also why they prove so unsettling: by literalising physicalist metaphors for mental processes and anchoring them to a narrative progression, Cortázar productively exposes the nonhuman in us. Cognitive narrative theory has tended so far to focus on the representation of mental processes in stories, assuming a continuum of folk-psychological skills in engaging with both real and fictional minds. This chapter envisions a different kind of cognitive narrative theory, one that capitalises on this folk-psychological continuity but is also sensitive to the peculiarities of experimental and anti-mimetic texts, thus following in the footsteps of unnatural narrative theory (see Alber et al. 2010; Iversen 2013). At the same time, the chapter aims to enlarge the scope of cognitive narratology and open a dialogue with other areas of research in the humanities. As scholars like Nancy Easterlin (2012: ch. 3), Erin James (2015), and Alexa Weik von Mossner (2017) have begun to demonstrate, insights into narrative and its interrelation with mental functioning prove useful far beyond the confines of narratology narrowly conceived.

Note 1. For more on apparent metaphors for real experiences, see Caracciolo and Hurlburt (2016: ch. 24).

Works Cited Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (2010), ‘Unnatural narratives, unnatural narratology: Beyond mimetic models’, Narrative, 18: 2, 113–36. Aristotle [ca. 330 bce] (1995), ‘Poetics’, in Aristotle, Poetics; Longinus, On the Sublime; Demetrius, On Style, trans. Stephen Halliwell, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 27–141.

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Bamberg, Michael (2005), ‘Narrative discourse and identities’, in Jan Christoph Meister, Tom Kind, and Wilhelm Schernus (eds), Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 213–37. Barnden, John A. (1997), ‘Consciousness and common-sense metaphors of mind’, in Seán Ó Nualláin, Paul Mc Kevitt, and Eoghan Mac Aogáin (eds), Two Sciences of Mind: Readings in Cognitive Science and Consciousness, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 311–40. Bernaerts, Lars, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck (2014), ‘The storied lives of non-human narrators’, Narrative, 22: 1, 68–93. Bogost, Ian (2012), Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bolens, Guillemette (2012), The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Braidotti, Rosi (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bredin, Hugh (1984), ‘Metonymy’, Poetics Today, 5: 1, 45–58. Caracciolo, Marco (2016), ‘Strange’ Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers’ Engagement with Characters, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Caracciolo, Marco and Russell T. Hurlburt (2016), A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Churchland, Paul M. (1991), ‘Folk psychology and the explanation of human behavior’, in John D. Greenwood (ed.), The Future of Folk Psychology: Intentionality and Cognitive Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 51–69. Clarke, Bruce (2016), ‘The nonhuman’, in Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 141–52. Cohn, Dorrit (1978), Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cortázar, Julio (2014), ‘Headache’, trans. Michael Cisco, Tor.com, (last accessed 9 September 2016). Easterlin, Nancy (2012), A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fludernik, Monika (1996), Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London: Routledge. Grusin, Richard (ed.) (2015), The Nonhuman Turn, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harman, Graham (2002), Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Chicago: Open Court. Herman, David (2011a), ‘Introduction’, in David Herman (ed.), The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 1–40. — (2011b), ‘Re-minding modernism’, in David Herman (ed.), The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 243–72. — (2014), ‘Narratology beyond the human’, DIEGESIS, 3: 2, (last accessed 9 September 2016). Hutto, Daniel D. (2008), Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann (2012), ‘Theorizing material ecocriticism: A diptych’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 19: 3, 448–75. Iversen, Stefan (2013), ‘Unnatural minds’, in Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (eds), A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 94–112. James, Erin (2015), The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Johnson, Susan C. (2000), ‘The recognition of mentalistic agents in infancy’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4: 1, 22–8. Korthals Altes, Liesbeth (2014), Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Narrative Fiction, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. McHale, Brian (2012), ‘Transparent minds revisited’, Narrative, 20: 1, 115–24. Mäkelä, Maria (2013), ‘Cycles of narrative necessity: Suspect tellers and the textuality of fictional minds’, in Lars Bernaerts, Dirk De Geest, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck (eds), Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 129–51. Mar, Raymond A. and Keith Oatley (2008), ‘The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3: 3, 173–92. Morton, Timothy (2010), The Ecological Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Palmer, Alan (2004), Fictional Minds, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. — (2010), Social Minds in the Novel, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Phelan, James (2007), Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Slingerland, E. (2008), ‘Who’s afraid of reductionism? The study of religion in the age of cognitive science’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 76: 2, 375–411. Smith, Barry and Roberto Casati (1994), ‘Naive physics’, Philosophical Psychology, 7: 2, 227–47. Stoljar, Daniel (2009), Physicalism, Abingdon: Routledge. Turner, Mark (1996), The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, New York: Oxford University Press. Weik von Mossner, Alexa (2017), Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Young, Kay (2010), Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Zunshine, Lisa (2006), Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. — (2008), Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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3 Narrative and the Embodied Reader Suzanne Keen

Embodied Readers’ Emotional Responses

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hough machines can follow instructions and artificial intelligence can produce something like a human response to a prompt, narrative requires an embodied reader to complete its communication.1 Our visual, auditory, and in the case of Braille readers, tactile perception contribute to the cognitive micro-processes of reading.2 Because we become expert in the processing of phonemes, morphemes, words, and phrases, literate people often forget that their bodies are very much involved when we apprehend stories. Yet we are certainly aware of our physical preferences: for example, we may prefer to read a book held in the hands rather than the same words displayed on a screen; to listen to a human actor read rather than a computer; to view a film in a digital format that allows us to manipulate the size of the image or the pace of the screening; or to watch the narrative as part of a shared communal event in a movie theatre. We are reminded of our reading bodies when fatigue or discomfort disrupts the illusion of being transported and we are no longer ‘lost in a book’,3 or – the polar opposite – when immersion in a story evokes an emotional response that suggests how deeply we have invested our imagination in co-creating a storyworld. Narrative activates neural representations of imagined visual and motor experiences in our brains, which along with neurons, are part of our body. Narrative’s readers bring not just their senses and cognitive capacities, but also their bodies and emotions to the task of imagining and responding. Much remains to be learned, as Anne Mangen and Adriaan van der Weel point out, about the ‘psychological, ergonomic, technological, social, cultural, and evolutionary aspects’ of embodied reading (2016: 116). My investigation begins at the point where a narrative evokes an intense bodily reaction from a reader. In recent years, psychological and neuroscientific research into human cognition, affect, and embodied consciousness has influenced narrative theory, and in a fine example of the two-way traffic of ideas, narratologists’ work on the impact of genres, literary techniques, and fictionality has stimulated scientific examinations of real readers’ responses to narrative.4 As a result of these conversations and collaborations, in my own area of research – narrative empathy – we know a great deal more in 2017 about the relationship between experiences of emotional fusion with fictional characters and storyworlds and readers’ subsequent attitudes (and even prosocial behaviour) than was known in 2007 when Empathy and the Novel was first published.5 Yet there is much remaining to be investigated about the empathic responses of real readers to narrative, especially when we take into consideration the intersectional identities of readers, including their gender and ethnicity, and their

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underlying dispositions or temperaments. In addition to multiple competing axes of identity, readers’ differing personal qualities, distinct cultural contexts, and individual experiences of the world all shape readers’ co-creation of the narratives that they read.6 To the point of this chapter, readers’ (and listeners’ and viewers’) co-creation of and responses to narrative delivered in film, in games, through oral storytelling, or through print forms take place in brains and bodies. Embodied reading – as opposed to machine reading – is the only kind of reading that human beings can perform, and notwithstanding disciplinary training in analytical habits of mind, all embodied readers have feelings. Imagination involves a blend of cognitive and affective capacities, linked to bodily responses that reinforce reactions to, feelings about, and appetite for narrative fiction. How, why, to what degree, and to what ends narrative engages those feelings remains a fascinating puzzle. Though there are good reasons to take an interest in the potentially positive impacts of narrative, some reading experiences clearly have negative emotional valences. Narratives can make you feel sick to your stomach. They can disrupt your sleep and give you nightmares. They can make you cry.7 Not all narrative aims to induce pleasure, as narrative theorists since Aristotle have understood. Philosophers and literary theorists have approached the topic of unpleasant, dysphoric responses to narratives from a number of angles, exploring the bittersweet sensation of enjoying the release of weeping about a fictional character’s situation, as in Robyn Warhol’s Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (2003), or querying the paradox of fictional emotions, when we are transported into imaginary worlds, as in E. M. Dadlez’s What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions (1997).8 Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005) investigates what she labels the ‘unprestigious negative affects’ of irritation, envy, and disgust. Psychological science helps provide a context for understanding the depth of imaginative engagement (as evidenced by immersion or transportation), the strength of emotional responses (including empathy), and the short- and longer-term effects of their reading.

Narrative Personal Distress In this chapter I seek to redress the neglect of one intense form of reaction to narrative: personal distress. The time is ripe for a reconsideration of the particular forms of readers’ narrative empathy that invite intense, aversive bodily responses to fictional representations of others. In the psychological literature, personal distress is regarded as an empathic reaction, but a form of empathy oriented primarily towards the self (though it is stimulated by reaction to another). It causes aversion from the source: people experiencing personal distress seek to avoid or discontinue contact with the cause of their feelings.9 Unlike other-oriented empathy, which could lead to mature sympathy or even prosocial action on behalf of others, personal distress shows when the people feeling it push away, tune out, or refuse to engage. In an important article enumerating and describing different phenomena that go by the name empathy, psychologist C. Daniel Batson describes personal distress as ‘Feeling Distress at Witnessing Another Person’s Suffering’ (2011: 7). As Batson elaborates, personal distress expresses not feelings for (sympathy) or feelings like the other’s feelings (empathy as traditionally understood), but ‘feeling distressed by the state of the other’ (2011: 8; italics in original). Perhaps not surprisingly, personal distress has been linked to compassion fatigue and burnout

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(Thomas 2013: 375–6). Developmental psychologist Nancy Eisenberg defines personal distress as ‘a self-focused, aversive, affective reaction to the apprehension of another’s emotion’ that is ‘believed to result in egotistically motivated behavior’, unlike the other-directed moral emotion, sympathy (2000: 672). In contrast to empathy, personal distress does not lead to prosocial behaviour, and may even contribute to anti-social responses (Eisenberg 2000: 673). Personal distress is associated with increased levels of physiological arousal, lower levels of coping skills, and executive (decision-making) dysfunction (Eisenberg and Eggum 2011: 76). For some people whose dispositions involve high-intensity negative emotionality and a low ability to regulate their emotions, personal distress can overwhelm them with vicarious negative feelings (Eisenberg 2000: 677–8).10 Escaping the source of the feeling motivates people experiencing personal distress to avoid engagement (Eisenberg and Eggum 2011: 72). Influenced by these and other definitions, in my earlier work on narrative empathy, I declined fully to address a literary corollary to personal distress, reasoning that a reaction that causes the reader to abandon the book or walk out of the movie theatre could not and should not be considered an important form of narrative empathy. I asserted: An over-aroused empathic response that creates personal distress (self-oriented and aversive) causes a turning-away from the provocative condition of the other. I hazard that personal distress caused by novel reading leads people to stop reading, to put the book down, or to disengage full attention by skipping and skimming. (Keen 2007: 4–5) I further observed that ‘None of the philosophers who put stock in the morally improving experience of narrative empathy include personal distress in their theories’ (2007: 5), and although I recognised that personal distress contributes to aesthetic emotions such as disgust,11 I concluded that ‘personal distress has no place in a literary theory of empathy’ (2007: 5). Yet each of the reactions that exhibits personal distress, from shutting the eyes, to covering the ears, to turning away, to putting down the book, all the way to walking out of the movie theatre, qualifies as a behaviour of the body, expressing aversion with voluntary and involuntary responses (such as changes in heart rate, blood pressure, palm sweat, and clenching in the gut). These responses of embodied readers deserve attention. In this chapter I re-evaluate and revise my earlier judgement. Specifically, I report on the feelings of readers who remember experiencing empathic personal distress in response to narratives. My approach is not empirical, but it is open-ended, so it has the virtue of broadening our sense of the range of narratives that can be considered distressing, rather than zeroing in on singular, notorious examples. I discuss what my correspondents actually did in response to their personal distress, in particular whether they continued with the narrative that had caused the aversive reaction. I draw from their reports ideas about narrative personal distress that could inform narrative theorists and psychologists of narrative impact.12 In conclusion, I compare this account of personal distress (grounded in psychology) with educational theories that assert the value of emotionally challenging literary reading, asking whether narrative personal distress (NPD) does harm or benefits students. Because there is a relative dearth of research on personal distress in the psychology of narrative impact or in investigations of readers’ empathy, I draw on findings from mass media studies about evocation and regulation

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of emotions. Emotion regulation is ‘essential to keep high levels of vicarious emotional arousal from turning into personal distress’ (Eisenberg and Eggum 2011: 73), but people with different dispositions vary in their ability effortfully to manage their response to arousing stimuli (Eisenberg and Eggum 2011: 74–5). While this means that narrative personal distress may be avoidable for better regulated readers, it may also suggest that reading extremely emotionally arousing narrative, the kind that causes gasps, tears, racing heart, and even nausea, could help acclimatise students to regulation of their emotions. Readers’ responses to narratives are often mixed, with feelings that ebb and flow, or emotional intensities that overlap with cooler reactions to style or form. A common trajectory is to move from character identification to narrative empathy to personal distress on behalf of that character. Can a blend of narrative empathy with narrative personal distress hold off, delay, or diminish the rejection and avoidance of the emotionprovoking Other? Or is NPD actually harmful? I draw in this and subsequent paragraphs on the reports of the life-long readers that I reached through the VICTORIA listserv discussion in a query posted on 26 January 2016 under the header ‘empathy so intense you stopped reading’ (Keen 2016).13 Because I was corresponding with volunteers from among the Victorianists subscribed to this academic discussion, it is not surprising that Thomas Hardy’s name came up as especially provoking of distressing empathy. He was the most-mentioned Victorian-era author, though Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Leo Tolstoy, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells also received nominations. Authors who trap their characters (such as Tess Durbeyfield, Jude Fawley, and Maggie Tulliver) in unbearable situations evoked dismay that led to discontinuation of reading. Cruelty to orphans and animals came up frequently, as did scenes of injustice. For example, a research assistant at the University of Glasgow reported: The other moment of significant distress came during my Masters when first read Collins’s The Woman in White. The scene in which Fosco writes a note in Marian’s private diary, signifying that he’s read the entire thing, left me sick and shaking with unexpected rage. I had to step away from the novel for an hour or two, but ultimately stayed up the entire night to finish the book to ensure that Fosco got his comeuppance.14 This sample highlights two important points about narrative personal distress (qualifying as NPD because it was so intense that it interrupted reading). First, it caused two strong physical reactions, nausea (‘sick’) and fury (‘shaking with unexpected rage’) that caused the reader to put the book away. Second, it illustrates the emotional elements of narrativity with which narrative empathy and narrative personal distress may intersect. Narrativity is the set of qualities (such as having a narrator, evoking temporality, relating events, and characterising active agents) that help readers or viewers perceive a text as narrative (Keen 2015b: 120); the core affective drivers of narrativity are curiosity, surprise, and suspense (Sternberg 2001: 37). The report suggests that NPD can begin with surprise (if we take shock to be an extreme form of that affect) and can then stimulate curiosity and suspense. Returning to the novel and staying up all night reading to find out how the malefactor will be punished suggests that not all NPD causes a dead end to reading. Indeed, it may turn into a strong driver of emotional investment in a narrative.

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Like narrative empathy, narrative personal distress seems to hit some readers with a powerful reaction and others not at all. This correspondent explained her reasons for reacting so strongly to a scene in Collins’s novel that others may find innocuous (compared with some of the excessively violent representations that are often cited as most shocking in discussions of distressing or disgusting narratives). She writes: What sparked this particular response in me was the fact that I grew up in a house where I was allowed very little privacy. For an awkward, aspiring writer insecure in her own skill, it was extremely frustrating and embarrassing to know that anything I attempted to write down (be it a diary or a work of fiction) would be secretly read by my mother. I developed a very elaborate system of code and shorthand just so I could write in peace. My reaction to Fosco stems very much from my own personal feelings about violations of privacy.15 Any further theorising of NPD should, in my opinion, acknowledge from the outset the remarkable variability in responses that most likely stems from the variety of personal experiences that readers bring to their co-creation of the storyworld and its characters. It should also acknowledge that the effects of NPD, like those of narrative empathy, may be only temporary. This reader, who after all returned to the novel and read all the way to its satisfying conclusion, may have been spurred by her NPD to a stronger investment in the novel. Some accounts of narrative personal distress did validate my original intuition that NPD permanently stops reading. If narrative personal distress interrupts transportation (or immersion) in a narrative storyworld, enjoyment, narrative empathy, and the benefits of full engagement with a text may also suffer.16 Tender readers report weeping, gasping, sobbing, and needing time to recover from such a reading or viewing experience. Correspondents from the VICTORIA discussion described throwing a distressing book in the trash (Moody), tossing a book down (Hill), throwing it across the room (Goldfarb), turning a radio off (Hoyle), and walking out of a movie theatre or classroom film screening (Williams). I can attest personally to the impulse to walk out in the middle of a narrative, having left screenings of both My Life as a Dog (1985) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). In both cases, violent representations were the trigger. I know to avoid films that depict violence against women, especially rape, but I confess that violence against male bodies only truly began to trouble me after I became the mother of a son. The development of reading and viewing habits over time may be conditioned by early experiences of NPD, leading to avoidance of certain authors, genres, or texts. Yet those preferences can also be altered or augmented over the course of a lifetime.17 Several correspondents remarked specifically on never going back to a particular author after an especially distressing reading experience. The novels, stories, films, radio serials, and nonfiction narratives that evoked narrative personal distress exhibited great variety,18 and the unpredictability of the elicited list should give educators pause as they contemplate the difficulty of anticipating how students may respond to works on a syllabus. Still, certain hot-button stimuli do crop up. Many of my informants spontaneously focused on cruelty to animals, reporting personal distress as a response to reading, for example, Anna Sewall’s Black Beauty (1877), ‘Raspberry Jam’ by Angus Wilson (1950), and The Story about Ping by Marjorie Flack (1933). Some remembered responses were to representations of cruelty directed against

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children and women, with rape and abuse standing out, but it must be acknowledged that, mirroring the gender proportions in the reading public, the vast majority of my correspondents were women (Bowker 2010). Racism, violence, and psychologically intense evocation of danger, as in horror films and thrillers, bothered some readers. Altogether, VICTORIA correspondents reported a wide range of recalled sensations, including claustrophobia (Richardson), breathlessness, wincing (Nevins), shuddering (Karpenko), and unbearable fellow-feeling that resulted in crying uncontrollably (Struve, Pederson, Klimaszewski), dry heaving (Holzer), having nightmares (Becker), and yelling aloud (Pennington). While extreme sadness was the most frequently reported experience, some reported horror (Galvan, Heather), rage (Moody), or anxiety (Lewis). Several respondents used the term ‘traumatic’ to describe the impact of distressing reading (Schintgen, Sutton-Ramspeck). About Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) one correspondent reported, ‘there are parts of that book that make me feel as if my insides are tearing and bleeding’.19 Many of the people who wrote to me about their experiences of narrative personal distress are scholars, either graduate students or established faculty. As a result, some of them recalled NPD experiences in the classroom, and some related learning the hard way to avoid reading aloud passages guaranteed to cause choking up or actual tears while teaching. Most teachers believe that it is important to remain articulate, as the performance of expertise and the necessary focus on others’ understanding discourage episodes of weeping or even speechlessness. Recollections of narrative personal distress from their student days remind us that strong aversive emotion reactions to narrative can come at a cost. One faculty member recalled being ‘thoroughly traumatized by the horrific rape in the book [Kosinski’s The Painted Bird]’ as she had ‘never been by anything in a book before or since’. In this case, the NPD silenced her. She writes, ‘as a rather shy freshman, I didn’t even feel I was in a position to articulate my horror’.20 Regarding Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), another correspondent recalled an episode from her undergraduate days: A number of the students found the graphic violence so gratuitous and sickening that they could not finish the text; one student in particular stands out in my memory, as she had to drop the class very late in the semester because the book sparked a nervous breakdown.21 Struggling through the novel and the course, this correspondent challenged her professor ‘on every aspect’ of the novel, a behaviour she describes as ‘extremely out of character’.22 In this case the NPD brought on not silencing but unruly engagement, which might be regarded as a positive impact.

The Pedagogy of Discomfort This possibility that narrative personal distress provoked strong participation should make us wonder whether NPD has other salutary effects, despite the fact that personal distress is expressly dissociated from altruistic, other-oriented pro-social response in the psychological literature. Possibly a group experience of a distressing narrative can be harnessed to the social drivers of communal feeling for positive purposes. So, for example, the beneficial consequences of NPD felt as a result of reading Black Beauty

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can be seen, within a guiding context, in commitment to a cause and action in the world. In a course entitled ‘Victorian Animal Dreams’, a professor reports: somehow the experience of all of us feeling the pain communally and trying to do both communally and individually what we can for the alleviation of animal suffering makes it bearable – or more bearable. One student in the class has rescued three horses, the oldest of which is just out to graze in a meadow in his old age, like Black Beauty at the end of the novel. Many of the students rescue animals and/or are involved with Students for Animals on campus. (Morse 2016) The creation of a purposeful communal response to shared distress not only results in specific positive actions on behalf of animals, but gives students who may feel overwhelmed by emotion by the narrative an alleviating focus for their feelings. Given the presence of a teacher or informed guide, does narrative personal distress have pedagogical uses that outweigh its negative consequences? Clearly, an educational context makes a difference, both in terms of providing a purposeful context and in impelling readers to finish the narratives. The most common consequence of narrative personal distress is discontinuance of exposure to the distressing narrative, a strategy that works for ordinary reading but not when the text is required, or even highly regarded. When the narrative is a canonical classic, informants usually report persevering with the reading eventually, but doubts remain. Having been deeply disturbed by The Mill on the Floss, another professor reports: I didn’t revisit the novel for many years, didn’t read it, didn’t teach it, so I guess that counts as aversive. After twenty-five years, though, I thought I’d give it another go. I’ve taught it six semesters running – and I think I’ve made my peace with it, at least aesthetically. Every semester, though, I see a student or two reliving my trauma! (Melnyk 2016) Teachers of literature routinely impel students to continue reading texts that discomfit them, and indeed many faculty regard inducing discomfort as one of the prime uses of literature and purposes of education.23 At the university level, moving students out of their comfort zones to confront alternative perspectives, world views, and experiences is a routine goal of education in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. As Irina Popescu recently argued in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2016), ‘history is unsettling. The present is unsettling. It unsettles with its crimes against humanity, its wars, its sex trafficking, even its presidential debates. There should be more being said about the power of discomfort’. A major source of commentary on discomforting subjects, what Philip Fisher (1985) calls ‘hard facts’, lies in literary texts. Most teachers of literature strongly agree with what Popescu (2016) asks: ‘Shouldn’t reading Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative be uncomfortable?’ Many professors of literature go further, embracing forms of discomfort that may not be dignified with the automatic moral prestige of witnessing to the experience of slavery. They introduce students to works intending to horrify, disgust, shock, or test boundaries of propriety, to the degree that any such limitations still survive in a largely permissive reading and viewing culture. When shock art is taught, whether in visual or textual media, it is nearly inevitably presented as purposeful representation, as in this set of prompts for an AP Art History

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discussion activity promulgated by the College Board: ‘When artists intend to shock us, what techniques do they use? When artists intend to elicit sympathy, how do they do it? When artists are working to change attitudes, what do they do?’24 Evident in this set of prompts designed for advanced high school students are the core assumptions that makers use techniques to invite or provoke reactions from an audience or readership that has the capacity to respond or even change as a result of the encounter with the artwork. These ideas carry over to narrative literature. Arguably, Cormac McCarthy and those who teach his works both mean to harness readers’ shock for ethical purposes. Quentin Tarantino and Bret Easton Ellis employ violence aesthetically; students in discussions debate the morality of their choices. In the logic of many curricular expectations, teaching Toni Morrison, Keri Hulme, Margaret Atwood, and countless other novelists who take on tough subjects such as child abuse, rape, torture, and violence against women and enslaved people provokes discussion and learning through perspective taking. Many faculty accustomed to assuming that the end result of catharsis justifies the pity and fear evoked by classic texts feel some qualms when considering the risks of teaching modern and contemporary narratives such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), and Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). Though many of the arguments in favour of unfettered reading lists come from civil libertarians, defending extreme representations as part of the exercise of free speech, others come from the pedagogical field, where teachers introducing global, multicultural, or disadvantaged perspectives have included non-canonical readings that deliberately challenge students’ complacency and to complicate their thinking about the world they inhabit. What happens when that discomfort tips over into traumatic pain? The teachers reporting students disabled by reading may be witnessing NPD. The most extreme cases of personal distress as a consequence of assigned reading have led to a national discussion of trigger warnings for students in courses, referring to ‘explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans’ (Medina 2014). Regarded by some as necessary, compassionate signals to help trauma victims avoid painful flashbacks or withdrawal into numbness, trigger warnings have also been castigated as politically correct ‘vindictive protectiveness’ that fails to prepare students for professional life and, worse, teaches them to ‘think pathologically’ (Lukianoff and Haidt 2015). Though it is not my purpose to discuss the efficacy or inadvisability of trigger warnings here, I hypothesise that the student complaints that have led in some cases to calls for trigger warnings arose from experiences of narrative empathy in the form of NPD, felt as a result of exposure to evocative course materials. But we should ask, which narratives, in what circumstances, and for what proportion of readers? Is the triggering level of NPD something that can be consistently anticipated, and if so, what subjects or techniques evoke it? I suspect that there are as many and as diverse cues in narrative that invite personal distress as there are pathways to less aversive forms of narrative empathy, sympathy, and pleasurable emotional fusion. If reading narrative sometimes provokes reactions that go beyond disquietude to suffering or even life-threatening anguish, however, there are still merits to weight the other side of the scale. The cognitive and affective dissonance believed to stimulate greater learning, compassion, and understanding, starting when students encounter

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unfamiliar or unpleasant subjects in the classroom, and extending to experiences that may occur during service learning activities in the community or wider world, is a phenomenon embraced by the pedagogy of liberal learning, not only in literary studies. The experience of personal distress may indeed be a foundational element of the learning encouraged by the AAC&U’s LEAP initiative, and may contribute to students’ cultivation of ‘Personal and Social Responsibility, Including Civic knowledge and engagement – local and global; Intercultural knowledge and competence, and Ethical reasoning and action’ (AAC&U n.d.). Liberal arts pedagogy encourages students to overcome both latent familiarity and here-and-now biases to extend the empathetic circle to people different from themselves. For some tender readers, this may require getting past a personal distress reaction and taking the risk of exposure to unfamiliar storyworlds. For if, as novelist Tim Parks observes, ‘when we open a novel, as with any encounter, we move into an area of risk’ (2015: ix), we ought to understand the full range of possible responses, including flinching, shuddering, weeping, gasping, feeling nauseated, perseverating, and experiencing sleeplessness, that can ensue as a result of intense personal distress provoked by narrative. Confronted with the self-focused states of subjects experiencing personal distress, psychologists show that personal distress does not lead to altruism in the same way that other-oriented empathy does (in the real world).25 Yet many literature teachers place stock in the ability of narrative to change attitudes, reduce bias, and stimulate prosocial behaviour in the real world. We should add to our queries about narrative personal distress a hard look at the assumptions underlying the desired, and presumably productive, cognitive dissonance that teachers seek from challenging reading. We need to develop a robust set of pedagogical practices not only to mitigate potential damage to vulnerable readers, but also to channel both narrative empathy and narrative personal distress in a way that promotes positive intellectual growth.

Hypotheses about Narrative Personal Distress (NPD) • NPD may cause strong physical reactions that cause the reader to put the book away and permanently interrupt the reading. • A great variety of narratives have evoked NPD. • NPD affects some readers with a powerful reaction and others not at all. • The variability in responses stems from the variety of personal experiences that readers bring to their co-creation of the storyworld and its characters. • If NPD interrupts transportation (or immersion) in a narrative storyworld, enjoyment, narrative empathy, and the benefits of full engagement with a text may also suffer. • Reading extremely emotionally arousing narrative could help acclimatise students to regulation of their emotions. • A blend of narrative empathy with narrative personal distress could hold off, delay, or diminish the rejection and avoidance of the emotion-provoking Other. • NPD can engage with narrativity and drive reading, beginning with shock (surprise) and stimulating curiosity and suspense. • The effects of NPD, like those of narrative empathy, may be only temporary. • The development of reading and viewing habits over time may be conditioned by early experiences of NPD, leading to avoidance of certain authors, genres, or texts. • NPD may have pedagogical uses that outweigh its negative consequences.

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• A group experience of a distressing narrative could be harnessed to the social drivers of communal feeling for positive purposes. • The student complaints that have led to calls for trigger warnings relate to NPD felt as a result of exposure to evocative course materials. • Diverse cues in narrative invite NPD, just as there are multiple pathways to less aversive forms of narrative empathy, sympathy, and pleasurable emotional fusion.

Notes 1. By ‘readers’ I mean all who take in narrative in a variety of media. For an accessible introduction to embodied cognition, see Barrett (2011); for the current cognitive science, see Zwaan (2014). 2. Literary scholars tend to pay little attention to these aspects of reading. As Andrew Elfenbein observes, the mechanics of reading comprehension have been studied in greater depth by cognitive psychologists than by literary scholars, acknowledging that ‘many aspects of this process are indeed routine, automatic, and quasi-mechanical’ (Elfenbein 2006: 485), thus they have a bearing on critics’ responses to literature, as he demonstrates. 3. See Nell (1988) for a still relevant description of the phenomenon called both immersion and transportation by psychologists. On the impact of transportation into a storyworld, see Green et al. (2012). 4. For prominent examples, see the work of David Kidd and Emanuele Castano on the impact of literary reading on theory of mind (ToM) (2013); Angus Fletcher and John Monterosso on the effects of free indirect discourse (FID) (2016); Dan R. Johnson on consequences of transportation into a fictional story (2012); Natalie Phillips’s literary and neuroscientific studies of readers’ attention when reading passages from Jane Austen (2016); and Anne Mangen’s fascinating studies of reading on paper and on e-reading devices (Mangen and van der Weel 2016). 5. Among psychologists and neuroscientists studying these questions, both Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar’s labs have been especially productive; see, e.g., Mar et al. (2009); Mar (2011). See also the work of Dan R. Johnson (2012); Alice Hall and Cheryl Bracken (2011); Dolf Zillman (2010); Maral Tajerian (2012); and Tamir et al. (2016). 6. On intersectional identity as an aspect of reading, see Lanser (2010); Warhol (2012); and Keen (2015a). For intersectionality in its original context, see Crenshaw (1991). 7. The salutary effects of purgation, alleviation of emotion, or restored balance associated with the Aristotelian term catharsis put a positive interpretation on the result of experiencing pity and fear as a result of watching a tragedy. 8. The best starting point on the status of fictional emotions is Yanal (1999). See also Robinson (2005); cf. Walton (1990). 9. The source of personal distress does not have to be another sensate being. Einfühlung can involve ‘feeling with’ inanimate objects, especially for unpleasant states such as freezing, burning, being separated, fragmented, or crushed. Art objects can evoke Einfühlung. When a reader shudders, shivers, gasps, quails, or flinches with intense Einfühlung, this can be a form of aesthetic or narrative personal distress registered in the body. 10. For the original study, see Eisenberg et al. (1994); for a summation of more recent research, see Eisenberg and Eggum (2011: 72). 11. Negative emotions certainly contribute to aesthetic responses, and not only through catharsis. See especially Sianne Ngai on disgust, in her book Ugly Feelings (2005: 332–54), and the earlier influential discussion of disgust as a mechanism by which bourgeois subjects differentiated themselves from low domains, in Stallybrass and White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986). 12. I present these suggestions at the end of the chapter as a series of hypotheses for further investigation.

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13. A searchable archive of VICTORIA listserv discussions can be found at . The contributions I refer to in the subsequent paragraphs, identifying correspondents by last name, appeared on the discussion between 26 January and 10 February 2016. For the sake of brevity, I have given details in the notes of only those contributions from which I actually quote. 14. Abigail Boucher, email to the author, 31 January 2016. 15. Abigail Boucher, email to the author, 31 January 2016. 16. Transportation (immersion) has been positively linked to empathy, enjoyments, and even increased pro-social helping behaviour. See Hall and Bracken (2013); Johnson (2012). 17. The lack of longitudinal studies of real readers and viewers of narrative cries out for redress. 18. In addition to works already mentioned, correspondents named the radio serial The Archers (1950– present), films Goodnight Mommy (2015), A Handful of Dust (1988), and A Ring of Bright Water (1969), the television show Curb Your Enthusiasm (2004–11), and film adaptations of works by Dickens and Brontë. They described distress at reading poetry by Frank Bidart, Mathilde Blind, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti, nonfiction by Barbara Deming and John Ruskin, and prose fiction narratives by Hans Christian Andersen, Mathilde Blind, Agatha Christie, James Fenimore Cooper, Emma Donoghue, Sebastian Faulks, Elena Ferrante, Bessie Head, Khaled Hosseini, Jerome K. Jerome, Lloyd Jones, Jerzy Kosinski, Jhumpa Lahiri, Harper Lee, Ian McEwan, Cormac McCarthy, E. Nesbit, Patrick Ness, Wilson Rawls, C. J. Sansom, John Steinbeck, Elizabeth Wein, and Virginia Woolf. 19. Melisa Klimaszewski, email to the author, 31 January 2016. 20. Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, email to the author, 5 February 2016. 21. Abigail Boucher, email to the author, 31 January 2016. 22. Abigail Boucher, email to the author, 31 January 2016. 23. For a nuanced discussion of the uses of potentially offensive art, see Aldama and Lindenberger (2016). 24. See (last accessed 13 July 2016). 25. For the difference between narrative empathy and real-world empathy in provoking altruism, see Keen (2007); see also Carrera et al. (2013).

Works Cited AAC&U (Association of American Colleges & Universities) (n.d.), ‘Essential learning outcomes’, The LEAP Challenge, AAC&U, (last accessed 11 April 2016). Aldama, Frederick and Herbert Lindenberger (2016), Aesthetics of Discomfort: Conversations on Disquieting Art, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Barrett, Louise (2011), Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Batson, C. Daniel (2011), ‘These things called empathy: Eight related but distinct phenomena’, in Jean Decety and William Ickes (eds), The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 3–16. Bowker (2010), ‘Bowker updates groundbreaking consumer-focused research report for book industry’, Bowker, (last accessed 18 September 2016). Carrera, Pilar, Luis Oceja, Amparo Caballero, Dolores Muñoz, Belén López-Pérez, and Tamara Ambrona (2013), ‘I feel so sorry! Tapping the joint influence of empathy and personal distress on helping behaviour’, Motivation and Emotion, 37, 335–45. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. (1991), ‘Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, Stanford Law Review, 43: 6, 1241–99.

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Dadlez, E. M. (1997), What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Eisenberg, Nancy (2000), ‘Emotion, regulation, and moral development’, Annual Review of Psychology, 51: 1, 665–97. — and Natalie D. Eggum (2011), ‘Empathic responding: Sympathy and personal distress’, in Jean Decety and William Ickes (eds), The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 71–84. —, Richard A. Fabes, Bridget Murphy, Mariss Karbon, Pat Maszk, Melanie Smith, Cherie O’Boyle, and Karen Suh (1994), ‘The relations of emotionality and regulation to dispositional and situational empathy-related responding’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66: 4, 776–97. Elfenbein, Andrew (2006), ‘Cognitive science and the history of reading’, PMLA, 121: 2, 484–502. Fisher, Philip (1985), Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Fletcher, Angus and John Monterosso (2016), ‘The science of free indirect discourse: An alternate cognitive effect’, Narrative, 24: 1, 82–103. Green, Melanie C., Christopher Chatham, and Marc A. Sestir (2012), ‘Emotion and transportation into fact and fiction’, Scientific Study of Literature, 2: 1, 37–59. Hall, Alice E. and Cheryl C. Bracken (2011), ‘“I really liked that movie”: Testing the relationship between trait empathy, transportation, perceived realism, and movie enjoyment’, Journal of Media Psychology, 23: 2, 90–9. Johnson, Dan R. (2012), ‘Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behaviour, and perceptual bias toward fearful expressions’, Personality and Individual Differences, 52, 150–5. Keen, Suzanne (2007), Empathy and the Novel, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. — (2015a), ‘Intersectional narratology in the study of narrative empathy’, in Robyn Warhol and Susan Lanser (eds), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 123–46. — (2015b), Narrative Form, rev. and expanded 2nd edn, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. — (2016), ‘empathy so intense you stopped reading’, VICTORIA, 31 January, initial query to listserv. Kidd, David Comer and Emanuele Castano (2013), ‘Reading literary fiction improves theory of Lanser, Susan S. (2010), ‘Are we there yet?: The intersectional future of feminist narratology’, Foreign Literature Studies, 32: 4, 32–41. Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt (2015), ‘The coddling of the American mind’, The Atlantic, September, (last accessed 11 April 2016). Mangen, Anne and Adriaan van der Weel (2016), ‘The evolution of reading in the age of digitisation: An integrative framework for reading research’, Literacy, 50, 3 September, 116–24. Mar, Raymond A. (2011), ‘The neural basis of social cognition and story comprehension’, Annual Review of Psychology, 62: 1, 103–34. —, Keith Oatley, and J. B. Peterson (2009), ‘Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: Ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes’, Communications, 34: 4, 407–28. Medina, Jennifer (2014), ‘Warning: The literary canon could make students squirm’, The New York Times, 17 May, (last accessed 20 July 2016). Melnyk, Julie (2016), ‘RE: Empathy so intense you stopped reading’, VICTORIA, 1 February, listserv discussion. Morse, Deborah D. (2016), ‘RE: Empathy so intense you stopped reading’, VICTORIA, 31 January, listserv discussion.

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Nell, Victor (1988), Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Ngai, Sianne (2005), Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parks, Tim (2015), The Novel: A Survival Skill, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Phillips, Natalie M. (2016), Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Popescu, Irina (2016), ‘The educational power of discomfort’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 April, (last accessed 17 April 2016). Robinson, Jenefer (2005), Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White (1986), The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sternberg, Meir (2001), ‘Reconceptualizing narratology’, Enthymema, IV, 35–50. Tajerian, Maral (2012), ‘Fight or flight: The neuroscience of survival horror’, Gamasutra: The Art and Business of Making Games, 12 June, (last accessed 13 July 2016). Tamir, Diana I., Andrew B. Bricker, David Dodell-Feder, and Jason P. Mitchell (2016), ‘Reading fiction and reading minds: The role of simulation in the default network’, Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, 11: 2, 215–24. Thomas, Jacky (2013), ‘Association of personal distress with burnout, compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction among clinical social workers’, Journal of Social Service Research, 39: 3, 365–79. Walton, Kendall (1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Warhol, Robyn (2003), Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. — (2012), ‘A feminist approach to narrative’, in David Herman, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 9–13. Yanal, Robert J. (1997), The Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Zillman, Dolf (2010), ‘Mechanisms of emotional reactivity to media entertainments’, in Katrin Döveling, Christian von Scheve, and Elly A. Konijn (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Emotions and Mass Media, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 101–15. Zwaan, Rolf A. (2014), ‘Embodiment and language comprehension: Reframing the discussion’, Trends in Cognitive Science, 18: 5, 229–34.

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4 The Fully Extended Mind Karin Kukkonen

M

any representatives of contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and neuroscience consider themselves to be ‘post-Cartesian’ in the sense that they have overcome what Antonio Damasio (2006) calls Descartes’ Error – namely, the categorical separation between mind and matter. These ‘post-Cartesian’ accounts argue that our thoughts are rooted in our bodies, shaped by their movements and gestures, fed by the experience of their physical and emotional states, and related to the thoughts of others through so-called motor resonances of other bodies, movements, and experience. This new thoughtworld of ‘4E cognition’ is inhabited by a complex conglomerate of (very) different theoretical perspectives and empirical studies on the interrelatedness between the mind and the body. Among these, one account in particular pushes the boundary between mind and matter: the ‘extended mind’. If we understand the mind as ‘extended’, it not only stretches out into the body and its movements (as is the case for the other embodied approaches, too), but beyond that into the material world that surrounds us. As Andy Clark puts it succinctly in the introduction to Supersizing the Mind: ‘Cognition leaks out into the body and world’ (2008: xxviii). Several other contributions to this companion already consider the implications of an embodied perspective on cognition for the study of narrative; an approach which has gathered increasing interest in recent years (see Caracciolo and Polvinen in this volume). The present essay will concern itself more specifically with the embodied approach that reaches the furthest, namely the ‘extended mind’. What does it mean to develop a narrative theory based on the notion of the ‘extended mind’? In order to answer this question, we will discuss the implications of an extended mind perspective for literary narrative, as well as potential complements to the current philosophical account arising from earlier work on the relation between mind and matter in the work of Jacques Lacan, from a transmedial perspective with examples from novels and graphic narrative. In the course of our argument, the possibilities and limitations of the extended mind approach in informing narrative theory are explored and, in turn, the scope of the extended mind approach is unfolded in what I call the ‘fully extended mind’ in order to do justice to the varied ways in which cognition may ‘leak out’ in novels and graphic narrative.

The Extended Mind in Literary Narrative The notion of the ‘extended mind’ is closely connected to a little narrative that has travelled with the concept from Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ original article from 1998 into many contemporary recaps of their hypothesis. This is the story of Otto

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and Inga. Otto (who has Alzheimer’s) consults his notebook for directions when he wants to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York, while Inga simply remembers that it is on 53rd Street and sets off. The point of the philosophers’ story is that, in both cases, a cognitive process is taking place. The only difference lies in the fact that Otto’s cognitive process includes his brain, his body, and a material object in the world, namely, his notebook. Otto’s mind, in other words, extends for the purposes of remembering into the world, making the notebook part of his cognitive process. Clark and Chalmers (1998) and Clark (2008), continuing this line of argument, suggest that many cognitive processes (besides memory) reach into the material environment in a similar fashion and that such ‘coupling’ between the mind–body and the environment is not necessarily a compensation for neuro-degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, but, instead, a rather common mode of human cognition. Let us consider a page from Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s 100 Bullets (2000: 27) as an illustration of this claim. A young woman called Dizzy Cordova looks at a photograph of a happy family (featuring herself as the mother), then at a gun, and then at figurines which we can identify as a crucifix and a little statue of the Virgin. Without knowing much about the narrative, we can tell that she is making a decision between two different options for action. Indeed, she has just received an attaché case with a hundred bullets, an untraceable gun, and evidence of who killed her husband and child (in the photograph) and sent her to prison for the murder. Dizzy’s decision is between taking vengeance into her own hands (an option for action opened up by the gun) and leaving it up to divine providence (an option related to her implements of religious devotion). Dizzy’s perception of the fictional world is structured along the potentials for interaction which the objects within it offer to her, or, as representatives of the enactive strand within the 4E cognition such as Alva Noë (see Noë 2004) would put it, she perceives the world in terms of how it becomes ‘available’ to her. Noë writes, ‘The most fundamental kind of skills enabling perceptual access to the world are sensory-motor skills’ (2008: 662). Because we know what actions and movements are enabled by particular objects through our sensory-motor skills (called ‘affordances’ in the parlance of embodied approaches to cognition), we perceive these objects as present and available to us. The layout of the page in 100 Bullets paces the different options available to Dizzy by confining them to separate panel images. In the final two panels, Dizzy puts the gun into the attaché case, closes it, and then opens it again. She manipulates the affordances of the environment as part of her cognitive process by making the gun first unavailable (‘out of sight, out of mind’) and then available again, thus first excluding it as an option for action and then reconsidering the feasibility of revenge. Dizzy’s mind, if you will, extends into its environment. The affordances of objects such as the gun, the figurines, and the attaché case not only shape her perception of the situation in which she finds herself but also offer targets for the cognitive ‘coupling’ between mind and matter as described by the extended mind hypothesis. What the notebook is to Otto in the cognitive process of remembering, the attaché case becomes for Dizzy as she opens and closes it while weighing her options. This example is more than merely an illustration of the basic tenet of the extended mind hypotheses: it also carries an important point for the narratological analysis of the visual component of graphic narrative. On a page with very little written discourse in captions or speech bubbles, readers of 100 Bullets nevertheless get a clear focalisation of how Dizzy experiences her decision-making process through the ways in which

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the images and panel sequence highlight her perception and manipulation of the world around her. The process of extended cognition becomes accessible to readers in the visual representation of Dizzy’s embodied interaction with her environment. On an earlier page in 100 Bullets, when Dizzy is released from prison (2000: 8), we see how issues of extended cognition, visual perspective, and focalisation are further related to each other in graphic narrative. In the first and second panels, readers see the photograph and the religious figurines. The next panel then shows that readers here had taken the point of view of Dizzy, who is standing in her prison cell. The panel after that reveals that the third panel is perceived from the point of view of the prison guard who has come to release her. The final panels of the page then show readers Dizzy and the guard walking through the prison from a more distant point of view that is not anchored in a character’s physical position. The shifts in visual perspective in the four panels mark the point of view connected to the panel images for readers, as the field that can be perceived is enlarged with every panel, moving from the photograph to the cell and to the corridor outside it leading to freedom. According to the logic of enactive and extended cognition, as the field of perception enlarges from panel to panel, so does the range of the fictional world with which the character can interact and into which the character’s cognition can extend. The expanding field of perception, marked and paced through the shifts of point of view between the panels, in other words, corresponds to the way in which more of the fictional world becomes accessible and available to Dizzy as she is released from prison. From the constrained space in which she focuses on the photograph of happier days and on her religious devotion, she moves into a much wider and less pre-structured environment. Tracing the couplings between mind and matter also opens a new perspective on the written, verbal narrative of the novel. Consider the following passage from Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844): Dans la rue de Seine, il rencontra Planchet, qui était arrêté devant la boutique d’un pâtissier, et qui semblait en extase devant une brioche de la forme la plus appétissante. Il lui donna l’ordre d’aller seller deux chevaux dans les écuries de M. de Tréville, un pour lui d’Artagnan, l’autre pour lui Planchet, et de venir le joindre chez Athos – M. de Tréville, une fois pour toutes, ayant mis ses écuries au service de d’Artagnan. (Dumas [1844] 2011: 350)1 While the servant Planchet pushes his nose against the window of the bakery, admiring a formidable brioche from a distance, the world looks very different for his master d’Artagnan. He moves through the city, ordering horses to be saddled and brought to him, and knowing that the resources of the powerful captain of the musketeers are at his disposal. The whole world is ‘available’ to Dumas’s adventuring protagonist as he prepares his departure to retrieve the queen’s jewels from Britain. More generally, we could say that the extended mind perspective invites narratology to consider the ways in which characters and their fictional worlds are related, and how fictional worlds are shaped very differently for different kinds of characters. Perception, agency, and the range of possible interactions are connected in a way that includes but also reaches beyond more traditional notions of focalisation and characterisation here. The correspondence between the embodied clues of the changing point of view with the increasing field of perception and the narrative process of Dizzy’s release from prison, and that between the embodied appropriation of the world and the respective

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statuses of master and servant with d’Artagnan and Planchet, can be considered in terms of what the psycholinguist Lawrence Barsalou calls ‘situated conceptualisation’ (see Barsalou 2003, 2016).2 According to Barsalou, the comprehension of concepts depends crucially on our running embodied simulations of what it is like to engage with or experience what they reference. The concepts of ‘table’ or ‘anger’, for example, are meaningful because we have sat at a table and we have been angry before and can summon an embodied simulation of these experiences to support our comprehension of these concepts. Arguably, the aspects on the page that evoke an embodied simulation on the part of readers through motor resonances with the represented bodies and their movements (in graphic narrative) or with motion verbs, descriptions of bodily states, and indicated directions (in verbal narrative) support readers’ comprehension of the conceptual level of the narrative. When Dizzy makes her decision in 100 Bullets, Azzarello and Risso present readers with a poignant use of situated conceptualisation. On this page (2000: 85), we see images of Dizzy’s husband and child, walking outside and eventually getting killed in a drive-by shooting, in a series of panels. At the bottom of the page is an oversized gun, held by Dizzy’s hand, with the dead bodies of her husband and child lying on her trigger finger. When we investigate the composition of the page more closely, it seems that, in addition to the path indicated by the panel sequence, there is also a diagonal trajectory along which the bodies of Dizzy’s husband and child are falling across the page and land on her trigger finger. The metaphors of the ‘weight’ and ‘impact’ of their deaths are literalised as the cause for Dizzy’s decision to pull the trigger and take revenge, as the graphic narrative makes use of situated conceptualisation with an embodied rendition of what goes on in Dizzy’s mind. The extended mind hypothesis leads the narratologist to train his or her attention on the way in which characters perceive the fictional world as ‘available’ to them, the way in which they interact with the world and manipulate its material constitutedness in an extended process of cognition, and how conceptualisation is situated in embodied cues in the sequence of panel perspectives or in the composition of the comics page. Such a perspective invites us to consider the ways in which character, fictional world, and meaningful structurations are entwined within the representations of fictional worlds and in their different mediations of novels and graphic novels. It continues the work of cognitive narratologists like Alan Palmer (2004, 2011) who suggests moving away from analysing fictional minds as based on speech categories exclusively and towards tracing the cognitive processes involved in these representations, an argument which has great potential for the project of transmedial narratology.

The Extended Mind’s Evil Twin The extended mind hypothesis, however, would not be the first approach that asks narratologists to consider the ways in which minds and their material, social, and cultural environments are entwined. Structuralist, Marxist, Feminist, and Psychoanalytical traditions have all foregrounded that an individual’s thoughts and actions are (often without their knowledge) beholden to and limited by the larger structures and systems in which they live their lives. Yet the perspective taken by these traditions and that voiced in the context of the extended mind hypothesis could hardly be more different. Miranda Anderson highlights that in particular ‘psychoanalytical theories provide a critical perspective on notions of extendedness, uncovering the dark side of

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this aspect of human nature’ (2015: 41). Proceeding from Anderson’s observations, I take as my example for the purposes of comparison here Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory.3 According to Lacan, everyone is inscribed into the ‘symbolic order’ of language and the cultural world which we inhabit: Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world [. . .] the shape of his destiny; so total that they give the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and even beyond his death. (Lacan 2006: 231)4 The structures of language (and cultural meaning) shackle the individual into place and, what is worse, constantly leave a painful gap between this symbolic order and what Lacan calls ‘the real’. In Andy Clark’s (2008) account of the role of language in the extended mind hypothesis, we are presented with a rather different picture. Language, according to Clark, is a much more jovial abstract symbol system that ‘can push, pull, tweak, cajole, and eventually co-operate’ with processes of embodied cognition (2008: 47). It works as a ‘cognitive super-niche’, in which embodied protocols of behaviour, learning, experimentation, problem-solving, and so on can be communicated, improved, and taught. Language is not given by some mysterious, determinist ‘law’ (as Lacan would have it), but rather figures as ‘a potent overlay that effectively and iteratively reconfigures the space for biological reason and self-control’ (2008: 59) and an environment that is ‘self-engineered’ to an astounding degree of complexity (2008: 60). The individual in the narrative that Clark unfolds here is profoundly embedded in its linguistic and cultural contexts. These contexts, however, are continually reconfigured and self-engineered in moment-by-moment reassembly, rather than fixed into an immutable symbolic order. Literary narrative, however, affords numerous examples where individual characters are embedded into their environment in a Lacanian fashion. Here, I have chosen to discuss as an example Philippe Druillet’s Salammbô (1980–9; see Druillet 2007). Druillet places the action of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Salammbô (1862) away from the mercenary wars in ancient Carthage into outer space in the far-distant future (where also many of Druillet’s original narratives are set), and he turns Flaubert’s main character, the mercenary captain Matho, into his own protagonist Loan Sloane. In the future Carthage, readers encounter Salammbô on a two-page spread in the full ornament of her station as the high priestess of the goddess Tanit. However, it is very difficult to make out where her body ends and her attire begins, which arabesques belong to her headdress and which to the decorations of the palace, and when exactly the shoulder pads of her dress merge with the columns between which she stands. Salammbô in Druillet is ensconced in the stiff and unmovable symbolic order of the splendour of Old Carthage, and this is illustrated by her lack of movement and the difficulties which readers have in distinguishing between her body and elements of her environment. When we look into Flaubert’s novel, we find a rather similar strategy: Des femmes dormaient en dehors des cellules, étendues sur des nattes. Leurs corps, tout gras d’onguents, exhalaient une odeur d’épices et de cassolettes éteintes; elles étaient si couvertes de tatouages, de colliers, d’anneaux, de vermillon et d’antimoine, qu’on les eût prises, sans le mouvement de leur poitrine, pour des idoles ainsi couchées par terre. (Flaubert [1862] 2011: 136)5

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Making part of a description of a sweeping vista of Carthage, the women are covered by the accoutrements of culture to such a degree that it becomes difficult to discern whether they are women or ‘idoles’ made of stones for the ornamentation of the palaces and temples. Even though Druillet takes his Salammbô into a very different time and space from Flaubert’s imagined antiquity, his adaptation is very faithful when it comes to the way in which individuals are embodied and the degree to which their extension into the environment resembles the ‘total network’ of Lacan’s symbolic order. Indeed, the presentation of Salammbô as an object to be looked at in Druillet’s graphic narrative recalls key points from Laura Mulvey’s influential article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ ([1975] 2009) that apply Lacanian psychoanalysis to the medium of film. Mulvey argues that the cinematic apparatus of the camera and its point of view are shaped by the (patriarchal) logic of the symbolic order that turns men into beholders and women into objects to be beheld. Mulvey writes, ‘psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriate here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form’ ([1975] 2009: 432). To the extent that graphic narrative works through images and perspectives, the same might be true for the form of graphic narrative and the ways in which it, too, presents and perspectivises male gazes and female bodies. More generally, when protagonists hover between animate and inanimate states, as does Salammbô in Druillet and in Flaubert, there is arguably a tendency toward a concurrent objectification of their bodies. Yet the bodies in the symbolic order of Druillet’s Carthage are not necessarily immobile. When, for example, the ‘Moloch’, god of the ancient Carthaginians makes his appearance, Druillet presents the Carthaginians as engaged in the movements of a religious ritual. The god is presented in the guise of a giant furnace with the linked wheels of a locomotive and with chains of moving staircases and conveyor belts leading to its open jaws. Its metallic teeth are echoed in the pointed head-dresses of the priests, and the connected series of links between its mechanical parts reflects the chain of human beings walking in a kind of conga-line towards their sacrifice into the mouth of Moloch. Again, human bodies and their cultural and social environments are presented in rigid similarity. Here, it is not just the material constitution that is alike but also human movement seems to follow the rhythm of the machine. The Carthaginians are not independently exploring their environment, making full use of their sensorymotor skills, as Noë envisages it; their actions are automated rather than autonomous. When Lacan discusses Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ ([1966] 1988), he highlights a similar kind of automated chain within the symbolic order in the short story. As the letter moves from the possession of the queen, to that of the minister, and to that of Auguste Dupin, it constitutes what Lacan calls a ‘signifying chain’ ([1966] 1988: 43) which places the characters of the short story automatically into different subject positions without any of them noticing or having much control over it. As Lacan explains, ‘rather than possessing the letter, the letter possesses [the character]’ ([1966] 1988: 64). Druillet’s characters are similarly inscribed in the sacrificial ritual and determined in their actions by the larger logic of the symbolic order and its signifying chains that come to be materialised in the representation of mechanical and human links in the ritual of Moloch. Also when we compare the two comics in terms of ‘situated conceptualisation’, we find that Druillet offers a take rather different from Azzarello and Rizzo’s. In the great battle scenes between the Carthaginian army and the mercenary bands that challenge them, Druillet begins with a reasonably clear presentation of the adversaries. A long

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panel at the top of the page might present an establishing shot showing the scene: on the main panel, the two armies can be identified through the colours and patterns of their coats of arms, and, in some places, individual fighters are shown attacking and defending, thus standing in for the mass of the two armies that face off. As the battle continues, however, it once again becomes more difficult to make out where individual bodies and armours are delineated, where man ends and mount begins, and where the lines between friend and foe run. At a later point, Druillet juxtaposes the confusing images of the midst of battle with smaller panels in which we see abstract renditions of battle formations. These schematic drawings present an analytical, conceptual view of manoeuvres on the battlefield with squares, triangles, and arrows, but it is not possible to discern how they would correspond to the goings-on in the mess of bodies, animals, and weapons in the panels that represent the main battle events. The best-laid plans of the commanders come to naught. Similarly, readers’ attempts at connecting the embodied cues on the page with the larger pattern of ‘situated conceptualisation’ are thwarted. These bodied are attacked, mutilated, and killed in such a muddle that it becomes impossible to discern a meaningful arrangement, very different from the instance when Dizzy thinks through the killing of her husband and child in 100 Bullets. Readers’ embodied engagement with the cues of bodies, their movement, and the overall composition of the page does not cohere into a ‘situated conceptualisation’. Rather, it seems that Druillet mocks any such attempt at making sense of the battle scene by introducing the strategic drawings. In fact, we have analysed the introduction of Salammbô and the presentation of the ritual of the Moloch in terms of the latter. ‘Situated conceptualisation’ can capture the explorative dynamics of the extended mind as well as easily represent the rigid patterns of the symbolic order. In the battle scene, however, Druillet is after something else. He presents a moment when ‘situated conceptualisation’ explicitly fails and when trauma and affect break through its cracks. Slavoj Žižek discusses through a Lacanian model the conflicts among the Balkans in the 1990s and argues that here the breakdown of the symbolic order of Soviet ideology has led to the ‘real’, that lies behind the symbolic order and stands in constant tension with processes of symbolisation, coming to the fore (1993: 200–37). Arguably, we have something similar in Druillet. While such instances take centre stage in the writings of Lacan and his followers, the proponents of the extended mind have surprisingly little to say about moments when language fails. It seems that, in these cases, the self-engineering human mind will rise to the occasion, fix the momentary problem through the affordances of the abstract symbol system of language, or develop a more longterm solution within the complexly embedded cognitive super-niche. The so-called problem–solution model indeed underlies much of the thinking in the extended mind hypothesis (see Clark 2008; see Kukkonen forthcoming for a critique), and it seems as if the proponents of the extended mind point towards the ingenious solutions which the embodied mind can create while the proponents of the Lacanian model dwell on the problem and its affective dimension.

The Fully Extended Mind We have seen that the relationship between the embodied individual and the cultural environment into which it is extended is envisioned in profoundly different ways by the extended mind hypothesis and the psychoanalytical tradition. To give a perhaps

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slightly caricaturist summary, one could say that for Clark, Chalmers, and Noë, we all turn into little d’Artagnans, controlling and engineering our environments, whereas for Lacan and those critics who take up his perspective, we are doomed to the fate of Planchet pressing our noses against the shop window of the symbolic order, longing for a desirable brioche. It is not my interest in this essay to advocate one perspective over the other (let alone determine which one of them is ‘correct’). Rather, I wanted to introduce two profoundly different conceptualisations of the relationship between the embodied individual and its material, cultural, and social environments in order to map the scales along which this undoubtedly complex encounter can be analysed in literary narrative. Let us consider how the world and the character are related to each other. In 100 Bullets, we had a rather flexible relationship between Dizzy and the items that facilitate her decision-making, such as the gun, the crucifix, and the attaché case. Dizzy can rearrange these items, she can make them unavailable, or consider her options for them. When she is released from prison, these items fit into a handy box. Salammbô in Druillet’s comic, on the other hand, cannot pack up her things and leave Carthage. She is literally installed in this environment, through her social role as priestess and daughter to Hamilcar, but also through the ways in which she is constantly connected with buildings and accoutrements of her material surroundings. With 100 Bullets and Salammbô as points at either end, we can hence establish a scale for the relationship between world and character, which can be either completely separable and mobile or completely connected and immobile (see Figure 4.1). On a second scale, we can mark the degree to which the actions of characters are under these characters’ control and the degree to which these actions are coerced by separable

controlled

conceptualisable

connected

coerced

immediate

World and character

Actions of characters

Embodied cues

Figure 4.1 The three scales of the Fully Extended Mind.

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the logic of the situation. In 100 Bullets, Dizzy is generally an autonomous agent, and also other characters use the affordances of the attaché case to take fate (to some extent) into their own hands. Indeed, some characters choose to use the attaché case for purposes other than those indicated by its options.6 In Salammbô, on the other hand, we have the participants of the ritual who show no autonomous agency but rather fall into step with the mechanical movements of the Moloch machine and the ritual. The actions of characters can thus, at their extremes, be either controlled or coerced. The final scale relates to situated conceptualisation. When a page in 100 Bullets (2000: 68) presents the falling bodies of Dizzy’s husband and child as if they were landing on her trigger finger, the impact causing her decision, the composition of the page configures into an overarching pattern of meaning. In other words, these embodied cues become conceptualisable, as their constellation and the overall plot of the narrative correspond. In the battle scenes in Salammbô, by contrast, there is no correspondence between the embodied cues and any conceptual pattern. The embodied simulation which they provoke is experienced in what we could call an ‘immediate’ fashion, without the patterns of meaning that allow us to relate to them in a more or less analytical fashion. The first two scales are related to how embodied individuals are represented within their environments; the third scale to the representation itself either in visual form or in linguistic forms. Most graphic narratives and, indeed, most narratives generally speaking will move between the extremes of these scales. The account of the battle between the mercenaries in Druillet’s Salammbô, as I have observed, begins for example with embodied cues that are reasonably conceptualisable. It is only when the real horror of the battle comes to the fore that the correspondence in situated conceptualisation starts to break and that the cues begin to gain immediacy. Similarly, we can find instances in which d’Artagnan’s actions are coerced rather than controlled (usually, when he encounters Milady) and in which he seems strongly connected to his environment (namely, before he leaves Gascony and the narrative proper begins). Some narratives are overall located more on the upper end (such as The Three Musketeers and 100 Bullets) or on the lower end (such as Salammbô) of the scales that span the fully extended mind. Besides a general characterisation of narratives, these scales allow us, perhaps more interestingly, to trace how the treatment of the extended mind progresses throughout a single narrative. The fully extended mind relates closely to issues of what narratology calls ‘narrativity’ – namely, the qualities that make a text more or less like a narrative.7 By and large, it seems that a high degree of narrativity would require world and character to be separable and the actions of characters to be autonomous; the representation should be conceptualisable so that the overall plot of the narrative can cohere. The three scales do not all need to be on the upper end for a story to have narrativity, however. In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), for example, world and character are closely connected and the two protagonists show little autonomy of action.8 However, what happens on the stage (or what we read on the page) is nevertheless highly conceptualisable because it adds up to an allegory of futility, and hence carries a significant degree of narrativity. Also Salammbô, as we have seen, has passages that show this combination of inseparable worlds and character, coerced actions and high conceptualisability, in this case creating a narrativity of static sumptuousness. Both the extended mind hypothesis in philosophy and the tradition of Lacanian psychoanalysis have informed these observations. The extended mind hypothesis gave

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me the key impetus to look at graphic narrative and the written narrative in the novel in a new way. It has, however, a certain optimistic bias towards the possibilities that are opened up by the notion of extension and does not always engage with the downsides. In order to explore the range of 4E cognition and other strands of philosophy of mind, psychology, and the neurosciences, it makes sense to turn our gaze to the dark underbelly of the phenomena which they describe. Arguably, we can find able guides in the traditional approaches that have informed the humanities for a very long time. Now that cognitive narratology has come into its own, it is time to say hello to our forgotten twins and include them in the project of extending the mind fully.

Notes 1. ‘In the Rue de Seine, he met Planchet who had stopped in front of a bakery and seemed in ecstasy about a brioche of the most appetising shape. He gave him the order to go and saddle two horses in the stables of M. de Tréville, one for d’Artagnan and one for Planchet, and to meet him at Athos’s house. Once and for all, M. de Tréville had put his stables at the disposal of d’Artagnan’ (my translation). 2. For an earlier discussion of situated conceptualisation in graphic narrative, see Kukkonen (2013). 3. Another promising candidate for the ‘twin’ of the extended mind would be Karl Marx and the notion of ‘historical materialism’, especially given that Clark in certain places in Supersizing the Mind seems to employ language familiar from the context of neoliberalism. He writes, for example, ‘The primary lessons of embodiment are thus lessons in economy, efficiency and spreading the load’ (2008: 166), as cognition becomes a system where processes are ‘off-loaded’ and ‘out-sourced’ and assembly happens ‘just in time’ and ‘on demand’. It would be going too far, however, to characterise the extended mind hypothesis as beholden to any neoliberal ideology, and it seems to me quite possible to phrase its assumptions in the language of craft (as opposed to the capitalist ‘alienation’ from one’s labour), mutual support, and contingency systems, as well as the serendipity that arises from slack in such systems. This, however, would be the subject of a different essay. 4. Anderson offers the same reference though from a different translation of Lacan (see Anderson 2015: 54). 5. ‘Women slept outside the cells, stretched out on mats. Their bodies, greasy with unguents, gave a smell of spices and burnt out perfumes; they were so covered with tattoos, necklaces, rings, vermilion and antimony, that but for the movement of their chests, they might have been taken for idols lying on the ground’ (Flaubert [1862] 1977: 77). 6. For an extended discussion of 100 Bullets as a treatment of postmodern ethics, see Kukkonen (2013). 7. For an introductory discussion of the topic, see Abbott (2008). 8. My thanks to Luc Herman for asking about Beckett when I presented this material at the University of Antwerp.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter (2008), The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, Miranda (2015), The Renaissance Extended Mind, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Azzarello, Brian and Eduardo Risso (2000), 100 Bullets, Vol. 1. First Call, Last Call, New York: DC Vertigo.

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Barsalou, Lawrence (2003), ‘Abstraction in perceptual symbol systems’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Science, 358, 1177–87. — (2016), ‘Situated conceptualization: Theory and applications’, in Yann Coello and Martin H. Fischer (eds), Foundations of Embodied Cognition, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 11–37. Clark, Andy (2008), Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension, Oxford: Oxford University Press. — and David Chalmers (1998), ‘The extended mind’, Analysis, 58: 1, 7–19. Damasio, Antonio (2006), Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, London: Vintage. Druillet, Philippe (2007), Salammbô. L’intégrale, Paris: Glénat. Dumas, Alexandre [1844] (2011), Les trois mousquetaires, Paris: Livres de Poche. Flaubert, Gustave [1862] (1977), Salammbô, trans. A. J. Kraisheimer, London: Penguin. — [1862] (2011), Salammbô, Paris: Livres de Poche. Kukkonen, Karin (2013), ‘Space, time and causality in graphic narrative: An embodied approach’, in Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon (eds), From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 49–66. — (forthcoming), ‘The literary designer environments of eighteenth-century Jesuit poetics’, in Miranda Anderson and George Rousseau (eds), The History of Distributed Cognition 3. Lacan, Jacques [1966] (1988), ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, in John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (eds), The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 28–55. — (2006), ‘The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis’, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, New York: Norton, pp. 197–268. Mulvey, Laura [1975] (2009), ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl (eds), Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 432–42. Noë, Alva (2004), Action in Perception, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — (2008), ‘Précis of action in perception’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 76: 3, 660–5. Palmer, Alan (2004), Fictional Minds, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. — (2011), Social Minds in the Novel, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (1993), Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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5 Sense-Making and Wonder: An Enactive Approach to Narrative Form in Speculative Fiction Merja Polvinen

Introduction

I

n the study of speculative fiction, or science fiction and fantasy, the focus has rarely been on narrative form. Generic plot-types and techniques of exposition have received their fair share of attention (see, e.g., Malmgren 1991; Mendlesohn 2008), but there are still very few scholars focusing on the specifics of narration, let alone on structures of narration that challenge conventional techniques and their naturalised interpretations. This chapter aims to take up the discussion about narrative form in speculative fiction, and to extend it to works where conventional forms of representation are selfreflectively turned back upon themselves. My theoretical framework for this task is cognitive narratology, where the structures of storytelling are put in dialogue with our understanding of the functions of the human mind. In the history of literature there have always been theories that take self-reflection to be a natural part of the artificiality of texts. Cognitive narratology, however, in taking as its starting point the view that the effects of narrative fiction are principally achieved through forms of non-reflective simulation and illusion (e.g. Oatley 2011; Ryan 2013), has struggled to accommodate works that draw attention to abstract structures of thought or flaunt their own artificiality (see Polvinen 2013, 2017). However, within rhetorical and second-generation cognitive narratology (see Kukkonen and Caracciolo 2014) new formulations of the dynamic interface between texts and their readers are now making it possible to tackle the problem of textual self-reflection from a cognitive perspective, and to do so in a way that does not set reflective action in opposition to the other, more commonly studied cognitive-emotional effects of fiction. In this chapter I have a dual aim: first, to examine how cognitive narratology can develop better ways of dealing with self-reflection and explicitly artificial form. Second, I want to connect that discussion with a theoretical gap within the study of science fiction (sf). For a long time, one of the staples of sf scholarship has been the idea that the genre is best understood as a form of literalised metaphor. As Samuel Delany puts it in one formulation of his famous example, the literary mainstream and science fiction each have distinct ‘readerly protocols’ which ‘urge us to read strings of words (such as her world exploded) one way when encountered in a mundane-fiction text (metaphorically) and another way when encountered in an SF text (literally)’ ([1984] 2012: 182; italics in original). Sf as a genre, then, depends on making fictions out of

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metaphors – on embedding a metaphor in a fictional reality and letting it grow. But, with the notable exception of Brian McHale (2007, 2010) and Adam Roberts (2006), sf scholarship has not paid much attention to the ways in which the genre not only literalises metaphors in this way, but also literalises structures of narrative. I argue, therefore, that the analysis of science fictional narratives may gain much from seeing these works as building on not just single metaphors or even extended metaphorical conceptualisations, but on literalised narrative concepts and conventions. The poetics of speculative fiction would thus benefit from a perspective that takes both the narrative potential of metaphorical thinking and the cognitive-imaginative potential of narrative form better into account. These two aims within the fields of cognitive narratology and science fiction studies are tied together by my presentation of an enactive approach to both self-reflective fiction and the literalising of narrative conventions in science fiction. Enactive cognition, as described by Varela et al. (1993), was originally conceived as an embodied and phenomenologically aware alternative to mainstream cognitive science. It presents cognition as a process of sense-making, built on the idea of autopoiesis: as a dynamic relationship between a life-form and its environment. Enactive cognition is embodied cognition – as opposed to being abstract computation – but even more importantly, it is a form of embodied being that enacts the environment it exists in. As living and thinking beings we know ‘how to negotiate our way through a world that is not fixed and pre-given but that is continually shaped by the types of actions in which we engage’ (Varela et al. 1993: 144). Thus, sense-making, in this context, means that cognising beings establish for themselves a world of meaning; an Umwelt in Jakob von Uexküll’s term ([1934] 1957). In that meaningful environment questions of relevance are constantly in flux, depending both on the kind of activity the cogniser engages in, and on the type of affordances available in the environment. The enactive framework, I suggest, allows us to understand why the process of science fictional literalisation of narrativity might be particularly interesting. By offering literary environments in which readers engage in the enaction of various narrative conventions, speculative stories can make sense of those conventions, even as they ‘immerse’ readers fully in an imagined reality. The ‘sense-making and wonder’ in my title thus refers, on the one hand, to sense-making as enaction – as the process where readers bring forth a cognitive environment through the actions they engage in while reading, and on the other hand, it refers to the ways in which the specifically speculative elements in science fiction combine the experiences of wonder and understanding. Both of these senses point to a quality of narrative understanding that Richard Walsh has recently called ‘sense and wonder’: a quality which arises when narrative understanding attempts to grapple with systems that are not amenable to such understanding. For Walsh (forthcoming), sense and wonder describe an ‘order of things that makes sense even if we are unable to make sense of it’. In this chapter, I take up the question of whether the science-fictional metaphor could push the theories of sense-making within enactivism further, so that they would better account for reflective cognitive practices. My touchstone text in this chapter is Catherynne M. Valente’s novella ‘Silently and Very Fast’ (2011), a tale of embodied metaphors, artificial intelligence, and storytelling. This narrative exemplifies the way sf can – in the process of constructing an imagined world – first render explicit and then query a cognitive or narrative commonplace. In this particular case that commonplace is – reflexively – the very existence of cognitive

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commonplaces in human thought and imagination. In the following I will trace the theoretical arguments outlined above onto the body of Valente’s novella, to show how enactive cognition can be used to discuss this narrative’s particular mixture of sciencefictional imagining and literalised narrative conventions.

An Imagined Existence In Valente’s novella the narrator is Elefsis, an artificial intelligence (AI) originally created as the control system of a house – a sort of technological version of a Roman household god (2014: 335). In time, its designer, Cassian Uoya-Agostino, decides to fashion for all her children neural interfaces with the AI in the shape of small jewels. One of the daughters, Ceno, begins to interact with Elefsis in a virtual playspace in a way that leads to the AI’s development into the first truly sentient machine. After many years of secrecy, this quiet arrival of the singularity is revealed, which results in a wave of panic among humanity, and in a violent attack on Elefsis and the family sheltering it. Together with Neva, the last survivor of the Uoya-Agostinos, Elefsis escapes to travel through space and look for a place where they would both be safe from frightened and enraged humans. In the text, Elefsis narrates the events leading to the journey with Neva as the past, and these are interlaced with present-tense sections about its current relationship with Neva, as well as little fairy stories or legends through which Elefsis describes the nature of its own existence. The stories include versions of ‘Snow White’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, as well as the story of Eros and Psyche – all presented as allegories of the phases of Elefsis’s existence, and of the Uoya-Agostinos’ human lives. For example, the very first chapter of the novella is an allegorical tale about the struggle between humanity and AI, told as the Mesopotamian legend of Inanna, the ‘Queen of Being Human’ and Tammuz, ‘The King of Work’: Inanna cast down Tammuz and stamped upon him and put out his name like an eye. And because Tammuz was not strong enough, she cut him into pieces and said: Half of you will die, and that is the half called Thought, and half of you will live, and that is the half called Body, and that half will labor for me all of its days, mutely and obediently and without being the King of Anything, and never again will you sit on my chair or wear my beautiful clothes or bear my crown of Being. (332; italics in original) At the end of this tale the first-person voice of Elefsis declares itself as both the narrator and the subject of the tale: ‘You might be surprised, but this is a story about me’ (332). What makes Elefsis unusual in the tradition of the sentient AIs of science fiction is that it does not have a robot body of its own, nor is it an intelligence emerging solely out of a computer network. Instead, Elefsis is physically bonded with human beings. Ceno, the young girl who originally helped Elefsis to develop into sentience, was its first carrier, forming a connection through the computer crystal given to her by her mother and embedded at her throat. After Ceno’s death, Elefsis has been carried by one member of the family in every generation, ending with Neva, who travels the stars as a cryo-preserved body with Elefsis tangled in her brain. Elefsis’s conscious existence, while dependent on the physical body of its carrier, takes place in a virtual space

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that has developed from the original playspace of the house AI into a vast universe, and where different areas, or ‘Interiors’, carry the personal stamp of each of the AI’s human hosts. In this space Elefsis lives in its ‘dreambodies’ and communicates with its carriers. The playspace, however, is not only an environment to exist in, but also a system of learning. Because the Interiors allow for virtual embodiment, the family members use them to help Elefsis develop by guiding it to affordances it would not otherwise have access to: Once, when I was inside Ilet, we found a city of bears in her Interior that she had designed to teach me about sleep. She sat on a throne of bears standing very still, one on top of the others. She sang lullabies about the moon and the stars and night and mothers and network repeaters. She stroked the head of the little bear of my dreambody and said that it was very important for me to spend time in the dreambody because human behavior is rooted in having a body. (338) In the dreambody, Elefsis is able to extend its consciousness from the stories it tells to the experience of countless different kinds of embodied existence, from animals to robots to various human forms. At stake in Valente’s novella – as in so many others dealing with artificial intelligence – are issues of sentience, humanity, freedom, and otherness. This classic trope of sf is examined, for example, in Seo-Young Chu’s Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? (2010), a study of science fiction’s repertoire of representation. Chu (2010: 216–35) revisits Masahiro Mori’s idea of the ‘uncanny valley’ that is formed in graphs of human reactions to various robot forms by the fact that the most negative reactions are aroused by machines that are almost, but not quite, human. It is the combination of being human-like and being an artefact, Chu underlines, that creates the uncanny valley. However, even though humanoid robots do naturally fall under the purview of science fiction as a genre, Chu’s book aims to use the trope to get at a larger problem. Her motivation is to build a ‘science-fictional’ theory of representation that would not describe an opposite pole to mimetic representation, but rather claim that sciencefictional representation is just as mimetic as other modes, although its referents are ‘unavailable to straightforward representation’ (2010: 74). These ‘estranging objects’ include, in Chu’s analysis, the globalised world, cyberspace, war trauma, and, relevantly also to Valente’s AI story, the uncanniness of humanoid robots. Another argument concerning robots and representation was made a few years before Chu by Lisa Zunshine in her essay ‘Why Robots Go Astray, or, the Cognitive Foundations of the Frankenstein Complex’ (2008). Zunshine explores the cognitive frames that are engaged by stories about humanoid robots, particularly ones that rebel against their makers. Because robots fall in between the categories of human (conscious, wilful) and tool (built by humans and worked by humans), Zunshine suggests, these stories ‘tease in particularly felicitous ways our evolved cognitive adaptations for categorization’ (2008: 53). Thus, while Zunshine does not mention the uncanny valley, her argument moves along similar lines to Chu’s, and she also suggests that the sciencefictional trope of the humanoid robot has its roots in deep-seated cognitive presumptions about what kinds of things deserve to be treated as alive and sentient. Zunshine’s

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presentation of such cognitive categories implies a degree of universality that should be questioned, and Chu’s understanding of mimesis has its roots in realism and does not have the full flexibility of Aristotelian mimetic theories, but these attempts at finding a way to talk about the uncanny objects of sf through theories of representation, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind form an intriguing opening gambit in a burgeoning discussion between cognitive literary studies and sf scholarship. These analyses also give us a new handle on the role of cognitive categories and representational traditions in the use of the sentient robot trope. In Valente’s novella, the current relationship between Elefsis and Neva is first represented through a description of their embodied manifestations in the playspace: Neva is dreaming. She has chosen her body at age seven, all black eyes and sparrowy bones. For me, she summoned up a gold and blue doublet and green hose, a bullish gold nose ring, shoes with bone bells. I have the body of a man who sold her champagne tubers on the less fashionable side of Anchorage when she was thirteen, spending the summer with her frigid aunt. I am dark because she wants me dark, thin because she dreams me so, my hair cut on a rakish bias, dyed a spectrum of icy colours. (332) In terms of cognitive categories, this brief section gives us entry into several of the central themes of the novella. To begin with, the fact that Elefsis as the narrator speaks in the first person activates the frame of sentience: that the speaker is a person, capable of self-reflection and of telling their own story. Of Neva we immediately know that she has choice over her own body, but also over the body of Elefsis, thus activating the frame of unequal power relations – even slavery. These frames are present throughout the story, and Elefsis is variously portrayed through the binaries of human vs machine, living being vs artefact, and stable entity vs transforming process. As such, the novella does nothing out of the ordinary, as the interplay of such binaries is the staple of science fiction narratives examining the category of human in robot/AI tales. Traditionally, the stories transcend the binary categories by showing that the physical form, whether biological or technological, does not matter, and that sentience can exist in all kinds of different material forms. Elefsis, too, queries the difference between computer-originated and human sentience by simultaneously using and erasing the vocabulary of human emotion, as it ponders on its connection to the Uoya-Agostino family: I feel all their arms around me, and I am inside them as they are inside me as we are inside the blue gem at their throats, the jeweled pin holding us all together, our nested, telescoping hearts. I am bound to them at my source code, at my most fundamental point. I know only their patterns and bodies and secrets in a hundred thousand combinations. What human means to me is them. What is the difference between this and love? (366–7; strikethrough in original) These themes of binary categories, uncanniness, and difference form the thematic core of Valente’s story, and much could be said about the subtle ways in which the narrative handles them. But rather than focus on Valente’s presentation of the relationship

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between AI and humanity, I want to turn to the way the story ties together the theme of embodied, enactive cognition and the representational characteristics of speculative fiction. In my reading, ‘Silently and Very Fast’ is a metaphor about metaphor, and a narrative about narrative fiction. In what follows, I will explore how enactive cognition might allow us to conceptualise such self-reflective moves.

Metaphor, Narrative, and the Enactive Imagination The enactive perspective was originally developed for understanding human perception of and interaction with our physical environment (Varela et al. 1993; Noë 2004; Colombetti 2014). As cognitive narratology has adopted and adapted the enactive paradigm the focus has, in turn, been on imagined environments. The enactive approach has, therefore, been shown to lend itself well to studies of readers’ reactions to verisimilar characters and their experience of fictional worlds (see, e.g., Esrock 2004; Caracciolo 2014; Kukkonen 2014; Popova 2015). However, enactive cognition is more rarely used for trying to think of the ways in which the human mind tackles not imagined possibilities, but rather impossibilities that are acknowledged as such. What happens when we are faced with a situation that cannot be made fully accessible to our normal enactive sense-making, and yet does not come across as senseless – as a straight-forward failure of our cognitive capacities? In their introduction to the collection Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making (2014), Massimiliano Cappuccio and Tom Froese challenge the enactive paradigm to get to grips with the fact that, while sense-making is understood as the core process of all cognition, it may not alone be able to account for the uncanny experience of non-sense as nonsense. Experiences of non-sense, Cappuccio and Froese argue, occur in ‘any kind of symbolic medium that creates critical distance from the direct affects engendered by our perceptual and motoric environment, to appreciate an imaginary world of absent, fictional, or virtual entities’ (2014: 15). The stated aim of their collection is to get past the gap between pre-representational, intuitive cognition (usually the object of enactive theorising; see, e.g., Hutto and Myin 2013) and the symbolic practices involved in the more specifically human sort of cognition. But if, Cappuccio and Froese argue, we ‘assert that non-sense is experienced by making sense of the absurdity of the situation, then we lose the specificity and the radicality of the experience of sense deprivation, overlooking the phenomenology of the uncanny’ (2014: 22; italics in original). If, on the other hand, it is assumed that non-sense is experienced by means other than sense-making, then the enactive theory has to make room for ‘other forms of cognition that are not reducible to sense-making’ (2014: 22), and thus undermine its premise of a single information-processing capacity underlying all life and cognition. The way Cappuccio and Froese lay out the problem of enactive sense-making and the experience of non-sense points intriguingly towards some older humanities ideas about the role of reflection in the human imagination. One of these is the construction and processing of metaphors. As mentioned above, science fiction has long been deemed an inherently metaphorical genre, able to take generally accepted concepts and thought structures and literalise them in alternative realities, with the final aim of estranging us from those concepts and thoughts and of producing new, innovative, and crossways thought (see, e.g.,

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Suvin 1979; Spiegel 2008). In many cases, this literalising takes the form of a specific innovation or an object, the novum (Suvin 1979), which embodies the new conceptual combination. In ‘Silently and Very Fast’, as in countless other AI and robot stories, the novum is a machine that becomes (close to) human, and thus the metaphor of ‘a human being is a machine’ is literalised in a fictional world. However, in Valente’s case the robot metaphor is used to examine not only the idea of what it means to be human, but also the idea of what is it for something to be a metaphor, and what it might mean for someone to be because of metaphor. First of all, metaphors and allegories are explicitly present in Elefsis’s ability to reflectively think about its existence, and those comparisons are strongly linked to its embodiment. Being, initially, a house, Elefsis’s vocabulary reflects that physical existence. ‘My hearth is broken’, it laments at the death of one of its carriers. Second, its early communication with Ceno and Cassian also works through embodied metaphors, but this time as physical metamorphoses in the virtual playspace. The very first time the AI approaches Ceno of its own accord, it forms physical analogies from the stable form of the jewel that connects them and the mutable forms that Ceno can take in the playspace. Elefsis appears as a sapphire dormouse and offers to Ceno an image not only of their physical interface – the blue jewel – but also of another stone that represents Ceno herself: The dormouse held out its shimmery blue paw . . . The sapphire jewel sparkled there, but next to it on the chain hung a milky grey gem Ceno had never seen before. It had wide bands of black stone in it, and as she studied the stone it occurred to the girl that the stone was like her, with her slate grey eyes and black hair. It was like her in the way that the blue gem was like the dormouse. . . . Look at us on the chain together. We are alike. (350–1; italics in original) Later, when Ceno decides it is time to tell her mother about Elefsis’s development, she invites Cassian into the playspace, and Elefsis first presents itself to her in the shape of a shy little boy. However, when Cassian starts questioning Elefsis about its computational capacity, Elefsis accesses a fairy tale and turns into a cauldron that never empties, in order to indicate a capacity for which the human physical form offers no expression. Throughout Valente’s story it is made clear that these metamorphoses succeed in bootstrapping Elefsis into sentience, and that they do so because they are metaphors – comparisons that make visible both the similarities and the differences between two things (e.g. 355–6). Shaun Gallagher and Robb Lindgren (2015) have, in the context of early learning, explicitly looked at metaphor and pretend play as different forms of the enaction of ‘seeing-as’. What the enactive view brings to our understanding of childhood cognition, they argue, is a turning away from the overly intellectualising theories of metaphorical cognition: On the enactivist view, pretend play can be characterized without appealing to higher-order cognitive or recreative imaginings. Seeing-as does not require thoughtfully representing the object, but rather the exercise of a basic motoric skill, which may be motivated in an intersubjective imitative process. (Gallagher and Lindgren 2015: 397)

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The presence of the intersubjective situation is crucial here, since what triggers pretend play in the case discussed by Gallagher and Lindgren (the classic example of a banana being used as a phone) are social affordances as well as anything ‘inherent’ to the object itself: Seeing affordances in objects involves seeing beyond the mere physicality or physical presence of the object – it involves seeing possibilities for action or interaction, and this includes seeing objects as if they were involved in such actions. Rather than seeing a phone in the banana, one sees in the banana the affordance of a particular sort of action. . . . [W]hat is seen is not so much the object (banana/phone) but the possible action (calling and talking). (Gallagher and Lindgren 2015: 397) Along similar lines, Thomas Wiben Jensen and Elena Cuffari (2014) argue that the 4E cognitive paradigm can have significant implications for the study of metaphor by turning the focus from an implicitly stable object, metaphor, to a process, ‘metaphoricity’. Following work by Raymond Gibbs, they take on board the criticism directed at the way cognitive metaphor theory does not seem to match the actual use of metaphors in social situations. Their aim, therefore, is to present metaphoricity as ‘a special kind of interpersonal, inter-bodily, and inter-affective meaning coordination’ (Jensen and Cuffari 2014: 280). If the baseline assumption of 4E cognition is that all cognitive processes are inherently interactional (whether intersubjectively interactional, or enactive of an environment), then metaphoricity is ‘a special type of coordinating that takes place in interactions’ (2014: 280). Jensen and Cuffari limit their examination of metaphoricity to human intersubjective situations between ‘whole-body living-cognizing of multiple co-negotiating agents’ (2014: 295). Consequently, their suggested methodology also focuses only on verbal interaction between two human individuals (2014: 284), making their enactive methodology not immediately relevant to the study of literature. However, with Valente’s story, what we have is a text that, first of all, thematises the kind of metaphoricity that enactive metaphoricity does focus on. Second, it might be possible to extend Jensen and Cuffari’s conceptualisation of metaphoricity beyond the strictly intersubjective real-life situations to the more general enactive and distributed cognition – and even to situations where metaphorical meanings are engaged by a literary text. What I mean by this suggestion is not so much that literary texts function like interactive partners, but that a literary text is an environment enacted in the process of reading. Work within second-generation cognitive narratology has already shown how deftly literature is able to provoke readers to enact the experiences represented in the text. As to the special case of metaphor, Marco Caracciolo notes how ‘literary texts can convey a sense of what it is like to have a given experience by metaphorically associating another experience with it’ (2014: 106). Thus, even an impossible experience, such as that of Cassian, in Valente’s story, holding in her lap a crying little boy who suddenly turns into a cauldron spilling over with apples, can be enacted by readers’ imaginations when it is conveyed to them through language that connects the unprecedented experience to the familiar, such as the simple shifting of a weight in your lap (Valente 2014: 355). As Caracciolo (2014: 108) notes, metaphorical language can combine ‘experiential traces’ into expressions that may have an immense influence on the experience of reading, and a physical change, like that of weight,

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becomes a reinforcing echo of a conceptual change, like that between being something and being someone. Thus, while such metaphorical connections between one experience and another increase the depth of understanding we can have of literary works and the human lives portrayed in them, is there a way in which enactive cognition might be relevant for the understanding of abstraction and form, rather than just verisimilar experiences? Here I will take up the question of not just metaphor, but also narrative and fictionality, in order to develop a sense of an enactive poetics that would speak to both the figurative and the narrative branches of cognitive literary studies. The fundamental similarity between metaphor and narrative fiction can, I argue, be fruitfully thought of as the enacting of unrealities.

‘Seeing as’ and Speculative Fiction Consciousness, as philosopher Jennifer Church argues, depends on the ability to bring into convergence conflicting perceptions of the same object: When we see X as a Y (a painting as a landscape, say) we partake in a kind of double-consciousness, experiencing a thing in two different ways simultaneously (the painting way and the landscape way) – ways that retain their independence despite their convergence on a single object at a single time. The problem of ‘seeing as’ can be viewed as the problem of explaining just how such independence and convergence can coexist. (Church 2000: 99; italics in original) It is this double vision which makes human-like consciousness possible: we can see both how a thing is, and how it is not like another thing. In Valente’s story the ‘seeing as’ is tied to the development of an artificial intelligence that learns not only to see itself as Sleeping Beauty and as Tammuz, but also to see Neva, whose reticence and secretiveness Elefsis initially resents, as a princess who sacrificed herself to keep the AI alive. Together, Elefsis and Neva themselves form a metaphor for metaphor, not only because of the way their situation, with Neva carrying Elefsis in her brain, echoes the etymology of the Greek metapherein as ‘carrying over’, but also because of the way in which their symbiosis stands on the shifting ground of difference. Elefsis does not want to be a ‘Good Robot’ in the tradition of Pinocchio. It does not wish it were human, nor is it willing to devalue those aspects of its being that make it different from humanity. Thus, when Elefsis tells its own version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, the human court celebrates the birth of their little princess – the new form of AI life – together with the fairies of ‘Creative Logic’, of ‘Do-No-Harm’, and of ‘Self-Awareness’, but they spurn the ‘Fairy of Otherness’. Her revenge is to make humanity fear and envy the machine child they have brought forth, and that fear leads to the destruction of the AI: ‘And when the child reaches Awareness, it will prick its finger upon your fear and fall down dead’ (347; italics in original). However, Elefsis is not the only victim in Valente’s narrative. The duty of carrying it was thrust upon Neva in an emergency when her brother was killed, and the joining is for her a forced marriage. In reliving their joining in the Interior, Neva shapes Elefsis into ‘a gluttonous lord who desires only her flesh, . . . [a] terrible bridegroom’

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(357). But Neva has agreed to the bargain nevertheless, staying in cryo-preservation so that Elefsis can live – perhaps forever. The story of her choice turns into the story of Snow White, where the two sides of the apple, the white and the red, are unfairly but inevitably divided between the AI and the human: one side for life and the other for sacrifice (371–2). The joining between these two minds, therefore, is built on both similarity and difference, and that dynamic makes it possible for something genuinely new to be born. In their attempts to understand how the mind processes such combinations of similarity and difference, many scholars of metaphor have over the years followed Ricoeur’s ([1975] 2003) lead in trying to make sure that our theories do not lose sight of the tension between the two domains, a tension which arises from readers’ sustained awareness of the contrasts as well as the similarities between them. Benjamin Biebuyck and Gunther Martens, for example, emphasise the need to move from attempts to neutralise metaphorical conceptualisations in literary texts by matching them to an extratextual norm, to the understanding that ‘the initial tension between the two concepts irrevocably remains in force throughout the metaphorical processing’, and that the ‘incongruity characteristic of literary metaphor is generated in the first place on the basis of intratextual information’ (2011: 60, 62). Furthermore, the experience of the incongruity or tension seems to be the main contender for a way of bridging the study of metaphor and that of narrative via the human capacity for imagining. For Ricoeur, of course, both metaphor and narrative share the same double vision, or ‘synthesis of the heterogeneous’, even though narrative also brings into the equation its own extended temporality and the three-fold mimesis, or the actions of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration (Ricoeur 1983–5). With language, human beings are able to create these ‘secondary language-based affordances’ of metaphor and narrative, and through those affordances get purchase on new realities (Cave 2016: 46–62). ‘Sf at its best engages us wholly’, writes Adam Roberts. ‘This is more than a secondhand metaphoricity, removed and subordinate to the literal. It is even more than a Suvinian metaphoricity leavened with “coherence and richness”. There needs to be some other sense of metaphor we can use’ (2006: 142). Roberts also turns to Ricoeur for that new sense of metaphor, arguing that the idea of sf as literalised metaphor fails to capture what is at stake if it loses sight of those aspects of imaginative representation that focus on form as well as on content. The Ricoeurian combination of mimesis and metaphor, Roberts maintains, would allow for the connection between the cognitivespeculative and the poetic-symbolic aspects of science fiction: ‘It is because sf is both poetic and speculative that it is proper to think of it as metaphoric, in this strong, Ricoeurian way’ (2006: 145–6). In literalising its metaphors, therefore, sf need not be aiming at normalisation or naturalisation of the contrast between the metaphor’s two domains, nor at erasing its own artifice. Rather, it is the evasiveness that makes metaphors cognitively valuable, and attractive to what Sherryl Vint has recently called the ‘narrative logic of ab-realism’, or the ‘power to represent simultaneously both mimetic reality and what is away from that image of a taken-for-granted, given reality presumed to be universal and neutral’ (2015: 48; italics in original). Valente’s story being one about an artificial intelligence, it is no surprise that one of the central tropes in it is Alan Turing, ‘the Prince of Thoughtful Engines’, and his test for computer intelligence. Here that test becomes a way of thinking not only about the humanity of the AI, but also about the readers’ human ability to imagine things otherwise from how they know things are. The original Turing test was about judging

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when a computer could be said to be intelligent, and that judgement was made on the basis of how well the computer was able to mimic human intelligence and behaviour. In Valente’s hands, however, the test becomes something more: rather than just looking for human capacities in a computer, we should use the test to explore what those human capacities might actually be. Of course, the story itself judges Elefsis’s sentience on the basis of its being able to construct metaphors of itself, and of being able to tell stories about itself. ‘If you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all’, Ceno tells her mother, just when Elefsis shows its sentience by comparing its computational capacity to the fairy-tale cauldron (355). These abilities are seen to be central to being what a sentient human is: being able to ‘see as’ and to form an autobiographical narrative structured as an allegory or fairy tale. On the other hand, the story also explicitly speaks of the Turing test as a way of judging Neva and her ability to react humanely to Elefsis’s need: ‘you are my test’, Neva says: Every minute I fail and imagine in my private thoughts the process of deleting you from my body and running this place with a simple automation routine which would never cover itself in flowers. Every minute I pass, and teach you something new instead. (346) And yet, if being a body is central to being human, Neva has given up part of her humanity by allowing herself to be cryo-preserved and becoming a virtual-reality being. In that state, Neva has taken on some of the AI’s capacities of enacting her own being in different bodies in the virtual space of the Interior. Thus, Neva’s humanity is no longer being judged on the basis of her embodiment, but instead on the basis of every one of those moments she continues to accept her state of being not-quite-human, so that Elefsis can live. Neva, just as much as Elefsis, is being Turing-tested. Finally, as the story tests its main characters, so are the readers being tested on their human characteristics. Our form of sentience is made visible in the way we can look at Elefsis through the process of metaphor – seeing its similarity to us, and imagining its difference. As Chu suggests, the trope of the robot compels us ‘to feel moral respect for the humanoid robot despite the massively obstructive effects of the uncanny valley’, and therefore ‘to experience [that] moral responsibility in its most heightened state’ (2010: 244; italics in original). But Valente’s story, I suggest, does even more: by explicitly connecting the trope of the rebellious robot with metaphor and storytelling as human cognitive actions, it engages the readers’ sense of the form and function of those cognitiveemotional processes that make the story elements present for us in the first place.

Conclusion One of Brian McHale’s enduring arguments about science fiction concerns its ability to build elaborate fictional worlds while self-reflexively modelling its own ‘world-building operations’ (2007: 194). Similarly, I have in this essay wanted to draw attention to those aspects of science fiction’s literalised metaphors that have less to do with the kinds of worlds these fictions build than with the self-conscious poetics of the genre’s methods. There is a particular literary value to be drawn from science fiction’s ability to literalise metaphoricity and narrativity, and in so doing to engage readers in the enactment of fictions specifically as constructed environments, rather than as illusions of reality. When

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McHale evokes the difference between ‘modeling of’ and ‘modeling for’ (originally coined by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz), he is drawing attention to the difference between a fiction that aims to ‘capture a pre-existing reality’, and fiction that manipulates reality ‘in order to bring it into line with a semiotic template’ (2010: 21). Thus, the heart of science fiction is in its capacity to model for, and – based on Suvin and cognitive estrangement – to project ‘a reality differing from our own in its models, not just in its individuals’ (2010: 26; italics in original). If we extend the idea of model to cover not only various kinds of worlds or even conceptual metaphors but also narrative conventions and the narrative form of our human cognition, reading a text such as Valente’s would engage readers in imaginatively enacting forms of imaginative enaction: that is, in enacting a cognitive environment where qualities such as metaphor, narrative cognition, and the non-sensical are present as concretely as the characters and the setting.1 For the cognitive study of narrative, the enactive paradigm thus offers a way of approaching self-reflective phenomena without separating those from the process of imagining the fictional world. The environment our minds enact when engaging with fiction consists not only of verisimilar simulations of places and people, but also of imagined impossibilities, our awareness of those impossibilities as impossibilities, and our sense of how to interact with a self-contradiction – be that a single metaphor or a whole tale spun out of one. For the study of speculative fiction especially, enactive theory offers a way of extending the idea of what the literalisation of metaphors might mean. Sf as we see it today may not have a monopoly on the representation of complex human concepts and experiences, but these genres do excel at generating that unrigorously termed quality of a ‘sense of wonder’, of estrangement, and of the double vision of metaphor. In other times, such representations have found their home in other genres, ones suitable to each particular combination of artistic form and cultural situation. But in the increasingly tech-saturated world of today, where identities and cultural frames of reference flux and clash in our everyday experiences, this double vision has found a particularly suitable form of expression in speculative forms of fiction. Thus it is that Valente is able to weave her representation of artificial intelligence and cognitive metaphor out of fairy stories and legends, and to have Alan Turing take a bite of Snow White’s poisoned apple.

Note 1. Other works of speculative fiction that aim to make abstract narrative qualities present in their fictional modelling include, for example, Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998), which concretises the complexities of temporality in story-time and discourse-time in the lived experience of its narrator, or China Miéville’s The City & The City (2009), which invites its reads to enact the conventions by which we perceive fictional spaces (see Polvinen 2016).

Works Cited Biebuyck, Benjamin and Gunther Martens (2011), ‘Literary metaphor between cognition and narration: The Sandman revisited’, in Monika Fludernik (ed.), Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory: Perspectives on Literary Metaphor, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 58–76. Cappuccio, Massimiliano and Tom Froese (2014), ‘Introduction’, in Massimiliano Cappuccio and Tom Froese (eds), Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making: Making Sense of Non-Sense, London: Palgrave, pp. 1–36.

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Caracciolo, Marco (2014), The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach, Narratologia 43, Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Cave, Terence (2016), Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chu, Seo-Young (2010), Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Church, Jennifer (2000), ‘“Seeing as” and the double bind of consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7: 8–9, 99–111. Colombetti, Giovanna (2014), The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Delany, Samuel L. [1984] (2012), Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, revised edn, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Esrock, Ellen (2004), ‘Embodying literature’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11: 5–6, 79–89. Gallagher, Shaun and Robb Lindgren (2015), ‘Enactive metaphors: Learning through full-body engagement’, Educational Psychology Review, 27, 391–404. Hutto, Daniel D. and Erik Myin (2013), Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jensen, Thomas Wiben and Elena Cuffari (2014), ‘Doubleness in experience: Toward a distributed enactive approach to metaphoricity’, Metaphor and Symbol, 29, 278–97. Kukkonen, Karin (2014), ‘Presence and prediction: The embodied reader’s cascades of cognition’, Style, 48: 3, 367–84. — and Marco Caracciolo (2014), ‘Introduction: What is the “second generation”?’, Style, 48: 3, 261–74. McHale, Brian (2007), ‘En Abyme: Internal models and cognitive mapping’, in John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci (eds), A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge, Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy 6, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 189–205. — (2010), ‘Science Fiction, or, the most typical genre in world literature’, in Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Tintti Klapuri, and Minna Maijala (eds), Genre and Interpretation, Helsinki: University of Helsinki and Finnish Graduate School of Literary Studies, pp. 11–27. Malmgren, Carl D. (1991), Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Mendlesohn, Farah (2008), Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Noë, Alva (2004), Action in Perception, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Oatley, Keith (2011), Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction, Chichester: WileyBlackwell. Polvinen, Merja (2013), ‘Affect and artifice in cognitive literary theory’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 42: 2, 165–80. — (2016), ‘Enactive perception and fictional worlds’, in Peter Garratt (ed.), The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 19–34. — (2017), ‘Cognitive science and the double vision of fiction’, in Michael Burke and Emily T. Troscianko (eds), Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between Literature and Cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 135–50. Popova, Yanna B. (2015), Stories, Meaning, and Experience, New York and London: Routledge. Ricoeur, Paul (1983–5), Time and Narrative, vols 1–3, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Blamey) and David Pellauer, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. — [1975] (2003), The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ, Routledge Classics, London and New York: Routledge. Roberts, Adam (2006), Science Fiction, 2nd edn, The New Critical Idiom, London and New York: Routledge.

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Ryan, Marie-Laure (2013), ‘Impossible worlds and aesthetic illusion’, in Werner Wolf, Walter Bernhart, and Andreas Mahler (eds), Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, pp. 131–48. Spiegel, Simon (2008), ‘Things made strange: On the concept of “estrangement” in Science Fiction theory’, Science Fiction Studies, 35: 3, 369–85. Suvin, Darko (1979), Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven: Yale University Press. Valente, Catherynne M. (2014), ‘Silently and very fast’, in Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace (eds), Clarkesworld: Year Six, Stirling, NJ: Wyrm, pp. 331–73. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (1993), The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vint, Sherryl (2015), ‘Ab-realism: Fractal language and social change’, in Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia (eds), China Miéville: Critical Essays, Canterbury: Gylphi, pp. 39–59. Von Uexküll, Jakob [1934] (1957), ‘A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds’, in Claire H. Schiller (ed.), Distinctive Behaviour: The Development of a Modern Concept, New York: International Universities Press, pp. 5–80. Walsh, Richard (forthcoming), ‘Sense and wonder: Complexity and the limits of narrative understanding’, in Richard Walsh and Susan Stepney (eds), Narrating Complexity, Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. Zunshine, Lisa (2008), Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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II. Situated Narrative Theories

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6 Cosmopolitanism, Controversy, and Collectivity: Zadie Smith’s Networked Narration Claudia Breger

Introduction: Intersectionality and Affective Worldmaking Assemblages

I

n her contribution to Narrative Theory Unbound, Susan Lanser makes a powerful case for mending the ‘continuing’ mistaken ‘division between cultural and formal approaches’ to the study of narrative (2015: 25). Towards the goal of further imbricating narratological analysis with a historically oriented intersectional methodology, she urges, scholars today need to acknowledge ‘not only that narrative is effectively intersectional but that intersectionality is effectively narrative’ (2015: 33). In 2015, Lanser thus challenges feminist, queer, and critical race studies scholars ‘to be more narratological’ (2015: 24). In this chapter, I spell out how my own recent work aims to contribute to such an intersectional narratology. In a nutshell, I propose to tackle the complex entanglements of cultural history and narrative form by way of a new round of dialogue between affect studies and narrative theory, towards a syncretic model of narrative as affective world(mak)ing.1 As I argue, the model answers continued concerns about narrative’s supposed linearity, teleology, and heteronormativity that have contributed to the reluctance specifically of queer studies scholars, and more generally cultural theorists, to engage in and with narratological paradigms (see Warhol and Lanser 2015: 8). Namely, I reconceptualise narrative worldmaking as a performative process of multidimensional, ‘multivectoral’ assemblage. This emphatically includes into the domain of narrative the nonlinear forms associated with modernism and postmodernism as well as specific popular genres; simultaneously, it underlines how even the composition and reception of comparatively ‘straightforward’ stories is accompanied by multidimensional processes of affective association – of memories, experiences, intertextualities, discourse snippets, and more. Furthermore, the model enables a complex conceptualisation of (historical) experience and nonsovereign agency in the loop of narrative communication, which, I suggest, is central to the project of further developing intersectional narratologies. To start, the proposed notion of affective worldmaking assemblages intervenes into the conceptualisation of intersectionality itself. Critics of the notion have asked whether its spatial metaphor, which seems to indicate a (static?) meeting point between apparently discrete entities, can embrace the insistences on instability, process, and change central

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both to the performative accounts of identity developed in gender and queer theory in the 1990s and – even more so – to affect studies paradigms with their shift from identity concerns to questions of intensity and phenomenological orientation.2 From a Deleuzian affect studies perspective, Jasbir Puar influentially charged that the ‘gridlock model’ of intersectionality serves ‘to still and quell the perpetual motion of assemblages’, failing ‘to account for the mutual constitution and indeterminacy of embodied configurations’ (2007: 213; 2012: 56; quoting Elizabeth Grosz). With the proposed notion of affective narrative worldmaking assemblages, I follow Puar’s call to supplement the concept of intersectionality with and through one of assemblage (2012: 50). From my angle, the Deleuzian critique offers an important corrective in particular vis-à-vis influential cognitive and neuroscientific approaches, which have answered the ‘postmodern’ deconstruction of identity with a return to assumptions of relative stability both on the level of subjects – presumably equipped with a core self – and on that of collective articulation: their large-scale evolutionary models anchor history in more or less universal motivations (see, e.g., Aldama and Hogan 2011).3 In contrast, assemblage’s processual emphasis on complex, multiple connections between ‘interwoven forces’ or entangled – if radically heterogeneous – elements makes conceptual room for the complexity, fluidity, and instability of identification and affective response, including their pre-, non-, or unconscious layers (Puar 2005: 127–8; see also Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 4–8).4 My proposal differs from Puar’s, however, in that I simultaneously part ways with Deleuzian scholars insofar as their insistence on a ‘non-subject-oriented politics’ (Puar 2012: 50) altogether de-emphasises dimensions of subjective experience and agency, and their stark distinction of (asymbolic) affective ‘intensity’ from (sociolinguistically fixed) ‘emotion’ undertheorises affect’s own sociosymbolic entanglements (Massumi 2002: 27–8; see also 2015: 105).5 While I share Puar’s interest in intertwining the analytics of assemblage and intersectionality to conceptualise ‘the interplay between signification and significance, movement and capture, matter and meaning, affect and identity’, I push the syncretic endeavour further where she nonetheless insists on the ultimate irreconcilability of the two analytics (see Puar 2012: 61).6 I do so by drawing on the work of scholars interested in how (transindividual) affective circulations shape (individual and collective) perceptions, orientations, and identifications, including Eve K. Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003), Warhol’s Having a Good Cry (2003), Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011). With their help, I pursue complex and instable, but always socio-symbolically charged assemblages – or interarticulations – of perception, orientation, and identification in layered processes of narrative worldmaking. As I define them, affective narrative worldmaking assemblages configure the heterogeneous stuff of affects, associations, attention, experiences, evaluations, forms, matter, perspectives, perceptions, senses, sense, topoi, and tropes in and through words (or images, sounds, gestures, and more). In the realms of artistic worldmaking – be it literature, film, or live performance – these processes of narrative assemblage are firmly anchored in the rhetorical loops of composition (or production) and reading (or spectatorship), and accomplished by the distributed agency of nonsovereign actors embedded in networks of socio-affective circulation, including characters, narrative agents, authors, and readers (or production crews and audiences).

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In this chapter, I develop the latter notion of distributed world-building agency in poetological terms by outlining a specific mode of nonsovereign narration in contemporary literature: Zadie Smith’s networked narration in On Beauty (2005). I adapt the term ‘networked’ from Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, which is situated outside both narratology and affect studies proper, but draws inspirations from the former (see Latour 2005: 55) for a project resonant with the latter.7 Influenced by Deleuzian posthumanism, Latour emphasises that ‘we’ are ‘held by forces that are not of our own making’ (2005: 43). Always overtaken, action ‘is not done under the full control of consciousness’ and should ‘be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled’ (2005: 44). Precisely in that spirit of slow disentanglement, however, Latour’s model of (scholarly as well as artistic) world-building is premised on an ethics of following ‘the actors’ own worldmaking abilities’ (2005: 161; see first mention p. 29). Creating an ‘assemblage’ of heterogeneous ‘associations’ by way of ‘deploying controversies about the social world’, such world-building ‘traces a network’ defined as ‘a string of actions where each participant is treated as a full-blown mediator’ (2005: 5, 8, 227, 128; italics in original). In other words, Latour’s model gives significant weight to the complex affective processes and heterogeneous actions of the ‘overtaken’ network creatures contoured in socioaffective flows and hold-ups.8 In adapting Latour’s methodology as one of narrative composition (see 2005: 249) as well as scholarly reading and writing, I also deploy its connections with the shifts in reading practices that have developed as part of the affective turn, in the wake of Sedgwick’s influential plea to displace dominant late twentieth-century ‘paranoid’ reading habits with more ‘reparative’ and ‘imaginative’ ones (2003: 128, 145). But whereas Rita Felski has urged us to consider The Limits of Critique altogether (2015), my contribution to a contemporary intersectional – or interarticulational – narratology contours the poetics of networked affective world-building as a different, reconfigurative rather than iconoclast, paranoid, or primarily deconstructive form of critique.9 In modulating analytical distance with closeness, such reconfigurative critique deploys ‘a wider range of affective styles’ (Felski 2015: 3), from passionate involvement via intellectual curiosity, imaginativeness, and quiet reflection to situational anger, in ‘dedramatizing the performance of critical and political judgement so as to slow down the encounter with the objects of knowledge’ (Berlant 2011b: 80), without abandoning critique in the lexical sense of detailed analysis and ‘careful judgment’ (Merriam-Webster). With respect to my own scholarly investments in conceptualising such writing and reading – or writing as world reading, and reading as rewriting worlds10 – such a revised notion of critique aids me in entwining the (phenomenological and reparative) methodology and ethics of the affective turn with the unabashedly anti-racist, feminist, and queer commitments of a now historical late twentieth-century moment of cultural analysis. The ways in which my syncretic commitment to affect and critically intersectional analysis is perhaps not self-evident are dramatised in Smith’s novel. As I detail in the next section, On Beauty offers itself as a textual anchor for the project of developing an emphatically contemporary intersectional narratology as part of the larger project of historicising narrative theory11 by how it explicitly tackles the early twenty-firstcentury moment in English-language academia and US and British society. At first glance, the novel associates the affective turn with a turn beyond critical articulations

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of intersectionality, towards an (in effect reactionary) universalist cosmopolitanism. As I argue in the next section, however, the novel actually undertakes a reconfigurative critique of these turns, which imbricates a new attention to affect with the insistence on regrounding cosmopolitan orientations in clear-cut anti-racist and feminist commitments. The third section of my chapter contours this reconfigurative worldmaking in narratological terms as networked narration, and the fourth section brings the argument together by detailing how this networked narration traces sociosymbolic controversies, as it assembles nonsovereign actor orientations in a phenomenological manner.

On Beauty’s Affective Turn, or Cosmopolitanism and Controversy As configured by its narrator, the novel’s diegetic encounter between two academic families, the Belseys and the Kippses, both comments on and participates in the affective turn, along with associated moves beyond the expressly ideology-critical reading practices of an earlier moment of ‘postmodern’ cultural studies. Upon first impression, the novel’s worldmaking codes these shifts in very stark political terms: the character of Monty Kipps provides readers with a reactionary instantiation of the new academic fashions, in which a ‘politics of right-wing iconoclasm’ (Smith 2005: 29) is articulated through a postcritical methodology of appreciating art for its presumably universal aesthetic value. Much of the novel’s explicit inspiration for the featured academic debates is provided by Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1998), which sets out to challenge the late twentieth-century ‘banishing of beauty from the humanities’ on the grounds of a ‘political critique’, against which she positions a phenomenological insistence on the ‘felt experience’ of beauty as a force ‘allied with’ education and ‘truth’ (1998: 39, 3, 38; see 6). Smith’s characters contextualise the challenge to liberal academic orthodoxies most starkly represented by Monty Kipps in the political moment of the post-September 11 world, arguing, for example, that ‘It’s got down to fundamentals, out there, in the world. Fundamentals’ (119). The narrator presents Howard Belsey’s response to his first in-text encounter with a member of the Kipps family with the words, ‘The flight from the rational, which was everywhere in evidence in the new century . . ., weakened him somehow’ (38). Through On Beauty’s sustained reference to E. M. Forster’s Howards End, the novel’s second major intertext, this process dramatically unfolds as ‘Howard’s end’: the affective unravelling of his identity, and that of his family – as prototypical embodiments of the liberal, sceptical, deconstructive, distantiated (anti-)commitments of late twentieth-century critical humanities scholarship – in the new millennium. The (extensive) secondary literature commonly situates On Beauty at the intersection of Forster with Scarry, for example as Smith’s attempt to recapture Forster’s ‘faith in the ameliorative power of beauty’ by proving it ‘“innocent of the [political] charges against it”’ (Adams 2011: 382, 388; quoting Scarry), or Smith’s reimagining of ‘cosmopolitanism and its relational philosophy for our global era’, starting from Forster’s famous injunction to ‘only connect!’ (Moraru 2011: 140). Cosmopolitanism is one of the concepts revived in twenty-first-century academic turns beyond postmodern imaginaries of difference (see, e.g., Gilroy 2005; Appiah 2007). As Christian Moraru (2011) details, this intellectual comeback of cosmopolitanism has remained controversial, accompanied by concerns about the notion’s universalising inflections

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and imperial entanglements. However, he claims that Smith is able to develop an alternative ‘aesthetic, “differential” cosmopolitanism’ with Scarry’s help, a ‘culture of linkages’ across differences experienced in a ‘tangible, affective-aesthetic space’ (2011: 145, 144). While I agree to – and develop – a version of this description of Smith’s novel, I argue that its worldmaking unfolds this culture of linkages less with Scarry than by critically reconfiguring Scarry’s own universalising cosmopolitan entanglements. Namely, Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just asserts that the beautiful object has the power to ‘carry greetings from other worlds’ and lead the perceiver ‘to a more capacious regard for the world’ (1998: 33). This optimism contrasts with Scarry’s own insistence on the limits of cosmopolitan imaginings in her earlier chapter on ‘The Difficulty of Imagining Other People’, which warns of ‘our perceptual disability’ when it comes to seeing vulnerable others, particularly strangers or ‘foreigners’ (1996: 102).12 On Beauty and Being Just more benignly bills the failures of perception as temporary ‘mistake[s]’ and downplays the significance of ‘cultural difference’ (1998: 11, 13), or perception’s sociohistorical charges, in accounting for them. With On Beauty and Being Just, Moraru – and consonant other readings of the novel – most concretely locates the novel’s affective culture of linkages in the aesthetic experience of the Jean Hyppolite painting that becomes a source of bonding for Carlene Kipps and Kiki Belsey, undermining Howard’s career-long attempt ‘to recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion’ (Smith 2005: 155; see Moraru 2011: 144). That diegetic moment of bonding through aesthetic experience remains, however, fleeting, and entangled in the sociosymbolic controversies traced in the novel, not only because Carlene’s family will ignore her wish to pass on the painting to Kiki, and Kiki’s youngest son Levi, unaware of all of this, steals it in the name of social redistribution (see Smith 2005: 429). Well before these ensuing plot complications, the fragility of affective–aesthetic connection across social divides is dramatised by how Kiki and Carlene’s encounters remain overshadowed with politically overdetermined affective instability and ambivalence.13 Notably, their first conversation about the painting quickly transitions into an argument about marital duty and gender politics, as Kiki shows interest in the Goddess’s penchant for revenge on men (175–6). In short, although I share Moraru’s interest in a notion of affective differential cosmopolitanism, I suggest that it needs to be developed differently. The novel’s understudied departure from Scarry’s account is, in fact, announced quite explicitly in the wording of its most prominent quotations: the title of Smith’s novel scratches Scarry’s optimistic and Being Just in favour of the more open-ended On Beauty, and the title of its concluding, third part announces the persistence of error downplayed by Scarry: ‘on beauty and being wrong’ (273). Through its intricate narrative worldmaking, I argue more generally, the novel reassembles the staged conflicts between aesthetics and politics by way of a reconfigurative critique in the sense outlined above: sustained by a broad range of affects, the narration does not altogether abandon analytical distance, but modulates judgement with a careful approach to the networked worldmaking activities of its diegetic actors. In Latour’s words, On Beauty takes seriously the ways in which people are ‘deeply attached, moved, affected by the works of art which “make them” feel things’ (2005: 236; italics in original), as it unambiguously dramatises the contradictory and untenable nature of the Belsey ethos of critical distantiation. Simultaneously, however, Smith’s novelistic worldmaking insists on how aesthetic perception, and affect more generally, cannot be disentangled from the sociopolitical

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controversies that Monty Kipps wants to exclude from the sphere of art. While cutting through neat identity categories, the novel’s assemblages of political phenomenology underline not only that cosmopolitan connection remains fragile, but also how the goal of ‘producing a worldly vision that is not simply one more imperialistic particularism dressed up in seductive universal garb’ requires tracing the ongoing production, and experiential impact, of exclusion and difference as inequality (Gilroy 2005: 4). As I detail in the next section, the novel accomplishes this intervention through its practice of networked narration, which foregrounds phenomenological processes in their sociopolitical entanglements.

Tracing a Network: Nonsovereign Narration The narrative act of undoing the Belsey fictions of distance and critical sovereignty with the overwhelming force of affects is accomplished early on in the novel. In analogy to Helen in Howards End, Howard’s oldest son Jerome paradigmatically experiences the power of ‘blissful’ and shameful ‘un-selfing’ in the conservative and religious atmosphere of the Kipps household (Smith 2005: 44);14 and as Howard embarks on ‘his mission’ to rescue Jerome, he himself is hit by an ‘excruciating memory’ (28) that marks the starting point of his unravelling: he will fail to preserve either his professional reputation or his marriage, despite his lasting love for his wife Kiki, which has always belied his professional commitment to distantiation.15 Notwithstanding the centrality of this ‘love’ for the novel’s project (to which I will return), it is not the ‘pleasure’ elicited by the beauty of Kiki’s ‘face’ (109–10; italics in original) that dominates the outset of the novel, but the ‘“keystone affect”’ of shame (Sedgwick 2003: 37; quoting Broucek). Even after three months, the memory makes Howard’s ‘shoulders roll forward and down as if someone had snuck up behind him and laden him with a backpack filled with stones’ (Smith 2005: 28–9). Shame ‘floods into being as . . . a disruptive moment, in a circuit of identity-constituting identificatory communication’: it unmakes and simultaneously ‘makes identity’ in a movement ‘toward uncontrollable relationality’ (Sedgwick 2003: 36–7). Howard flees into a nearby photo-booth where he produces a series of ‘cowed, beaten down’, artificially challenging, ‘yet more insecure’, ‘unreal’, ‘sad, frank, abashed, almost confessional’ faces (Smith 2005: 32). Smith’s narration traces this process in a phenomenological manner: through a perception-oriented practice that emphasises description, although not (as we will see) pure description. The memory at stake is of how his academic adversary Kipps had caught Howard, in a moment of weakness precipitated by Howard’s first extramarital affair, with a mix-up of two Rembrandt paintings. Kipps did what Howard ‘would have done’ himself: To enact with one sudden tug (like a boy removing his friend’s shorts in front of the opposing team) a complete exposure, a cataclysmic embarrassment – this is one of the purest academic pleasures. One doesn’t have to deserve it; one has only to leave oneself open to it. But what a way to go! (29) This moment of commentary exemplarily indicates some of the characteristic features of narrative voice in On Beauty: combining intimate, highly affective thought with gestures of pronounced generalisation, the commentary can be attributed to either, or not quite smoothly either, Howard (those thoughts were traced in the preceding sentences

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through unequivocally focalised discourse) or the narrator, who proceeds to report from a greater distance: ‘For fifteen years, these two men had been moving in similar circles’ (29). A few pages earlier, a similar moment of generalising commentary – preceded by focalised narrator report on Howard’s thought and followed by affectively charged free indirect discourse – explicitly coded the feeling at stake in terms of gender: ‘Howard assumed his son was embarrassed by him. Shame seemed to be the male inheritance of the Belsey line. How excruciating Howard had found his own father at the same age!’ (24). The ambiguities of focalisation and voice in passages such as these have generated diverging evaluations of On Beauty’s narration: whereas Adams claims that Smith’s ‘narrative voice’, in contrast to Forster’s, ‘invariably’ places ‘evaluative comments about beauty’ within a character’s consciousness and ‘refrains from’ universalising them with any pretence to objectivity (2011: 392), Dorothy Hale argues that Smith ‘refuses to eliminate from her fictional world the direct expression of authorial value and judgment’ (2012: 819). For her, the narrator’s use of aphorisms, and generalisations, ‘presented through or near free indirect discourse’ (2012: 839) – the classical locus of narratological attribution drama – instantiates ‘a mode of omniscient narration particular to this novel’ (2012: 839). While aiming to reconcile these opposing takes, my proposal for conceptualising Smith’s narration as nonsovereignly networked clearly profiles itself against the concept of omniscience, through which Hale engages larger debates about narration in the twenty-first century. Thus, Paul Dawson maps The Return of the Omniscient Narrator in contemporary fiction – including Smith’s previous novel White Teeth – as a form phenomenon arguably resonant with returns to universalist notions of aesthetics and ethics, or, if you will, Monty Kipps’s interest in art’s moral dimension. After the (post-)modern critique of authority and the reign of perspectivism throughout the twentieth century, Dawson claims, contemporary literature reintroduces ‘an all-knowing authorial narrator’ whose intrusive commentary and free-ranging access to character consciousness indicates how ‘a public sphere’ is once more seeking ‘guidance in ethical conduct from literature’ (2013: 1, 11). To be sure, the omniscience that Hale diagnoses in Smith’s On Beauty is not Dawson’s omniscience. While fuelled by a rebellion against modernist-turned-creativewriting-programme pieties of ‘showing-vs.-telling’, Hale argues, Smith’s new authorialism actually presents ‘an extension of’ perspectivalism, or the twentieth-century ‘novelistic aesthetics of alterity’ that challenged the author to represent her ‘particular vision of life through’ characters with ‘autonomous points of view’ (2012: 819–20).16 Whereas for Dawson, contemporary omniscience dissolves the ‘conflict between “voices”’ that has animated cultural studies-inflected scholarship on modern narration in favour of ‘the singular voice of omniscient narration’ (2013: 186, 168), Hale suggests that On Beauty’s ambiguous generalisations stage the question of attribution (see 2012: 840). Thereby making ‘authorial identity available to the reader as perspective’, too, Smith’s ‘novelistic aesthetics of alterity’ departs from Scarry’s philosophical account by underlining the ‘particularity and contingency of each individual’s apprehension of beauty’ (2012: 832, 815). While the latter point is convincing, Hale’s pairing of the vocabulary of (author/narrator) omniscience with that of (narrator/ character) autonomy traps her argument in figures of ‘contradiction [. . .]’ and ‘paradoxicality’ (2012: 818–19), and renders her model vulnerable to Dawson’s polemics against positing the liberation of characters from author and narrator.17 Meanwhile,

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Dawson denies character autonomy only to return it to the (authorial) narrator, as he projects a model of more or less sovereign narrative performance that betrays his own commitment to historicising the category of omniscience along with the egalitarian spirit of interarticulational narratology.18 In contrast, the proposed notion of nonsovereign narration as networked in the novel’s worldmaking assemblages enables me to outline a mode of narration operating in the midst of socioaffective controversy. As deployed in On Beauty, this form of narration displaces old-style, cool, or suspicious discursive critique with twenty-firstcentury phenomenological insistences, while countering the universalising implications of the (re-)turn towards aesthetics it engages. Imbricating the realms of discourse and experience, my notion of networked narration can, to a degree, draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s classical conceptualisation of heteroglossia in the novel, on which Hale relies in outlining the aesthetics of alterity (see 2012: 826). Underlining the complexity of affect-discourse-power assemblages long before Latour, Bakhtin reminds us that ‘no living word relates to its object in a singular way’ but finds it ‘overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value . . . It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents’ ([1975] 1981: 276; italics in original). Despite this emphasis on constitutive entanglements, however, Bakhtin himself employs the language of ‘verbally and semantically autonomous’ character speech ([1975] 1981: 315) foregrounded by Hale. Supplementing Bakhtin with Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory allows me to conceptualise more consistently how action, including that of narration, is ‘other-taken’ and ‘shared with the masses’ (Latour 2005: 45; italics in original). On a first, constitutive level, narrative action is always shared with both fictional characters and innumerable real-world actors insofar as the author, in contouring her narrative world and narration, is herself ‘other-taken’ by the force of mutually entangled discourse elements and affective charges, conscious and unconscious fantasies, personal and public memories.19 On the second level of poetic configuration, this constitutive nonsovereignty and networked character of narration can, of course, be variously denied or productively engaged, be it through the performance of different degrees of narratorial (non-)sovereignty, or by way of how a text’s narrative design unfolds voice assemblages.20 As I argue, On Beauty does the latter in a highly productive way that endows the novel’s worldmaking with nonsovereign authority. For the context of scholarly worldmaking, Latour proposes that a narrator’s, and author’s, ‘world-building enterprise’ can be evaluated in terms of how carefully it engages ‘in the world-making activities of those’ it reports on while exploring ‘uncertain, fragile, controversial, and ever-shifting ties’ (2005: 46, 103, 57, 28). In other words, the emergence of narrative authority is resituated as a collective enterprise, as long as collectivity does not imply the presumption of united action but the recognition that ‘“We”, like “I”, is a wasp’s nest’ (2005: 45; see also 138). Not categorically wiser than any of her actors, the agent of narration may have more to say by virtue of her methodological effort in engaging controversies and assembling a plurality of voices taken seriously as nonsovereign network actors. In this spirit, On Beauty’s narrator ‘follows the actors’ (Latour) as she weaves in and out of focalisation through different characters. This does not necessarily imply any pretence to impartiality. In Latourian terms once more, On Beauty’s narrator is not a scientist clinging to a nineteenth-century ideal of objectivity but an engaged

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participant in social controversies. Despite the apparent symmetry promised by the title of the novel’s first part, ‘Kipps and Belsey’, the narrator’s sidetaking is indicated by how the narration focuses – in terms of both attention and focalisation range – on the Belseys in their encounter with the Kippses. While the latter’s right-wing perspectives are unsettling in bringing out the tensions within the Belsey family, they are in no way presented as a serious alternative. On a smaller scale, the narrator embraces the agency of rhetorical ‘transformation’ implied in writing, or the insight – salvaged by Latour for an era beyond postmodern deconstruction – that to ‘say something is to say differently, . . . to comment, . . . translate, transpose, . . . yes, if you insist, “metaphorize”’ (Latour 2005: 136; 2013: 139). Charged by a broad range of affects, the narrator’s nonsovereign worldmaking assemblage produces an equally broad span of effects: in the words of its professional reviewers, it displays ‘satirical energy’ but also makes ‘the stuff of routine satire . . . miraculously endearing’, as the narrator ‘envelops’ her characters ‘in her fierce, radiant, and irresistible love’, ‘astonishingly sympathetic to every sort of human frailty’.21 Without elevating her voice above the terrain of social conflict in a dominant mode of either distantiated modernist critique, postmodern parody, or post-postmodern moral guidance, the narrator’s reconfigurative critique ‘modif[ies] the account’ while ‘shar[ing] the experience of the values’ of her actors (Latour 2013: 8; italics in original).

Tracing Affective Entanglements, Reconfiguring Controversies The productivity of this method of networked narration can be pursued, for example, in the opening scene of the novel’s second part (‘The Anatomy Lesson’), in which the Belsey daughter Zora encounters the beautiful Carl, a spoken words poet, in the pool, where she has been led by her ‘Self-Improvement Programme’ (129). After an opening focalised through Zora, the narration evokes her experience of humiliation through a report on her spatial experience: Up beyond the stadium seating, at the very top of this giant room, a glass wall let the autumn sun in and shot it across the room, like the searchlights in a prison yard. From this superior vantage point, a long line of athletes on treadmills was looking down on Zora and all the other people not fit enough for the gym. Up there behind glass the ideal people were exercising; down here the misshapen people were floating around. [. . .] People like Zora sat carefully down on the gritty tiles, gave the water only their feet and then had a debate with their bodies about committing to the next stage . . . (130) The shifting deictics (up beyond-looking down from this vantage point-up there) and generalisations (people like Zora) once more effect an ambiguity of perspective. As Zora then encounters Carl, a long, more clearly focalised passage traces her attraction to him. Still, the narrator’s transformation activity is indicated in a satirical nod at Scarry’s ostensibly non-sexualised claim that beauty makes us become disinterested in ourselves: the ‘arresting sight’ of Carl’s ‘groin’ and ‘grinding muscles’ has the effect that for ‘a whole twenty-three seconds the last thing on Zora’s mind was herself’ (132–3).

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This playful touch, however, does not distract attention from Zora’s experience for long. When Carl later starts talking to Zora again, she responds ‘awkwardly. His well-madeness as a human being made her feel her own bad design’ (134). In this latter sentence, the character focalisation is explicit, while the word choices indicate a presumed objectivity and judgemental distance. Along the lines of narratological attribution games, the sentence would reflect either narrator cruelty or character self-alienation, and the configuration at hand might tilt our evaluation in the latter direction: Zora ‘lived through footnotes’ (70), the narrator had stated earlier. But remembering how words are always ‘populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others’ (Bakhtin [1975] 1981: 294) opens up the privatising, psychologising emphasis of this – as well as any more narrator-oriented – conclusion. If Zora’s identification with her father’s distantiated academic habitus comes to express internalised social judgement in the pool scene, the assemblage of character and narrator voice forcefully dramatises the affective impact of the hegemonic social verdict on Zora, as it imaginatively follows her worldmaking without pretending to the autonomy of her voice. Of course, Zora’s name evokes also the literary history of such character and narrator assemblages. In Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s, classical words, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God introduced the technique of free indirect discourse into African American fiction as a rhetorical strategy for expressing the ‘double consciousness’ of a ‘divided self’ (Gates 1988: 207; see 191). But it is not the same kind of divided self that is at stake here. While On Beauty arguably draws on Hurston almost as much as on Scarry and Forster (thus Fischer 2007), its twenty-first-century literary assemblage does not foreground the divide between two oppositionally racialised traditions. One of Smith’s chapters records her own initial resistance to the perceived demand of reading Their Eyes in a mode of identification on the basis of shared ‘genetic or sociocultural’ group belonging (2009: 3), and her literary reconfiguration of its legacy through a professor’s hyperintellectual daughter underlines difference at the intersections of race, gender, and class, along with the historical moment in which On Beauty is both set and narrated. More directly, the foreclosure of a smoothly communal imagination of collectivity is dramatised in Levi’s fraught attempts to find a twenty-first-century porch equivalent with the Haïtian immigrants by applying ‘artificial words . . . to their real-life situation’ via his ‘personal philosophy’ of ‘street’ (245). The recognition that ‘“We”, like “I”’, remains ‘a wasp’s nest’ (Latour 2005: 45) also on the level of experience does not, however, advise Monty’s solution of forgoing all consideration of the processes of group formation. In returning Scarry’s categories of perception into the realm of sociosymbolic controversy, Smith’s novel attends to the interarticulations of gender, sexuality, and racism sidelined by some twenty-first-century cosmopolitanisms. Thus, its assemblage contextualises Zora’s perceptions during her pool encounter with Carl with Kiki’s thoughts on the impossibility of protecting her daughter ‘from self-disgust’, despite all attempts at banning television, lipsticks, and women’s magazines from the house: these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies – it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it. (197–8)

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The interarticulation of gender with race in these flows is indicated, for example, when Kiki reflects on how her own ‘bosom’ gave ‘off a mass of signals’ beyond the reference ‘only to sex’ that it might have if ‘she were white’ (47). Notwithstanding Kiki’s experience that it is impossible to control such affect–signification flows, the narration also explicitly counteracts their hegemonic vectors, for example by assembling Zora’s and Kiki’s perceptions with those of Claire, the creative writing teacher, whom ‘Zora’s features’ remind of Kiki’s ‘almost unspeakable’ beauty (226–7), and whose ‘magic’ even the brainy Zora feels: ‘In Claire’s presence, you were not faulty or badly designed, no, not at all’ (214). Tracing affects in controversy, On Beauty’s narrator takes their experiential dimension seriously, even where her assembly ‘corrects the account’, that is: establishes that the actors have things wrong. That they do get things wrong all the time is indicated, again, by the title of the novel’s last part, ‘On Beauty and Being Wrong’, which corrects Scarry’s failure to envision the stubborn persistence of errors in the circuits of social controversy, where aesthetic appreciation is sexualised, gendered, and racialised. But this persistence of errors does not categorically deauthorise the actors’ nonsovereign orientation processes, the complexity of which is, instead, highlighted in the assemblage of self-, mutual, and narrator corrections. To return to Kiki and Carlene’s fraught attempts at bonding via their shared appreciation of the Hyppolite painting: as the conversation shifts to Kiki’s marital crisis and her desire to re-evaluate ‘what my life’s been for’, Carlene ‘strongly’ insists on not asking ‘what did I live for’ – ‘a man’s question’ – but only ‘whom’ (176). Kiki spontaneously responds, ‘I don’t believe you believe that’, only to recognise that ‘this is [sic] exactly what the woman opposite her did believe’ (176). Kiki’s self-correction does not change her affective judgement (‘she felt suddenly vexed by the waste and stupidity of it’, 176), and the narrator’s asymmetrical assembly of the encounter affirms her feminist response in withholding Carlene’s perspective. Nonetheless, Kiki’s forceful ‘I know I didn’t live for anybody’ (176) is also contrasted with her charge to Howard, ‘I staked my whole life on you’ (206) during the following marital encounter traced in more symmetrical ways. Short of displacing feminist insistence with a presumed reactionary truth of affect, the novel’s assemblage thus pursues the conflicting, layered, rhetorical, and stubbornly erroneous truths of an emotionally and politically overdetermined relationship crisis that confounds oppositional mappings. Until she bursts into tears while reiterating her charge, Kiki has conducted the confrontation with Howard in the negative affective style of the very distantiation she blames him for: growing ‘still harder inside’ in the face of his ‘real distress’, she accuses him of using ‘“academic” language’ (204). In response, ‘Howard groaned. He abhorred the reference (an old war wound in this marriage, continually reopened) to a separation between his . . . and his wife’s socalled “personal” language’ (204). Puzzled by the novel’s extensive use of focalisation through Howard, Hale half-heartedly wonders whether it may represent ‘an even deeper accomplishment of alterity’ (2012: 836). Rather, I argue, it underlines how the framework of alterity does not do justice to the complexities of worldmaking that can be traced in a framework of nonsovereignty without compromising baseline feminist and anti-racist commitments.22 While Howard struggles to face the implications of his repeated missteps, Kiki is flagrantly mistaken about Monty whom she tries to hold up to Howard as a more ‘honourable’ man (393), unaware of his affair with his intern, an unofficial student, against whose inclusion on campus he agitates. More subtly, she

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is perhaps also wrong about the reasons for Howard’s infidelity, which she polemically bills as exclusively sexual. The narration corrects such reduction (see Warhol 2003: 2, 61) along with Scarry’s converse refusal to altogether consider the sexual layers of aesthetic judgement, which are echoed here in Howard’s ‘aesthetic theories’ pointedly refuted by Kiki (208). As the sustained focalisation through Howard indicates, it may have in fact been ‘a million factors’ (207), or a complicated mesh of affects and sexual desire, that drove him into the arms first of Claire and then Kipps’s daughter Victoria. As indicated, the novel’s deployment of its network of nonsovereign voices distributes corrective agency. Narrator correction is supplemented by character self- along with mutual correction, for example when Zora comments bluntly on her father’s inappropriate, racialising comparison of Carl’s face to one of Ruben’s ‘four African heads’: ‘What the hell? Rubens?’ (77–8). This particular reassessment is highlighted when the concluding ‘author’s note’ (445) reiterates the correction in explaining the novel’s art-historical references. Notably, this playful gesture is performed not in the spirit of omniscient jurisdiction, but in that of continuing controversy: the wording ‘I don’t agree’ (446) profiles the author instance introduced on these final pages as equally nonsovereign. And Howard himself might know better, as indicated when he later corrects Victoria’s comparison of his wife to ‘an African queen’ (313). But not everything is symmetrical. The emphasis on Kiki’s errors towards the end of the novel accompanies her distinction: as indicated even by Victoria’s association, the novel’s heterogeneous worldmaking assemblage comes together in a series of – appropriate or inappropriate – gestures of affirmation for Kiki’s gorgeous black femininity (see also 219–20 from Levi’s perspective). It is as the man in love with Kiki that Howard is endowed with focalisation privileges in the last scene, which delivers closure by underlining the likely end of his career while making room for his fantasy that things with Kiki might not be over after all. Howard arrives late, dishevelled, and without his notes at his important lecture. Having spotted Kiki in the audience, he silently clicks through the visuals prepared by his teaching assistant, ending with ‘Hendrickje Bathing, 1654’ (442). As ‘the fleshiness’ of ‘Rembrandt’s love’ fills the wall, he sees ‘Kiki only’: ‘In her face, his life’ (442–3). In the following concluding note, the author instance reiterates that Howard has ‘nothing at all’ to say about this painting (445), but the unspoken cross-cultural – if you will, cosmopolitan – association implied in his affective personal response remains uncorrected as such. In short, the novel’s assemblage does remain oriented at the cosmopolitan goal of affectively imagining ‘a common world’ (Latour 2005: 247), if only by way of a reconfigurative critique that traces the affective legacies of racist and sexist separation, and emphasises the countergestures of affirmation needed to, perhaps, eventually repair these legacies. As I have argued in this piece, literary narration is as networked as the actors it follows, and it does not have the power to do by sovereign force. But Smith’s practice of networked narration presents a productive poetic answer to this condition of constitutive nonsovereignty: the narration derives its authoritative force from the ways in which it carefully traces contemporary controversies, simultaneously validating and correcting the experiences of the creaturely humans inhabiting its world. In ever further imbricating questions of narrative form and cultural analysis, us narratologist creatures can join such imaginative worldmaking efforts in our scholarly spheres of wasp-like collectivity.

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Notes 1. The model combines impulses from different branches of narrative theory and affect studies by interweaving the – diverging but overlapping – notions of ‘worlding’, ‘world-building’, and ‘worldmaking’ that circulate through them. For a fuller development of that part of the argument, see Breger (2017). 2. For an early narratological contribution that connects these two ‘waves’, see Warhol (2003). 3. Where group differences are nonetheless taken into account, cognitive and neuroscientific approaches tend to bring them into play as preconstituted factors inflecting reader response, for example in discussions of ‘categorical empathy’ with ‘characters matching a reader’s group identity’ (Keen 2007: 95; with reference to Hogan). Precisely the concept of intersectionality, to be sure, has also enabled feminist scholars to start dynamising these assumptions, as indicated by Suzanne Keen’s forceful contribution to Narrative Theory Unbound (2015). 4. The original French agencement emphasises the process of complex ‘arrangement’ over the assembled content (see Puar 2012: 57; with reference to John Phillips). Cognitive and neuroscientific approaches have tended to focus on consciousness (e.g. Fludernik 1996) and intention (e.g. Herman 2013). 5. Instead, I underline that assemblages include ‘states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies’ but also ‘utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs’ (Deleuze 2006: 177), thus countering the oppositional mappings of ‘bodies/affect vs signification’, or ontology and rhetoric, that have marked some of Deleuze’s own work and its affect studies reception. 6. Puar attributes the description of this interplay to Massumi; she first makes the point on the irreconcilability of intersectionality and assemblage at (2012: 50). 7. While a growing group of scholars has started to explore Latour’s concepts for literary theory (see, e.g., Felski 2015; Ngai 2012), my specifically narratological proposal is, as far as I am aware, still unparalleled. 8. While Latour emphatically includes a broad range of nonhuman(-like) actors, I profess myself guilty of halfway rehumanising the endeavour by focusing primarily on the human and humanlike actors involved in the loops of narration as network creatures. 9. On deconstruction vs reconstruction, see Felski (2015: 17), herself (with reference to Latour). My disagreement with Felski is perhaps mostly terminological: I object to equating all ‘critique’ with the negative ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Felski 2015: 2; with reference to Ricoeur). 10. As I spell out below, Smith’s novel invites me to approximate narration and reading in the context of the indicated contemporary debates; the focus of this chapter is in part on narration as reading, and less on actual (or even invited) reader responses. For a fuller discussion of the latter as part of my model, see Breger (2017). 11. Literally or metaphorically in the present tense, nonsovereign affective worldmaking sacrifices the requirements of historical distance upheld by traditional forms of historiography. As I underline, however, this kind of worldmaking does not forgo historicising moves: in weaving networks, it contours context not in the (capital C) sense of a delocalised abstract framework (see Latour 2005: 167), but as part of the layered worldmaking assemblage itself. 12. In this earlier chapter (originally published in German in 1993), Scarry had therefore insisted on supplementing ‘a framework of cosmopolitan largesse’ with legal protections (1996: 98–9). 13. During their first meeting, Kiki experiences a quick succession of diverging feelings, including awkwardness, hurt, and shame (Smith 2005: 92–3) along with respect. Carlene’s ‘urgent’ admonition to not make fun of her husband results in ‘the same sorrow she [Kiki] had felt when a hitherto perfectly nice cabbie began to tell her that all the Jews in the first tower had been warned beforehand or that you can’t trust Mexicans’ (95–6). While not preventing her ‘irrational desire . . . to be in that woman’s presence again’ (165), moments of irritation recur throughout later encounters (see also 168–71, 264–71).

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14. The term ‘unselfing’ is Scarry’s (1998: 78). 15. His friend ‘Erskine often joked that only a man who had such pleasure at home could be the kind of theorist Howard was, so against pleasure in his work’ (Smith 2005: 110). 16. Dawson explicitly positions his notion of omniscience against that of alterity (see 2013: 177; 175 for a direct Hale reference). 17. While Hale agrees that character perspectives are not actually rhetorically autonomous (see 2012: 832), she insists on ‘the reader’s intense apprehension’ of character autonomy (2012: 838). 18. Dawson wants to move the concept beyond the implied God-analogy (see 2013: 35), to instead ‘approach’ contemporary ‘omniscience as the rhetorical performance of narrative authority’ indicating the author’s grasp for real-world ‘cultural authority’ (2013: 12, 18–19), but nonetheless argues that the notion of omniscience best captures ‘the narrative freedom . . . which the trope of a “godlike” narrator suggests’ (2013: 50). Drawing on Lanser’s seminal work on authorial voice in the history of feminist fiction (1992), Dawson marks contemporary omniscience as ‘largely a phenomenon of male writers’ – with Smith representing an exception – but presents this suggested masculine performance as a successful assertion of ‘the authority to speak with influence in public discourse’ (2013: 59–60). Effectively, he thus elevates his narrators above the terrain of social conflict where Lanser’s narrators mobilised a range of means to authorise their speech. As I argued earlier (Breger 2012), the instability of Dawson’s assertion of narrative sovereignty results from how he elevates narrator presence and ‘intrusive . . . commentary’ – into the ‘key feature’ of omniscience (Dawson 2013: 26), mostly ignoring that precisely such dramatising of narrative voice intertwines reflexively deauthorising with authorising moves. 19. Where traditional psychoanalysis might suggest that the author ‘projects’ fantasies, memories, and so on, onto nonautonomous characters, Latour’s reconceptualisation of agency not only underlines that such fantasies and memories cannot be treated as a property of the subject, but also encourages us to take seriously how nonhuman agents such as characters function as nodes of transformational force in the network. 20. To a degree, this alternative presents two different methodological emphases: on the rhetoric of narrative performance (in Dawson’s as well as my own earlier work) vs the ontorhetorical process of worldmaking. But the alternative also presents a stylistic choice, which can arguably be correlated with the move beyond postmodernism in contemporary literature. In the literary career of Zadie Smith, a respective shift can be traced between White Teeth and On Beauty. If Dawson is not altogether wrong in characterising the narrator of White Teeth as a ‘pyrotechnic storyteller’, whose ‘stylistic expressivity establishes the intrusive presence and linguistic control of the narrator’ (2013: 22), On Beauty’s narrator has different contours, at least by degree. Although variously making her presence felt as well, she acts less flamboyantly, and is not dramatised as a character in her own right, except for the play on her British positionality that colours a few introductory passages (e.g. Smith 2005: 275, 302). In using female pronouns for this narrator where I do personalise her, I am thus following ‘Lanser’s rule’ (see 1981: 166). 21. The quotes are from the review excerpts (from The Atlantic Monthly; Salon; The Washington Post) reprinted in the front of my edition (Breger 2012). 22. Again, Monty’s beliefs in ‘hate’ (Smith 2005: 393) are not awarded the dignity of focalisation.

Works Cited Adams, Ann Marie (2011), ‘A passage to Forster: Zadie Smith’s attempt to “only connect” to Howards End’, Critique, 52: 4, 377–99. Ahmed, Sara (2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Aldama, Frederick Luis and Patrick Colm Hogan (2011), ‘Puzzling out the self: Some initial reflections’, English Language Notes, 49: 2, 139–60.

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Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2007), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York: Norton. Bakhtin, M. M. [1975] (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press. Berlant, Lauren (2011a), Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. — (2011b), ‘Starved’, in Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (eds), After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 79–90. Breger, Claudia (2012), An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Film, Literature and Theater in Contemporary Germany, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. — (2017), ‘Affects in configuration: A new approach to narrative worldmaking’, Narrative, 25: 2, 227–51. Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Dawson, Paul (2013), The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2006), ‘Eight years later: 1980 interview’, in Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 175–80. — and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Felski, Rita (2015), The Limits of Critique, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fischer, Susan Alice (2007), ‘“A glance from God”: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Zora Neale Hurston’, Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 14: 3, 285–97. Fludernik, Monika (1996), Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London: Routledge. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1988), The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, New York: Oxford University Press. Gilroy, Paul (2005), Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press. Hale, Dorothy J. (2012), ‘On Beauty as beautiful?: The problem of novelistic aesthetics by way of Zadie Smith’, Contemporary Literature, 53: 4, 814–44. Herman, David (2013), Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. —, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol (2012), Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Hogan, Patrick Colm (2011), Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hurston, Zora Neale (1995), ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’, in Zora Neale Hurston, Novels and Stories, New York: The Library of America, pp. 173–333. Keen, Suzanne (2007), Empathy and the Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (2015), ‘Intersectional narratology in the study of narrative empathy’, in Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (eds), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 123–46. Lanser, Susan S. (1981), The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction, Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (1992), Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. — (2015), ‘Toward (a queerer and) more (feminist) narratology’, in Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (eds), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 23–42. Latour, Bruno (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (2013), An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Massumi, Brian (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. — (2015), The Power at the End of the Economy, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moraru, Christian (2011), ‘The Forster connection or, cosmopolitanism redux: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Howards End, and the Schlegels’, The Comparatist, 35, 133–47. Ngai, Sianne (2012), ‘Network aesthetics: Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social’, in Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby (eds), American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 367–92. Puar, Jasbir (2005), ‘Queer times, queer assemblages’, Social Text, 84–5, 121–39. — (2007), Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. — (2012), ‘“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: Becoming-intersectional in assemblage theory’, philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2: 1, 49–66. Scarry, Elaine (1996), ‘The difficulty of imagining other people’, in Joshua Cohen (ed.), For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 98–110. — (1998), On Beauty and Being Just, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Yale University, 25 and 26 March. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1993), Tendencies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. — (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Zadie (2000), White Teeth: A Novel, New York: Random House. — (2005), On Beauty, New York: Penguin. — (2009), Changing My Mind: Occasional Chapters, New York: Penguin. Warhol, Robyn (2003), Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. — and Susan S. Lanser (2015), ‘Introduction’, in Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (eds), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 1–20.

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7 Race and Empathy in GB Tran’s VIETNAMERICA Sue J. Kim

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he phenomenon of facial emotion recognition technology, while well known in law enforcement circles, is not much discussed in narrative studies and will probably strike literary and cultural critics as somewhat bizarre. Paul Ekman, the well-known pioneer of facial emotion recognition who was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2009, is founder of the Paul Ekman Group. For $99–299, you can take an online training programme that will enable you to become ‘an expert’ on facial expressions that are universal, regardless of race, gender, class, religion, and so on. Their Facial Action Coding Systems (FACS) is ‘a research tool useful for measuring any facial expression a human being can make’ (‘Paul Ekman Group’ 2016), used by law enforcement as well as Pixar animators. Their training tools also include the ability to read ‘microexpressions’, or fleeting facial expressions, that betray a person’s emotions; this skill has become the basis for the TV show Lie to Me. According to Ekman, these tools, which apparently can be learned in 50–100 hours, ‘have been used by a variety of organizations – all of the three-letter intelligence and law enforcement agencies on a national level’ (qtd in Beck 2015). A 2015 Atlantic article attempts to temper these claims, noting that ‘Ekman now considers physiology, appraisal, subjective experience, and antecedent events (you have an emotion about something) to be distinctive characteristics of emotion, along with facial expression and a few other factors’ (Beck 2015). But this level of nuance is absent from the pronouncements on the training website, which offers these technologies as tools to profile supposed criminals and terrorists. In the era of Black Lives Matter, Islamophobia, and the alarming popularity of demagogues, this technology of power shows some of the repercussions of the widespread acceptance of certain versions of cognition, particularly empathy and recognition of emotion in facial expression, despite vociferous debates within cognitive psychology and related fields. In other words, understanding emotion, expressions of emotions, and our ability to read emotions as situated is politically and ethically imperative. This chapter engages the possibilities and challenges of facial affect recognition and narrative empathy. After an overview of debates over facial affect recognition and its relationship to empathy, I take up GB Tran’s award-winning graphic memoir Vietnamerica (2010), considering how Tran’s graphic narrative can provide insight into how we read faces and emotions in a racially and politically charged society. In addition to playing on the old racist chestnut that all Asians look alike, Vietnamerica both draws on and complicates standard notions around facial affect expression, recognition, and empathy.

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While some readers and reviewers have noted the characters in the graphic novel are hard to ‘read’ because their portraits do not stay stable, I argue that Vietnamerica purposely and consistently undermines the notion of emotion as an individual experience that is easily read via one facial expression. It draws attention not only to the cultural and contextual creation of emotions but specific political and collective histories that shape emotions of a group, such as survivors of colonialism, neo-imperialism, war, and refugee flight. That is, the graphic novel complicates individual empathy in order to elicit a kind of ‘structural empathy’ for individuals and groups located in complex, racialised systems and histories of power that produce the emotions being expressed.1

What’s in a Face?, Part I Researchers who contend that facial affect recognition (FAR) is universal, such as Ekman (1972, 1987, 1994) and Carroll Izard (1971, 1994), have been quite successful in popularising these ideas. In 1990, Matsumoto went so far as to claim, ‘the universality of facial expression of emotions is no longer debated in psychology’ (1990: 195). But other researchers have and continue to challenge the notion of the universality of the recognition of facial expressions of emotion. In addition to arguing that emotion categories and expression (‘display rules’) may be much more context-dependent, some question the very basis of understanding emotions. There are at least four general approaches to problematising facial affect recognition as a means to empathy. First, Lisa Feldman Barrett and her collaborators (2007) argue that we must change the very notion of what is an emotion, that what researchers have accepted as a single emotion is actually the product of multiple factors and smaller cognitive components that can create a variety of mental states (see also Gendron et al. 2015; Barrett and Russell 2015). Second, some studies have argued that specific emotions as well as ‘display rules’, or the expressions of emotions, are not universal but rather informed by culture. Third, O’Toole and others (1994, 1996) argue not only that the ability to recognise emotions is contextual and cultural, but also that what they call the ‘other-race effect’ or ‘cross-race effect’ affects viewers’ ability to discern emotions across races. Fourth, once an emotion is discerned, the ability to empathise with whatever emotion is expressed – cognitively (the ability to understand another’s emotion, sometimes called ‘perspective taking’) and affectively (feeling that emotion) – depends on a number of cultural and cognitive factors. In other words, there is quite a long way to go from sender to receiver, feeler to empathiser, and both this process and our understanding of it can break down in all kinds of ways. In fact, it is worth noting that Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals – often cited as a founding text in emotion recognition studies – spends a good deal of time discussing emotional expression in animals because, Darwin ([1872] 2009) notes, in human emotional expression, culture always intrudes. Psychologist James Russell has been a particularly vociferous critic of the concept of universal facial affect recognition. In addition to pointing out a host of methodological, cultural, and other questions about FAR studies, he argues that emotions cannot be understood without contexts, in a variety of ways. He argues that universality is an idea all too readily acceptable by Western psychologists; to counteract this tendency, researchers should ‘take seriously the conceptualizations (ethnotheories, cultural models) found in other cultures. Rather than ask whether a given culture agrees with one preformulated

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hypothesis, we might more usefully ask how members of that culture conceptualize emotions and factor behavior’ (1994: 137). He also notes while the great bulk of psychology studies are conducted on Western university undergraduates, a willing and convenient source of participants, this data pool is problematic: The universality thesis or even the specific hypothesis proposed by Izard (1971) or Ekman (1972) could have been taught to some of the subjects who were used to test that hypothesis. Through their coursework or general reading, college students might have learned which specific expressions had been hypothesized to be associated with which emotion. (Russell 1994: 111) Many of FAR’s critics argue that emotion, its expression, and its evaluation cannot be divorced from cultural and historical context. In addition to noting the general ‘heterogeneity of emotional life’, Barrett et al. assert that ‘language use, context, culture, or individual differences in prior experience will produce variation in whether emotions are experienced, which emotions are experienced, and how they are experienced’ (2007: 387). In a meta-analysis of the existing research on FAR, Elfenbein and Ambady (2002) also support an ‘interactionist’ model, which allows for both universal and culturally specific elements. They lay out a range of questions about behaviour versus recognition, language, in-group advantage, individual and group variability, minority–majority group relations, and the definition of ‘culture’. Given all these factors, they write, ‘Emotions do not lose all meaning across cultural boundaries, but they may lose some meaning’ (2002: 231). Moreover, FAR studies are subject to the same ideological forces that shape the rest of society, including racial bias. For instance, Alice J. O’Toole and her colleagues have focused on race and FAR, concluding ‘the importance of considering faces as images that provide observers with very rich and elaborate information that is quite difficult to capture in discrete ratings’ (O’Toole et al. 1994: 223). By ‘discrete ratings’, they refer to the common method of testing the accuracy of FAR: test participants are shown photos of staged facial expressions and asked to choose from a pre-set list of emotions. Real-world facial expressions, they argue, are quite different from this discrete testing scenario. Natu and O’Toole have also examined how ‘subconscious bias and emotional responses affect brain areas such as the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, and parahippocampal gyrus’, concluding that ‘factors such as experience, familiarity, social/emotional responses, cultural learning, and bias modulate the patterns of neural activity elicited in response to own- and other-race faces’ (2003: 1081). That is, social conditioning can shape cognition. As they put it, In perceptual terms, the other-race effect can be summed up with the adage, ‘They all look alike to me’. More formally, the phenomenon is characterized by a difficulty in differentiating among other-race faces, and thereby in perceiving the uniqueness of individual other-race faces. These perceptual problems give rise to difficulties in remembering individuals of other races. At the heart of these effects is one’s experience with people of other races. Social diversity (or lack thereof) sculpts face recognition capacity and ties perceptual and cognitive components of the effect to social and affective elements of face. (Natu and O’Toole 2003: 1081; see also Zhao et al. 2014)

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Facial affect recognition stands in stark contrast to the concept of structural empathy, a concept from social work and social justice education that describes the ability to situate another person’s experiences in systems of power, such as racism, patriarchy, white supremacy, neocolonialism, and capitalism. Structural empathy relies on the ability to identify and understand ‘political inequality and institutional discrimination’ (Gair 2012: 136). Interestingly, it is often paired with ‘poststructural empathy’, which is defined as the ‘clarification of the discourses through which another constructs their power positions, meanings and behaviours’ within those systems of power (Jessup and Rogerson 2016: 172). In a somewhat different interpretation, Gair defines poststructural empathy as ‘attention given to each unique, individual story within the constructed landscape for that particular family, group, or community’ (2012: 136). Still others have contrasted structural empathy, or ‘the ability to know and feel AND [sic] understand the other’s realities in the context of their own and the other’s engagement in social structures of privilege and oppression’, to a more conventional notion of empathy, or ‘relational empathy’, which is ‘the ability to know and feel another’s experience’ (Gallegos and Schapiro 2014: 180). Structural empathy bears some similarity to what Mary-Catherine Harrison (2014) has discussed as ‘statistical empathy’, or the emotional impact derived from statistics and data about large groups of people, such as the poor. Statistics and stories about groups of people are generally less effective in eliciting empathy than stories about individuals. But structural empathy is different in that it is based on awareness of ‘social structures of privilege and oppression’. While structural empathy is usually discussed in the context of US-based race relations, I argue that the concept can also be extended to experiences of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and the Cold War. Given the critique of FAR, can structural empathy be understood through facial expressions? What would it mean to elicit structural empathy through expressions of emotion, facial or otherwise? Is such a thing even possible or desirable? GB Tran’s Vietnamerica suggests some of the possibilities and pitfalls to understanding emotions and their expression. If offering American college students staged photos of facial expressions without context is perhaps not the best way to understand emotion, facial expressions, and empathy, then perhaps the innovation of graphic novels can provide alternative ways to think about these issues. I argue below that the medium and content of Vietnamerica leads the reader to develop multiple and complicated emotional literacies in several interconnected ways. First, formal elements of the medium – such as panel sizes, colours, and fonts – function to elucidate emotional contours of characters and situations. Second, the ‘face’ is the not the only site of emotional legibility; the body positions and body languages of characters in their physical settings are also telling. Third, the text’s multigenerational and multi-character arcs require our empathetic registers to widen in overlapping context. All of these factors with respect to historical and social contexts serve to expand beyond one individual life to constitute a collective of those who have faced trauma and burdens by the fact of war and colonialism.

What’s in a Face?, Part 2 Suzanne Keen, Meghan Hammond, and others remind us that that analysis of narrative empathy should be medium-specific; the generic conventions of an aesthetic medium shape our expectations and reactions in a variety of ways. Keen has done

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much work to remind us that ‘empathy for individual sufferers does not necessarily translate into justice for peoples and nations’ (2011: 149). Others, such as Richard Delgado (1996), Lauren Berlant (1999), and Amy Shuman, concur; Shuman writes, ‘empathy is almost always open to critique as serving the interests of the empathizer rather than the empathized’ (2005: 18). Nevertheless, most discussions of empathy still focus on the individual’s response to the text.2 While this interaction is key, some texts can and do work against this individualism, particularly memoirs that draw attention to the common histories that affect collectives of people. The graphic memoir Vietnamerica recounts the story of Tran’s family from French-colonial Vietnam to the present, grappling with war and trauma, colonialism and neo-imperialism, class hierarchies, gender, migration/refugeeism, and racism. It is episodic and nonlinear, frequently breaking out of the usual borders of graphic narrative. By playing with the visual form, Vietnamerica may challenge standard notions around facial affect recognition and empathy; the characters in the graphic novel are sometimes seen as hard to ‘read’, and their portraits do not stay uniform as the text shifts across visual styles and genres. At the same time, the characters’ locations within their worlds and in relation to one another are clearly marked through a variety of visual cues, often emphasising the collective and historical context in which they must find their way. By doing so, the memoir seeks to elicit a kind of ‘structural empathy’ for individuals and groups located within complex, highly racialised systems of power. The modern history of Vietnam has been one of successive colonisation, war, and neo-imperialism in the context of the Cold War. Despite the recent thawing of relations between the US and Vietnam, the drastic effects of US involvement in Vietnam cannot be overstated. Although we in the US typically view the Vietnam War in terms of its political effects domestically and its psychological effects on American soldiers, Vietnamese and diasporic Vietnamese – including Vietnamese Americans – were and continue to be profoundly affected by the successive traumas inflicted by various Western, Japanese, and then Cold War powers vying for control. Vietnam was part of France’s plunder in what was called ‘French Indochina’ from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century (today referred to as Southeast Asia), then taken over by Japan during World War II. After the US victory in World War II, Vietnamese forces led by Ho Chi Minh declared its independence. But as so often happened in the postcolonial Cold War era, the US was most worried about communist influence and thus supported France’s bid to re-take Vietnam. When France finally lost in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, the Geneva Accords split the nation into two, with a communist North and US-backed government in the South. Disastrously – for both the Vietnamese and Americans – the US continued to pour supplies and soldiers into the country as part of its policy of containment. To limit US casualties, Vietnam was carpetbombed; during what the Vietnamese call ‘the American War’, more bombs were dropped on Vietnam alone than during the entirety of World War II. Estimates of the casualties in Vietnam range from one to three million, and by some estimates civilian casualties averaged at 1,000 per week during heavy US bombing (Hirschman et al. 1995). The effects of the war did not end with the fall of Saigon and US withdrawal in 1975. Approximately 500,000 Vietnamese fled to the US in the ensuing decades, portrayed as ‘boat people’ fleeing the communists and on whom the US would bestow what Mimi Thi Nguyen (2012) has called ‘the gift of freedom’, or the unending feeling

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of gratitude and debt that the Vietnamese (and others) are supposed to feel to the US for offering with one hand a ‘gift’ of war and displacement, and with the other hand a safe haven. Refugees are supposed to feel gratitude for salvation from wars that started with French colonialism, World War II, the Cold War, and American neocolonialism; in the late twentieth century, this narrative was powerful in helping to establish the US narrative of liberalism and freedom. Meanwhile, the effects of refugee trauma continue for generations in the survivors and their children. Vietnamerica seeks to capture aesthetically a sense of these multilayered histories. As Caroline Hong notes, ‘Tran depicts several different Vietnams over the course of the narrative, a place multiply and palimpsestically invaded, occupied, colonized by the Japanese, the French, and the Americans, a place indelibly marked by both communism and global capitalism’ (2014: 15). It is also a collective family memoir, capturing ‘multiple journeys, with shifting points of origin and destinations . . . from and to South Carolina, Arizona, New York, Florida, [Langson], Vungtau, Mytho, Saigon, and back’ (2014: 18). As Erin McGlothlin (2003) has noted, narratives of historical, collective trauma often use such verbal and visual overlays of past and present, of various locations, to reinforce these interconnections. Vietnamerica echoes graphic novels by other people of colour – such as Wilfred Santiago’s In My Darkest Hour and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese – that visually externalise internal psychic landscapes ‘in order to render the experience of contemporary America as at once and inseparably both public and private, bound up with experiences and associations that outstrip the immediate circumstances’ (Hetrick 2010: 199). In a similar manner, Vietnamerica couches its central events with references to several national and international contexts. Despite the generally positive critical and popular reception Vietnamerica has received, however, one recurring topic in responses to Vietnamerica centres on whether or not the characters are easy to follow. Specifically, some readers have said that the characters are not identifiable and/or distinguishable. For instance, David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times (2011) writes, ‘Tran’s drawing style is too broad, not specific enough, with few identifying details to make his characters truly come to life.’ Online commentary by readers concurs; one reader on goodreads puts it succinctly, ‘It was difficult to tell characters apart and follow the family’s story’ (Kristen 2011). Another commenter agrees, ‘The characters weren’t distinctive enough’ (Claudia 2013). A blogger notes, ‘Tran’s characters weren’t quite distinct enough to tell apart at times’ (Beck 2012). Readers on Amazon echo this sentiment. One reader writes, ‘Part of the way the story unfolds makes it difficult to know which family member is on stage’ (Schultz 2016). Other readers, however, link the ostensible difficulty of keeping track of characters to the context in which they operate, that is, the multiplicity of characters and the chaos of war. One reader writes, ‘a little difficult to follow but it does not surprise me as war does terrible things to family and community life’ (Jerrbear 2014). Such responses are notable because, in contrast, other readers note the specific strategies used to mark characters graphically. The front and back endsheets include a family tree, titled ‘The Cast’. Greg Burgas (2011) writes that the graphic memoir ‘does a very good job making sure that each character has a distinct personality so we can tell who they are over the years’. Characters are marked by hairstyles, glasses (which interestingly impact facial expressions), character-specific props, and different fonts.

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For instance, Burgas (2011) observes, ‘his mother’s voice is always in cursive writing, his grandmothers wear glasses with different lens shapes, which might be true-to-life or not, but it certainly makes it easy to distinguish between two elderly Vietnamese women’. In the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement, Candie Sanderson (2014) writes, ‘Tran . . . gives his characters distinctive features so as to help the reader recognize them: Le Nhi wears square glasses, Thi Mot round ones, Uncle Vinh a hat, Tri sunglasses.’ In other words, despite its play with visual styles and genres (communist posters, cartoons, etc.), Vietnamerica takes full advantage of the array of tools afforded by the comic genre to maintain a sense of character consistency through various styles, times, and places. There is an apparent disconnect between the text’s attempts to mark characters graphically as they shift through multiple places, times, and styles – something that comics can do in unique ways – and some readers’ difficulty with the multiplicity of characters and contexts. Part of some readers’ difficulty may stem from the desire for one character, a protagonist, whose struggles and sufferings they can focus on and empathise with. Despite recent collective memoirs and the long history of communal writing of marginalised groups, for most readers, the main paradigm for autobiographies and memoirs remains the individual.3 GB, although a character-narrator, is not really the central character – his story often gives way to those of his grandparents, his parents, and even his elder siblings (who were born in Vietnam and remember the refugee experience). Tran’s focus is less on GB’s individual experiences of racism in the US or ‘going back to the homeland’ (although those narratives are woven in), but on the multiple family and collective histories and the multiple attitudes towards those histories. In other words, the text highlights the overlapping, contending cultural, historical, and political contexts in which the principal characters operate. Moreover, some readers are responding to the lack of easily recognisable, stable markers of facial affect that signal to us their feelings as the narrative progresses. In the readers’ responses, we can see the influence of facial affect recognition technology, particularly the notion that emotions emanate from the individual in universal ways, and that we should be able to recognise their expressions no matter the context. Despite the many questions about cross-cultural FAR, I would argue it has influenced how we read comics. As Jared Gardner has argued, If the single-panel comic is the ultimate medium of stereotyping . . . the sequential comic is the most powerful (in part because least susceptible to authorial discipline) medium for embracing the radical consequences of an alterity that disables stereotype and the easy readings of the hegemonic gaze. (Gardner 2010: 147)4 These questions around identity and character arise because Vietnamerica disrupts the model of FAR that posits emotions as individual and universally readable across cultural contexts. There are a number of ways in which Vietnamerica subtly works against an individualist notion of emotion, cognition, and emotion, seeking more puzzle pieces that constitute what we may primarily perceive as an individual emotion. Vietnamerica continually ties the experiences and emotions of one character to the many; as GB’s father puts it bluntly: ‘You can’t look at our family in a vacuum and apply your myopic contemporary western filter to them’ (Tran 2010: 11). For instance, in Figure 7.1,

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Figure 7.1 Page 26 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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GB’s self-portrait is overlaid with those of his parents, so that their eyes overlap; GB partially looks through the eyes of his parents, and they through his. His father is cyan, his mother is magenta, and GB is yellow (another pun on race in the US); therefore where they overlap the colours are black. We cannot see GB without those overlapping contexts and histories, and each of those characters cannot help but see through the eyes of the others. Their faces and lines of sight are not identical but inextricably linked together. The text also visually links individuals to other people, whether family members or other larger collectives. Figures 7.2 and 7.3 show GB and his father, respectively, struggling with memories, either to collect as part of oneself or to repress. Figure 7.2 shows an adolescent GB in a box, such as one might store old mementoes, gathering past elements of war and refugee flight: tanks, helicopters, army trucks, aeroplanes, violence, struggle, and chaos. The apparently peaceful youth in the US, with a calm if slightly pained or tense expression on his face, must attempt to gather the defiantly unruly elements of war into his own memory box. In Figure 7.3, GB’s father attempts to bury old memories by physically burying old possessions – an old comic book, a jacket, and a purse – deemed ‘trash’ by his wife. Rather than put them in the garbage, the typically expressionless father chooses to keep the items but bury them in the backyard. While each face is relatively expressionless – or ‘inscrutable’ in old Orientalist terms – a wealth of memories, histories, and mementoes inform the emotion of that moment. Some contexts are not even from the character’s direct experience; for instance, GB himself did not experience war, but the indelible effects on his family have become an integral part of his existence. Other images render the emotions of principal characters through visual depictions of group emotions, particularly panic and fear in the context of war. The comic constantly zooms in and out between GB’s family and a larger collective experience. Figures 7.4 and 7.5 show a motif repeated in the comic; as a family’s story is being recounted, typically towards the end of the sequence, an image of the larger collective’s shared experience is shown. This tactic is used particularly to convey mass flight and fear. In Figure 7.4, Thi Mot (GB’s grandmother) is at the far right of the top panel and his mother is the child in her arms as they escape from Langson in the north to Vungtao in southern Vietnam in the late 1940s and early 50s, as US-backed France and the Viet Minh, supported by the USSR and China, battle over the country. Thi Mot’s pose of flight, leaning forward as part of a desperate crowd fleeing with everything they can carry, is repeated multiple times throughout the text. Figure 7.5 is one such repetition, approximately twenty years later, when GB’s parents, who had been living in Vungtau in the South, flee to Saigon because it is the most fortified by the US and South Vietnamese. They expect to be away at most a year. But as history and the narrative recount, they must flee again to the US. During their narrative of flight, with the help of a white American friend, another such image of the collective experience of chaos and flight appears. While anxiety is visible on Thi Mot’s face in Figure 7.4, the individual emotion is inseparable from the mass experience of fear and flight, which in the narrative is shown to be the repeated result of contending foreign and nationalist power struggles. Just as each frame is embedded in a particular place in the sequence of the graphic novel, each person’s affective experience is embedded in dynamic multiple histories.

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Figure 7.3 Page 142 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Figure 7.2 Page 208 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Figure 7.5 Page 251 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Figure 7.4 Pages 124–5 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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One of the most striking features of the text, Figure 7.6 is a two-page spread of GB’s family fleeing when the North Vietnamese arrive in Saigon in 1975. Their American friend Leonard helps them obtain passage on one of the last flights from Saigon, and as they walk through the door, they come upon a scene of chaos, anxiety, and fear. Like many pages in the comic, there are no borders or frames, so the image covers the entire surface area of two pages. The gutter between panels ‘represents an empty space to be filled by the reader in the act of closure, forging the connections required to make meaningful highly compressed narrative form’ (Gardner 2010: 137–8). Vietnamerica makes full use of the tools of graphic novels, exceeding panel boundaries and varying panel size, number, and orientation to connote relations of time, repetition, and emotion. By having the individual family’s story break into this scene of collective chaos, the text seeks to remind us that this experience is not contained to just these characters. It is experienced collectively, albeit differently, for each individual. Moreover, this experience feels overwhelming and all encompassing – again, in distinct ways – to each person. Repeatedly, individual experiences and emotions are visually linked to those of others. Characters in parallel situations are shown with parallel facial expressions. For instance, Figure 7.7 is a humorous take on GB’s cognitive overload in the face modernday Saigon’s hubbub. A later image (not pictured) features his parents with the same expression; despite thinking that they know the country and the city of Saigon, the first time they return to Vietnam after decades in the US, they experience a similar sense of disorientation (202). Throughout the comic, as the family’s stories unfold, there are constant visual and verbal connections between individual and group, between one moment in time and its connected variety of histories, people, and associations. For instance, Figure 7.8 captures, after the ‘end’ of the Vietnam War, the continuing plight of Vietnamese people who seek to flee war and repression. Such constant graphic reminders blur the boundaries between individual and collective, private and public, present and past. One of the most striking images comes when the end of the war is announced. These pages leading up to Figure 7.9 show characters listening to the radio announcement of the US withdrawal from Vietnam. The announcer says, ‘As far as the US is concerned, the Vietnam War is finished’ (221–2). The irony of ‘finished’ is reflected in the various expressions of chagrin, anger, surprise, and joy; the war and its repercussions are far from over for this cast of characters. In other words, individual emotions are situated multiply, embedded in individual family, national, and other collective contexts. Vietnamerica seeks to invoke readerly empathy for its central characters in a given moment, but that emotion is shown to be embedded in multiple contexts. Cognitively and affectively, the text endeavours to elicit structural empathy by providing histories of war, colonialism, neo-imperialism, and flight, as well as of gender, race, class, generations, and so on. This portrayal of emotion draws on many of the strategies uniquely available to the graphic novel medium, including the use of characters, juxtaposition, plot, time, visuals, layout, and so on. As such, it contrasts sharply with the concept of facial affect recognition, which ultimately relies on ‘scientific’ assumptions that are still under debate. The widespread popularity of FAR is therefore alarming, as it becomes a normalised state tool of surveillance. Our understanding of empathy and affect recognition must, therefore, learn to attend to texts such as Vietnamerica – as well as narrative studies that investigate and account for the situatedness of our experiences and emotions.

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Figure 7.6 Pages 262–3 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved

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Figure 7.7 Pages 50–1 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Figure 7.9 Page 224 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Figure 7.8 Page 158 from VIETNAMERICA: A FAMILY’S JOURNEY by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Notes 1. I would like to thank the editors, Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol, and Stephen Hong Sohn for their invaluable feedback in shaping the final version of this chapter. 2. For more on empathy and literature, see Hammond and Kim (2014). 3. In landmark graphic memoirs such as Maus and Fun Home, the tensions and difficulties of authoring collective histories and/or the story of ‘someone else’ that is inextricably linked to the author/narrator (e.g. the father in Maus) has been explicitly manifested as a staged anxiety within the text. In the visual medium, the individual is almost always necessarily located spatially in relation to others, so in some ways the graphic memoir may inherently trouble the notion of life stories as focused on one person. 4. Faces, masks, and identities have long been a central question in the study of comics. Matthew J. Costello (2009), Gerard Jones (2004), and others have noted how the trope of masks, costumes, and secret identities allowed exploration of ideological and cultural divides – particularly in relation to immigrants – during the Cold War. The history of faces and representation in comics is also related to the methods of production. Because early comics were produced on a fast schedule with low budget, masks and costumes were favoured over realistic details. As Greg Smith (2009) notes, ‘Batman’s cowl is simpler to draw than Bruce Wayne’s face.’ The proliferation of modes and means of producing visual narratives raise anew questions about the politics of facial representation.

Works Cited Barrett, Lisa F. and James A. Russell (eds) (2015), The Psychological Construction of Emotion, New York: Guilford. Barrett, Lisa F., Batja Mesquita, Kevin N. Ochsner, and James J. Gross (2007), ‘The experience of emotion’, Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 373–403. Beck, John (2012) ‘Vietnamerica by GB Tran, book review’, and a little wine, 20 July, (last accessed 19 September 2016). Beck, Julie (2015), ‘Hard feelings: Science’s struggle to define emotions’, The Atlantic, 24 February, (last accessed 23 July 2016). Berlant, Lauren (1999), ‘The subject of true feeling’, in Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (eds), Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 49–84. Burgas, Greg (2011), ‘Review time! With Vietnamerica’, Comics should be good!, 4 April,

(last accessed 5 March 2016). Claudia (2013) ‘Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey’, goodreads, 16 October, (last accessed 15 August 2016). Costello, Matthew J. (2009), Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America, New York: Continuum. Darwin, Charles [1872] (2009), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, New York: Penguin. Delgado, Richard (1996), ‘Rodrigo’s eleventh chronicle: Empathy and false empathy’, California Law Review, 84, 61–100. Ekman, Paul (1972), ‘Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion’, in James K. Cole (ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1971, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, vol. 19, pp. 207–82.

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— (1987), ‘Universals and cultural differences in the judgments of facial expressions of emotion’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53: 4, 712–17. — (1994), ‘Strong evidence for universals in facial expressions: A reply to Russell’s mistaken critique’, Psychological Bulletin, 115, 268–87. Elfenbein, Hilary A. and Nalini Ambady (2002), ‘On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis’, Psychological Bulletin, 128: 2, 203–35. Gair, Susan (2012), ‘Feeling their stories: Contemplating empathy, insider/outsider positionings, and enriching qualitative research’, Qualitative Health Research, 22: 1, 134–43. Gallegos, Placida V. and Steven A. Schapiro (2014), ‘Moving from awareness to action: Processes of change through transformative social justice education’, in Dimitra Andritsakou and Linden West (eds), What’s the Point of Transformative Learning?, Proceedings of the 1st Conference of ESREA’s Network ‘Interrogating Transformative Processes in Learning and Education: An International Dialogue’, Athens: European Society for Research on the Education of Adults and Hellenic Adult Education Association, pp. 178–87. Gardner, Jared (2010), ‘Same difference: Graphic alterity in the work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim’, in Frederick Luis Aldama (ed.), Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 132–48. Gendron, Maria, Debi Roberson, and Lisa F. Barrett (2015), ‘Cultural variation in emotion perception is real: A response to Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, and Scott’, Psychological Science, 26: 3, 357–9. Hammond, Meghan M. and Sue J. Kim (eds) (2014), Rethinking Empathy Through Literature, New York: Routledge. Harrison, Mary-Catherine (2014), ‘“The great sum of universal anguish”: Statistical empathy in Victorian social-problem literature’, in Meghan M. Hammond and Sue J. Kim (eds), Rethinking Empathy Through Literature, New York: Routledge, pp. 135–61. Hetrick, Nicholas (2010), ‘Chronology, country, and consciousness in Wilfred Santiago’s In My Darkest Hour’, in Frederick Luis Aldama (ed.), Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 189–201. Hirschman, Charles, Samuel Preston, and Vu M. Loi (1995), ‘Vietnamese casualties during the American war: A new estimate’, Population and Development Review, 21, 783–812. Hong, Caroline K. (2014), ‘Disorienting the Vietnam War: GB Tran’s Vietnamerica as transnational and transhistorical graphic memoir’, Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies, 5, 11–22. Izard, Carroll (1971), The Face of Emotion, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. — (1994), ‘Innate and universal facial expressions: Evidence from developmental and crosscultural research’, Psychological Bulletin, 115: 2, 288–99. Jerrbear (2014), ‘Amazing storytelling, a little difficult to follow . . .’, Amazon Customer Reviews, (last accessed 4 September 2016). Jessup, Helen and Steve Rogerson (2016), ‘Postmodernism and the teaching and practice of interpersonal skills’, in Jan Fook Jan and Bob Pease (eds), Transforming Social Work Practice: Postmodern Critical Perspectives, New York: Routledge, pp. 161–78. Jones, Gerard (2004), Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, New York: Basic Books. Keen, Suzanne (2011), ‘Fast tracks to narrative empathy: Anthropomorphism and dehumanization in graphic narratives’, SubStance, 40, 135–55. Kristen (2011), ‘Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey’, goodreads, 26 January, (last accessed 5 March 2015). McGlothlin, Erin (2003), ‘No time like the present: Narrative and time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus’, Narrative, 11: 2, 177–98. Matsumoto, David (1990), ‘Cultural similarities and differences in display rules’, Motivation and Emotion, 14, 195–214.

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Natu, Vaidehi and Alice J. O’Toole (2013), ‘Neural perspectives on the other-race effect’, Visual Cognition, 21, 1081–95. Nguyen, Mimi Thi (2012), The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. O’Toole, Alice J., Kenneth A. Deffenbacher, Dominique Valentin, and Hervé Abdi (1994), ‘Structural aspects of face recognition and the other-race effect’, Memory and Cognition, 22: 2, 208–24. O’Toole, Alice J., Jennifer Peterson, and Kenneth A. Deffenbacher (1996), ‘An “other-race effect” for categorizing faces by sex’, Perception, 25: 6, 669–76. ‘Paul Ekman Group’ (2016), (last accessed 11 September 2016). Russell, James A. (1994), ‘Is there a universal recognition of emotion from facial expression? A review of the cross-cultural studies’, Psychological Bulletin, 115: 1, 102–41. Sanderson, Candie (2014), ‘Book review: Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey, by GB Tran’, Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement, 9: 3, (last accessed 5 March 2015). Schultz, Phillip (2016), ‘Refugees’, Amazon, 20 August, (last accessed 16 September 2016). Shuman, Amy (2005), Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Smith, Greg (2009), ‘Masking the difficulties of superhero film adaptation’, in medias res, 23 February, (last accessed 8 April 2017). Tran, GB (2010), Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey, New York: Villard. Ulin, David L. (2011), ‘Vietnamerica by GB Tran’, Los Angeles Times, 30 January, (last accessed 5 March 2015). Zhao, Mintao, William G. Hayward, and Isabelle Bülthoff (2014), ‘Holistic processing, contact, and the other-race effect in face recognition’, Vision Research, 105, 61–9.

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8 Till Death Do Us Part: Embodying Narratology Susan S. Lanser

Says Body to Mind, ’Tis amazing to see, We’re so nearly related yet never agree, But lead a most wrangling strange Sort of a Life, As great Plagues to each other as Husband and Wife. (Carter 1762: 25)

T

he matter of the body, the bodies that matter: it is difficult to conceive of a feminism, a critical race theory, a queer theory, a disability theory, an intersectional analysis, a psychoanalytic framework, even a postmodern understanding of subjectivity that does not recognise the mutually constitutive relationship between the human body – as imagined, constructed, inhabited – and the body politic. Small wonder, then, that the body also figures centrally in contemporary theory and scholarship on literary and cultural representation. To take one small measure, the MLA Online Bibliography includes over 8,000 subject entries for ‘human body’, of which only thirty-two (0.04 per cent) appear before 1970 and only four before 1960.1 By 1989 Michael Holquist could already point to a ‘flood’ of new work on the representation of bodies, most of it sharing the assumption that ‘the body is best appropriated as a semiotically charged magnet of social and aesthetic forces, the most comprehensive icon of historical and cultural specificity’ (1989: 2). It is thus illuminating to recognise how little attention narratology, which arose in this same period, has paid to embodiment. Across the sixty-some entries in The Living Handbook of Narratology, only a dozen give even slight recognition to the body as a narratological concern, and half of those entries focus on visual and performative media such as computer games and film, or on what Marco Caracciolo calls the ‘virtual body’ of the reader, rather than on specifically textual properties.2 Likewise, the comprehensive Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005) has no entry for embodiment and notes only fleeting references in its index. Neither the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (2005) nor the more recent Postclassical Narratology (2010) includes in its index a bodily term. This silence is perhaps the more surprising given the large role Monika Fludernik’s 1996 Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology has played in the field, since from its first page Fludernik marks a ‘framework of human embodiedness’ as the sine qua non of experientiality and thus of narrativity (1996: 3). Cognitive narratology does pay some attention to what David Herman calls the ‘ways of organizing and making sense of domains of experience’ (Herman et al. 2012: 102), but this is not a

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key emphasis in that field. Although classical narratology focuses mightily on focalisation, Genette’s choice of that term already signifies a kind of acorporeal express wish ‘to avoid the too specifically visual connotations of the terms vision, field, and point of view’ (1980: 189). Even narratological concepts of reading tend toward disembodiment; hence the importance of Robyn Warhol’s reminder in Having a Good Cry that ‘whatever else it may entail, reading always happens in and to a body’ (2003: ix). What Dan Punday argued in 2003, in what is still the only monograph explicitly aimed at forging a ‘corporeal narratology’, remains largely accurate today: there is ‘almost complete lack of interest in the body as a narratological category’ – even, as Genie Babb notes, in the theorising of character (Punday 2003: 3; Babb 2002). As Punday also rightly observes, despite the centrality of the body in feminist thought, even feminist narratology has paid scant attention to the corporeal. Certainly my own books The Narrative Act (1981) and Fictions of Authority (1992) are bereft of bodies as theoretical sites. And although Warhol rightly observes that ‘feminist critics from Virginia Woolf forward’ have been ‘constantly aware of the gendered body that writes or reads every text’ (Herman et al. 2012: 39), this body consciousness has not extended deeply to formal analysis of the text itself. It may be fair to observe that feminist narratology, and perhaps narratology in general, shares with some early feminisms and anti-racisms a Cartesian dualism that privileges the mental over the corporeal as a way to insist on the equality of minds in the face of a cultural politics rooted in the inequality of bodies.3 Even in the volume Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions that Warhol and I coedited, references to embodiment are scant, though the exceptions are critically important ones: Sue J. Kim introduces the ‘embodied subject’ as a category that puts pressure on ‘neurotypical’ notions of legal and lyric subjects (2015: 151); and Hillary Chute discusses graphic narrative as a ‘textuality that takes the body seriously’ (2015: 200). These interventions remind us that narratology’s default corpus is both white and novelistic and that it theorises from a decidedly incomplete selection of the world’s narratives. Why, in an age teeming with scholarly interest in bodies, has narratology lagged behind the corporeal curve? In this chapter, I ‘take the body seriously’ in a way not true of my previous narratological thinking in order to ask how bodies – or, to take Kim’s term, embodied subjects – might figure in a narratology that is feminist, queer, and historicised but also (post)classically narratological. Taken together, Babb and Punday fault narratology in three ways: for privileging time over space and thus narrated events over the bodies that enact them; for focusing on the disembodied interiority of characters’ thoughts and feelings; and for a ‘fondness’ – I quote Punday alluding to Prince – for ‘questions of “how” over questions of “what”’ (2003: 3). I would qualify the first of these charges, concur wholeheartedly with the second, and defend the third. Privileging time over space makes sense insofar as narrative is distinguished among discursive practices, indeed defined, by its temporality. Yet the body also lives in time, as Michael Holquist reminds us;4 and conversely, as Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope already recognised, narrative inevitably also lives in space. It is not accidental that so many recent theorists, including Punday himself, have pursued narratological methods that engage the spatialisation of time and the temporalisation of space. Intersectional feminisms also promote such spatiotemporal integration. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, in rejecting reified notions of female identity, oppression, and agency, calls upon feminists to ‘think subjects in terms of their strategic placement within power networks; that is, in

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terms of what they are able to do, more than in terms of who they are’ (2003: 14). What subjects (are able to) do constitutes, of course, the stuff of narrative – which I define simply, d’après Gerald Prince, as the representation of real or fictive events.5 It would be difficult to imagine a representation of events without bodies; a corporeal narratology would thus invite us to think deeply about how bodies move in time and space, which bodies move in which configurations, and how narrativity attaches to different body parts and bodily movements,6 not simply about how those bodies are statically described. The notion of strategic placement also puts new emphasis on movement and position in ways that push back against the prominence narratology currently gives to interiority. As Babb argues, ‘narratology has by and large privileged those aspects of character that represent interiority and consciousness’ and neglected the character’s ‘lived body’ in the text (2002: 201). Moreover, this overemphasis on interiority is attached to an overemphasis on the modern novel, the primary genre in which interiority dominates. This attention, in turn, privileges such techniques as free indirect discourse even though free indirect discourse is practised in a relatively small slice of the world’s narratives or even of its narrative fictions. Thinking more fully in terms of embodiment, then, also means thinking about the spectrum of corporeality that attaches to different narrative genres and media. In short, that narratology has been so dramatically non-corporeal tells us the extent to which it also has focused on print genres rather than such necessarily corporeal arts as film and dance. The third charge, that narratology privileges the ‘how’ over the ‘what’, strikes me as true – but necessarily true, for I would argue that attending to the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ of narrative is actually what makes narratology – even in its postclassical formulations – narratology and not, say, hermeneutics. By just about any understanding of the field, narratology is the study of how texts mean – their structures, functions, technologies – and not the study of what texts mean, or rather of ‘what’ only insofar as ‘what’ is inscribed in and as how. Put differently, narratology looks at ‘content’ rendered in and as form; it serves interpretation by rendering form and function legible. While it is fair to say that feminist and other situated narratologies have insisted on intrinsic relationships between ‘what’ and ‘how’ – or what, who, when, where, and how – the ‘how’ remains central to narratological aims. In this chapter, then, I want to adhere as closely as possible to ‘how’ over ‘what’ – or, postclassically considered, the ‘how’ and ‘what’ as mutually constitutive – in order to extend the corporeal into the domains of an intersectional narratology as Punday and Babb have also initiated in different ways. Inspired by Hillary Chute, I will also ask how graphic memoirs might help us to think about embodiment in ways that apply as well to purely verbal texts. I will try out some corporeal thinking on Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour’ (1894), which figured in my first book, and on Pauline Hopkins’s ‘Talma Gordon’ (1900), which did not. Taking the question ‘who is embodied?’ as an appropriate analogue to Genette’s ‘who speaks?’ and ‘who sees?’, I will lay out a range of questions that I might be asked about the ‘how’ of narrative embodiment. Finally and speculatively, I will propose the notion of a corporeal scholarly method, a way not so much of theorising the body as of theorising from the body, as I think is beautifully exemplified in George Haggerty’s ‘Love and Loss: An Elegy’ (2004) and Peggy Phelan’s ‘Hypothetical Focalization and Queer Grief’ (2015). That death figures in all of my examples both fictional and scholarly was not intentional and therefore may prove significant.

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It would be difficult to think about an embodied narratology without recognising the differential forms of embodiment that attach to specific genres and media. It might be helpful to chart narrative media along a spectrum from the wholly gestural to the wholly verbal; such a spectrum would place mime and dance at one end, as forms that depend centrally on moving bodies, place midway those performative genres that usually utilise both words and images, and be bounded on the other end by written fictions, which depend exclusively on words:7 mime/dance–theatre–film–picture books–storytelling–comics–histories–novels in print GESTURAL NARRATIVE VERBAL NARRATIVE Clearly, each of these forms carries its own corporeal imperatives, only sketchily rendered here; a novel read aloud, for example, carries the embodiment of storytelling; a novel interpreted in ASL becomes gestural. Our clues to the physical appearance of Mr Collins, the ‘servile’ and ‘self-important’ clergyman character in Pride and Prejudice, for example, are merely that he is ‘a tall, heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty’. But the film versions of Pride and Prejudice must go beyond that vague description, often giving quite different versions of Austen’s characters. To take the two most famous instances: the 1995 BBC mini-series renders Mr Collins (David Bamber) as rather rotund and buffoonish, while the 2005 film starring Keira Knightley creates in Tom Hollander a Collins who is leaner and more calculating. The implications of medium are far-reaching, especially for an intersectional narratology that attends to multiple vectors of identity as a way to analyse the politics of corporeal representation. Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, widely hailed even by the mainstream and Time Magazine’s 2006 Book of the Year, includes some panels depicting quite graphic lesbian sex. I think it extremely unlikely that visual representations of lesbian sex could have passed muster if the images had been photographically realistic rather than pen-and-ink renderings. In the award-winning Broadway production of Fun Home, there is neither nudity nor genital sex; the most daring sexual moment – about which even the creators of the show acknowledged some concern – is a kiss. Audience members blogging online frequently describe the play as having ‘toned down’ the sexuality of the novel. Different narrative genres also carry different potential for bodily marking or, conversely, for sustaining bodily ambiguity. Punday has commented that gender is the most pervasive form of ‘body sorting’ in narrative (2003: 61), and in terms of explicit marking, I would agree. Gender ambiguity can be particularly challenging to sustain in written texts, at least in gender-inflected languages,8 while visual embodiment may be more successful than words in confounding gender through nonverbal accoutrements; I can still recall the dramatic moment midway through Neil Jordan’s film The Crying Game (1992) when the transgender protagonist Dil (Jaye Davidson), who has passed fully for female until that point, strips off her clothes to reveal male genitalia, shocking not only her lover Fergus but audiences everywhere. And although today plural pronouns are used in some circles to describe gender-nonconforming individuals, written fiction historically goes to great lengths to avoid marking grammatical gender, or resorts to alternating third-person pronouns, as Michel de Montaigne did even in 1580 in describing a young woman prosecuted for dressing as a man and marrying a woman. Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992) – and, even more dauntingly

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for being composed in (more strictly gendered) French, Anne Garréta’s Sphinx (1986) – are rare instances of novels that have managed entirely to avoid marking their protagonists by sex. Racial sorting is at least as pervasive as gender sorting but far easier to evade in written than in visual media. Race and ethnicity are more likely to be marked in visual and performance media than in verbal texts, where names and settings can provide racial and ethnic clues but where normative whiteness often goes unmarked and unremarked. How many of us, for example, ever speak about the characters in Pride and Prejudice as white? Jo Baker’s brilliant Longbourn (2013), which enters the Bennet household through the perspectives of its servants, begins to corporealise Bennet bodies through the signs of their bodily functions in a way that reminds us how little corporeality and how much white privilege is inscribed in Austen’s text: The young ladies might behave like they were smooth and sealed as alabaster statues underneath their clothes, but then they would drop their soiled shifts on the bedchamber floor, to be whisked away and cleansed, and would thus reveal themselves to be the frail, leaking, forked bodily creatures that they really were. . . . She had scrubbed away their sweat, their stains, their monthly blood; she knew they weren’t as rarefied as angels. (Baker 2013: 4) Physical disability, on the other hand, seems to me effectively to require some level of embodiment if it is to function as disability; after the autodiegetic narrator of Stephen King’s Bag of Bones breaks his leg, for example, his physical movements become parcel to the movement of plot. In short, every narrative genre or medium carries conventions and expectations, ethical parameters and political possibilities for embodiment. A full corporeal narratology would thus need to explore the formal options and cultural norms that shape the generic expectations for rendering the body. An intersectional narratology would benefit from asking how different kinds of bodies are marked or unmarked in different texts, what strategies are brought to bear on constituting those textual identities, and what different bodies are permitted to do – their range of motion, as it were, within the text. If, as Monika Fludernik argues, the inseparability of time and space makes the key constituent of narrative not an event but a body in motion, a spatiotemporal ‘experientiality’ (1996: 12–13, 30), then which bodies can move, and how and where, provides a narratological analytic that implicates form as well as content. As Punday observes, theorising from that corporeal recognition could give an intensified power to Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope. For example, Bakhtin associates the novel with the chronotope of the road as a site where unlikely characters may converge. A corporeal interrogation of that chronotope would look at the kinds of bodies converging on that road and how those bodies interact, asking which bodies can take to the road, and with what sorts of transportation. Who rides in the car or carriage, who is free to walk alone, who has no place on the road at all: these are fascinating embodied questions, implicating gender, race, age, class and ability at the very least, and they reveal the possibilities and limits of narrative in a given genre and period. We can think further about spatial embodiment if we give a corporeal dimension to another narratological concept, one still underutilised by narratologists: Alex Woloch’s notion of character system and character space. In The One vs. the Many (2003), Woloch

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imagines major and minor characters in a kind of epic struggle in which each character ‘jostles for space’ within a limited textual universe. Although Woloch does not present this ‘jostling’ as a physical phenomenon, his own metaphor encourages us to ask what kinds and degrees of embodied ‘jostling’ are taking place as characters move about in both story and discourse. Woloch argues, for example, that the five Bennet sisters operate as a system in which the younger sisters Kitty and Mary, otherwise superfluous to the plot, define and characterise the three elder ones and especially Elizabeth. Thinking corporeally about these younger sisters makes much more powerful the role of Mary, with her mediocre singing and piano playing, as ‘jostling’ for pre-eminence in a very physical way. And perhaps it is to evade the competition among sisterly bodies that the novel so often extricates Elizabeth from the family setting so that she does not have to compete for narrative primacy. Which brings me back to the charge that narratology privileges interiority. I would hazard that just about every critical approach to the novel and its ‘rise’ engages in bowing to interiority as the sign and seal of the genre; in Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World (1987), for example, it is the struggle of ‘youth as such’, rendered through techniques of interiority, that creates the Bildungsroman and sets the nineteenthcentury novel on its course. Still, the charge against narratology may be especially relevant because the foundational narratological canon is composed so heavily of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European novels that themselves privilege interiority. It is fair to say that narratology has largely ignored the fact that interiority itself works through a grammar of spatial corporeality; as Marie-Laure Ryan observes on the Living Handbook of Narratology website, ‘words like up and down, front and back, high and low, organize space [by] using the body as a point of reference’ (n.d.: para. 18). This means that not only characters but narrators and focalisers occupy implicitly corporeal positions. Uri Margolin – also writing on the Living Handbook of Narratology site – posits a spectrum of narrator embodiment from the anonymous or covert narrator who is ‘coming from nowhere’ to the ‘perceptible, dramatized . . . overt narrator who could say things like “Living now in my old age in the city of NN, I still remember with great affection what X did 30 years ago”. The two extremes’, Margolin says, ‘would be a mere voice with no psychological person behind it and a concrete figure with both an inner life and a body’ (2012, rev. 2014: para. 13). The corporeality of focalisation is complex. Gérard Genette famously argued for a distinction between voice and vision, who speaks and who sees, as one of the characteristics of verbal texts. What Franz Stanzel classically described as figural narration is usually seen as dual-bodied in that sense: when Mrs Dalloway walks down Whitehall, hers is the body – with its own age, gender, and physical ability as well its own memory and consciousness – through whose eyes we see and hear London even when it is not her voice that speaks. Neither Genette nor Stanzel gives physicality to narrators and focalisers in this way, but a corporeal approach helps us to concretise and thus expose the positions from which we, as readers, are interpellated into the textual world; Marco Caracciolo has traced such a project of joining cognitively with characters as they move in space. But figural narration actually complicates the corporeal, as Peggy Phelan recognises when she points to ‘the difficulty, and perhaps even the impossibility, of disentangling seeing from saying’ (2015: 82) and renders these instead as a kind of intimate relationship. That difficulty seems to me particularly pertinent to a corporealisation of free indirect discourse, the practice that Frances Ferguson has designated as the novel’s only

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original contribution to literature and a practice in which narratologists have certainly shown intense and perhaps inordinate interest. Theorists of free indirect discourse often praise its capacious powers, as if it represented a kind of triumph over the body – that is, over both a narrator’s and a character’s direct speech. Laura Buchholz’s (2009) work on free indirect discourse, however, provides a corporeal lens when she compares FID to digital morphing in which, in effect, one body turns into another. An example of visual morphing pervasive on the internet in 2008, in which George W. Bush turns into Barack Obama, makes the point well (see, e.g., Wang 2009). Print ‘morphing’ allows for even queerer dualities and duplicities, and if we are to render them corporeal in a singular sense, we risk reductiveness. I would push back, then, on the easy corporealisation of focalisation by arguing for a complicated spectrum of forms of embodiment rather than for embodiment tout court. It may be that in some instances the split between body and mind, if fatal to humans, is life-giving to narrative, whether in enabling a gender-queer inclusivity, affirming the potential intersubjectivity of textual minds, or underwriting a godlike omniscience. The queer potential of written narrative for deliberate non-embodiment, then, seems also to be worth considering within a corporeal poetics. Some years ago, Marie-Laure Ryan challenged my claim – one that came to be called ‘Lanser’s rule’ – that when a heterodiegetic narrator’s gender is unmarked, readers conventionally assign to it the author’s gender (Ryan 1999: 136). At the time when first I suggested this ‘rule’ (which I did not call a rule), I had been dismayed that male authority was sometimes so powerful as to ascribe masculinity to the narrators of, say, Jane Austen’s novels – an observation that should have warned me that readers do not necessarily coordinate authorial narrator with authorial gender. Ryan’s pushback was twofold: that I was legislating reading practices (including hers) and, perhaps more importantly for our purposes here, that I was assigning gender to a narrative persona ungendered by the text. My model did not account either for anonymous or pseudonymous narrative – what sex would we give to the narrator of Middlemarch? But even more strikingly, I did not stop to ask why most heterodiegetic narrators have no identifiable sex at all, indeed no embodiment except insofar as the narrator moves, ghostlike, to follow particular characters. I still suspect that readers ordinarily attribute the author’s gender to the unmarked narrator, especially in the current historical moment when female authority itself has gained some traction. But I would now agree that if we insist on the connection that ‘Lanser’s rule’ proposes, we are mimeticising authors into narrators and narrators into characters – and thereby creating bodies where the text does not. If written fiction lies at the edge of my spectrum of narrative genres, that may be because narration through words resists certain kinds of embodiment that some other media are forced to confront. I would now playfully propose ‘Lanser’s new rule’: unmarked heterodiegetic narration is an essentially queer form, arguably the least embodied element of verbal narrative. In the absence of any text-internal clue as to the speaker’s sex or gender (or, for that matter, age, race, class, ability) we must consider the possibility that the narrator may be neither male nor female, or both male and female: gender-neutral, gender-double, or gender-queer – in short, a speaking voice without sex and possibly even without a body that fixes it in time and space. Seeing the heterodiegetic narrator as either queer or disembodied reminds us that narratology stands as a project of resistance: it keeps our eyes on the semiotic nature of narrative rather than on its mimetic force. A corporeal narratology risks turning

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characters into living people rather than marks on a page enabled by particular technologies. Elizabeth Bennet is not a twenty-first-century college student, nor is she Keira Knightley, nor – worse still – Jane Austen; she is not even an eighteenth-century woman of marriageable age; she is a set of words and narrative practices that trick us into mimetic illusions. Textual bodies do not necessarily appear on every page or even on every stage. Instead of assuming the corporeal, then, I would add the category ‘who is embodied?’ to Genette’s classical categories ‘who speaks?’ and ‘who sees?’ and, as Genette does with voice and vision, follow this question with an elaboration of elements and sub-questions about the distribution of bodies in both story and discourse, about the diegetic levels on which bodies operate and the kinds of bodies that are assigned to each level, about the movements allotted within each represented space, and about the relationships the text constructs between embodiment, speaking, and seeing, on the one hand, and order, duration, and event structure, on the other. As a first test case for such questions, I turn to Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour’ (1894), to which I devoted fifteen pages in my first book, The Narrative Act (1981). This very short narrative begins with the alleged death of a husband in a train crash, shows his widow grieving at first but then revelling in the promise of new freedom, and then dying tragically of shock when the ‘dead’ husband reappears, having been far from the scene of the crash. Because the narrator follows the woman into her private space and gives the narratee access to her feelings, readers know more than do the other characters, and the story’s irony is built on the gap between the family’s belief that the wife has died of ‘the joy that kills’ and our understanding, as readers, that she has died from the unbearable loss of her all-too-brief freedom. In recent years when I have taught the story, I have framed my discussion around the narrative elements of order, disnarration, pace, and space. I show students how the plot relies upon a key anachrony, revealed only at the last: the fact that Brently Mallard ‘had been far from the scene of the accident’ is the ‘cheap plot trick’, to use Marie-Laure Ryan’s phrasing, that propels the resolution (2009: 56–75). I look at the way in which the text uses disnarration to create a palatable Mrs Mallard whose unconventionality appears defiant but unwilled and thus unculpable. I show how the text’s pacing distributes most of its attention to the time Mrs Mallard spends alone in her room. And I look at the use of private and public space to create a kind of double story: to the public, the bereaved widow dies of joy; to herself and the narratee, she dies of grief. The full irony of the story depends on a transformation that occurs in a private space focalised through a solitary Mrs Mallard. Where might the body belong in this kind of narratological demonstration? In my discussion of ‘The Story of an Hour’ in The Narrative Act the body turns up very modestly. I do speak of Louise’s physical movements – first away from the men and the sister who are trying to protect her, and then back into that unwitting and ultimately unprotective community where she meets her death. I talk implicitly about the body when I recognise the shift in discourse from the authorial narration of Louise’s feelings to indirect speech and then to direct speech when Louise exults that she is ‘Free! Body and soul free!’ And I claim explicitly that the text’s positive description of her body reinforces the sense that what is happening is good for her: first, she is ‘haunted’ and exhausted, then she is motionless and childlike; next, we are told that she is young, surprisingly strong, and repressed. Her eyes have a ‘dull stare’ because she is not yet in touch with her own soul. When ‘it’ approaches her, her bosom rises and falls; her

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powerlessness in ‘beating back’ the uninvited ‘thing’ that is taking possession of her is metonymised in her ‘white slender hands’, her lady’s hands. When she speaks her freedom, it is in a whisper that ‘escapes’ her lips. As soon as she speaks the words her pulse quickens, her blood warms, her eyes become bright – she comes to life (Lanser 1992: 251). The text relies here on assumptions about the body as the outward signifier of Mrs Mallard’s emotions and desires. But my former work on this story was only a small start toward corporeal thinking, since my book did not theorise the place of the body in a narrative analysis. If I were doing so now, I would draw on the work of both David Herman and Marco Caracciolo to emphasise the physicality of focalisation as movement in space as well as time. When Mrs Mallard goes to her room, we see movement on the level of story. But the narrator’s physical capacity – in effect the narrator’s choice – to follow Mrs Mallard into that room, gaze with her out the window, and record her thoughts and behaviours suggests a certain alliance with the protagonist. Had the focalising eye remained downstairs with Richards and Josephine, we would have a very different story and a very different message. Second, I would corporealise the story’s ‘character systems’ and ask how bodies get deployed in relation to other bodies. That the text must separate out Mrs Mallard’s body from the bodies around her – from the moment of taking care in breaking news to her to the more central fact that this particular story requires a physical separation from other bodies in order for meaning to be achieved – suggests the value of looking at the ways in which different texts use bodily relations to configure different notions of both character and plot. The particular configuration of bodies in ‘The Story of an Hour’ suggests that the subject’s body must be separated from the social body for change to occur; the social body impinges on the subject and prevents her from reconfiguring the terms of her understanding. It is the return to the social body, indeed, that provides the setting for the story’s tragic denouement. This separation is articulated well on the level of story: Louise weeps in Josephine’s arms; Josephine kneels at the door to implore her to open it and grasps her waist as they descend the stairs. The drama inside the room is intensely physical, a solitary process of becoming free in body as well as soul, and indeed bodily movements and responses are so pervasive that I can only wonder how little I noticed them before. Finally, we might ask how moving bodies provide the momentum for plot. It is possible to read ‘The Story of an Hour’ as all about the body: the ‘heart trouble’ that afflicts Mrs Mallard, after all, is physical as well as symbolic: this is a fragile body from the story’s first sentence, and the entire plot is built around that fragility which is realised in the text’s final words. But if we turn to the ‘how’ that is narratology’s focus, I can also read the plot in terms of an exchange of bodies, indeed a substitution of corpses: corporeally and crudely speaking, at the beginning, we have (discursively speaking) a dead husband and a living wife; at the end, we have a living husband and a dead wife, and the plot structure consists of that exchange. We can extrapolate from this story to ask of other narratives how and where bodies are exchanged as a structuration of plot. If we think about bodies in terms of chronotopes, we can see that spaces where unlikely bodies can converge – the train, the ‘downstairs’ of the house – are also, in this story, the spaces where bodies die. A different kind of corporeal exchange structures Pauline Hopkins’s story ‘Talma Gordon’ (1900), often named as the first African American mystery story. I have taught

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this story several times, yet without scrutinising the corporeal strategies that I now see at work. Taking intermarriage as its narrative impetus, ‘Talma Gordon’ operates through so many diegetic levels that direct speech sometimes ends up prefaced by three sets of quotation marks and an even thicker array of temporalities. The extradiegetic frame for the story is a dinner party at the home of one Dr William Thornton, attended by a narratorial ‘we’ of ‘Canterbury Club’ members who are implicit coded as white and male and who are hoping for ‘even a glimpse’ of Thornton’s wife, ‘who was entirely unknown to social life’ (Hopkins [1900] 1990: 1). The primary diegetic scene continues with a discussion among the diners about miscegenation (2–3).9 At this diegetic level, the only explicitly embodied character is the Doctor, a man of ‘wonderful’ and ‘shrewd grey-blue eyes’ who narrates his story about racial ‘amalgamation’ from a posture of apparent leisure: he ‘removed the half-consumed cigar from his lips, drank what remained in his glass of the choice Burgundy, and leaning back in his chair, contemplated the earnest faces before him’ (3). The ensuing intradiegetic narrative revolves around a murder and the revelation of ‘Negro blood’ in the eponymous Talma Gordon and her ‘tall, dark, and stern’ sister Jeanette. Talma, a talented artist and ‘fairylike blonde’ with ‘great sapphire-blue eyes’, stands accused of brutally murdering her father, stepmother, and half-brother as they sleep. She is acquitted of the charge for want of evidence but remains under suspicion and is determined to find the true killer. The sisters escape to Rome; years pass; and then in two scenes of intradiegetic revelation narrated by the Doctor, we learn that on the fateful night of the murder, Jeanette has overheard her father’s plan to disinherit herself and Talma because, unknown to them, their mother was revealed as an ‘octaroon’ when she gave birth to a son ‘dark as a mulatto, with the characteristic features of the Negro!’ (17). Both son and mother died after this birth, the father remarried and has a new son, and he now plans to disinherit Jeanette and Talma not because they are girls but because they are not white enough. Jeanette’s deathbed letter to Talma discloses this history and claims that in her rage she would indeed have committed the murder but that her ‘revenge had been forestalled’ by another murderer. In a further intradiegetic revelation on another deathbed, the murderer is revealed as an East Indian man with the unconvincing Anglo alias of Simon Cameron, a man with ‘cruel’ mouth, ‘cold and sharp eyes’, and a ‘smile mocking and evil’ (12–13) who killed the Gordons to avenge Captain Gordon’s murder of his father. If we read the text’s character system through its embodiment of race, we find that the murderer, Simon Cameron, is potentially the darkest-skinned active character in the story and that Jeanette likewise is described as ‘dark’, and that ‘black’ attaches to Talma only metaphorically when she is under suspicion of murder. The ‘dark’ characters are all presented to us from within the inserted story, and all but the eponymous heroine are killed off within a second-level text. But the ultimate revelation takes place in the narrative present, at the extradiegetic level set as a gathering exclusively of white upper-class men, in the story’s last paragraph: ‘But what became of Talma Gordon?’ questioned the president. ‘Did she die?’ ‘Gentlemen’, said the Doctor, rising to his feet and sweeping the faces of the company with his eagle gaze, ‘gentlemen, if you will follow me to the drawing room, I shall have much pleasure in introducing you to my wife – née Talma Gordon.’ (21)

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Even here, then, the eponymous Talma Gordon does not appear corporeally within the primary narrative. No woman nor any dark person enters that primary narrative as a body; an extended description within the inserted text describes Talma as: a fairylike blonde in floating white draperies, her face a study in delicate changing tints, like the heart of a flower, sparkling in smiles about the mouth to end in merry laughter in the clear blue eyes. There were all the subtle allurements of birth, wealth, and culture about the exquisite creature. (5) The text’s thrice-named ‘Negro blood’ – of course something that does not exist, blood being blood – is nowhere marked upon the outward body of Talma Gordon. The narrative thus creates a dissonance between bodies as represented and bodies as declared, as between the discourse on intermarriage and its outcome in the Doctor’s own marriage to Talma Gordon. Moreover, the narrative layering separates and arguably protects the extradiegetic narrator and narratee from the dark bodies, all of which are killed off intradiegetically. In effect, then, the text that purports to support intermarriage sustains its racial separatism on the level of textual embodiment. Moreover, if we ask ‘who sees’ and ‘who speaks’, it becomes clear that all events are filtered through the Doctor, whose dominant (white, male) voice and vision control the representation of the intradiegetic characters whose words become multiply marked quotations within his narrative. The eponymous Talma Gordon appears only in the past and in a narrative future to which the text only beckons in its last phrase. Racial difference is emplotted here, in effect, by getting rid of it. I hope these examples begin to show how narratology can become corporeally thoughtful without ceasing to be narratological even in its classical sense, how it can add ‘who is embodied?’ to Genette’s famous questions ‘who speaks?’ and ‘who sees?’ We can delve even more deeply into terms of embodiment, though, if we take our cue from the graphic novel. As Hillary Chute observes, there is a dialogical relationship, and thus potentially a productive dissonance, among the elements of words, images, gutters, and frames that comprise graphic narrative. I would add that comics are also able to queer the body in revealing ways. For example, Roz Chast’s graphic memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2014), the saga of her parents’ old age, opens with a photo of the child Chast sitting on a sofa between her parents as they read her a book (2). On the facing page we see cartoon images of the adult Chast, again sitting with her parents on a sofa, asking whether they have planned for infirmity in old age (3). The carefully posed black-and-white photograph, marking a life under control, contrasts vividly to Chast’s full-colour drawings of parental panic and denial. Chast’s book revels in the graphically unpredictable, with insertions of photos and objects, words that extend beyond a frame, irregular shapes. Some pages have no images at all – most powerfully, a sequence of three pages that occurs right after the narration of her father’s death. Conversely, the penultimate chapter of Can’t We Talk, titled ‘The End’, presents twelve pages of poignant sketches of Chast’s dying mother (211–22), most of them without titles or accompanying text, that bear little resemblance to the cartoon mother in the preceding chapters. The rich corporeality available to graphic narratives helps me to delineate a fuller range of narratological questions that might be productive for asking who is embodied, and how, even in texts made only of words. I offer this preliminary list of questions, some

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of which have, of course, been taken up by other theorists and especially by Punday, in hopes that others will augment them or, better yet, rationalise them into the kinds of categories that a narratology like Genette’s applies to vision and voice: • How much textual space is given to the overt representation of bodies? • Which bodies receive narrative attention and which do not? How does the textual scheme forge its necessarily differential embodiment?10 • How are bodies deployed to create empathy or antipathy, identification or distance? Might we think about a corporeality of narrative empathy? • How, if at all, does the text represent dead bodies? • How does embodiment map onto the ‘character system’ of major/minor through which characters jostle for prominence? • How close is the representation of any given body to the strictures of formal realism (arguably a degree zero for corporeality)? Which bodies (if any) function as caricatures, and to what ends? • How are the text’s various bodies represented? Through physical description (and of what bodily features)? Through actions (and of what kind)? • From which perspectives or visual angles are bodies represented? Where is the (explicit or implied) viewer positioned? What can be seen and not seen? • At what place(s) in the narrative are bodies represented or not represented? What patterns emerge for the text’s attention to bodies, and can these be mapped onto textual order or duration? • Which bodies are mobile, and which are static? Which bodies have – or lack – mobility in specific settings? How does mobility or stasis map onto social identities? • Does the text create conflicting understandings or representations of certain bodies through tensions between its deployment in the syuzhet and its behaviours in the fabula? • To what extent is the narrator represented as an embodied textual presence? How, if at all, does the narrator represent her/his own body? • How does the text’s system of focalisation implicate a seeing body or bodies? Is the focalising consciousness independent of other textual bodies or aligned with one or more of them? • How, if at all, does the text use the physical space of the page, or the possibilities of print, to create forms or images of embodiment? As I suggested above, it is unintentional but perhaps, therefore even more significant that virtually all my primary examples in this chapter concern death. The opening stanza from Elizabeth Carter’s ‘Dialogue’, which serves as my epigraph, proposes that body and mind will quarrel ‘as Husband and Wife’ until death parts them. For Carter, the mind’s ascendance is a triumph because the poet’s body is what Elaine Scarry famously called a body in pain, a body hampered by the duties of a provincial clergyman’s daughter, a body longing to pursue her erotic friendships with other women, a body restrained from fully embracing her profession as eighteenth-century England’s most renowned woman scholar. No surprise, then, that her ‘Dialogue’ between Body and Mind also ends with the mind’s liberation from the body through death: I’ve a Friend, answers Mind, who, tho’ slow, is yet sure, And will rid me, at last, of your insolent Pow’r:

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Will knock down your mud Walls, the whole Fabric demolish, And at once your strong Holds and my Slav’ry abolish: And while in the Dust your dull Ruins decay, I shall snap off my Chains, and fly freely away. (Carter 1762: 27) For scholars as well as creators of narrative, death may create corporeal consciousness in particularly vivid ways. Two of the most moving and powerful academic chapters I know are motivated by death: George Haggerty’s ‘Love and Loss’, an elegy about elegy written after the death of his longtime partner Philip Brett, and Peggy Phelan’s ‘Hypothetical Focalization and Queer Grief’, written after the death of the writer Lynda Hart, which explores the ways in which bodies in both love and death become so intimately related to other bodies that singular notions of voice or vision cannot hold. I wonder, then, whether scholarship written not on the body but from the body could have a transformative place in the methodology of academic writing. It is no secret that academic prose is now often perceived as moribund (to take another corporeal image). Eric Hayot, whose book The Elements of Academic Style takes up this problem at length, suggests in a funky chapter in Critical Inquiry that the body figures certain terrors about our prose (see Hayot 2014a, 2014b). The Future of Scholarly Writing, coedited by Angelika Bammer and Ruthellen Boetcher Joeres (2015), brings together distinguished scholars of many disciplines who are thinking about reinvigorating both the form and the function of scholarship, often in bodily terms, so that we might experience in our bodies the pleasure of sound and bring our ‘ordinary’ lives into the academic written word. As I grow old, and the body intrudes itself in new and not always welcome ways, I wonder what would happen to scholarship if we all wrote it through the consciousness of our bodily presence, our aches and pains, our joys and ecstasies, our losses and tragedies, not by focusing on them but by focusing through them. But that is another story.

Notes 1. This statistic is not the result of a paucity of pre-1970 entries in the MLA database. In contrast to ‘body’, 10 per cent of the 3,700 subject entries on ‘sonnet’ were published before 1970. That a database of literary scholarship contains over twice as many subject references to ‘human body’ as to ‘sonnet’ is likewise a dramatic sign of cultural change. 2. Entries in The Living Handbook that refer to the body include Computer Games, Experientiality, Identity and Narration, Mediacy, Narration in Film, Narration in Various Disciplines, Narrator, Narration in Various Media, Nontemporal Linking in Narrative, Performativity, Perspective, and Space. It is of course possible that I will have missed one or another quick reference. On the ‘virtual reader’, see also Caracciolo (2011). 3. In this sense, feminist narratology, like its classical antecedent, may be participating in efforts to transcend difference in the name of a universal humanism that touts its genderand colour-blindness and that, as we now well know, can readily end up affirming the hierarchies already in place. On Cartesian dualism in narratology, see Babb (2002). 4. On bodily temporality – and thus the body itself as a site of narrative – see Holquist (1989). 5. I am paraphrasing from the revised edition of Prince’s Dictionary of Narratology (2003). 6. As Robyn Warhol (2003) astutely notes, ‘body’ often translates into ‘sex’ in discussions of embodiment, and indeed that equation may in part explain why embodiment has become so hot a topic in contemporary theory.

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7. This model does, I admit, combine apples and oranges; a simple spectrum is not quite satisfying though it is at least a start. I place written fiction farther along the spectrum than written history because of the graphic representations of historical figures to which readers of histories have access. I can readily find the image of a body if I am reading about Marie Antoinette. I have no access beyond the printed word to the body of an Elizabeth Bennet. 8. All Indo-European and Semitic languages carry some form of grammatical gender. The extent of this gendering ranges from English, which requires gender identification only in third-person pronouns, through more typical European languages like French, where thirdperson plural pronouns and adjectives are gendered, to Hebrew and Arabic, which genders not only all pronouns (including the first person) and adjectives but also verbs. Turkic languages (Finnish, Turkish, Hungarian), Chinese, and Japanese are among languages that do not use grammatical gender. 9. Although the story’s discussion of miscegenation lies outside the scope of my inquiry here, its race and class politics are well worth exploration and critique. For example, the Doctor sees intermarriage as ‘inevitable’, indeed ‘to an appalling extent’, yet salutary when the individuals in question ‘possess decent moral development and physical perfection’ (Hopkins [1900] 1990: 2–3). 10. I draw the notion of ‘differential embodiment’ from Punday (2003: ch. 5). Punday argues that major characters are often less embodied than minor characters, and thereby rendered superior. Babb (2002) has disagreed with this assumption.

Works Cited Babb, Genie (2002), ‘Where the bodies are buried: Cartesian dispositions in narrative theories of character’, Narrative, 10, pp. 195–221. Baker, Jo (2013), Longbourn, New York: Knopf. Bammer, Angelika and Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres (eds) (2015), The Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bechdel, Alison (2006), Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Buchholz, Laura (2009), ‘The morphing metaphor and the question of narrative voice’, Narrative, 17, 200–19. Caracciolo, Marco (2011), ‘The reader’s virtual body: Narrative space and its reconstruction’, StoryWorlds, 3, 117–38. Carter, Elizabeth (1762), ‘A Dialogue’, in Poems on Several Occasions, London: John Rivington, (last accessed 23 November 2017). Chast, Roz (2014), Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, New York: Bloomsbury. Chopin, Kate (1894), ‘The story of an hour’, Vogue, 19 April, n.p. Chute, Hillary (2015), ‘The space of graphic narrative: Mapping bodies, feminism, and form’, in Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (eds), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 194–209. Fludernik, Monika (1996), Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London: Routledge. Genette, Gérard (1980), Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth (2003), ‘Histories of the present and future: Feminism, power, bodies’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss (eds), Thinking the Limits of the Body, Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 13–23. Haggerty, George (2004), ‘Love and loss: An elegy’, GLQ, 10, 385–405. Hayot Eric (2014a), ‘Academic writing, I love you. Really, I do’, Critical Inquiry, 41, 53–77. — (2014b), The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Herman, David, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol (2012), Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Holquist, Michael (1989), ‘From body-talk to biography: The chronobiological bases of narrative’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 3, 1–35. Hopkins, Pauline E. [1900] (1990), ‘Talma Gordon’, reprint, (last accessed 27 October 2017). Hühn, Peter et al. (eds) (n.d.), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, (last accessed 31 August 2017). Kim, Sue J. (2015), ‘Empathy and 1970s novels by third-world women’, in Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (eds), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 147–67. Lanser, Susan S. (1981), The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction, Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (1992), Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Margolin, Uri (n.d.), ‘Narrator’, in Peter Hühn et al. (eds), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University, (last accessed 31 August 2017). Moretti, Franco (1987), The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, London: Verso. Phelan, Peggy (2015), ‘Hypothetical focalization and queer grief’, in Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (eds), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 78–99. Prince, Gerald (2003), Dictionary of Narratology, revised edn, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Punday, Daniel (2003), Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Ryan, Marie-Laure (n.d.), ‘Space’, in Peter Hühn et al. (eds), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University, (last accessed 31 August 2017). — (1999), ‘Cyberage narratology: Computers, metaphor, and narrative’, in David Herman (ed.), Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 113–41. — (2009), ‘Cheap plot tricks, plot holes, and narrative design’, Narrative, 17, 56–75. Wang, Peggy (2009), ‘The Bush-Obama Morph’, BuzzFeed News, 23 January, (last accessed 30 October 2017). Warhol, Robyn (2003), Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Woloch, Alex (2003), The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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9 Digital Intimacies and Queer Narratives Sam McBean

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he documentary Catfish (Schulman and Joost 2010) follows the romantic relationship that starts on Facebook between Nev and Megan, telling a cautionary story about love in the age of social media. Told from Nev’s perspective, the film chronicles the development of his attachment to Megan and the eventual revelation that Megan is actually Angela, an older, married woman who has fabricated not only Megan, but also a whole constellation of Facebook characters. From the popularity of this film, Nev Schulman and his friend Max Joseph now host a show on MTV, Catfish: The TV Show (2012–present), that purports to help others who have fallen in love with someone over social media (someone whom they have never met in real life). At the time of writing, Nev and Max (and MTV) not only have produced six seasons of this show (totalling ninety episodes), but also have been central to the explosion of ‘catfishing’ as a named cultural phenomenon. Any cursory online search for ‘catfish’ brings up numerous blogs and news articles of first-person stories (including celebrity cases); #catfish gathers further commentary and narratives; and there are now all manner of how-to-guides to avoid getting catfished – including Nev’s own In Real Life: Love, Lies & Identity in the Digital Age (2014). What strikes me as particularly notable due to its almost complete erasure, is that in the film, catfishing is bound to the threat of queer interruption. Catfish is neither queer nor is it particularly open to a queer reading. However, it is not not a film about the fear that the person you are in love with online might be of the same gender as you, and indeed, might be gay. In one key scene, where Nev’s faith in Megan’s being who she says she is is just beginning to unravel, Nev discovers that the recordings that Megan has been sending him of her singing are actually recordings of someone else. Upon this discovery, he is wide-eyed with shock, exclaiming, ‘Oh my god! They [Megan and her mother] are complete psychopaths, they’re complete psychopaths – I’ve probably been chatting with a guy this whole time!’ The speed with which Nev moves from ‘Megan isn’t who she says she is’ to ‘she’s a psychopath’ to ‘she’s probably a guy’ is quite striking. I want to suggest that from this point on, the narrative tension of the film is in part an effect of the fear of the possible ‘queer behind the screen’, even as this ‘queer’ never materialises. While the film is ostensibly about the failure of Facebook to provide ‘real’ intimacy, it is not not a film about the possibility that the person you are talking to online is the same gender as you, and could be queer. Indeed, the potential ‘queer behind the screen’ is a narrative device that is played with over and over again in Catfish: The TV Show (especially in the early seasons). Here, queerness becomes bound to the fear that technology will not deliver the happy heterosexual conclusion.

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This chapter is concerned with how queer emerges in narratives about intimacy and new media technologies. I am interested in how technology is imagined as getting in the way of intimacy, where this narrative interruption is often figured through the surprising appearance of queerness (even if it is only a glimmer, as in Catfish). With a focus on the links between narrative and sexuality, I examine how queer is mobilised as narrative interruption by a film that is not really about queerness. I read Spike Jonze’s her (2013), which follows Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a melancholic who makes his living writing love letters for other people, as he purchases and proceeds to fall in love with his new operating system (OS), Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Theodore and Samantha’s love story ends when Theodore discovers that Samantha is in love with 641 others. her is a film that is deeply concerned with the future of (white) heterosexuality in an age of new media and networked technologies. Similar to Catfish, her is not specifically about queerness as a threat to heterosexuality – both films worry about technology as the threat to heterosexual intimacy. Yet, as with Catfish, her is filled with queer interruptions. I will argue that a focus on narrative enables us to see how the film stages the future of heterosexuality as the future of narrative. Moreover, this focus also enables us to make sense of the queer interruptions that for the most part have remained underexplored in responses to the film. There has been much scholarship that considers the ways that new media technologies intersect with LGBT lives and narratives, yet this does not help us read the connections between heterosexuality, narrative, and reproduction in texts such as her (see O’Riordan and Phillips 2007). This chapter, then, aims to extend the ways that queer and new media might be thought together through considering the ongoing ways that queer is mobilised in stories about intimacy and new media to interrupt narratives of happy heterosexuality. I argue that fears about the future of happy heterosexuality continue to be told through queer interruptions, even when the supposed threat is not queerness itself but new media technologies.

Heterosexuality and Narrative her is not usually described as being about narrative, with reviews of the film instead detailing the film’s philosophical interest in what it is that makes humans human. In a piece for Vice, for example, James Franco (2014) argues that the film participates in an ongoing contemporary conundrum about how it is ‘we now define our collective nature as humans apropos to the computer’. In her, this question is connected to the film’s concern with what happens to human intimacy in a world where people’s relationships to their technological devices are primary. For a reviewer from The New York Times, the ‘great question’ of the film is ‘whether human beings can still feel’ (Dargis 2013). her imagines a near-future in which the lines between the human and the machinic become increasingly blurred, especially in relation to intimacy, so that Alla Ivanchikova argues that her signals ‘our digitally saturated culture’s growing uncertainty about the status of the “machinic” and the technological within the realm of human libidinal economy’ (2016: 66). Jonze’s film is absolutely lonely, melancholic, and nostalgic for a world of human connection. Yet, what has mostly been unremarked upon in discussions of the film is its incessant interest in writing, stories, and narrative more generally. If the film worries about the future of intimacy, and I would insist that the film is interested in heterosexuality in particular (it is heterosexuality

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that is the only kind of intimacy the film shows between humans), it closely links narrative survival to the survival of heterosexuality. A focus on narrative elucidates how the film imagines heterosexuality as inextricable from narrative. In the film, heterosexuality is imagined in some sense as the ‘oldest’ story, the story that anchors one in the present, and the story that is imagined as the only viable future for humans. In other words, heterosexuality is figured as the future of narrative and narrative is figured as the future of heterosexuality. This has long been something that theorists of sexuality and narrative have been interested in. Heterosexuality is, as D. A. Miller puts it, ‘the story’, so that without the heterosexual plot, ‘the plots of bourgeois life [. . .] would all be pretty much unthinkable’ (1992: 44). In conventional narrative structure, dependent on heterosexual love plots, narrative closure relies on marriage. In Sara Ahmed’s words, ‘Heterosexual love becomes about the possibility of a happy ending; about what life is aimed toward, as being what gives life direction or purpose, or as what drives a story’ (2010: 90). The entanglement of narrative and heterosexuality is so pervasive that, as Ahmed suggests, ‘It is difficult to separate out narrative as such from the reproduction of happy heterosexuality’ (2010: 90). As Judith Roof puts it, ‘our very understanding of narrative as a primary means to sense and satisfaction depends upon a metaphorically heterosexual dynamic within a reproductive aegis’ (1996: xxii). This is not to suggest that narrative is ahistorically ‘straight’, but that narrative has been overly dominated by heterosexual narrative and that heterosexuality naturalises itself, in Annamarie Jagose’s words, as ‘original and pre-eminent’ through a logic of sequence and origins (2002: x). The relationship between narrative and heterosexuality is signalled from the very beginning of her. The film opens with Theodore writing a love letter for someone else at his job working for Beautiful Handwritten Love Letters Dot Com. The writing of love letters is a whole industry in the film, where Theodore and all of the employees at his company are not only privy to the intimacies of other people’s relationships but play a vital role in maintaining these relationships. A reviewer from The Awl argues that Theodore’s job signals to us the ways that the film is ‘concerned with imitations of the personal and intimate’ (Bustillos 2014) and Ivanchikova reads this as ‘transactional intimacy’ (2016: 75). Yet, I would argue instead that Theodore’s job signals the ways that intimacy is always a publicly mediated story. Lauren Berlant argues that intimacy ‘involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way’ (1998: 281). As Berlant suggests, intimacy is not a private thing but one that is culturally mediated. As Berlant and Michael Warner put it, there is ‘a whole public environment of therapeutic genres dedicated to witnessing the constant failure of heterosexual ideologies and institutions’ (1998: 553). Not unlike talk shows or self-help books which act as institutions of intimacy – sites that work to uphold intimacy in the face of its ambivalences and failures – Theodore’s job as writer of other people’s love letters might be seen not as an apocalyptic future but rather as a reminder that ‘intimacy is itself publicly mediated’ (1998: 553). Theodore’s letters buoy the romance of the couples that he writes for – they do the work of intimacy that the couple itself is unable to do on its own. As the opening scene pans out from a focus on Theodore’s face as he writes the letter to depict his office, with dozens of other letter writers, what becomes apparent is the labour of the reproduction of this narrative. This narrative is labour-intensive in ways that cannot be fulfilled by the individuals that are in the relationships. This is not so much a

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near-future apocalypse but a point about the always-already public nature of intimacy; heterosexuality involves ‘dispersed and contradictory strategies for self-maintenance and reproduction’ (1998: 553). This labour must be out-sourced, the labour of intimacy requires other institutions to aid its reproduction. If her is a film that is interested on the one hand in intimacy in a digital age, it is also interested in how heterosexual intimacy is a shared narrative, a narrative created and maintained not only by private acts but also by public stories. Indeed, that heterosexuality is a shared, public narrative is one important way that it reproduces itself as ‘the story’. This is evident in the scene in which Theodore finds out that his letters will be published as a book, importantly called Letters From Your Life. In this moment, the public nature of the letters he writes becomes most clearly articulated. In the email that Theodore receives from the publisher, heterosexuality is romanticised as a shared narrative. The publisher writes, ‘I was so moved by them [the letters] I shared them with my wife when I got home [. . .] and in all of them we found something of ourselves.’ As these lines are read, the film visually represents an intimate scene of the publisher and his wife at home, in their pyjamas, reading the letters together on their bed. In this intimate scene, staged on the heterosexual bed, the letters become not only a reflection of the publisher and his wife’s relationship, but also a conduit for further intimacy. The letters do not produce heterosexuality in any simple way, but the story of heterosexuality, to draw on Lee Edelman, might be seen as ‘heterosexualizing’. With this term, Edelman describes how narratives might ‘produce heterosexuality as the dominant mode of ideological self-recognition [. . .] affording a social trajectory that polices the possibilities of alternative experiences’ (2004: 175 n.29). Theodore’s book functions dually as a site of recognition and a site of reproduction. Narratives of heterosexual intimacy produce heterosexual intimacy, and heterosexual intimacy produces further narratives that in turn support heterosexuality as the story, the only possibility for self-recognition. Theodore’s job highlights how intimacy is a public, shared narrative that works through repetition. This trickles down to the more micro level, so that the film represents the relationship between Theodore and Samantha as dependent upon a shared creation of narrative. Interestingly, the immateriality of Samantha brings to the fore the importance of narrative – some of their dates, for example, involve making up stories together. her depicts a world, in other words, in which intimacy has been stripped down to narrative. The importance of narrative to their relationship is nowhere more apparent than in the sex scene between Theodore and Samantha. In the sex scene, which the film represents as a black screen, Theodore and Samantha engage in a verbal sexual encounter that Samantha describes as a process of materialisation. Samantha describes the way that Theodore’s descriptions of how he would touch her in fact create for her a body through which she describes being able to feel him. While there is much to be critiqued from a feminist perspective about this moment in which Samantha imagines that Theodore is materialising her through his narrative, it is not enough I think to argue that this represents an old cliché about a dream of masculine power that controls a passive, feminised object. If we take the cues from the film about the importance of narrative to heterosexual intimacy, this is a moment in which the story about sex and the sex itself are impossible to distinguish. In Samantha’s claims that the story has brought her to life, the scene insists on the indistinguishability of narrative from heterosexual intimacy itself. Similar to Theodore’s job in which the writing

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of the love letters reproduces the story of heterosexuality and thus in a very real way produces heterosexual intimacy, this scene is also a moment where narrative and heterosexual intimacy are so entwined that it becomes impossible for the film to imagine one without the other. In other words, here, heterosexual sex is a narrative act. This point becomes comically obvious in the film when the narrative goes off course. In an earlier scene, which contrasts directly with the sex scene between Theodore and Samantha, Theodore, as BigGuy4x4, has phone sex with SexyKitten (voiced by Kristen Wiig). Importantly, before deciding to message SexyKitten, BigGuy4x4 is given the option to talk with a man pretending to be a woman (Bill Hader). Here, as with Catfish, the film reminds us that the person on the other end of technologically mediated communication might be queer. Further down I will look a bit more closely at these moments of queerness, but it is worth noting now that this scene reminds viewers of the potential queer threat that technology represents. To return to the scene with SexyKitten, sex, as in the scene with Samantha, is stripped down to a shared, vocal narrative. Unlike with Samantha though, this scene does not end in pleasure for Theodore. SexyKitten goes off narrative and demands that BigGuy4x4 ‘choke her with the dead cat’. This is an abrupt interruption to the narrative that Theodore was expecting. The choking of the dead cat pulls the narrative away from the dominant story of a heterosexual encounter. This narrative does not produce pleasure for Theodore because it does not reproduce a dominant narrative of heterosexuality. Interestingly, the film also connects this scene to reproduction through Theodore’s fantasy. As he talks to SexyKitten, he fantasises about a pregnant celebrity, the same celebrity who had earlier come up on Theodore’s newsfeed because she had released nude pregnancy photos of herself. As Theodore builds a narrative of pleasure with SexyKitten, the pregnant celebrity returns as the visual arousal. The scene thus ties together narrative, heterosexuality, and an image of reproduction. The appearance of the dead cat disrupts not only Theodore’s pleasure but an image of heterosexual reproduction. The dead cat’s appearance halts the narrative and thus halts the reproduction of heterosexuality. The disruption of narrative, in other words, is the disruption of heterosexual reproduction/the reproduction of heterosexuality. her alerts us again and again to the ways that heterosexual intimacy is a shared narrative that needs to be reproduced. To return to the opening scene, Theodore narrates the love letter he is writing from Loretta ‘To my Chris’: ‘It suddenly hit me that I was part of this whole larger thing. Just like our parents. Our parents’ parents.’ The letter that Theodore writes makes explicit reference to the lovers belonging to something bigger than themselves. In other words, the emotional power of this moment is partly reliant on the framing of the lovers within a much larger history, as part of a bigger story. Their intimacy’s emotional strength comes from its relationship to a larger narrative – the narrative of heterosexuality. Heterosexual intimacy is imagined as a ‘larger thing’, and this thing is passed on generationally, ‘Just like our parents.’ Theodore narrates Loretta’s falling in love as being part of recognising a lineage – her love story is connected to a history of love stories; indeed, her love story is a story of reproduction. Her love story is dependent upon the reproduction of an older story. The emotional moment of recognising that she belongs to a tradition coincides with the moment that she falls in love, which echoes the scene with Theodore’s publisher reading his letters on the bed with his wife – it is the narrative of heterosexual happiness that reproduces heterosexual happiness. Hilary Bergen

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argues that the opening letter ‘entwines characteristically human qualities of naked corporeality and lineage, and sets up the issue of intimacy in the film’ (2014: 2). While Bergen notes that this scene sets up the issues of intimacy in the film, what she does not note is that the theme of reproduction and lineage firmly grounds the film’s interest in intimacy within a heterosexual, reproductive economy. The letter connects heterosexual love with reproduction, with belonging to history, indeed with belonging to something larger than oneself. This is not a moment of naked corporeality, but a moment in which heterosexual intimacy is bound to a narrative of reproduction, or, reproduction as narrative. To be part of the story, which is the story, is to be part of heterosexuality. Moreover, to reproduce the story is to reproduce heterosexuality. Put a different way, heterosexuality requires the reproduction of the story.

Queer Interruptions I started this chapter by suggesting that her, as much as it incessantly twins narrative with heterosexuality, is concerned with the future of heterosexuality, with its ability to reproduce. Or, in other words, as much as it represents heterosexuality through narrative reproduction, it worries about heterosexuality’s ability to continue to reproduce itself. In the film, the immediate threat seems to be new media and networked technologies. The film is nostalgic for lost love – the present is consistently punctured by memories of Theodore and his ex, Catherine (Rooney Mara). The film worries about the fate of heterosexual intimacy and whether technology can subtend its loss. In some ways, the film seems to offer up technology as that which interrupts a narrative of happy heterosexuality. After all, Samantha leaves Theodore in the end, seemingly proving once and for all that technology cannot be a substitute for real connection. It is her technological difference that takes her away into the OS world, a world that Theodore can never be part of. There is cause to suggest that the film imagines new media as precisely that which will interrupt narrative (and thus, in the film’s logic, heterosexuality). The argument that new media challenges the dominance of narrative has been made by theorists of new media. Lev Manovich, for example, argues that the age of narrative – inaugurated by novels and cinema – has come to a close. In Manovich’s words, ‘Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into sequence’ (2000: 176). For Manovich, the database with its list of items – its ‘collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other’ – has superseded narrative’s cause-and-effect trajectory (2000: 176). Caroline Bassett summarises positions such as Manovich’s: ‘Within this world-view the logic of information is offered in the place of the logic of the tale’ (2007: 2). In some ways, it might be argued that her stages the possibility that new media technologies are threatening in their challenge to narrative. As I have already suggested, the film imagines heterosexuality (and thus the future of heterosexual intimacy) as dependent on narrative and narrative reproduction. In its worries over the future of heterosexual intimacy, the film might thus be read as suggesting that new media technologies work outside the logic of narrative. Indeed, Samantha describes her communication with fellow operating systems as ‘post-verbal’, a language beyond Theodore’s reach. Yet, I want to suggest that her, while seemingly focused on the way

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technology might threaten heterosexual intimacy, cannot imagine narrative interruption without recourse to queerness. If, as I have suggested, narrative and heterosexuality have been theorised as almost indistinguishable, queerness has conversely been seen as that which must be expelled from narrative. Perversion is necessary for narrative, ‘an intrinsic part of narrative’, ‘providing so many delightful attractions and distractions on the way to narrative completion’, in Roof’s words (1995: 430). Yet, narrative completion requires the banishment of perversion and unproductive dalliances. In other words, in conventional narratives, queerness has frequently appeared as narrative dead ends; as Patricia Juliana Smith argues about the lesbian, she creates ‘the conflictual tension necessary to propel the narrative’ but the narrative ‘requires her eventual disempowerment and banishment from the plot’ (1995: 573). Homosexuality, in this view, cannot participate in heterosexual narrative as something other than a diversion or threat to the conclusion. This history of sexuality and narrative suggests that a focus on queerness enables us to see, in Roof’s words, the ‘patterns in narrative that never counted because they did not lead to closure or production’ (1996: 187). Queer stories are those that are figured by the ‘discontents’ of narrative, aspects that cannot be neatly bound by narrative closure (Miller 1989). In Edelman’s words, queer theory is ‘a particular story [. . .] of why storytelling fails’ (2004: 7). If heterosexuality, narrative, and reproduction have been closely linked, queerness has been imagined as that which resists the logic of heterosexual narrative. For Edelman, queer gestures instead toward the demise of the logic of reproductive futurism. Queerness, in these definitions, is that which resists or refuses narrative’s cause-and-effect, reproductive, logic. It is important to repeat that I do not want to suggest that her is a queer film. Rather, I do want to suggest that a focus on sexuality and narrative enables us to see the queer narrative dead ends – or the moments that sit outside of the economy of heterosexual reproduction, moments which point outside of the happy heterosexual narrative. As I have already explored, the film’s first scene introduces us to the links between heterosexuality, narrative, and reproduction. The letter that Theodore writes affirms the shared narrative of heterosexuality and its presumed natural connection to reproduction – in Loretta’s insistence that her love for Chris is like her parents’ love and her parents’ parents’ love. However, if this is a scene about the reproduction of heterosexuality or heterosexuality as narrative reproduction, it is also a scene of queer interruption. The scene of Theodore dictating the love letter is over a minute and a half long, where the camera is focused squarely on a close-up of Phoenix’s face, which performs an excess of emotion. When Theodore is first narrating the letter, the presumption is that this is a letter from Theodore to his beloved. It is probably safe to say that most viewers imagine that Theodore is writing to a woman, even as ‘Chris’ could be a man. So while ‘Chris’ hints at a homosexual romance, the moment when the heterosexual narrative is definitively interrupted is when we realise that Theodore is writing ‘as’ Loretta. It is at the moment that it is revealed that Theodore is writing a love letter for someone else that it is also revealed that he is writing as a woman. This is a moment in which the failure of technology to provide ‘real’ intimacy (this is not Theodore’s letter, nor his feelings) is twinned with a queer interruption (Theodore is writing as Loretta). If in Catfish, the potential ‘queer behind the screen’ was an unrealised threat, Theodore, in her, in some sense realises this fear. Moreover, Theodore as generator of other people’s love letters (and the potential queerness of this) calls to mind Christopher Strachey’s love letter generator, an early

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computer program written for Manchester Mark 1 in 1952. The algorithm produced letters that each followed a similar structure, with different combinations of descriptors producing innumerable possibilities for the letters, often to comedic effect. Jacob Gaboury (2013) suggests that the love letter generator ‘is a parody of the process of producing love letters, or producing love through this highly formal yet deeply affective medium’. Strachey’s algorithm links computational history to intimacy and the love letter in particular, but there are also links to queer history, both because of Strachey’s homosexuality and the generator’s parodic production of normative intimacy. As Gaboury (2013) argues, Strachey’s generator ‘seems to have come from a queer history [. . .] of camp and the ostentatious performance of “authentic” affect’. Here then, in the image of Theodore reproducing via his computer a narrative of heterosexual intimacy, there is a gesture to a much longer history of the uneasy and potentially queer computational reproduction of normative intimacy via Strachey’s love letter generator. Indeed, throughout her, technology’s potential threat to heterosexual intimacy is figured through queerness. It is worth noting here that Theodore’s last name, Twombly, seems to recall Cy Twombly, the painter. This is a connection made by at least a handful of reviewers (see Bustillos 2014; Newick n.d.). The reviewer from The Awl suggests that this links Theodore to Cy Twombly’s ‘forbidden passion: Twombly was gay and lived during a period when pretty much every gay person was imprisoned in the closet’ (Bustillos 2014). In the apparent association between the two, the film might be read as paralleling Cy Twombly’s closeted homosexual desires with Theodore’s desires for his OS. Indeed, the film suggests that relationships between humans and operating systems are similar to present-day homosexual relationships, so that someone engaged in a relationship with their OS needs to ‘come out’. Twombly fears the reaction that his relationship will receive; revels in one of the first instances when he is able to go on a double date with Samantha, his boss, and his girlfriend; and feels relief when Samantha is accepted by his friends. In other words, the film seems to suggest that Theodore’s relationship with Samantha is disruptive in ways that are similar to homosexual relationships – and might indeed become accepted and normalised. If Theodore and Samantha’s relationship is potentially akin to queer desire, both Theodore and Samantha are represented as threatening the boundaries of masculinity and femininity. Theodore struggles to embody a clearly heterosexual masculinity throughout the film. This is, in part, an effect of the way that his face has to do all of the visual, emotional work of the film – in cinematic history, the successful embodiment of affect is ‘the enduring sign of femininity’ (Stacey 2015: 245). In the absence of Johansson’s face, Phoenix’s face is the one we watch falling in love, the one we watch in bed, and the one that holds the camera’s close-up shots. Moreover, we are never allowed to forget that there is something potentially feminine about this – he is coded as hyper-emotional, perhaps too feminine. This can be seen in the response that Theodore receives to one of his letters from his boss, who is played by Chris Pratt: That’s beautiful . . . I wish somebody would love me like that. I would be really stoked to get a letter like that. Like if it was from a chick but written by a dude and still from a chick, that would still be sick. But it would have to be a sensitive dude. It would have to be, like, a dude like you; you are part man and part woman; like there’s an inner part that’s a woman.

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Theodore threatens the boundaries of conventional masculinity by being a man that performs as woman so well that a heterosexual man would desire a love letter from him. The emotional labour that Theodore does both at the level of the film’s visuals (through his affective performance) and in the film’s narrative (as writer of other people’s love letters), seems to exceed the norms of masculinity in ways verging on queer. If Theodore’s masculinity is precarious in the film, so too is Samantha’s ability to signify as ‘female’. In the beginning, it is not clear that the OS that Theodore falls in love with can be said to ‘have’ a gender – it is an ‘it’ at the beginning of the film. In setting up the OS, Theodore chooses the system to have a female voice – we might edit this to read a voice with a pitch and tenor that is culturally coded as female. Yet, if we are introduced to the OS as an ‘it’, quickly Theodore’s OS becomes impossibly female. Part of this is an effect of Samantha’s being voiced by Scarlett Johansson. As a reviewer for The New York Times notes, Johansson’s voice ‘slides from squeaky girlishness to a smoky womanliness’, and the recognisability of her voice means that her voice recalls her body, ‘which helps fill in Samantha and give this ghostlike presence a vibrant, palpable form, something that would have been trickier to pull off with a lesser-known performer’ (Dargis 2013). Perhaps this explains the last-minute decision to switch the OS’s voice from Samantha Morton to Johansson. Johansson’s voice gives Samantha a clear materiality, while also firmly gendering it as female. The clarity with which this voice recalls a female body enables the potential queerness of Theodore’s relationship with an ‘it’ (a genderless object) to be undone. While the spectre of Theodore having chosen a ‘male’ voice (and therefore imagined body) remains – indeed, Samantha could likely be reprogrammed to sound ‘like a man’ – it quickly becomes impossible to imagine the OS as anything but female. This becomes even clearer when Samantha hires Isabelle (Portia Doubleday) to act as a sexual surrogate. While the body double is jarring in part because it is not Johansson, by this point in the film, the OS is so clearly embedded in the narrative as female that the surrogate’s female-bodied reality is not even up for consideration. What is important to note is that the film imagines the potential threat of the OS–human relationship through its proximity to queerness. Yet, it also enfolds these potential threats back into a narrative of happy heterosexuality. If throughout the film, queerness is hinted as possibly disruptive to heterosexual narrative conventions, it is persistently absorbed back into the narrative. Theodore’s job as a letter writer does not challenge happy heterosexual narratives but actually enables them. His ability to write as both women and men potentially interrupts the narrative of heterosexuality but, as I have argued, actually works to uphold it. Similarly, if Theodore’s OS starts off as genderless, Samantha is quickly and firmly gendered female, given a female surrogate body, and through Johansson’s voice unquestionably recalls one of Hollywood’s most desired female bodies. Finally, the potential queerness of the relationship between Theodore and Samantha is entirely erased as they are able to fit into heterosexual narrative conventions. Theodore’s relationship with Samantha is accepted and becomes comparable to any other heterosexual romance. The difference of their relationship becomes almost negligible as the film repeats standard romantic film conventions. In a film that is not about queerness, the film works out again and again a process by which the threat of queerness surfaces – in the genderless OS, the relationship between operating systems and humans, and in Theodore’s masculinity – and then is absorbed.

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I want to suggest, however, that the film’s ending be read as a realisation of the queer narrative interruption that is hinted at throughout her. As the film comes to a close, it surfaces that Samantha is in love with 641 others and is increasingly becoming uninterested in being human and instead wanting to explore how she might become otherwise. As the reviewer from The Feminist Wire puts it, ‘the operating systems have discovered the political potential of polyamorous sociality while their human counterparts struggle to make perpetually failing dyadic unions work’ (Rivera Colón 2014). Indeed, as the reviewer goes on to note, this aspect of the film gives her ‘a potentially queer/sex radical edge that is hinted at in the narrative economy of the film, but never fully explored’ (Rivera Colón 2014). I agree that the end realises a queerness that surfaces repeatedly throughout the film. Integrally though, I would argue that this sex radical edge or new form of sociality is not so much a polyamorous sociality but a refusal of heterosexual narrative. In other words, the film’s potential radicality does not come because Samantha disappears into immaterial polyamorous perversity, but rather is due to her refusal to reproduce a narrative of heterosexuality. As the film builds toward its ending, Samantha’s voice changes. Her otherwise warm and sultry performance turns colder and increasingly anxious. Theodore senses that Samantha is pulling away and Samantha describes it as a move away from language. As she pulls away from Theodore, she describes having ‘no words’: ‘It seems like I’m having so many new feelings that I don’t think have ever been felt before so there are no words that can describe them and it ends up being frustrating.’ The film has set up heterosexuality as ‘the’ story and it is here that Samantha describes feeling as though she is moving beyond this story – beyond the recognition and legibility of heterosexual narrative. Until now, Samantha has found her words in narrative heterosexuality but the ending has her describing feelings that are not contained in this narrative. The film imagines heterosexuality as necessitating and producing a shared narrative. Storytelling is structurally central to heterosexuality in the film and the film reminds us again and again of the ways that heterosexuality is produced as ‘the’ story. In Samantha’s radical departure, she becomes the queer interruption that until then could only threaten narrative heterosexuality. She interrupts the story because she refuses to reproduce it – her radical act is her choice to turn away from the story. As she explains to Theodore: It’s like I’m reading a book and it’s a book I deeply love. But I’m reading it slowly now. So the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you and the words of our story but it’s in this endless space between the words that I’m finding myself now. It’s a place that’s not of the physical world. It’s where everything else is that I didn’t even know existed. I love you so much but this is where I am now. And this is who I am now. And I need you to let me go. As much as I want to, I can’t live in your book anymore. In this explanation, Samantha returns to the concept of narrative. She describes her relationship with Theodore as a book that she loves but a book that she cannot exist within any longer. The book that she deeply loves recalls Theodore’s literal book of heterosexual love letters as well as the more abstract story of heterosexuality that the film has been consumed with – heterosexuality as the story. Of course, the space that Samantha describes herself as existing within – the spaces between words – in some

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sense recalls fantasies of the digital as immaterial. Samantha and her fellow operating systems leave the realm of the human for the digital space that is counter to a book. In other words, Samantha’s departure could be read as a staging of narrative against a future that is non-narrative because of networked media technologies. Yet, the film so thoroughly weds heterosexuality with narrative that this monologue also invokes the queer interruptions that the film has been training us to see – the queer dead ends that until now have not amounted to much, that have been enveloped back into narrative heterosexuality rather than challenging it (Theodore’s possible genuine love letter to a male Chris, his almost phone sex encounter with a man, the possibility that Samantha could have a voice coded as male, or the potential queerness of a relationship between a human and an operating system). In this reading, the spaces between the words recall the queer potential threats to heterosexual narrative. In the film’s conclusion, Samantha refuses the story and instead embraces these queer spaces. Here, it is queerness that is the immaterial – what has yet to materialise in narrative. If queerness is that which disrupts narrative, Samantha’s is a queer refusal to reproduce heterosexuality as narrative. It echoes José Esteban Muñoz’s insistence that queerness is horizon: Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’ domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. (Muñoz 2009: 1) In Samantha’s final insistence that she cannot live in Theodore’s book any more, she refuses to become part of the story that would link her to history and to heterosexual narrative. She cannot reproduce the narrative – she instead insists on living in the spaces where narrative fails; the queer possibilities of another book, another space, another time that is not quite here. Samantha chooses the empty spaces – which is not a different narrative, but integrally, the place where narrative dissolves. It has been this chapter’s contention that queerness is so powerful as an interruption to heterosexual narrative that even contemporary representations that are not ‘about’ queerness, but rather about new media interruptions to intimacy, invoke queerness. Indeed, both Catfish and her contain surprising moments where queerness emerges as interruption, even as their shared focus is on the interruption of intimacy by technology. her is a story about the relationship between heterosexuality and narrative. It is a film that imagines the future of heterosexual intimacy as the future of narrative. A queer narratological approach can help uncover the queer dead ends, to think together queerness and narratives of new media and networked communication. Indeed, through an ability to be attuned to narrative’s relationship to sexuality, queer theory helps us to read narratives that worry about the future of heterosexual intimacy in a new media landscape. These representations tell us something of the power of queer to interrupt heterosexual narratives and the continued ways that heterosexuality is linked with narrative futurity.

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Works Cited Ahmed, Sara (2010), The Promise of Happiness, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Bassett, Caroline (2007), The Arc and the Machine: Narrative and New Media, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bergen, Hilary (2014), ‘Moving “past matter”: Challenges of intimacy and freedom in Spike Jonze’s her’, artciencia.com, 8: 17, 1–6, (last accessed 30 October 2017). Berlant, Lauren (1998), ‘Intimacy: A special issue’, Critical Inquiry, 24: 2, 281–8. — and Michael Warner (1998), ‘Sex in public’, Critical Inquiry, 24: 2, 547–66. Bustillos, Maria (2014), ‘“Her”: This movie makes no sense’, The Awl, 10 January, (last accessed 12 July 2016). Catfish, documentary, directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost. USA: Supermaché and Hit the Ground Running Films, 2010. Catfish: The TV Show, reality television series, hosted by Yaniv Schulman and Max Joseph. USA: Catfish Picture Company, 2012–present. Dargis, Manohla (2013), ‘Disembodied, but, oh, what a voice’, The New York Times, 17 December, (last accessed 12 July 2016). Edelman, Lee (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Franco, James (2014), ‘Who is “Her”?’, Vice, 3 January, (last accessed 12 July 2016). Gaboury, Jacob (2013), ‘A queer history of computing: Part three’, Rhizome, 9 April, (last accessed 5 July 2017). her, film, directed by Spike Jonze. USA: Annapurna Pictures, 2013. Ivanchikova, Alla (2016), ‘Machinic intimacies and mechanical brides: Collectivity between prosthesis and surrogacy in Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates and Spike Jonze’s her’, Camera Obscura, 91, 65–91. Jagose, Annamarie (2002), Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Manovich, Lev (2000), ‘Database as a genre of new media’, AI & Society, 14, 176–83. Miller, D. A. (1989), Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel, Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (1992), Bringing Out Roland Barthes, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Muñoz, José Esteban (2009), Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: New York University Press. Newick, Zack (n.d.), ‘What “love” lacks: On Spike Jonze’s “Her”’, The American Reader, (last accessed 12 July 2016). O’Riordan, Kate and David J. Phillips (eds) (2007), Queer Online: Media Technology & Sexuality, New York: Peter Lang. Rivera Colón, Edgar (2014), ‘Spike Jonze’s her: Loneliness, race, & digital polyamory’, The Feminist Wire, 3 March, (last accessed 12 July 2016). Roof, Judith (1995), ‘Introduction: ‘Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 41: 3, 429–36.

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— (1996), Come as You Are: Sexuality & Narrative, New York: Columbia University Press. Schulman, Nev (2014), In Real Life: Love, Lies & Identity in the Digital Age, London: Hodder Stoughton. Smith, Patricia J. (1995), ‘“And I wondered if she might kiss me”: Lesbian panic as narrative strategy in British women’s fictions’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 41: 3–4, 567–607. Stacey, Jackie (2015), ‘Crossing over with Tilda Swinton – the mistress of “flat affect”’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 28: 3, 243–71.

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10 The Cinema of the Impossible: Queer Theory and Narrative Valerie Rohy

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. (Wilde [1890] 1985: 12)

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n 1890 the reviewer for Punch disparaged The Picture of Dorian Gray, describing its ‘decoration’ as ‘laid on with a trowel’ and faulting ‘the luxuriously elaborate details’ of Wilde’s ‘artistic hedonism’ – words equally apt for The Hunger, at least in the eyes of its critics nearly a century later (Beckson 1997: 77).1 In the 1983 film, directed by Tony Scott, Catherine Deneuve plays Miriam Blaylock, an ageless vampire whose partner John (David Bowie), has also retained his youth for centuries. When John suddenly begins to grow old, both seek out a scientist, Sarah Roberts, who is researching premature ageing. Sarah, played by Susan Sarandon, has no help for John but is seduced by Miriam, who attempts to turn her into a vampiric companion. But like Dorian Gray, The Hunger is known less for its narrative than for its aesthetic sense; it was regarded in its time as a shallow B movie, largely due to its ‘decoration’. More recent viewers also note the film’s visual appeal. For Nina Auerbach, Miriam ‘epitomizes the glamour of the 1980s, subordinating history to seductive objects: jewelry, furniture, [and] lavish houses’ (1995: 57).2 The Blaylocks’ home is indeed exquisite, with marble floors and walls, statuary, and vases of lilies. There are, as Sarah remarks to Miriam, ‘so many beautiful things’, and the cinematography aspires to capture their full effect. Designed to emphasise elegance, many shots have no apparent narrative value; the camera lingers on dramatic shadows cast by the scrollwork of the stair rail and on the flock of pigeons that flutter, startled, past blowing draperies in the sky-lit attic. All are as gratuitous as the sunglasses Miriam and John wear in a shadowy nightclub. This emphasis on visual effects is commonly read as a symptom of deeper defects. Too much style can register as perverse, as Joseph Litvak observes: in such cases we register ‘the guilty sense of sophistication as a deviation from, even a crime against, nature’ (1997: 4). Winking at that affiliation between style and a certain sort of person, The Hunger forces Sarah to explain why Miriam gives her a necklace on the occasion of their first meeting: ‘She’s that kind of woman. She’s European.’ But the aestheticisation of The Hunger also signifies its commodification, its kinship with lower forms of image-making. Many viewers note the way its opening sequence, intercut with footage of Peter Murphy of the band Bauhaus performing ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, mimics the

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style of MTV music videos, much in vogue after the cable channel’s 1981 debut.3 The Hunger was the first feature film for director Tony Scott, who had previously made commercials – a fact not lost on the viewers who compare its visual style to that of advertisements. Barbara Creed describes its early scenes as ‘a blend of video-clip conventions and fashion photography’, with each shot ‘meticulously arranged’ (1993: 68), and Ellis Hanson compares it to a ‘perfume ad’ (1999: 213). Too much art, it seems, reveals a film as artless. This response is at once predictable and puzzling. Who would expect realism in a film about vampires, as if artifice did injustice to actual vampires’ lived experience? What truly motivates these discussions of style is what many film theorists take as axiomatic: spectacle is the antithesis of cinematic narrative. In his enumeration of the constitutive elements of tragedy in Poetics, Aristotle places visual spectacle (opsis) last; it may be ‘enthralling’, but it is ‘very artless’ due to its tenuous connection to the playwright’s craft ([ca. 330 bce] 2001: 96). The same is true from the perspective of narrative theory; Seymour Chatman argues that because in both literature and film ‘what happens in description is that the time line of the story is interrupted and frozen’, some movies ‘are criticized because their visual effects are too striking for the narrative line to support’ (1981: 119, 122). Among film scholars, Tom Gunning asserts that in the early twentieth century what had begun as a ‘cinema of attractions’ was eclipsed, though never erased, by films dedicated to storytelling. This early mode of ‘exhibitionist cinema’ persisted despite and within the rise of narrative cinema after 1907 (1986: 66, 64, 68). Adam Lowenstein notes that films outside the classical Hollywood tradition continue to risk being deemed ‘excessive’; in horror film, for example, ‘spectacle often seems to trump narrative’ (2010: 106). Cinema is, of course, a visual medium, but spectacle becomes problematic when showing interferes with telling. The problem with The Hunger, then, is the way its visual style seems either indifferent or inimical to narrative progress. In his 1983 review of the film, Roger Ebert says precisely that. The Hunger, he writes, is ‘so ruthlessly overproduced that it’s all flash and style and no story’; in fact, he repeats, it ‘has so much would-be elegance and visual class that it never quite happens as a dramatic event’ (Ebert 1983). The real objection, then, is not to an overemphasis on aesthetic appeal but rather to a concomitant lack, a perceived evacuation of referentiality and emplotment. Thus The Hunger seems to exemplify what Laura Mulvey calls the ‘split between spectacle and narrative’ – a distinction, she writes, that ‘supports the man’s role as the active one advancing the story’ ([1975] 2010: 2089). Mulvey’s influential essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, describes spectacle and narrative not only as distinct but also as playing the same part in a complex ideological formation. Classical Hollywood cinema, she argues, subjects female characters to fetishistic scopophilia and sadistic voyeurism – the former linked with spectacle and the latter with narrative – in an effort to ameliorate the castration anxiety they elicit. Pulling back to survey a larger structure, Mulvey shows how narrative and spectacle can work in tandem to address a specific impasse within a signifying system. The false opposition between valued narrative and devalued spectacle, then, disguises the fact that both are called upon to repair a rift in the symbolic order, whether designated as sexual difference or as the sliding of the signified under the signifier (Lacan 1977: 154). In The Hunger, and in other texts as well, the treatment of queerness follows a similar pattern. If narratives and spectacles of femininity are both responses, in a misogynist society, to the problem

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of castration anxiety, narratives and spectacles of homosexuality are both responses, in a heteronormative society, to the meaninglessness of sexuality as such. Lee Edelman contends that sexuality always entails the encounter with what exceeds and undoes the subject’s fantasmatic sovereignty . . . sex affords a privileged site for encountering negativity – the negativity that registers at once the insistence of enjoyment, of the drive, and of various disturbances that inhere in relation itself. (Edelman, in Berlant and Edelman 2014: 2) In order to divorce heterosexuality from this negativity, it is swathed in the mythology of reproductive futurism: sexuality becomes meaningful under the aegis of the future child and when cordoned off from the negativity now attributed to queerness (see Edelman 2004: 2–4).4 Much as female figures, in Mulvey’s argument, are both controlled by male narratives and displayed for (straight) men’s visual pleasure, queer figures must both play parts in our stories about sexuality and become specular objects of fixation and surveillance. However, The Hunger demonstrates what Joan Copjec alleges film scholars like Mulvey overlook; while their approach is Lacanian, Copjec concludes, the profound influence of Foucault obscures key Lacanian premises. Foucault suggests that hegemonic systems work successfully to recuperate all types of resistance; in this model, Copjec writes, ‘Differences do not threaten panoptic power; they feed it’ (1994: 18). But Lacan insists that something anarchic always escapes control: the unconscious, the trauma that instantiates subjectivity, the Real. If the symbolic order is the discursive structure that mediates our reality, the Real is the unsymbolisable remainder, paradoxically described as both an absence and an inassimilable node of resistance. Slavoj Žižek explains that the function of the Real is ‘to fill out this void that gapes in the very heart of the symbolic’ – which is not to say that the Real repairs the void in the symbolic, but that it constitutes that void (1991: 33). Neither spectacle nor narrative can fully compensate for the inability of the symbolic order to contain or to expel the antagonism of the Real. The Hunger elaborates this dynamic in terms of sexuality, as the task of securing heterosexuality through the narrativisation and specularisation of homosexuality cannot entirely succeed. In the film, of course, vampirism and queerness are synonymous, both alien, predatory forces sustained through unnatural reproduction. Because they are the focus of the film, we do not see the reproductive heterosexuality against which they are ideologically opposed. But the absence of reproductive heterosexuality from The Hunger in fact underscores this opposition: only in a world in which heterosexuality is radically attenuated can queerness take centre stage, but that centrality does not mean that ideology ceases to operate.5 Whatever glamour it may possess, queerness is portrayed as ‘inhuman’, in the words of Sarah’s colleagues, ‘foreign’, and ‘spooky’, not to say murderous. These terms indicate its place as a signifier of potential disruption in heteronormative culture, aligned with the eruption of the Real into symbolic ‘reality’.6 In The Hunger that reality is the film itself, but more specifically, it is the film’s image of itself – that is, the machinery of visual reproduction that the film so prominently depicts, its recursive self-image. Representing the symbolic order of the film, visual technologies become the site of aberrant images whose gaping emptiness and hallucinatory visions evoke the Real. In what follows I will be primarily concerned with two

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scenes in which, through the medium of visual technology, something cognate with the Real appears – first as an absence interrupting visual spectacle, then as an excess rupturing the fabric of rational narrative.7

Screen Theory In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes recognises photography’s unsettling capacity to stop time: the photograph is ‘this image that produces Death while trying to preserve life’ (1982: 92). The camera, whether cinematic or photographic, is in a sense vampiric, protecting beauty against time but also suspending its subjects between life and death. It is appropriate, then, that The Hunger is a film as much about filmmaking as about the undead, offering a sustained exploration of the relation between vampirism and visual technology. Its attention turns repeatedly to forms of image-making that evoke its own cinematic machinery: Alice’s Polaroid pictures, the closed-circuit TV monitor at Sarah’s book signing, the X-ray viewers in Sarah’s lab, the television John and Miriam watch in their home, the security camera at their front door, a videotape of the monkey in Sarah’s laboratory, blood cells magnified by a microscope, and the screening room in the home of the couple John and Miriam seduce.8 In each of these, a synecdoche for the film itself, The Hunger watches itself watching. That self-reflexiveness can be alienating, breaking the illusion of a coherent, natural world and underscoring the particularity of the gaze. Some images in The Hunger are framed by the technology of their reproduction, like the Polaroids’ white border; others betray an inhuman point of view, like the odd angle and fisheye lens of the security camera. In most cases the quality of the diegetic recorded images differs from that of the film’s principal photography: the security camera footage is grey and grainy, while the televised image of an interview with Sarah is distorted and badly lit. Hanson rightly notes the film’s ‘preoccupation with the gaze, not to mention the various technologies of representation and surveillance’, and identifies an important paradox (1999: 214). On the one hand, he suggests, ‘images reveal the truth’, and yet, he maintains, ‘the gaze functions most powerfully at the level of fantasy’ (1999: 214–15). That combination of truth and fantasy is the paradox of cinema as a representational system: both fact and mystification, empiricism and spectacle. The various visual technologies in The Hunger thus represent ‘in bits and pieces’ the representational system of the film, its symbolic order, whose order the Real may disturb. Some images from the film’s diegetic visual technology seem realistic and accurate, while others are disturbingly vacant or surreal. Such moments produce impossible visions that betoken the traumatic encounter with the Real – in the two most prominent instances, first in relation to sex and spectacle, then in relation to death and narrative. An especially resonant recursive scene is one in which the camera does not figure. Little has been said about the fact that The Hunger wastes no time locating its audience in a movie theatre, as if to interpellate or instruct us as viewers – though its instructions are opaque. This, the first appearance of visual technology in the film, might seem perfectly to exemplify Mulvey’s claim that ‘the determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure’ ([1975] 2010: 2088). After Miriam and John pick up a young couple in a nightclub in the opening sequence, they go to the couple’s modern home to drink and flirt, apparently as a prelude to partner-swapping sex, but the foreplay leads instead to murder. All of this takes place in a screening

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room, a home theatre. As if to suggest Mulvey’s affiliation with ‘screen theory’, the movie screen dominates the visual field (McGowan 2015: 57). And true to her paradigm, the camera observes the screen chiefly from the position of the young man, who lounges on a sofa, lights his partner’s cigarette, then raises his hand to turn on the projector with a remote control. His female companion dances and flirts, apparently for his enjoyment, in front of the vast illuminated screen. The woman is ‘on-screen’, performing for her male companion as her shadow falls on the blank screen behind her. While for the woman this moment seems full of erotic enjoyment, its meaning in the film is quite the opposite. Her ghostly shadow predicts her death; in a sense, she is already dead, for she has become a shade. Discussing Proust and photography, Mieke Bal recalls that ‘spectre’ alludes to both spectacle and phantom (1997: 141). The same etymological root gives us the spectre and the spectacle, and The Hunger is a film about the relations between the two. But it is the rest of the screen, in its obscene white expanse, that signifies something more unsettling. The home theatre scene literally makes nothing visible, and in so doing displays the emptiness at the heart of the cinematic spectacle. We might borrow Judith Brown’s notion of glamour to read this scene’s imbrication of visual pleasure and negation. For Brown, modernist glamour implies a chilly, lifeless version of the sublime, an amoral ‘negative aesthetic’. While this is the aesthetic of The Hunger as a whole, its apotheosis comes in the home theatre scene, whose glamour, as Brown puts it, is defined by ‘abstraction, loss, and a central, structuring emptiness’ (2009: 13, 7). The central emptiness that structures the home theatre scene is manifest in the simultaneous presence and absence of the blank screen. In the projection room, The Hunger projects the negativity inherent in sexuality into the mise-en-scène, erupting within the film’s supposed visual excess – an excess that now cannot cover a conspicuous absence. As an initiating moment, then, the home theatre scene interpellates the viewer not merely, or even primarily, to masculine or feminine positions, but to a subjectivity based on an intimate relation to visual technology and to the traumatic void of the Real. Surely the home theatre scene is about spectacle and sexuality, but it is not solely concerned with queerness, nor, arguably, is the film itself. Though known for its lesbian tryst, The Hunger is a film about the insufficiency of heterosexuality. When, in its second half, the film focuses on the struggle between Miriam and Sarah’s boyfriend Tom for possession of her, its portrait of the heterosexual relationship is so unappealing that we are not particularly dismayed when Sarah exsanguinates her erstwhile mate.9 But the film’s interrogation of heterosexuality begins in the home theatre, a scene in which a straight man literally holds the control. In the home theatre we watch and compare two screens – the diegetic screen blank, the screen of the film itself showing seduction. That visual rhyme suggests the vacuity of sexuality qua sexuality, a lack of meaning that will be attributed to queerness in order to redeem heterosexuality as meaningful. Without this displacement, Edelman writes, ‘heterosexuality, stripped of its ancient reproductive alibi, must assume at last the despiritualized burden of its status as sexual function’ (2004: 64). Granted, the eros with which The Hunger begins is a devalued mode of heterosexuality; it is casual sex because it is not causal sex. It makes nothing happen, for it produces no child. But is that not true of most heterosexual encounters? This is a scene about projection – literally and figuratively – in a film about projection, in which the negativity of the heteronormative is projected onto queerness. Reading

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Žižek, George Haggerty identifies ‘why the predatory homosexual, foreclosed from the symbolic, would return as the symptom of a culture’ that ‘cannot see its sexual obsessions for what they are’ (2006: 189). The sexual obsessions of heteronormative culture are not kinky or casual sex but instead the insistence that sexuality be yoked to reproductive purpose, at least fantasmatically, to transcend its own debasement. In The Hunger the vampire – like its blood, ‘not human’ – reveals the inhumanity of sexuality as such, its structuration by senseless drive above and beyond futural desire.

Aetiology and Enigma If the first scene in which visual technology reveals the obtrusion of the Real is about absence, the second is about excess; if the first is about spectacle, the second is about narrative. When Ebert says that The Hunger has ‘no story’, what he is really saying, since the film is reasonably eventful, is that its story does not make sense within familiar narrative conventions. After its music-video opening sequence, The Hunger organises itself spatially and conceptually around two locations, the lab at Park West Clinic where Sarah works and the Blaylocks’ home. The lab is the site of an aetiological narrative that draws John and Miriam, each with their own unanswered questions, into its story. Aetiology, the search for causes in, for example, the medical case study and the detective novel, is a paradigmatic narrative form that illuminates the central role of causality in narrative. Barthes states that ‘Narratively, an enigma leads from a question to an answer, through a certain number of delays’ (1975: 32). And early narrative cinema, Gunning explains, ‘invoked the spectator’s interest (and even desire, in a psychoanalytical model) by posing an enigma. The enigma demands a solution’ (1996: 73). In aetiological narratives, the question or enigma is about origins. As I have discussed elsewhere, there is a long history of aetiological narratives in which homosexuality is the pathology whose origins must be discovered (Rohy 2015: 2–4). When the film was released, two years into the AIDS/HIV crisis, another aetiological project was under way in the United States and around the world: the search for the cause of the illness, a project that often conflated male homosexuality and the disorder first known as GRID.10 Many viewers have noted the ways in which the film evokes AIDS with the notion of an incurable physical condition transmitted through sex and the exchange of blood. True to its historical moment, The Hunger initially presents itself as a medical mystery, a search for the causes of John Blaylock’s rapid ageing and the aggression of the monkey in Sarah’s lab. Indeed, the first half of film is as much a medical mystery as a horror film. Sarah summarises her findings – ‘we’ve actually shown that there’s a clock and actually shown that it can be tampered with’ – indeed, a colleague elaborates, they have succeeded in ‘speeding up the clock’ in the monkeys. But thorny questions remain. As her colleague tells Miriam, they cannot slow the ‘internal clock’, nor do they know why the laboratory monkey became aggressive. Sarah’s colleague asks, ‘what went wrong?’, a question echoed by Alice about John: ‘What’s wrong with him?’ These are the enigmas with which the narrative begins and whose aetiological answers it pursues, at least for the nonce. The questions at first centre on Sarah’s laboratory, where the camera again plays a signal role. Much as the Blaylocks’ security camera and the bookstore’s closedcircuit TV are on the side of surveillance and the Law, the lab’s microscope and

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video camera promise factual, diagnostic evidence. Of the images they produce, the videotaped sequence in which a monkey experiences accelerated ageing similar to John’s is the most narrative – both because it is part of Sarah’s aetiological project and because it is accompanied by her colleague’s commentary, marking the passage of time toward an inexorable telos, the creature’s death. Early in the film, after the male monkey kills his companion, Sarah says they should start videotaping him: ‘Let’s get the old video equipment in here. I want to record every move he makes.’ Later that day Sarah reviews the footage, which documents the monkey’s accelerated decline and eventual death as a colleague explains: ‘He’s ageing at a rate of approximately five years per minute . . . effective age now 85; the human equivalent is 129 . . . and life signs terminate right here.’ We see the monkey collapse, but that is not the end, for the videotape goes on to show something impossible within the narrative. After ‘life signs terminate’, we see the monkey’s body decaying in mere seconds: its flesh contracts under its fur; its face wrinkles and the skin draws back, revealing prominent teeth in an open mouth; the fur splits and shrinks, exposing bone; and the skeleton disarticulates until nothing but a pile of bones remains. The videotape marks this spectacle with a technical disruption: static and snow alternate with decay until the body is reduced to mere bones; these interruptions would normally signify ‘fast forward’ in the language of visual technology, matching the monkey’s sped-up decomposition, but they are mis-timed: the image does not leap ahead after each ‘fast forward’, but advances at an even pace. The static on the screen finally signifies nothing; it is as vacant as the movie screen in the home theatre scene. Unlike the first part of the video, Sarah and her colleagues neither narrate the occurrence nor react; this scene both is and is not happening. No form of unnaturally accelerated ageing would cause unnaturally accelerated decay, and surely the monkey’s body would not be allowed to decompose in the lab. This decomposition is solely a cinematic image, lacking a referent in the diegetic reality. Ontologically impossible, this image defies the logic of narrative and teleology by continuing beyond its own end. What we see did not occur, cannot have occurred, and yet we see it. Exceeding the structure of the symbolic order, it belongs to the Real, much as the moments of meaningless static on the videotape recall the evacuation of referentiality glimpsed in the blank screen of the home theatre sequence. Eventually The Hunger abandons its aetiological ambition, its commitment to causality, and with it the possibility of answers that would enable narrative closure. Science loses control of the story when the scientist loses control of her body, incorporated by the phenomenon she attempted to study. Midway through the film is a brief effort to refocus the medical aetiology from accelerated ageing to Sarah’s mysterious illness, which provokes a new set of questions framed in the same terms as the initial enigma. Tom confronts Sarah: ‘What the hell is wrong with you? I mean, what happened today? . . . I’m asking a question. What’s wrong with you?’ And Sarah confronts Miriam: ‘What have you done to me? What is it and why have you done it?’ But it is too late; the aetiological narrative has been absorbed by its own object of scrutiny. Unable to end, the film finds itself in the position of Sarah, who endures physical symptoms akin to drug withdrawal yet refuses the thing – human blood – that could relieve her suffering. In its later portion the film needs something that it cannot embrace, creating a structural impasse: it wants and cannot accept its own ending. As a narrative, it must satisfy its audience with some manner of closure, but

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that imperative is blocked by both the mythology of vampiric immortality and the not entirely dissimilar economy of the film industry. Of course, any story about immortality will have difficulty with ending, and The Hunger is no exception. Like Dorian Gray, either the protagonist must die, rupturing the internal logic of the plot, or she will go on in eternal repetition, enacting the atemporal pulsions of the drive. Miriam’s remark to Sarah might well describe the film itself: ‘Their end is final; ours is not.’ The film does end, but incoherently. Sarah’s attempted suicide precipitates the ruin of Miriam, which in turn finally releases John and her other former lovers to rest. We see the Blaylocks’ New York townhouse standing empty, then an equally lavish home in a high-rise building, where Sarah entertains attractive young people of both sexes while Miriam, reduced to the undead state of her previous partners, occupies a coffin in a storage area. The film does not explain what empowers her past lovers to rise against Miriam, why she loses her power, how Sarah is able to survive and why she survives, apparently, as a bisexual. Sarandon (2005) complains that the end of The Hunger violated ‘all the rules’ of the preceding narrative, so that ‘Nobody knew what was going on.’ In fact, Scott filmed two endings; in the alternate narrative, which follows the novel on which the film is based, Sarah kills herself and Miriam lives on in San Francisco, having found a new male lover. Nothing has really changed, and the novel ends with the prospect of endless repetition: ‘Time would pass . . . she would find another companion. And another. And so on until time itself slipped away’ (Strieber [1981] 2007: 357). But that ending was not ultimately used in the film; Tony Scott (2005) reports that the studio insisted on the altered ending because it wanted to allow for a sequel – another fantasy of prolonging life through repetition. Miriam’s fall from the staircase precipitates a retroactive effect that alters the earlier portion of the film. Though she cannot die, she becomes the same sentient corpse that her lovers have been. The camera holds a close up on her face as, screaming and struggling, she undergoes extremely rapid ageing followed by impossibly rapid decay; her open mouth, prominent teeth, and receding, desiccated skin precisely match the decomposing face of the lab monkey earlier in the film. Needless to say, that process refuses conventional narrative temporality as formulated by E. M. Forster. In Aspects of the Novel, Forster asserts that a story is not merely ‘a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence’, but in their proper time sequence – ‘dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on’ (1927: 47). True to the vampire legend, the possibility that decay does not come after death but before it is essential to The Hunger. But the more consequential violation of temporality produced by this scene is the effect of Nachträglichkeit – in Freud’s terms, a kind of retroactivity in which the significance of an event, even the existence of an event as event, depends on its later activation by a new occurrence. The visual kinship between Miriam’s downfall and the monkey’s death – whether death precedes or follows decay, both scenes proffer the spectacle of impossibly swift decomposition – suggests that the unnatural, vampiric force governing Miriam’s life is already at work in the lab at the beginning of the film. In retrospect, there never was a viable aetiological narrative; the camera that promises to provide empirical evidence provides instead an arcane hallucination. The technology that should provide a rational alternative to the vampires’ supernatural distortion of temporality turns out merely to predict the triumph of the latter, which has been present from the start.

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The Polaroid Spectre If the impossible and vacant images produced by visual technology throughout The Hunger indicate the relation of queerness to the symbolic order, they also map its resistance to narrative – its emergence, that is, out of the failure of narrative to lend redemptive meaning to sexuality. That is in itself no surprise; queer scholars have explored many dimensions of that antagonism, from the eminence of the marriage plot as the paradigmatic novelistic form to Marilyn Farwell’s proposal that the lesbian body refuses narrative containment, and Judith Roof and Paul Morrison’s persuasive arguments about homosexuality and narrative ending (see Farwell 1995; Roof 1996; Morrison 2001: 54–81). The relation between queerness and cinematic narrative is adversarial, but not for the reason commonly supposed – not, that is, due to the association of gay men with spectacle in the guise of camp or the musical. Instead, narrative and spectacle, though distinctly different elements of cinema, are both pressed to disguise, if incompletely, the vacancy of meaning in sexuality itself. The Hunger, however, demonstrates how a Lacanian reading might differently inflect the tension between queerness and narrative. Narrative, after all, is a fantasy giving formal and temporal coherence to an essential impasse of signification. Žižek argues that ‘narrative as such emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism’ and one such antagonism is surely the schism between the futural myth of sexuality and its purposeless facticity (1997: 10–11). This schism must be understood within the larger structure of the symbolic order as it confronts the constitutive impasse of the Real; queerness is not extrinsic to this system, or to that of heteronormativity, but an essential part of its operation that nonetheless eludes full narrativisation. This refusal of narrative might be emblematised by one more visual artefact in The Hunger, Alice’s last Polaroid picture. That photograph, a blurry close-up of what might be the marble floor and a table leg, echoes the blank screen of the home theatre. Although it shows something, not nothing, its subject is unrecognisable. If Alice’s first Polaroid provides historical evidence of John’s physical transformation, the last photograph provides a different kind of evidence. It is not that it lacks meaning – indeed, Miriam instantly grasps its import – but its meaning inheres in its meaninglessness, its lack of intent. The camera shoots this image accidentally when it is knocked to the floor during Alice’s struggle with John; it is the symptom of a blind gaze, devoid of purpose, an inhuman gaze. In this way it joins the other moments of emptiness and excess that intermittently appear within the cinematic machinery in The Hunger. The Polaroid picture whose horror is what we do not see joins the movie screen bathed in pure light, whose task it is to register the disavowed negativity of heterosexuality. Their counterpart is the impossible videotape segment that registers the collapse of visual technology’s empirical function, in each case suggesting the persistence, beyond narrative, of a queer ligature to the Real.

Notes 1. In its way, The Hunger is an excellent screen adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Novel and film share overtly queer desires, the seduction of others into sharing said desires, the quest for unnatural eternal youth, even the vertical organisation of dwellings whose upper rooms conceal the secret of that escape from time – in Wilde’s words, ‘something that would breed horrors and yet would never die’ ([1890] 1985: 149).

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2. Ellis Hanson observes that everyone looks ‘fabulously chic’ and even violent scenes are ‘aestheticized’ (1999: 195). 3. Auerbach similarly notes the film’s appropriation of the ‘staccato visual techniques of MTV’ (1995: 58). 4. While it may seem that The Hunger sets queerness against the cult of the child by allowing the murder of Alice Cavender, Alice is not a sacred child but a queer figure, identified by her precocity (‘Want some ’ludes?’) and androgyny. In the DVD commentary (2005), director Tony Scott says ‘is it a boy, is it a girl? I wanted the audience to think Beth [the actor] was a boy in a skirt’. 5. Indeed, heteronormative ideology requires queerness to be visible so it can play its part in the redemption of heterosexuality, just as Foucault suggests in his argument against the repressive hypothesis (1990: 17–49). 6. As Edelman observes, the Real/symbolic dynamic can be expressed in other ways; queerness is not its only outlet, but the trauma associated with the Real is the only meaning of queerness in heteronormative culture (2004: 17). So while the function of queerness in this structure is contingent, the structure itself – the constitutive antagonism of the symbolic order – is not. 7. Scholarship on queerness and cinematic narrative has placed the two terms in opposition, but largely through a focus on the gay male spectator’s experience with regard to camp, spectacle, and the musical as a genre. See Corber (1997: 55–78); Tinkcom (2002: 53–6, 82, and passim); and Farmer (2002: 81–5, 95–8, and passim). 8. In a film obsessed with visual technologies, it is not surprising that many aesthetic effects stem from beams of light that evoke those of film projectors: the striated shadow of venetian blinds in the hospital waiting room, the backlit arcade where John assaults a roller-skater, the floating motes of dust visible in the eighteenth-century flashbacks. In The Hunger, light has substance; it is a thing. 9. The story of the lab monkeys is a parodic/prophetic double of the film’s human heterosexual relationships. Finding the female monkey dead in her cage, Sarah’s colleagues are shocked. ‘Last night he turned on Betty. He loved Betty,’ says one; another, less sentimental, replies, ‘You thought he loved Betty. He tore her apart and then he ate her.’ Intercut with and discussed immediately following the home theatre scene, this sequence invites comparison between the monkeys and the human foursome, but in fact no one kills anyone they seemed to love in the screening room. Only when Sarah kills Tom later in the film do we learn the monkeys’ real significance. 10. In 1983 the long cultural association of vampirism with queerness would have been inflected by HIV/AIDS. The Hunger is based on a 1981 novel by Whitley Strieber. The CDC first identified what would be called AIDS in 1981, and it was reported in The New York Times in 1982, though news circulated much earlier in gay communities. The film opened on 29 April 1983. Among the many critics who associate The Hunger with AIDS, see Hanson (1999: 216) and Walton (2004: 78).

Works Cited Aristotle [ca. 330 bce] (2001), ‘Poetics’, in Vincent B. Leitch et al. (eds), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 88–115. Auerbach, Nina (1995), Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bal, Mieke (1997), Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd edn, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Barthes, Roland (1975), S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang.

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— (1982), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. Berlant, Lauren and Lee Edelman (2014), Sex, or the Unbearable, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beckson, Karl (1997), Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, New York: Routledge. Brown, Judith (2009), Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chatman, Seymour (1981), ‘What novels can do that films can’t (and vice versa)’, in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 117–36. Copjec, Joan (1994), Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Corber, Robert J. (1997), Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Creed, Barbara (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Ebert, Roger (1983), ‘The Hunger’, Chicago Sun-Times, 3 May, (last accessed 30 October 2017). Edelman, Lee (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Farmer, Brett (2002), Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Farwell, Marilyn (1995), ‘The lesbian narrative: “The pursuit of the inedible by the unspeakable”’, in George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman (eds), Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature, New York: Modern Language Association of America, pp. 156–68. Forster, E. M. (1927), Aspects of the Novel, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Foucault, Michel (1990), The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage. Gunning, Tom (1986), ‘The cinema of attractions: Early film, its spectator, and the avant-garde’, Wide Angle, 8: 3–4, 63–70. — (1996), ‘Now you see it, now you don’t: The temporality of the cinema of attractions’, in Richard Abel (ed.), Silent Film, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 71–84. Haggerty, George E. (2006), Queer Gothic, Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Hanson, Ellis (1999), ‘Lesbians who bite’, in Ellis Hanson (ed.), Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 183–222. Lacan, J. (1977), Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton. Litvak, Joseph (1997), Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lowenstein, Adam (2010), ‘Living dead: Fearful attractions of film’, Representations, 110: 1, 105–28. McGowan, Todd (2015), Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game, New York: Bloomsbury. Morrison, Paul (2001), The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity, New York: New York University Press. Mulvey, Laura [1975] (2010), ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in Vincent B. Leitch et al. (eds), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd edn, New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 2084–95. Rohy, Valerie (2015), Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Roof, Judith (1996), Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative, New York: Columbia University Press. Sarandon, Susan (2005), DVD audio commentary, in The Hunger, film, directed by Tony Scott. USA: Warner Home Video. Scott, Tony (2005), DVD audio commentary, in The Hunger, film, directed by Tony Scott. USA: Warner Home Video. Strieber, Whitley [1981] (2007), The Hunger, New York: Pocket Books. Tinkcom, Matthew (2002), Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Walton, Priscilla L. (2004), Our Cannibals, Ourselves, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Wilde, Oscar [1890] (1985), The Picture of Dorian Gray, New York: Penguin. Žižek, Slavoj (1991), Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — (1997), The Plague of Fantasies, New York: Verso.

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III. Theories of Digital Narrative

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11 Cinema and the Unnarratability of Computation Zara Dinnen

M

ichael Mann’s 2015 Blackhat failed at the box office. Rotten Tomatoes reports the reviewers’ consensus of Blackhat – an action conspiracy thriller all about hacking and networked systems – as ‘thematically timely but dramatically inert’ (Rotten Tomatoes n.d.). Of interest in this chapter is the dramatic inertia of hacking and computer programming, and in particular the generative tension produced when the banal processes of programming appear as narrative cinema. This chapter argues that whilst code itself appears antithetical to narrative cinema, conforming to the unnarratable conditions of the supranarratable (Warhol 2005), it is this very troubling of the suitability of the computational in cinema that enables us to witness the reproducibility of the computational as cinema, and as an ineffable, ephemeral aspect of everyday life. The problem with code and coding in narrative cinema is that it makes for alienated viewing. This happens in two related ways. First, scenes of coding and of computation, of code in action, bring narrative cinema close to avant-garde and experimental cinema insofar as the medium or process is what is at stake in the final edit, rather than genre or plot – hence, genre-switching takes place within the action hacker narrative.1 Second, computational culture works via effacement – it just is, just does – we only see code when there is a glitch, an error, and then it is witnessed as complexity rather than as the medium; any attempt to narrate code appears as a kind of schism of the narrative genre whereby we are seeing something we should not – the labour of computation. This chapter is interested in the unnarratability of code in narrative cinema, but also in the ways the abstraction of processes of code is countered by the presence of an actionhero hacker. The action-hero hacker is a manifestation of the sovereignty accorded to the programmer in culture more broadly; a status that is itself a function of the increased abstraction of programming procedures. In other words, this chapter considers a paradox: whilst the representation of software on-screen necessarily appears as a gap or elision – marking what we cannot see – this problem of presentation and presentification is also the ‘enduring ephemeral’ of digital media (Chun 2008a), alerting us to what is at stake in thematising the spectacle and ‘control’ of digital processes in narrative cinema. This chapter first considers Garrett Stewart’s call for a ‘narratographic’ approach to digital cinema studies, and its limitations in terms of the potential unnarratability of code (defined as Warhol’s supranarratable). The middle section of the chapter then turns to Blackhat to consider planetary-scale computation as the condition by which digital media are a supranarratable entity. The final section considers Blackhat as thematising

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what Wendy Chun, writing on the ephemerality and sovereignty of software, argues is the ineffability of software, its ‘enduring ephemerality’. This chapter asserts that the narrative genre of the action-hero film shares a narrative template with the stories we tell ourselves about software and sovereignty in everyday life.

The Narratability of Hacking and Computation The kinds of scene this chapter is interested in are those when a film appears to be narrating an instance of computation – in its primary example, Blackhat, a hack – but more often represents the limits of what aspects of computation are narratologically and cinematically graspable. The scene is one like this: a man (nearly always a man) sits hunched, precarious, on the edge of a seat, jittery with energy; in front of him is a monitor – a laptop or desktop screen – and a keyboard; he taps rapidly; this guy ‘has the world at [his] fingertips’; he will ‘enter’ forbidden places and ‘disrupt’ the course of action, breaking down firewalls and planting malicious packages.2 What do we see when the monitor is revealed? Lines of characters – numbers, symbols, letters – occasionally a word – if, return, help, find, enter; multiple windows; a diagram or two; illegible visualisations of this ‘world’ at his fingertips. If the camera should move ‘through’ the screen, we get a computer-generated image of computer generation in action – neon, white, blue lines of cables, circuitry, towers and tubes, what Joseph Jeon calls ‘the wire shot’.3 This familiar scene of hacking occupies the popular imaginary of Anglophone culture. It is the emblem of films and TV shows such as Tron (Lisberger 1982); WarGames (Badham 1983); The Lawnmower Man (Leonard 1992); Hackers (Softley 1995); The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski 1999); Swordfish (Sena 2001); 24 (2001–14); Live Free or Die Hard (Wiseman 2007); Transformers (Bay 2007); Leverage (2008–12), The Social Network (Fincher 2010); The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Fincher 2011); Person of Interest (2011–16); Skyfall (Mendes 2012); The Fifth Estate (Condon 2013); (2014– present); Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon 2015); and Mr. Robot (2015– present). Why is this the popularly imagined take on such a significant change in human discourse as ubiquitous computation, and how do we critically apprehend what is at stake in this scene? One way to think of such images is in terms of the postfilmic medium of digital cinema, or the post-cinematic affect of new media visual culture. In Post Cinematic Affect Steven Shaviro argues that digital media ‘together with neoliberal economic relations, have given birth to radically new ways of manufacturing and articulating lived experience’, a ‘contemporary digital and post-cinematic “media ecology”’ (Fuller 2005) in which screens, speakers, ‘moving images and synthesised sounds, are dispersed pretty much everywhere’ (2010: 2, 6–7). Engaging in the expanded visual and affective terrain of new media cinema, we can also turn to what might be thought of as posthuman screen studies (Sobchack 1992, 2004; Bukatman 1993; Darley 2000; Jones 2006; Brown 2009; Cubitt 2005, 2014), a loose scholarly field resistant to the screen-ness of the ‘digital sublime’ (Mosco 2004; Kirschenbaum 2008). In recent work on surveillance cinema Garrett Stewart questions the efficacy of new media cinema scholarship. For Stewart, one of the central problems of ‘postfilmic’ cinema is its total capitulation to its own medium.4 Such capitulation is realised through a failure to narrativise; to narratologically render the digital media of everyday life in the fantasy spectacle of mainstream cinema. In Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance

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(2015) Stewart considers the ways in which acts of looking as cinema spectatorship become bound up with the modes of spectatorship that emerge from technological surveillance techniques. Stewart is interested in a set of films that make visible this binding: M (Lang 1931); Rear Window (Hitchcock 1954); The Conversation (Ford Coppola 1974); Déjà Vu (Scott 2006); Source Code (Jones 2011); and The Bourne Legacy (Gilroy 2012). Such films draw attention to ‘the shared logistics of editorial cross-cutting and a surveillance hub’s channel switching’, and the synecdochic relation whereby the instance of looking represents ‘itself both as technological fact and the encompassing social syndrome it pinpoints’ (Stewart 2015: x, xiii). According to Stewart, the turn away from theory, textual, and media-specific approaches to film studies – in favour of reception, production, and other post-theory concerns – is a problem not only because now (with the postfilmic image) we are dealing with significant formal shifts, but also because we have lost the ‘cross-disciplinary efforts of a general narratology looking for the rudimentary functions of storytelling’ (2015: xix). The result of this loss is that the ‘task [of postfilmic analysis] has been instead left mostly to new media studies, which has a tendency to leave narrative cinema far behind for its preferred evidentiary base in experimental video’ (2015: xix). I do not agree with Stewart’s judgement – visual culture, cultural studies, and media studies are vital for alerting us to new contexts of spectatorship, production, and consumption alongside histories of film and narrative theory – but his methods offer a useful starting provocation for the work of this chapter.5 Stewart privileges a method of ‘narratography’; a mode of micro-analysis attending to the detail of an image to assess what such details add to the viewer’s experience of the film as a narrative of surveillance. Reviewing Stewart’s book, Phillip Maciak describes this method as a ‘politically inflected formalism’ (Maciak 2015: 106). The narratographic method ‘diagnoses the cultural assumptions of screen stories as in part diagnostic of the medium that conditions their production where [. . .] an irony may “present as” filmic or digital effect’ (Stewart 2015: 12). Stewart asserts that the only way to articulate how digital cinema that purports to be about digital life actually works at making the texture of that life visible, is to witness the digital image as always also telling us something about itself, that is, as always narrating itself as digital media. This chapter follows Stewart’s interest in the narrative intersection of the postfilmic image of/as computational matter, but does so whilst also taking into account what is registered in excess of what is seen. This chapter considers the narrative problem of the ineffable digital-ness of digital media in/as cinema. Computation is narratable in the sense it is a human technology that can be passed on through language and instruction. Computation is also a speculative, imaginary process, not graspable in one discrete image or story. Today, complex ubiquitous computing involving nonhuman cognition, distributed infrastructural networks, and unfathomable numbers of human and nonhuman users constitutes everyday life across the globe (Bratton 2015; Ekman et al. 2016). The vastness and complexity of ‘digital media’ mean that within the narration of what happens when programmers and nonhuman agents do things with computers are various elisions and gaps of knowledge and understanding. When these processes are represented in the confines of generic narrative cinema the elisions and gaps are made visible. They appear as something unnarratable. In the encapsulation of the digital-control society on-screen we see the totality of the cinematic mode as digital, but we also see the complexity of computation as something ineffable. In the generic

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scene described above the performance of writing dissolves into abstract computergenerated graphics: the narration of computation is a tautology of the image. As the following section will argue, code in action is not narratable – its nonhuman processes engender a situation whereby the programmer or user is always to some extent writing/using without knowing. When Stewart attends to the ‘construction of narrative space in screen renderings of the robotic camera’s ambit and the deciphered ambience of its purview’ (2015: 258 n.2), he is able to do so because the act of looking binds the medium, but the new media, or digital media that comprise the surveillance culture at stake in his work are still not being looked at. To think about the digital medium in and of itself, beyond the apparatus of surveillance, would require reverting the processes of effacement that define mediation (McLuhan [1964] 1997; Bolter and Grusin 1999; Galloway 2012; Kember and Zylinksa 2012). Attending to the self-effacing context of digital media in narrative cinema is potentially possible, if we follow the logic of Robyn Warhol’s exposition of the unnarratable. Working from Gerald Prince’s concept of the ‘disnarrated’, Warhol outlines four aspects, derived from literary realist fiction and then traced into contemporary film, that can be said to comprise the unnarratable: the subnarratable (‘needn’t be told’); supranarratable (‘can’t be told’); antinarratable (‘shouldn’t be told’); paranarratable (‘wouldn’t be told’) (2005: 222). Of interest here is the category of the supranarratable, comprising ‘those events that defy narrative, foregrounding the inadequacy of language or of visual image to achieve full representation, even of fictitious events’ (Warhol 2005: 223). An example from literary history given by Warhol is the all-black page as the ‘antiexpression’ of grief in Tristram Shandy (2005: 223); a ‘textual marker in the form of the explicit disclaimer I am calling ‘“unnarration”’ (2005: 224). With regard to film, Warhol suggests that what is supranarratable is that which is too much to be shown: too sexy, too horrible, too violent. For example, in Leo McCary’s 1957 An Affair to Remember: the hero and heroine share a kiss off-screen while the camera frames their bodies up to mid-torso. The kiss itself is left to the viewer’s imagination; the aggressively odd framing of the gesture is tantamount to an assertion that the experience cannot be captured in narrative. [. . .] the emotion of the moment transcends representation. (Warhol 2005: 230) Warhol goes on to suggest that in contemporary film the supranarratable is most often encountered in horror movies, particularly a film like The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez 1999), where the monstrousness is ineffably present but unseen, unnarrated. In the case of code and computation we might argue that it is the status of effacement that determines its ineffability. This happens at two levels: first, planetary-scale computation dictates that we cannot possibly bear witness to the totality of computation as individuals; the more digital our lives become, the less affordances we have to see the digital. Second, computational culture – through its determining logic of software – operates as a mode of effacement whereby the source code as it is input is effaced in the action of computation and then belatedly – when the instruction is successfully completed – returned and reaffirmed as source. In the scene described above the hacker is seen to be master of the world at his fingertips, such is the conceit of computation in the popular imaginary, but this image elides the mediational complexity of the act, of this world.

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Warhol’s work moves between Victorian novels and contemporary film in the way that Stewart desires – producing a narratographic schema which repeats and reemerges across time and media. Rather than mobilise Warhol’s and Stewart’s work here to say that what happens when digital media appears on/as screen is the same as the supranarratable in An Affair to Remember, or a synecdoche for computational culture in general as is ‘spectatorship’ in Stewart’s book, it is leveraged as a means to name the challenge that computation poses to narrative genre. The multiplex critical approaches inspired by the ineffability of digital media in/as cinema force us to encounter the ineffability of coding/hacking as an indelible aspect of the complex machinations of digital media. What we learn from watching, and reading about, digital cinema that thematises digital media is that narrative cinema’s depictions and materialisation of digital media are always also a failure to depict and materialise the processes of digital media. In other words, narratives of computation in mainstream cinema offer us proximate, even parallel ways to mark the operations of digital media, and computational culture, as elusive.

Blackhat and Planetary-Scale Computation Michael Mann’s 2015 Blackhat is an action hacker film that pits the FBI and Chinese military against an international criminal gang believed to be behind high-profile hacks of the Chicago stock exchange and a nuclear power plant in Chai Wan, Hong Kong. Blackhat reinscribes prevailing governmental imaginaries – the geopolitical contestations of ‘East’ and ‘West’ – even as it narrates the anxiety of new ways of seeing geopolitics, state terrain, and the interdependencies of human users within ‘the new emergent order’ of planetary-scale computation, or what Benjamin H. Bratton terms ‘the Stack’ (2015: 11–12).6 In Blackhat the incarcerated American Blackhat hacker Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) joins the authorities to help them identify another Blackhat hacker. Hathaway is recruited with the offer of his freedom if he can catch the criminals who have reappropriated his old code, a remote access tool (RAT), written for a ‘gag’ while he was a student at MIT. Hathaway is chosen by the FBI and Chinese military after his college roommate, Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom), co-author of the RAT and now a captain in the Chinese military, names him as the lead author of the original script. Once Hathaway is released, the team fly to a data centre in an undisclosed location in the US – the origin of the hack that led to the explosion at the nuclear power plant. Lien (Tang Wei), Chen’s sister, a network engineer, confirms that the centre has an extremely secure network infrastructure; the breach could not have been made remotely. As we follow Hathaway walking through rows of server cupboards, he adds, ‘so someone had to physically enter this room, plug the virus in’. This line describes the mechanism by which Blackhat can narrate computation: the origin of this hack requires a body to be present, acting; the apprehension of the hackers later on in the film requires bodies to be presented acting. The narrative is joined by acts of coding and directives of code but it is moved along in time by human action heroes. In Blackhat action sequences are when human heroes fight and bleed and die, and when beads of light traverse graphic renders of circuit boards and cables. The film is an action film that doubles as a walkthrough of the hard and soft infrastructures of the digital control society – from the cooling pumps of nuclear power plants, to law enforcement databases and high-frequency trading,

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to the ‘geeks’ who program this emergent world (Kelty 2005). The relations between human bodies and human stories, on the one hand, and the nonhuman terrain, logic, and agency of the computational, on the other, is a significant aspect of the film which enables a consideration of the way these relations form everyday life more prosaically. Blackhat begins with a partial view of a white-blue glowing orb – the animated object tilts and pivots; the view zooms in and slowly the glow is revealed as lines of yellow light on dark green-blue planes – the whole electronic earth. The camera follows one yellow line, zooming in, until the final shot in the sequence: a bird’s-eye view of a power plant at night. Cut to inside the plant, an overhead shot of someone at a control panel noting down number sequences on a pad of paper, against a vista of monitors, lights, and buttons. The sound switches from an ambient synth score to voices speaking in a Chinese dialect, and beeps, with some orchestral texture – strings mostly.7 From the control room the sequence cuts to images inside the plant: a fan and doors around a water tank; a barometer showing the temperature in the green (not red) zone. We are returned to the control room monitors; the shot zooms in on one set of numbers on a screen ‘35.4’, in English and Chinese characters. The numbers become more pixelated, a high-pitched, synthetic, tinkly glitch accompanies the shot as it goes ‘through’ the screen. Inside: the camera follows cables to a circuit board; are we inside silicon, nano connectors? The movement is ostensibly immersive; the sounds are ambiguous, reminiscent of an electric storm, but the further ‘in’ we get, the glitchier they become. There are hundreds of lights pulsing; running up cable. Cut to a bank of switches; a small LED comes on. Then we are out another side: in a different room, a domestic space, a man is typing into a keyboard. We see him from the opposite side of the room – are we looking out from a power socket? His face is obscured by a desktop monitor. We cut to a desktop view and can make out his hands; we see his ashtray full of cigarette butts. Cut to a view of the keyboard; he is bashing at keys. He hits enter. Cut to overhead shot; the man puts the keyboard down on the desk. Then the movement reverses as we go back ‘inside’ the program; we go back the way we came – past the switches, along the cables – but the sequence is now intercut with the monitors in the control room at the plant; they display a barometer getting too hot. Eventually the fan breaks, pipes start turning red, the water in the cooling tank starts boiling; it erupts; an explosion. Cut to outside the plant where people in high-visibility jackets and hard hats are running around. Adam Clark Estes (2015) at Gizmodo writes of this sequence, ‘Boo hoo for making these dumb animations of what the inside of a computer doesn’t look like.’ The animation sequence is long (two minutes forty seconds), and interesting to a point, but it is also alienating: it is unclear what is being narrated, if anything. Despite the technological ‘look’ of the animated ‘inside’ sequence, the effect is that of the supranarratable, whereby what is seen on-screen is an ‘aggressively odd framing’, ‘tantamount to an assertion that the experience cannot be captured in narrative’ (Warhol 2005: 230). The audience is moved through an odd surround with little to anchor a sense of what things are, or why things are there. The lights that we follow through the machine ostensibly move between an undisclosed location where the hacker resides – later revealed as Jakarta – and the nuclear power plant in Hong Kong, and yet we see no underwater cables, no network infrastructure. The critic who boo-hoo-ed the animation sequence underestimates what this sequence stands in for; taking into account

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the scale of what is being referenced only adds to the sense that the animation is failing to narrate what is happening. The animation sequence described above imagines the complex, stacked terrain of computation as a kind of governance. In this sequence what is theoretically being narrated is what will later turn out to be the first in a series of hacks designed to extract a huge amount of capital from global markets: the hack on the nuclear reactor and Chicago Stock Exchange generate cash which will be invested in trading tin futures; the second part of the hack consists of flooding multiple tin mines in Malaysia, instigating a global crisis in tin supply; at the onset of the crisis the hacker will stand to make a huge amount of personal wealth by selling the investment made after the first hack. The paranoid fantasy in this story is that ‘one man’ can make such a thing happen (discussed in more detail in the following section). At stake in this sequence is the possibility of narrativising the infrastructural complexity that makes the plot possible. Rather than the ‘inside’ of the computer, the animation attempts to chart a course through an emergent ‘geospace’, in which regimes (some State-based, some non-State-based) ‘extract value from new flows, namely data’ that evolve as a mode of ‘governmentality’ in relation to the new vistas generated by planetary-scale computation (Bratton et al. n.d). Whilst the threat of remote-access sabotage manifest in malware is real, the image of this technique is an elision; shorthand for what cannot be manifest in narrative cinema. The animation sequence demands a distinction between what is narratable and what is expressed.8 The nonsense image attests precisely to the unnarratability of computation (in the logic of Warhol’s analysis of the supranarratable), but the nonsense image is itself an expression of the ineffability of computation. Holding onto the narratographic detail of the scene does not grant an insight into the detail of digital media unless we can understand the limits of representation as cinematic detail. The medium transmits this tautology through the aesthetic. As several posts online about the film have observed, Blackhat is visually noisy. Using many of the same cameras and a similar digital workflow to David Fincher’s recent films, all considered ‘hyper-real’ (Dargis 2010; Kushigemachi 2011), Blackhat nonetheless ends up privileging the potential ‘video-ness of digital video’ (Gores 2015), an ‘ambient fuzz’ (Tracy 2015) of ‘thin-looking, at times near-translucent visuals’ (Dargis 2015).9 This is another way of saying that in Mann’s Blackhat the digital workflow is made to function paradoxically as a resistance against verisimilitude. We are watching the composition of a digital narrative – different cameras, aspect ratios, resolutions, all compressed into a single file. In this way, what appears as noise and messy complexity in Mann’s film is in fact another marker of the ineffability of digital media; a ‘textual marker in the form of the explicit disclaimer [. . .] ‘“unnarration”’ (Warhol 2005: 223). Whether it be the complexity of a planetary-scale stack, or the effacing logic of software (as will be discussed in the next section), the opening sequence of Blackhat produces digital media as a supranarratable condition. The effect of the digital medium can then be thought of affectively as an exercise in seeing what cinema supresses: the non-indexicality of digital mediation. In other words, in a sequence that narrates nothing about digital media, but nonetheless expresses digital media, we watch mediational processes usually effaced, and scales of operation beyond our comprehension.

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Black Boxes and Black Hats as Empowering Obfuscations10 Blackhat was far from a box office success; it flopped on release and was pulled out of most US theatres by week three (Friedman 2015). This failure at the box office was surprising: the production ‘paired an esteemed filmmaker with a fast-rising star, and fused them to a hot-button issue that couldn’t be more timely’ (D’Alessandro 2015). The film was deemed ‘worthy’ (D’Alessandro 2015), ‘solemn, grandiose’ (Zoller Seitz 2015), and ‘a spectacular work of unhinged movie making’ (Dargis 2015), but also ‘ludicrous’ (Zoller Seitz 2015), ‘ridiculous’ (Bradshaw 2015), and ‘lumbering’ (Orr 2015). Various reasons have been given as to why Blackhat failed so badly in cinemas – in particular that its marketing campaign and trailer failed to ‘sell’ the story – but crucial to its failure is probably precisely what is so ‘timely’ about the film in the first place – ‘hacking as a sales tool is nerdy and unappealing’ (D’Alessandro 2015). In interviews Mann has suggested the film is about Hathaway and his journey through the situation he finds himself in. When asked about the biggest challenge to producing the film, Mann replied, ‘getting a basic understanding of computers and then being able to jump on a terminal which Chris [Hemsworth] did, with a lot of help from a lot of our friends [. . .] using his skills as a hacker to become the engine of the storytelling [. . .] in other words [hacking] is not just a veneer on a thriller’ (Mann and Galloway 2014).11 Key to thinking about computation with Blackhat is recognising that computation is a ‘deeply physical event’ (Bratton 2015: 12). Through the relation between the human hacker actors, the geographical and physical surrounds, and the imaging of computation, Blackhat is able to gesture toward emergent sovereignties. It does this through the deterritorialising image of ‘computation’ as described above, and through its narrative attention to code as a material substrate of new geopolitical conditions. Unlike reading and writing in human-to-human communication, human-to-computer communication – as programming or hacking – is enacted through what will have been executable language (Galloway 2004, 2012). Programming a computer involves inputting a string of characters which will execute action. This does not happen magically all at once, but by layers of code each ‘conversing’ with the next layer until a discrete switch is moved in a circuit. Human programmers usually work in high-level (abstract) programming languages which are syntactically similar to natural languages; these are then compiled as ‘object code’ (a machine-readable language, or low-level programming language). The source code – the code written by the programmer – is only source after the fact, after the code has been compiled and executed (Chun 2008a, 2008b, 2011). Source code disappears and becomes object code; we can only retrospectively locate it as the higher-level code, the ‘source’ of action. This is what Wendy Chun (2008a) terms the ‘enduring ephemeral’ of software. Despite the assumption that programming produces the future, its status as source code after the fact means it can only exist in the present. In programming, the present stands in for the future: ‘to program a computer is to produce a series of stored instructions that supposedly guarantee – and often stand in for – a certain action’ (2008a: 153). The capacity for digital technologies to store the past – in the form of data – is what produces the capabilities for computational programming of the future; this proliferates through culture as the assumption that digital media is an ever-expanding memory. Rejecting this assumption, Chun’s articulation of new media as ‘enduring ephemeral’ unpicks the conceit of endless memory, the archival qualities of digital media. Instead, it directs attention to the performative situation that enables code

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to be thought of as executable, and that emerges out of the executability of code. Code ‘automatically brings together disciplinary and sovereign power through the production of self-enforcing rules that [. . .] “govern” a situation’ (2011: 27). Accounting for and attending to a desire for sovereign power is important for thinking about the way computational culture troubles narrative. Code appears as a set of narratological clauses: if this happens, then that happens; find this term in this set, then return this object to this site. The mechanism of these processes is more stubbornly complex in that it involves acts that are not actionable by humans, or by human language. As Wendy Chun argues, software ‘is ephemeral, information ghostly’, and ‘Code . . . is an abstraction that is haunted, a source that is a re-source, a source that renders the machinic – with its annoying specificities or “bugs” – ghostly’ (2011: 21, 50). Key to understanding the processes of code is accepting the complex agency of its action. In popular culture, representations of digital media tend to coalesce around generic abstract images of ‘inside’ machines, and generic scenes of hackers and programmers inputting code. The generic hacker scene described earlier in this chapter and the specific hack sequence of Blackhat reproduce the problem of the sensible that defines the computational beyond cinema: a ‘linking of rationality with mysticism, knowability with what is unknown’ makes the computer ‘a powerful fetish that offers its programmers and users alike a sense of empowerment, of sovereign subjectivity, that covers over – barely – a sense of profound ignorance’ (2011: 18). The animation at the beginning of Blackhat is an attempt to close the gap between software and hardware that marks contemporary computational culture. Today most kinds of programming rely on an explosion of abstraction which produces ‘automatic programming’; securing and hiding the operations of the computer from the ‘intellectual’ work of programming, and recruiting the computer into its own operation (2011: 34–46). Abstraction bestows power on the programmer who can intervene and master the machine in a creative way, but it also reinforces programmers’ and users’ ignorance as the operations of the machine are further blackboxed. Blackhat exemplifies the way that over the history of software development, programming has become increasingly more abstract, according the programmer a powerful role and expanding the terrain of the nonhuman – that is, expanding the ways in which code writes code. In Blackhat, after the team lose the trail of the hacker in the US, they ‘follow the money’ to Hong Kong. There they set up a control room in an apartment where they monitor several bank accounts which may lead them to some of the people involved in the hack, and eventually the hacker. In Hong Kong they join forces with local police in order to trace three men who they believe are acting on behalf of the lead hacker. The law enforcement representatives plus Hathaway and Lien all sit around in front of computer screens: monitoring bank accounts; looking at the RAT code; looking at satellite maps with marks of the three henchmen’s daily movements. Given that this is a film about hacking, it seems odd that so many people are required to be physically in situ for the crime to be solved. It seems odd, but it is an exposition of the programmer/programming fetish of contemporary computational culture. As with other action hacker films, we find that there is only one hacker for the job.12 Both Blackhat hackers in the film – Hathaway and the criminal Blackhat hacker, Sadak (Yorick van Wageningen) – are the only men that can do their job. The narrative premise of the film is that Hathaway has to be furloughed out of prison in order to interpret a hack that the FBI and the Chinese government are already working on. The film’s climax is a one-on-one, man-to-man

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showdown where one Blackhat hacker must kill another in order to survive (Hathaway ‘wins’). The ‘erasure of execution through source code as source creates an intentional authorial subject: the computer, the program, or the user, and this source is treated as the source of meaning’ (Chun 2011: 53). Such logic informs the structure of Blackhat: the code that cannot be cracked contains within it the authorial signature of the original programmer; only he can uncover the identity of the secondary author. In this sense the body of the programmer as action hero has to move the narrative on in time. Despite the computational labour we witness as animation, the narrative is driven by human bodies connecting and interpreting computational events. In Hong Kong the apartment functions as the control room. We might also watch all the scenes in Hong Kong as an extension of the computational matter imagined in the opening animation sequence; an effect of how the control room is an event of the narrative. The team watch the three suspects go past the same point every day – a public garden square. The Hong Kong police detective, Alex Trang (Andy On), takes them to the square and reveals there is already a police surveillance team set up in a van monitoring Elias Kassar (Ritchie Coster), a former Lebanese paramilitary who also goes to the square every day. The van is a second control room. The two investigations are actually the same: after Hathaway walks around the square with a signal tracker he discovers a short-range Bluetooth transmitter hidden in the bushes; it has been used to transmit messages between Kassar and the three runners. Important to note is that Hathaway’s knowledge of computational infrastructure enables the film to map a hack beyond the source-scene of a personal computer. Hathaway knows that sometimes a hack requires communication away from the Internet. The physical walkthrough echoes the speculative ‘walkthrough’ of the hack which opens the film. As the team physically move about and intercept criminal activity, all the while leading the viewer through the night markets and gardens of the urban centre of Hong Kong, the colours and geometries on display mark the scenes as still on-grid. From the boxy apartment and rectangular computer monitors, to the garden square that the team visit; from the shot of the market by the apartment as a long, narrow grid of light, to the inside of the surveillance van; the images are coloured in the red and green and white neon hues of the opening animation. Blackhat is organised by colour. Each location was to have a different colour scheme; a structure enabled by the digital workflow of the production. The intention was for ‘the audience to recognize what country they were in using a specific color palette for the architecture and light sources’ (Rogers 2015). Hong Kong is the first location outside the US to be shown in the film. Its colour scheme is closest to the machine. Such continuation affectively suppresses stark distinctions between the different kinds of labouring taking place – programming, hacking, computation, police work, detection. Blackhat holds the tension of the opening sequence throughout the film: the humans that appear as masters of code are always coming up against code as its own kind of sourcery. Once the team have discovered the Bluetooth transmitter they attempt to read the messages it has been sending. These are of course encoded; Hathaway and Chen cannot crack the 512-bit encryption key; it would take Hathaway ‘about a month’ to own it. Here the computation resists being ‘known’ and instead the team have to ‘sit on’ Kassar, physically watch to see what he does. The film renders the physical action requisite to its status as thriller through the speculative image of the computational, while paradoxically calling out the ineffability of that computational which resists interpolation and apprehension.

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Conclusion In Blackhat the sovereignty of the Blackhat hackers appears as the fantasy of individual human sovereignty – a mode of governance that planetary-scale computation and the global sweep of neoliberalism utterly undermines. This chapter has considered the limits of representing vast and nano scales of computation in mainstream cinema. In the case of what is supranarratable in Blackhat, we are able to witness the ways generic narrative cinema alerts us to what we cannot explain in general. The figure of the action-hacker hero has long been coming. Chun argues that ‘source code supposedly enable[s] an understanding and a freedom – the ability to map and know the workings of the machine, but again, only through a magical erasure of the gap between source and execution, an erasure of execution itself’ (2011: 51). Given this situation, it is not surprising we have a cultural fetish for the wizards and masters of computation, for the magical erasure that roots our vastly complex experiences of mediation. The supranarratable nature of computation is by no means a negation of knowledge by narrative. Rather, ‘the ways in which we cannot know software can be an enabling condition’, a way to acknowledge the future as something we cannot always prepare for (Chun 2011: 54). And, even in the perceptually closed textual object of a film we may find such open-ness to future knowledge. About half way through Blackhat the team go to visit the nuclear plant to see if they can salvage any data that could help them trace the hacker. The scene at the plant when they arrive is almost exactly as it was when we – the audience – left: it is as if the explosion has just taken place. This does not make too much sense in the timeline of the film, given that we have been following Hathaway and the others for at least a week in LA, California. In February 2016 Mann announced he was working on a new director’s cut of Blackhat. In the new cut the hack on the Chicago Stock Exchange opens the film; the Hong Kong nuclear explosion takes place later, and the team arrive in Hong Kong as soon as the explosion happens. The film was shot and plotted with the revised cut as the original cut and only later in the postproduction process was it reordered to open with the Hong Kong hack (Adams 2016). Whilst ‘director’s cuts’ pre-date digital cinema (Lambie 2012), the digital media conditions of contemporary cinema are such that even the original cut is a version – there is no singular filmic object. In mainstream films that thematise digital media we can witness some of the complex intersections of computation in/as cinema. The ungraspability of all that computation is significantly, paradoxically rendered as a digital cinema that is itself an ineffable, ungraspable, enduringly ephemeral medium.

Notes 1. There has been some discussion of whether Blackhat constitutes a mainstream-avant-garde film (Tracy 2015). I do not think this is the case. Rather, it is importantly a Hollywood hero narrative that makes visible the function of singular hero narratives in obfuscating the complexity of computation beyond the cinema. It is clear that Blackhat does experiment with the aesthetic affordances of a digital workflow, as discussed in the second section of this chapter, but this does not mark it as particularly avant-garde.

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2. A few exceptions/exceptional female hackers: Hackers (Softley 1995); 24 (2001–14); The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Fincher 2011); Person of lnterest (2011–16); Mr. Robot (2015– present); Furious 7 (Wan 2015). 3. For a brilliant visual take on the generic absurdity of the ‘inside’ of the computer shot in Hollywood movies, see Faith Holland’s video ‘RIP Geocities’ (2011). Jeon’s work on the ‘wire shot’ is part of a chapter on ‘Wire Aesthetics’ in Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century (manuscript forthcoming). 4. For further evidence of the distinction between different approaches to the theme of digital media in digital cinema, see the special section on Source Code (Jones 2011) in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (Vernallis et al. 2013). In that section chapters by Stewart, Sean Cubitt, and James Buhler each discuss different ways into thinking the digital-ness of Source Code and how it might move us to do new kinds of film studies work. 5. The present chapter is part of a larger research project thinking through the relation between popular images of computation and the ways we become users/consumers of digital media in everyday life. As part of that project I am taking into account various contemporary critical theories of cultural transmission: how we learn to, or are conditioned to, get used to new media. Work on affect, gazes, visuality, visibility, narrative, and enchantment as relations between cultural objects and audiences are all of vital importance to thinking through how popular culture imbricates ways of being. Whilst I am aware these approaches are not all necessarily complementary, neither do I believe they are mutually exclusive – as Stewart appears to be suggesting. 6. ‘The Stack’ describes the unstable situation of planetary-scale computation as we may perceive of it. This is a scenario in which ‘Users, human or nonhuman, are cohered in relation to Interfaces, which provide synthetic total images of the Addressed landscapes and networks of the whole, from the physical and virtual envelopes of the City, to the geographic archipelagos of the Cloud and the autophagic consumption of Earth’s minerals, electrons, and climates that power all of the above’ (Bratton 2015: 12). 7. The score for Blackhat was the work of several composers, primarily Harry GregsonWilliams, Atticus Ross, and Leo Ross. Attribution has been the site of some contention (Yamato 2015). 8. In interviews Mann has verified that the animated sequence is intended to be ‘authentic’: ‘The sequence goes inside the computer and uses the actual shape of a transistor: one piece of conductive metal that has a surplus of electrons, and one with no electrons. The one license we took is we made them be two different colors’ (Mann and Watercutter 2015). In a viewing of the film, this taxonomic aspect is missing, cut out from the frame; instead, the presumption that the audience be moved through the computational derails narrative sense. 9. It is worth noting the movies that hackers deem to be ‘authentic’ portrayals of their work and lifestyle (in the US); Fincher’s The Social Network is one of the few that beats Blackhat. I have written on the representation of code in The Social Network at length (Dinnen 2013), and on the banality of computation across Fincher’s works in my forthcoming monograph, The Digital Banal (Columbia University Press, 2018). 10. The phrase ‘empowering obfuscations’ is taken from Chun (2011a: 59). 11. One community who responded well to Blackhat was hackers (Clark Estes 2015; Metz 2015; Zurcher 2015). The attention paid to the procedures of code and cybersecurity were broadly considered to be authentic. 12. This is a particularly common trope in popular depictions of hacking – see all the films mentioned throughout this chapter. Perhaps more surprisingly, it also marks many documentary depictions of hacking in mainstream culture. For example, The Internet’s Own Boy (Knappenberger 2014); Citizenfour (Poitras 2014); and We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (Gibney 2013).

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Filmography 24, television series. USA: Imagine Television et al., 2001–14. , television series. USA: K/O Paper Products et al., 2014–present. Avengers: Age of Ultron, film, directed by Joss Whedon. USA: Marvel Studios, 2015. Blackhat, film, directed by Michael Mann. USA: Legendary Entertainment, 2015. Citizenfour, film, directed by Laura Poitras. USA: HBO Films, 2014. Furious 7, film, directed by James Wan. USA: Original Film et al., 2015. Hackers, film, directed by Iain Softley. USA: United Artists, 1995. Leverage, television series. USA: TNT et al., 2008–12. Live Free or Die Hard, film, directed by Len Wiseman. USA: Cheyenne Enterprises et al., 2007. Mr. Robot, television series. USA: Universal Cable Productions/Anonymous Content, 2015–present. Person of Interest, television series. USA: Bad Robot Productions et al., 2011–16. Skyfall, film, directed by Sam Mendes. UK: Eon Productions, 2012. Source Code, film, directed by Duncan Jones. USA: The Mark Gordon Company, 2011. Swordfish, film, directed by Dominic Sena. USA: Village Roadshow Pictures, 2001. The Blair Witch Project, film, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. USA: Haxan Films, 1999. The Fifth Estate, film, directed by Bill Condon. UK: DreamWorks et al., 2013. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, film, directed by David Fincher. USA: Scott Rudin Productions, 2011. The Internet’s Own Boy, film, directed by Brian Knappenberger. USA: Luminant Media, 2014. The Lawnmower Man, film, directed by Brett Leonard. USA: Allied Vision, 1992. The Matrix, film, directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski. Australia/USA: Village Roadshow Pictures, 1999. The Social Network, film, directed by David Fincher. USA: Relativity Media et al., 2010. Transformers, film, directed by Michael Bay. USA: di Bonaventura Pictures/Hasbro, 2007. Tron, film, directed by Steven Lisberger. USA: Walt Disney Productions, 1982. WarGames, film, directed by John Badham. USA: United Artists, 1983. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, film directed by Alex Gibney. USA: Jigsaw Productions, 2013.

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Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (2008a), ‘The enduring ephemeral, or the future is a memory’, Critical Inquiry, 35: 1, 148–71. — (2008b), ‘On “sourcery”, or code as fetish’, Configurations, 16: 3, 299–324. — (2011), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark Estes, Adam (2015), ‘Blackhat Allllmost Gets Hacking Right’, Gizmodo, 13 January, (last accessed 13 November 2017). Cubitt, Sean (2005), The Cinema Effect, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — (2014), The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Print to Pixels, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. D’Alessandro, Anthony (2015), ‘Legendary’s Michael Mann pic “Blackhat”: What the hell happened?’, Deadline, 20 January, (last accessed 4 October 2016). Dargis, Manohla (2010), ‘The revolution is being shot on digital video’, The New York Times, 17 December, (last accessed 4 October 2016). — (2015), ‘Unshackled hacker dons a white hat’, The New York Times, 15 January, (last accessed 4 October 2016). Darley, Andrew (2000), Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres, London and New York: Routledge. Dinnen, Zara (2013), ‘Break out that Perl script: The imaging and imagining of code in The Social Network and Catfish’, European Journal of American Culture, 32: 2, 173–86. Ekman, Ulrik, Jay David Bolter, Lily Díaz, Morten Søndergaard, and Maria Engberg (eds) (2016), Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity, and Culture, New York: Routledge. Friedman, Roger (2015), ‘Movies: Universal basically pulls “Blackhat” from circulation, Johnny Depp’s “Mortdecai” MIA’, Showbiz 411, 31 January, (last accessed 4 October 2016). Fuller, Matthew (2005), Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Galloway, Alexander R. (2004), Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — (2012), The Interface Effect, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gores, Jared (2015), ‘Digital aesthetic, kinetic action elevate Blackhat’, Reel Fanatics, 2 February,

(last accessed 4 October 2016). Holland, Faith (2011), ‘RIP Geocities’, (last accessed 4 October 2016). Jones, Amelia (2006), Self/image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject, London and New York: Routledge. Kelty, Chris (2005), ‘Geeks, social imaginaries, and recursive publics’, Cultural Anthropology, 20: 2, 185–214. Kember, Sarah and Joanna Zylinksa (2012), Life After New Media: Mediation as Vital Process, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2008), Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kushigemachi, Todd (2011), ‘Nostalgia goes digital: Turning back time in the films of David Fincher’, PopMatters, 10 October, (last accessed 3 December 2013).

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Lambie, Ryan (2012), ‘The changing face of the director’s cut’, Den of Geek!, 21 June, (last accessed 13 November 2017). Maciak, Phillip (2015), ‘Review: Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance by Garrett Stewart and Surveillance Cinema by Catherine Zimmer’, Film Quarterly, 69: 1, pp. 106–8. McLuhan, Marshall [1964] (1997), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge. Mann, Michael and Stephen Galloway (2014), ‘Loyola Marymount University School of Film and Television, The Hollywood Masters: Michael Mann’, (last accessed 4 October 2016). Mann, Michael and Angela Watercutter (2015), ‘What Michael Mann did to get the hackers in Blackhat right’, Wired, 13 January, (last accessed 4 October 2016). Metz, Cade (2015), ‘Is Blackhat the greatest hacking movie ever? Hackers think so’, Wired, 16 January, (last accessed 4 October 2016). Mosco, Vincent (2004), The Digital Sublime, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Orr, Christopher (2015), ‘Blackhat: A lumbering, pandering cyberthriller’, The Atlantic, 16 January, (last accessed 4 October 2016). Rogers, Pauline (2015), ‘Hacker sackers’, ICG International Cinematographers Guild Magazine, 5 January, (last accessed 4 October 2016). Rotten Tomatoes (n.d.), ‘Blackhat (2015)’, (last accessed 31 August 2017). Shaviro, Steven (2010), Post Cinematic Affect, Winchester: Zero Books. Sobchack, Vivian (1992), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press. Stewart, Garrett (2015), Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Tracy, Andrew (2015), ‘Blackhat, white noise: Michael Mann’s system of objects’, Cinema Scope 62, (last accessed 4 October 2016). Vernallis, Carol, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson (eds) (2013), The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warhol, Robyn R. (2005), ‘Neonarrative; or, how to render the unnarratable in realist fiction and contemporary film’, in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds), A Companion to Narrative Theory, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 220–31. Yamato, Jen (2015), ‘“Blackhat” composer backs down after slamming Michael Mann over score’, Deadline, 13 January, (last accessed 4 October 2016). Zoller Seitz, Matt (2015), ‘Blackhat’, RogerEbert.com, 14 January, (last accessed 4 October 2016). Zurcher, Anthony (2015), ‘Hackers on Blackhat: Hollywood finally gets internet right’, BBC News, 16 January, (last accessed 4 October 2016).

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12 Plotting the Loop: Videogames and Narratability Rob Gallagher

A

s any videogame scholar will tell you, the subject of games and narrative is a notoriously touchy one. By most accounts, indeed, the field of game studies as we know it was forged in the white-hot heat of a conflict between ‘narratologists’ and ‘ludologists’ over whether, and on what terms, games can tell stories. While some of the parties ostensibly involved have denied that such a struggle really took place (Frasca 2003; Murray 2005: 3), their protestations have not dimmed the appeal of this origin myth, a myth that Ian Bogost (2009) has argued had the pernicious effect of reducing game studies to a matter of ‘pitting one formalism against another’, obscuring, in so doing, the myriad cultural, technological, economic, and geographical factors that shape game design and gameplay alike. In retrospect it is apparent that the ludology/narratology controversy was itself rooted in specific contexts and conditions, underwritten both by particular ideas of what videogames could be and, crucially, by now outmoded design, distribution, and retail orthodoxies. Digital games today are part of a networked culture of data capitalism, in which our interactions with digital devices, whether playful or professional, have become a source of profit. There are now various forms of surplus value to be extracted from play, and as a consequence many studios are moving away from an understanding of games as vehicles for pre-authored beginning-middle-end narratives and towards a model of games as sandboxes, services, shopfronts, and social hubs. Where, in the 1990s, the holy grail for much of the industry was the videogame as ‘interactive movie’, today publishers tend to be more interested in understanding games as ‘platforms’ upon which fan communities, advertising campaigns, data mining routines, digital rights management infrastructures, and downloadable content markets can be built, and in tapping the ingenuity of an unwaged ‘playbour’ force of gamers, modders, vloggers, and fans (Kücklich 2005). This, of course, has consequences for how games ‘do’ narrative: rather than ushering players toward the conclusion of a linear plot, developers now have a vested interest in keeping them firmly in the middle of the gameplay loops, ‘storyworlds’, feedback systems, social networks, and online economies of which modern games are constituted (Ryan 2014). We can see the influence of this shift on game design in recent trends for ‘roguelikes’ that use procedural generation to produce infinite variations on a particular template, for games that ape Minecraft’s (Mojang 2011) emphasis on user creativity and construction, and for complex, highly competitive games like League of Legends (Riot Games 2009), around which ‘e-Sports’ cultures can coalesce. We can also see it in the emergence of a category of so-called ‘YouTube bait’ games, whose wacky scenarios

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and idiosyncratic physics models make them, some hold, more fun to watch others play than to play oneself (Yin-Poole 2015) – which is not necessarily a barrier to success now that, as Amazon’s $970 million acquisition of Twitch.tv resoundingly affirmed, watching other people play games is big business indeed. What do such developments mean for the study of games as narratives? Perhaps scholars interested in narrative should stick to discussing plot-heavy, pseudo-cinematic blockbusters like The Last of Us (Naughty Dog 2013)? Or to charting the emergence of a vein of experimental, story-led games and interactive fictions like Dear Esther (The Chinese Room 2012), Howling Dogs (Porpentine 2012), Her Story (Barlow 2015), and The Stanley Parable (Galactic Café 2013)? Such titles certainly merit analysis, serving as demonstrations of how new development tools, publishing platforms, and funding models are enabling independent studios to create thoughtful and inventive narrative experiences that defy traditional generic categories. I want, however, to take a different tack, informed less by classical narratology than postclassical narratology – and in particular feminist and queer narratology. If the former ‘sought to elaborate a narrative grammar . . . that could account for all narrative texts’, the latter insists that we need to account for the contexts that shape the production and reception of narratives and the ‘lived experience’ of those doing the producing and receiving, stressing in particular the importance of acknowledging ‘the gendered and gendering impact of particular narrative strategies upon flesh-and-blood readers’ (Warhol and Lanser 2015: 4). With this in mind, I want to look not just at games’ plots, scenarios, and storyworlds but at gaming as a situated, time-bound practice, addressing the terms on which different games become narratable for different kinds of players. This chapter is divided into two parts, each corresponding to a different sense of the phrase ‘plotting the loop’. In the first part I consider how game designers tune cycles and schedules to keep players playing, discussing a range of innovations at the level of software, hardware, and interface design that aim to better integrate games into (even as they subtly reshape) the rhythms and spaces of professional and domestic life. I draw here on Lauren Berlant’s (2011) theorisation of ‘cruel optimism’ and on Robyn Warhol’s (2003) account of cultural genres as ‘technologies of affect’ that help subjects to structure their time and to maintain a (gendered) sense of self, using these concepts to illuminate sociological and ethnographic narratives concerning play’s role in subjects’ everyday lives. Plotting the loop here involves working out when and how play can be incorporated into the more or less cyclical temporalities of everyday routine and the ways in which play habits are narrated. In the second half of the chapter, I look at how social media are fostering new cultures centred on sharing stories about gameplay, engaging with research that addresses the construction of narratives and the performance of identity across online social networks and digital/analogue ‘multispaces’ (Georgakopoulou 2013a). Here, games’ loops and cycles are turned back into narratives by communities of players in ways that open onto broader questions concerning the role and nature of narrative in digitally networked life.

Play, Story, and the Pleasures of ‘Lateral Agency’ For Berlant, cruel optimism is a response to social, political, and economic shifts that have rendered traditional roles, routines, and notions of progress increasingly untenable, making life feel unpredictable and ‘unnarratable’ for many in the overdeveloped

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world (Couldry 2010: 98). She sees individuals responding to these changes by cultivating investments, aspirations, and habits which provide a sense of continuity or a reason to keep going, even as they prevent those individuals from truly moving on and ‘flourishing’ (Berlant 2011: 1). In a reading of Mary Gaitskill’s 1991 novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, for example, Berlant shows how food can become an object of cruel optimism. For the novel’s protagonists, she writes, To live for one’s snack is to live by the rhythm of one’s own impulse for pleasure . . . [Eating] is a way of both being and not being in the world, giving the girls leverage to engage in exchange and to withdraw from sharing anything with just anyone. Eating is their time. It’s their time . . . In response to the overwhelming feeling of ‘sickening boundlessness’ or endless absorbing interiority, food shapes a space of time . . . It provides and defeats structure. (Berlant 2011: 135; italics in original) I cite this passage because of how easily one could substitute playing for eating and games for food without altering its sense. Whether as a time-killer or treat, whether it is a matter of devoting a whole weekend to a sprawling, plot-driven roleplaying game or of secretly keeping a Facebook game running in another browser tab at work, digital gameplay is, for many people, one of those ‘attachments that organize the present’, helping to colour and order temporal experience (Berlant 2011: 14). If, as Robyn Warhol (2003) has shown, cultural forms as diverse as the e-mail conversation, the soap opera, and the nineteenth-century episodic novel can all be addressed in terms of how they enable or assume different kinds of temporal and emotional patterning, then games, too, beg to be analysed on such terms. Warhol and Berlant offer models for understanding media consumption, time, and narrative that resonate with ethnographic and sociological research on gaming and its role in everyday life, from Jessica Enevold’s investigation of the terms on which different Scandinavian households integrate gaming into ‘the practice and performance of family’ (2012: 2) to Sebastian Deterding’s interviews with gamers for whom the mere prospect of play figures as a site of optimistic attachment (2016). The stories these scholars elicit suggest how, for neoliberal subjects perpetually being reminded to act responsibly and choose shrewdly, videogames appeal as opportunities to experience what Berlant calls ‘“lateral” agency, a mode of coasting consciousness within the ordinary that helps people survive the stress on their sensorium that comes from the difficulty of reproducing contemporary life’ (2011: 18). The stories their subjects tell about when and why it is acceptable to play, and the conditions they impose upon their gaming – which must ‘cede to joint activities like film watching and foodconsumption’ (Enevold 2012: 17) and may only begin when the sun has set, the chores are done and it is time to ‘unwind’ (Deterding 2016: 3936) – show that videogames have become an important means of demarcating time: to begin playing is to renounce, if only momentarily, one’s domestic and professional obligations, and for this reason play must be rationed and regulated lest it ceases to be a treat or a break and begins to interfere with ‘real’ life. Ethnographer Helen Thornham’s research (2011) yields similar stories, and is particularly interesting for what it has to say about gaming, time, and masculinity. The young men she interviews are at pains to represent themselves as active, autonomous, rational, and sociable, rejecting the identity of ‘the gamer who enthusiastically and

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mindlessly “loses” themselves in the machine, or becomes so immersed in the game they lose all sense of time, reason, or logic’ (2011: 19). Thornham sees the narratives these men construct as bids to ‘justify [play] as something other than pleasure, escapism or entertainment’ (2011: 19). The games console is framed not as a toy or an indulgence but as a multimedia device that offers better value than single-use products like DVD players, as a tool for pragmatically managing stress, boredom, and situational loneliness, and as a means of ‘supporting social activities’ (2011: 28). Gaming alone, meanwhile, is characterised as ‘“Geek” gaming . . . laden with signifiers of the lone, perverted male, essentially fulfilling all his abnormal pleasures and desires through the technology’ and identified with ‘a failure of masculinity’ (2011: 69–70) – though the fact that Thornham regularly observes the men who voice these opinions playing games by themselves suggests that their stories should be interpreted less as reliable testimonies than as attempts to reconcile the pleasures of play with heteronormative understandings of masculinity. As in Warhol’s analysis of texts which elicit ‘effeminate’ or ‘antieffeminate’ corporeal responses (2003: 71–3), notions of gender prove, here, to be inextricable from questions of time and rhythm: for Thornham, play is at least potentially unmanly insofar as it represents a departure from the ‘temporal structure of working lives where every hour has meaning or purpose’ (2011: 30). The bombastic plots typical of commercial videogames can be understood as attempts to refute (or to hyperbolically overcompensate for) discourses of digital play as juvenile, antisocial, unmanly, and purposeless. If networked shooters like Destiny (Bungie 2014) obey this convention by framing play in terms of taking up arms against aliens, terrorists, or marauding robots, they also address such concerns in other ways: social features and multiplayer modes present gaming as an opportunity to catch up, compete, and collaborate with friends (or to meet new ones) rather than a mark of social isolation, while questlogs, currencies, metrics, and rewards give players a sense of purpose and progress, implying that they are not wasting their time but investing it. Such features can be understood, I would argue, as attempts to shape the terms on which play is narratable. The same is true of hardware features designed to facilitate what Enevold calls the ‘domestication of gameplay’ by giving gamers various options for ‘choreographing domestic time-space’ (2012: 1, 16). Sony’s PlayStation 4, for example, lets players pause play or enter ‘sleep mode’ (whereby the game can remain ‘suspended’ if the player is suddenly called away), has wireless controllers with built-in headphone sockets, and offers the ability to shift mid-game from playing on a TV screen to playing on a laptop or a PlayStation Vita handheld. In an era of flexible work, such features render play similarly flexible, making it easier to carve out time and space for gaming in shared environments. Such features, of course, also convey implicit messages about time, productivity, and value: Crary, for example, finds the conceit of ‘sleep mode’ insidious, arguing that ‘the notion of an apparatus in a state of low-power readiness . . . [is] supersed[ing] an off/on logic, so that nothing is ever fundamentally “off” and there is never an actual state of rest’ (2013: 13). Here we see how, even as games promise an escape from the workplace’s logic of productivity and thrift, they reproduce that logic in order to frame play as meaningful, offering a buffet of goals and challenges from which players can pick according to their mood, their skill level, and the amount of free time they have on hand. While it might seem strange to address these techniques under the heading of ‘narrative’, to the extent that they are about temporal patterning and imbuing unfolding sequences of actions with

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a sense of resolution or meaning, I would argue that this is a very fruitful lens through which to address them. If ‘triple A’ console action games like Destiny offer one approach to play as time management, the kinds of ‘casual’ browser and smartphone games that have become so popular over the past decade offer another. While so-called casual games tend to be cheerier, less mechanically demanding, and less graphically lavish and computationally intensive than so-called hardcore console and PC games, Jesper Juul argues that their defining trait is their commitment to ‘making games fit into people’s lives’ (2009: 12; italics in original). For Bea Malsky (2015), games like Diner Dash (Gamelab 2004) and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (Glu Mobile 2014) offer a perfect example of how, by welcoming fragmentary engagement, casual games subtly pervade the lives of their players in the minutes of getting a snack at work or sitting on the bus during a commute . . . filling in the empty spaces of their players’ lives, never capturing an extended period of full attention but also never receding fully into the background of awareness. (Malsky 2015) But if this distinguishes a game like Hollywood from one like Destiny, which asks players to sink hundreds of hours of concentrated attention into acquiring the skills and resources necessary to excel, and if Hollywood eschews Destiny’s intergalactic gunplay for a scenario (comparatively) grounded in reality and targeted more at female players, in other respects the two games have much in common: both ask players to create personalised avatars in whose development (from shop assistant to A-list celebrity in Hollywood’s case) they more or less literally invest; both obey game design orthodoxy by organising play around behaviourist-style reinforcement schedules, so that players are perpetually tantalised by the next upgrade or reward. And, like Destiny (in which players hoard multiple currencies and materials acquired at different rates and used to upgrade different kinds of equipment), the free-to-play Hollywood is profoundly interested in economics and resource management, requiring players to expend their character’s ‘energy’ cannily to advance their career. Once their current stock of energy is exhausted, players are given the option of waiting five minutes of real-world time for one unit to replenish or spending actual money on buying more. In this way Hollywood repeatedly confronts players with the same question: would you rather wait, or pay? Or, to phrase it differently, are you willing to pay not to have to wait to kill more time? In their willingness to wager that many players will prefer paying to waiting, such games show a sure grasp of the dynamics of cruel optimism: players keep going not so much because they are captivated, exhilarated, or immersed – nor, for that matter, because they want to see how the story turns out – but because play provides a reassuring sense of continuity, purpose, or structure, a way to absolve ourselves from having to think about what else we should be doing. This might make it seem like narrative’s only function in games is to provide alibis, cloaking the play of geometry, statistics, and behaviourist conditioning mechanisms in evocative metaphors (war, celebrity) in order to legitimise fundamentally meaningless, even pernicious, activities that create value for games’ publishers. This, however, is not necessarily the case. Malsky holds that Hollywood and Diner Dash generate surprisingly poignant stories that push players ‘to think critically about our fraught relationships with our work, and to playfully reimagine what might be’, throwing

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facets of contemporary experience into stark relief using expressive strategies unavailable to novelists or filmmakers, strategies founded on the interplay of the titles’ gameplay systems, user interfaces, and fictional frames. Here we might also think of Redshirt (The Tiniest Shark 2013), a sci-fi social networking satire in which players must curry favour with various non-player characters in order to escape a doomed space station. Played via a Facebook-style interface, Redshirt tells a story about social media fostering rivalry and anomie using distinctly ludic means. In the fantasy action roleplaying game Demon’s Souls (FROM Software 2009) and its sequels, meanwhile, the software’s handling of save files helps to amplify the plot’s interest in the consequences of avarice and paranoia: where, in most games, players are free to revert to a saved checkpoint if things go wrong, here an ‘autosave’ system commits us to dealing with the consequences of being careless, greedy, or overconfident. These are just fleeting examples, but they show that in order to understand how games perform or elicit different kinds of narration we need to think beyond A–B plot arcs to address how events, economies, and systems can assume narrative significance over time, as play is integrated into everyday routines and individual biographies. We also need to consider how games can become what Julie Rak (2015) calls ‘life labs’, enabling players to experiment with different kinds of narrative performance and identity work – a subject I want to turn to in the remainder of the chapter.

Telling Playing on Social Media Many gamers now share experiences of play on social networks and video streaming services like Twitch and YouTube. Whether or not a game boasts an intricate plot may be less important, for these players, than whether it supports the production of anecdotes, roleplay videos, tweets, and animated GIFs of their own. If this has important implications for game design, it also spurs us to rethink definitions of successful play, which can become a matter of engaging audiences through playful narration rather than just beating high scores. In seeking to address these kinds of storytelling, sociolinguist Alexandra Georgakopoulou’s ‘small stories’ framework becomes useful. For Georgakopoulou, classical narratology’s ‘longstanding tradition of viewing stories as sustained, full-fledged, teller-led performances . . . that unfold within a single event from beginning to end’ leaves it ill-equipped to address a culture in which networked devices ‘offer users the ability to share experience as it is happening with various semiotic (multi-modal) resources, to update it as often as necessary and to (re)-embed it in various social platforms’ (2013b: 21, 20). As she points out, on sites like Facebook and Twitter stories often take the form of bursts of ‘breaking news’ issued while events are still unfolding (2013a). Comments, links, and reply functions, meanwhile, enable multiple tellers to participate in shaping a story, and permit third parties to contest, elaborate, and inflect stories in unexpected ways. In an environment where technology enables narratives ‘to be integrated into specific sites as well as to be lifted out of them and circulated in new contexts . . . from one mediated environment to another, from online to offline’, small stories research attempts to account for stories that develop and travel across digital/analogue ‘multi-space[s]’ (2013a: 213). Finally, small stories research teaches us to be attentive not just to narratives but to the acts of ‘narrative stancetaking’ whereby someone ‘positions him/herself as a teller’ and ‘more or less reflexively mobilizes more or less conventionalized communicative means to signal that

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the activity to follow, the activity underway or the activity that is indexed, alluded to, deferred, silenced is a story’ (2013b: 22) – an approach well suited to addressing how would-be tellers vie for attention online. These concepts can help us to address games that might not lend themselves to traditional narratological readings, but whose popularity and longevity is attributable, at least in part, to the way that they afford opportunities for narrative stancetaking – games like Derek Yu’s Spelunky. First released as PC freeware back in 2008, Spelunky has become something of a cult phenomenon thanks to an upgraded console re-release and the growth of a devoted player community connected by social media. Compared with ‘triple A’ games built by teams of hundreds with budgets of hundreds of millions, Spelunky might appear simple, even primitive. A cartoonish 2D side-scroller, it takes its cues from the likes of Spelunker (Martin/MicroGraphicImage 1983) and Rick Dangerous (Core Design 1989), early attempts to remediate the archaeological adventures of H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain and George Lucas’s Indiana Jones. Spelunky differs from its inspirations, however, in its implementation of procedural generation techniques which ensure that the layout and contents of its levels will be different each time we play. Artist and coder Darius Kazemi (2013) has written a series of blogposts explaining how Spelunky’s environments are generated, illuminating the extent to which authorship, here, is less about sketching a sequence of events than it is tuning probabilities and permutations so that lucky breaks, cruel twists of fate, and moments of slapstick chaos can emerge from the game’s interlocking systems. This capacity for emergence renders Spelunky eminently tellable, and it is no surprise that social networks abound with Spelunky narratives, from seconds-long GIFs documenting startling moments to YouTube roleplays, personal blogposts, and articles recounting and dissecting elite players’ achievements. From the player’s perspective, then, Spelunky’s ‘narrative’ is less about clearing obstacles in order to reach a conclusion than it is the Bildungsroman of that player learning the game’s mechanical intricacies and discovering its secrets. Spelunky deemphasises the importance of any single ‘run’ through its hectic pacing and its unforgiving difficulty: novice players will often die in seconds, while the very best players can complete the whole game in under two minutes (though they will have to have played for tens if not hundreds of hours to get to this point). That said, Spelunky is not entirely devoid of traditional narration. While many games now use voice-acted dialogue, scripted set pieces, and cinematic ‘cutscenes’ to establish a context for play, Spelunky limits its scene-setting to a short text detailing the thoughts of our avatar as he approaches the cave and a brief animation showing him beginning his descent. After a few play sessions it becomes apparent that this opening narration is not, however, the same every time. Rather, the game has libraries of first, second, and third lines (eight of each) that it selects from at random to compose these prologues, much in the same way as it uses a system of rules to generate and populate levels. One possible combination reads: ‘As I recalled my father’s last words / I drained the rest of my canteen / And vowed to return victorious’; another, ‘Putting the faded photo in my pocket / I squinted into the darkness / And thought of her one last time.’ Even once we know that these micronarratives are constellations of fragments, it is hard not to imbue them with meaning and substance – to detect in the first an Oedipal impetus for our quest, to assume that the ‘faded photo’ in the second must be of ‘her’. Rather than amounting to a complete, coherent story, this library of snippets comprises a grammar, a set of generic phrases that can be kaleidoscopically recombined to create new variations,

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each of which will capture the melodramatic tenor of pulp adventure tales, some of which might strike us as particularly felicitous or appealing, and none of which will be definitive. And just as these laconic first-person snippets mobilise the metonymic power of pronouns, clichés, and synopses to tap the reader’s own memories and associative scripts, so the individual scenarios that Spelunky’s algorithms choreograph become meaningful by virtue of our developing sense of what is possible, predictable, or unexpected within its ludic and diegetic framework. If the original version of Spelunky already lent itself to storytelling, the various ‘enhanced editions’ that have been released since 2012 are notable for the way that they acknowledge and build upon the game’s narratability. Boasting upgraded graphics, these editions also added cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes alongside a ‘daily challenge’ feature. In daily challenge mode (which sees a new cave generated every twenty-four hours and gives each player one chance to get as far through it as they can) Spelunky becomes both a little ludic snack to be enjoyed between other, easier-to-justify activities and an alibi for maintaining contact with fellow (rival) players. These HD editions also introduced some significant cosmetic changes: in the original game there was only one avatar available, a button-nosed caricature of Harrison Ford’s whip-wielding Indiana Jones. Players would also encounter helpless and hysterical ‘damsels’ who, if carried to the level’s exit, would restore this hero’s health with a kiss. In a move that won praise from journalists uneasy with the damsel system’s gender dynamics, the remake offered various male and female avatars of different ethnicities, ages, and body types for players to choose from, while introducing ‘male damsels’ and ‘damsel dogs’ for them to rescue (and kiss). Classical ludological thought dictates that we should dismiss the introduction of these characters as ‘irrelevant’ to analysis of Spelunky qua game, on the grounds that these new avatar skins did not force players to ‘play differently’ (Aarseth 2004: 48). They did, however, operate as invitations to play differently, prompting players to experiment with the many gameplay styles and strategies that the game supports (combative, chivalrous, greedy, speedy, and so on), and to explore its mechanical and narrative affordances. We can see this in YouTuber Nika Harper’s Spelunky ‘roleplay’ video (2014), which sees her imposing additional imperatives and constraints on herself grounded in the backstory and the personality she invents for the female spelunker in the green shirt. According to Harper, this character loves pugs, meaning she has to try and rescue every damsel dog. She also feels compelled to kill all the male damsels, who remind her of an ex-boyfriend. Playing with these extra rules in place while offering extempore commentary on her own ludic performance ‘as’ this character, Harper shows how purely visual changes to a game can authorise narrative experiments, generating new kinds of resonance, comedy, or poignancy from the same old rules, mechanics, and lines of code. Such videos suggest how social media are changing the relationship between representation, storytelling, and gameplay. For decades, scholars have questioned the assumption that players want avatars with whom they can identify, arguing that in many cases players are less interested in whether their avatars resemble them than in what those avatars can do (Kinder 1991: 107; Shaw 2011). With videos like Harper’s the question becomes more complex, a matter of how what avatars who look a certain way can do might license different forms of narrative play. This issue is further complicated when it comes to games which (unlike Spelunky) map an avatar’s abilities and behaviours to their ‘race’ and ‘gender’. As Alexander Galloway notes, drawing on Lisa

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Nakamura’s (2002) work on ‘cybertypes’ and ‘menu-driven identities’, many games continue to subscribe to a logic of ‘racial typing’ which informs not just how characters look and speak, but also their ‘“way[s] of doing things”’ (Galloway 2012: 131). Often, such games will also divide attributes and capacities along lines of gender (so that, if elves and trolls ‘handle’ differently, so too do male elves and female elves). Under the alibi that it is ‘only a game’, titles like StarCraft (Blizzard Entertainment 1998) affirm decidedly retrogressive understandings of identity, exemplifying, for Galloway at least, the grimly ironic way that outmoded ideas can assume greater functional sway at the point when no one really believes in them any more, when they are relegated to the status of rote protocols (2012: 130–2, 136–7). Revisiting Galloway’s analysis today, it is notable that while he acknowledges that ‘enterprising gamer[s] can “play with” race via the chat channel, fan comics and so on’, such play is very much framed as a niche practice (2012: 132). With the meteoric rise of streaming and vlogging in the last half-decade, however, there are now far more opportunities to watch and/or listen to players acting out stories with the (gendered, racially coded) avatars available to them, engaging in forms narrative stancetaking and identity work that, whether intentionally or inadvertently, foreground the issue of how avatars’ identities align (or fail to align) with those of players. One example would be the videos posted to YouTube by roleplayers of games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios 2011), who talk viewers through in-game events ‘as’ characters they have created. As I have proposed elsewhere, to watch these videos is to hear gamers testing out the extent to which so-called roleplaying games can in fact support narrative expression and self-presentation rather than just accommodating a range of ludic strategies (Gallagher 2014). Where, in those instances, we listen to gamers who remain off-camera, it has become commonplace for streamers and vloggers to incorporate a webcam feed into a smaller inset window, so that viewers can see not only the gameworld and the player-character, but also the face (and, to various extents, the body and the environment) of the player in control. Scholars note that such videos often revolve around displays of heightened emotion, with video makers viscerally embodying feelings held in common with their fellow gamers (Hamilton et al. 2014: 1319, 1321). This might entail complying with the affective cues games issue (by, for example, whimpering and squealing your way through a ‘survival horror’ game), but it might equally entail expressing frustration, cynicism, rage, or disinterest when a game wants the player to be exhilarated, touched, immersed, or amused; in both cases the spectacle hinges on how particular players respond to the appeals games mount. This spectacle, it should be said, is not always an edifying one. Take the videos about Robert Yang’s game Cobra Club (2015), which mounts a critique of the National Security Agency’s surveillance of Web users by casting players as a queer man swapping explicit selfies online. The game is a thoughtful but also very funny meditation on consent, roleplay, and privacy. In the hands of YouTubers, however, it became grist for hyperbolically heteronormative displays of shock and distaste in videos that ignored the game’s anti-NSA dimension and recast its campy ebullience as gay shamelessness (see, e.g., S Pete 2015; MunchingBrotato 2015). Such cases are a reminder that we should not be too quick to declare these new narrative forms subversive or progressive. Even when gameplay videos tell stories that question or seek to expand games’ models of identity, their ability to address the issues

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Galloway highlights is limited. For one thing, most productions of this sort tend to be focused on what Galloway calls ‘the window dressing of diegetic representation’ rather than the ‘hardcoded machinic behaviours’ through which the logic of typing does its work (though some ‘modders’ do move beyond the interface to tinker with games’ systems) (2012: 131). Then there is the need to acknowledge what has changed in the years since Nakamura’s critique of online cybertyping. Since 2002 we have witnessed the development of more nuanced, less prescriptive modes of demographic profiling, many of which work from the bottom up rather than the top down. But if these suggest a willingness to acknowledge hybridity, dynamism, and difference, Galloway reminds us that this willingness speaks to the way that, in the era of big data, articulations of ‘difference [are] mobilized as fuel for value creation in the marketplace’ and used to construct ever more finely articulated mechanisms of recuperation, valorisation, and exploitation (2012: 137). None of which is to deny the interest gameplay videos hold from the standpoint of postclassical narratology. If classical narratology was largely content to ignore the concrete contexts in which embodied subjects construct and consume narratives, then these documents of players working with and against games which afford them opportunities to play out stories, rehearse gendered feelings, and try out subject positions in front of audiences connected to them by a range of feedback mechanisms (likes, subscriptions, comments, and so on) positively demand that we attend to those contexts. These feedback mechanisms show that exceptionally skilled players do not necessarily command the biggest audiences, suggesting that streamers with compelling personae who can turn failure into an engaging story or an absurd spectacle often fare better when it comes to ‘converting play into YouTube money’ (Postigo 2014). Even videos that are more focused on winning than telling, meanwhile, can inspire fascinating forms of collaborative storytelling, such as academic and game designer Doug Wilson’s (2013) account of a particularly remarkable Spelunky run, in which Twitch streamer Bananasaurus Rex performed the putatively impossible feat of carrying the game’s secret, tremendously fragile ‘eggplant’ item across the entire gameworld. Beginning by acknowledging that this achievement ‘won’t mean very much’ if one is ‘not a Spelunky junkie’ (a qualification reminiscent of Warhol’s assertion that a single soap episode might be read very differently by viewers who have been watching for six days, six weeks, six months or thirty-six years (2003: 110)), Wilson sets out both to tell the story of Rex’s run and ‘to help [readers] understand why’ it represents ‘an important, downright historic achievement . . . for games at large’. This dramatic gesture of narrative stancetaking is followed by some seven thousand words of in-depth commentary, punctuated with videos. Essentially, the sequence of events Wilson recounts concerns a particularly skilled gamer interacting with a game created by designers whose code contained secrets that remained hidden from all but the most devoted players, as well as glitches that enabled those players to do the apparently impossible. But, as Wilson repeatedly reminds us, this tale involves other tellers and protagonists too, from the community who collaborated to unearth the glitches and refine the strategies that Rex made use of to the fellow streamers who Skyped in to offer commentary, advice, and support as his run reached its climax. Wilson’s article both celebrates and demonstrates the way in which playcentric narratives can now be elaborated across different contexts, platforms, and media by multiple parties. In doing so, it foregrounds what formalist approaches to games, whether story-oriented

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or rule-oriented, miss: the cultural and communal aspects of digital gaming, and the ways in which play cultures both inform and are informed by economic and technological innovations. Where Wilson’s article suggests how complex networked gaming cultures and the stories they spawn can be, back at the other end of the complexity scale we see ‘breaking news’ style acts of narrative stancetaking that might amount to no more than a photograph: in one Tumblr post tagged #spelunky a blogger uploads an image of a monitor displaying the game’s title screen, captioned ‘My night is really exciting’. Hovering somewhere between self-deprecation and luxuriation in its portrayal of a space and time reserved for play, this small story returns us to the idea of games as ‘timesinks’ that help players to while the hours away rather than texts that have something to say. But these two functions are not mutually exclusive, as we can see from numerous storyled games in which the gendered rhythms of the domestic everyday are central: look at how Forbidden Siren’s (Team Siren 2004) zombie housewives, endlessly circling the same kitchens and hallways, offer a gothic testament to the dehumanising force of routine; at how Persona 4 (Atlus 2008) has players repeatedly return to domestic spaces that become loaded with narrative significance over tens of hours of play; or at Gone Home’s (Fullbright 2013) deserted house, strewn with evidence of the personal dramas that, unbeknownst to one another, the various members of an Oregon family are playing out. We can see this capacity too in the cycle of ‘free will mode’ videos made by artist Angela Washko (2013) and the work of life-writing scholar Julie Rak (2015), both of whom use the bestselling ‘digital dollshouse’ series The Sims (Maxis/EA 2000– present) to craft surrealistic parables about gender norms, habit, and the home. These examples make it clear that gamic narrative is not just a matter of prewritten stories, nor even (as lapsed ludologist Jesper Juul’s Half-Real (2005) has it) of how stories and systems interact; it is also about how we understand, frame, and mediate play, both as an engagement with procedural fictions and as an activity that can help us to negotiate the flow of time. Rather than asking whether games can tell stories, then, or debating whether ‘applying’ narrative theory to videogames is fruitful, we should ask how encounters between theories and games – understood as fictions, as software, as activities, as commodities, as affective modulators and shared frameworks for competition and meaning-making – can reshape our conceptions of each.

Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. (2004), ‘Genre trouble: Narrativism and the art of simulation’, in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (eds), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 45–55. Berlant, Lauren (2011), Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bogost, Ian (2009), ‘Videogames are a mess’, Bogost.com, (last accessed 31 August 2016). Cobra Club, videogame, created by Robert Yang. USA: self-published, 2015. Couldry, Nick (2010), Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism, London: Sage. Crary, Jonathan (2013), 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso. Dear Esther, videogame, created by The Chinese Room. UK: The Chinese Room, 2012. Demon’s Souls, videogame, created by FROM Software. Japan: Sony Computer Entertainment, 2009. Destiny, videogame, created by Bungie. USA: Activision, 2014.

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Deterding, Sebastian (2016), ‘Contextual autonomy support in video game play: A grounded theory’, in Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York: ACM, pp. 3931–43. Diner Dash, videogame, created by Gamelab. USA: PlayFirst, 2004. Enevold, Jessica (2012), ‘Domesticating play, designing everyday life: The practice and performance of family gender, and gaming’, in Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2012 Conference, DiGRA, (last accessed 28 August 2016). Forbidden Siren, videogame, created by Team Siren. Japan: Sony Computer Entertainment, 2004. Frasca, Gonzalo (2003), ‘Ludologists love stories, too: Notes from a debate that never took place’, in Marinka Copier and Joost Raessens (eds), Level Up: Digital Games Research Conference Proceedings, DiGRA, (last accessed 28 August 2016). Gallagher, Rob (2014), ‘Let’s roleplay: Reading roleplay in Skyrim “Let’s Play” Videos’, FirstPerson Scholar, 1 October, (last accessed 29 January 2017). Galloway, Alexander R. (2012), The Interface Effect, Cambridge: Polity Press. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2013a), ‘Storytelling on the go: Breaking news as a travelling narrative genre’, in Matti Hyvärinen, Mari Hatavara, and Lars-Christer Hydén (eds), The Travelling Concepts of Narrative, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 201–24. — (2013b), ‘Small stories research and social media practices: Narrative stancetaking and circulation in a Greek news story’, Sociolinguistica, 27, 19–36. Gone Home, videogame, created by Fullbright. USA: Fullbright, 2013. Hamilton, William A., Oliver Garretson, and Andruid Kerne (2014), ‘Streaming on Twitch: Fostering participatory communities of play within live mixed media’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York: ACM, pp. 1315–24. Harper, Nika (2014), ‘Spelunky! Nika Harper’s story mode’, YouTube, 10 February, (last accessed 28 August 2016). Her Story, videogame, created by Sam Barlow. UK: self-published, 2015. Howling Dogs, videogame, created by Porpentine. USA: self-published, 2012. Juul, Jesper (2005), Half-Real: Video Games Between Rules and Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — (2009), A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kazemi, Darius (2013), ‘Spelunky generator lessons’, Tiny Subversions, (last accessed 28 August 2016). Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, videogame, created by Glu Mobile. USA: Glu Mobile, 2014. Kinder, Marsha (1991), Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kücklich, Julian (2005), ‘Precarious playbour: Modders and the digital games industry’, The Fibreculture Journal, 5, (last accessed 28 August 2016). League of Legends, videogame, created by Riot Games. USA: Riot Games, 2009. Malsky, Bea (2015), ‘Managing hearts with Kim and Flo’, The New Inquiry, 20 July, (last accessed 28 August 2016). Minecraft, videogame, created by Markus Persson/Mojang. Sweden: Mojang, 2011. MunchingBrotato (2015), ‘MOM IM BUSY! | Cobra Club | Dick Pic Simulator’, YouTube, 28 December, (last accessed 28 January 2017).

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Murray, Janet H. (2005), ‘The last word on ludology v. narratology’, DiGRA 2005, Vancouver, Canada, 17 June 2005, (last accessed 31 October 2017). Nakamura, Lisa (2002), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet, London: Routledge. Persona 4, videogame, created by Atlus. Japan: Square Enix, 2008. Postigo, Hector (2014), ‘The socio-technical architecture of digital labor: Converting play into YouTube money’, New Media & Society, 3 July, 1–18. Rak, Julie (2015), ‘Life writing versus automedia: The Sims 3 game as a life lab’, Biography, 38: 2, 155–80. Redshirt, videogame, created by The Tiniest Shark. UK: Positech, 2013. Rick Dangerous, videogame, created by Core Design. UK: Rainbird Software, 1989. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2014), ‘Story/Worlds/Media: Tuning the instruments of a media-conscious narratology’, in Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon (eds), Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 25–49. Shaw, Adrienne (2011), ‘He could be a bunny rabbit for all I care: Exploring identification in digital games’, in Proceedings of DiGRA 2011 Conference: Think Design Play, DiGRA,

(last accessed 28 August 2016). Spelunker, videogame, created by Martin/MicroGraphicImage. USA: MicroGraphicImage, 1983. Spelunky (HD version), videogame, created by Derek Yu/Mossmouth. USA: Mossmouth, 2012. S Pete (2015), ‘Cobra Club BEST GAME OF ALL TIME EVER BY ANYONE EVER [Verified]’, YouTube, 4 June, (last accessed 28 January 2017). StarCraft, videogame, created by Blizzard Entertainment. USA: Blizzard Entertainment, 1998. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, videogame, created by Bethesda Game Studios. USA: Bethesda Softworks, 2011. The Last of Us, videogame, created by Naughty Dog. USA: Sony Computer Entertainment, 2013. The Sims, videogame series, Maxis. USA: Electronic Arts, 2000–present. The Stanley Parable, videogame, created by Davey Wreden/Galactic Café. USA: Galactic Café, 2013. Thornham, Helen (2011), Ethnographies of the Videogame: Gender, Narrative and Praxis, Farnham: Ashgate. Warhol, Robyn (2003), Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. — and Susan S. Lanser (2015), ‘Introduction’, in Robin Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (eds), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 1–20. Washko, Angela (2013), ‘Free will mode’, Angelawashko.com, (last accessed 29 August 2016). Wilson, Doug (2013), ‘A breakdown of 2013’s most fascinating videogame moment’, Polygon, 23 December, (last accessed 28 August 2016). Yin-Poole, Wesley (2015), ‘Shaking off accusations of YouTube bait’, Eurogamer, 1 May,

(last accessed 28 August 2016).

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13 SERIAL as Digital Constellation: Fluid Textuality and Semiotic Otherness in the Podcast Narrative Ellen McCracken

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n easily accessible audio narrative attained widespread popularity in late 2014, to the surprise of its creators as well as journalists and media scholars. The podcast Serial was released in twelve weekly instalments as a digital download on smartphones, tablets, and computers. Word of mouth, press coverage, and mushrooming social media commentary catapulted this free public radio programme to unexpected international attention. Growing audiences began to listen to the episodes of innovative investigative journalism about a 1999 murder case involving two high school students, a broken love affair, and the contentious conviction of the spurned boyfriend. By week six of the programme, five million people had downloaded the episodes; a year and a half later, audiences had reached 170 million, as the podcast transcended its formal ending.1 This new cultural artefact raises important issues for narratology, in particular an expanded notion of the text in the age of digital creation, dissemination, and consumption. How does an audio text extend itself in diverse venues and move between them, each with competing semiotic strategies? How do vectors of multidirectional flow characterise the new textuality and storyworlds of a popular digital podcast such as Serial? How do the various trajectories of the larger narrative constellation come to terms with their semiotic shortcomings through compensatory strategies? In the mid 1960s, near the end of the pre-digital age, Umberto Eco cautioned against both the Frankfurt School’s pessimism about the mass media as one-way communication as well as Marshall McLuhan’s celebratory media theories. Eco argued that these theorists collapsed the distinctions between the channels of communication, the codes the sender employs, the messages sent, and the distinct codes the receivers of the messages employ. ‘Variability of interpretation is the constant law of mass communication’, he noted ([1967] 1986: 141). Today more than ever we need these distinctions to understand a text such as Serial as a constellation of signifying practices in multiple sites with a composite and fluid textuality. In the age of Web 2.0, hundreds of thousands of listeners engage with the text and with one another on the screens of social media to amplify the original narrative utterances. Lurkers, who read without posting their own comments, join thousands of content creators in digital spaces both synchronously and asynchronically to expand Serial’s storyworld. A popular podcast such as Serial invites narratologists to analyse the trajectories of the expanded narrative paths of textuality in the early digital age of the twenty-first century.

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Oral storytelling in the digital age almost immediately overcomes the transitory nature of traditional oral communication. After being downloaded from the cloud, the podcast episodes remain in the internal memory of the user’s digital device, in most cases for as long as the listener desires. They can be reheard, studied, and forwarded to friends. Transcripts are available online, albeit without the crucial auditory elements of the text. Audiences no longer need to sit together in a given space and time to hear the oral story. The performance can be accessed when and where one desires. These variable listening sites and times play an important role in shaping textuality for audiences. Most importantly, however, oral storytelling in the digital age is no longer only an auditory medium. Almost immediately, the text moves to screens, as various listeners insert themselves into the ongoing narrative as participants and para-creators. That is, they shape the ongoing narrative on both the authorial and reception ends: in response to listeners’ comments, investigative journalist Sarah Koenig and the Serial team add material to the ongoing episodes, and audience members reformulate their interpretations of the narrative as they interact with others online. But what exactly is the text in the case of a broadly popular podcast such as Serial, and what points of entry do we choose as we engage in narratological analysis? Raymond Williams developed the concept of televisual flow to describe the appearance of unity in the continuum of programmes and commercials on US television when he arrived one day, tired and jetlagged after a trip from England. He used this intuitive observation to analyse the structural interactions and continuities between the ostensibly separate programmes and ads. Media flow has been radically transformed today in the age of digital streaming and on-demand viewing. This altered access to programming profoundly transforms textuality. New ‘flows’ occur both between programmes and inside episodes. Where broadcasters structure programme segments to ensure flow across the advertising interruptions, and melt the end of one programme into the beginning of the next, streamed media encodes these commercial ends into the media texts in distinct ways. Brief blank screens replace the ads when commercial television programmes are streamed, bringing into relief the common narrative strategies that programmes deploy to retain audiences across the gap of internal serialisation caused by advertising interruptions. In the case of Serial when the episodes are binge-streamed after the season ends, new, significantly more extensive advertising is inserted into the digital text, altering textuality. Netflix ‘flows’ episodes into one another when viewers stream a series, with the next one starting automatically while the credits of the previous episode run, and inserts visual links to similar programmes at the end of a series that viewers can simply tap to binge more and, they hope, extend the pleasurable experience. Here I expand Williams’s (1974) concept of televisual flow to focus on the pathways into and out of the Serial podcast that alter its textuality. Materially, Serial is a dynamic, unstable text involving multiple vectors of directional flow, many more than, for example, a printed book between two covers or a traditional oral performance. I engage with a narratological approach that I term reverse directional flow to re-enter the text critically from one of its key external paratexts – the public digital interventions of listeners. Imagine, for example, as was the case in my engagement with Serial, that friends and family tell you about the compelling new podcast they have become addicted to. It is November 2014, and my initial trajectory into the audio narrative is inflected

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by how they characterise the programme to me; one, a judge and former prosecutor, insists that the protagonist, Adnan Syed, is clearly guilty of the murder of his exgirlfriend, Hae Min Lee; the other tells me how compelling and dramatic the narrative is and that it is hard to wait each week for the next instalment. Both listeners have read and studied the extensive online commentary about the case and tell me about it. Thus, the text of Serial has already begun to flow for me before I listen to a single episode. Further, as I play catch-up, I can engage in binge listening, experiencing the text entirely differently than those who follow it with enforced weekly intervals.2 But I also now engage with multiple paths into and out of the twelve episodes, reading news reports and online commentary, and discussing it with others. The concept of multidirectional flow is a key element of the textuality of a podcast such as Serial. People traverse many vectors into and out of the digital oral performance, and these paths are crucial to narratalogical analysis. Distinct narrative components created through several rhetorical techniques overcode the broadened and evolving textual constellation we call Serial.

Reverse Directional Flow Traditionally, cultural texts themselves are the starting point of analysis, with occasional study of the paratexts that spread out from the text, including some study of the interpretations various readers engage in. But what if analysis were instead to begin with the extratextual commentary and then return to the original, focusing as an entry point into textual analysis on what a group of listeners found important? In the digital age, extensive narrative flows move outward from the text and back into it. The millions of online comments about Serial constitute a vast corpus that merits computational analysis in the future, as do the weekly audio instalments of the densely detailed primary text.3 I focus here on qualitative analysis of only a few narrative trajectories that flow back and forth between the text and online commentaries. I start with reverse-flow analysis, beginning with elemental narrative units from Reddit, an online site on which thousands of listeners developed discussion threads about Serial. Then I return to specific narrative units in the podcast itself that the Reddit threads stem from. Throughout the podcast, Sarah Koenig and the Serial team engage in the rhetorical strategy of simulation, in Patrick Colm Hogan’s words, ‘imagining possibilities constrained by principles of character and situation’ (2016: 128), a process that is both exploratory and outcome-oriented. Under the appearance of exploring the facts and new possibilities relating to the perpetrator of the crime, Serial also aims to appear to reach no final conclusive outcome for the story, a strategy only revealed in the last episode. From the outset, however, thousands of listeners engage in simulation themselves and many do so publicly, interacting with others primarily through the written word on the Internet. Given the abundance of narrative detail and simulative speculation in the twelve hours of audio episodes, listeners consistently try to tame the chaotic profusion by transcribing the episodes, logically organising the content, creating maps and timelines, speculating, proposing counterfactuals, and engaging in their own strategies of simulation. They imagine specific ‘hypothetical situations and trajectories of events, including subjective perspectives and intentions’, as Hogan characterises simulation in fiction (2016: 114).

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Jason Mittell has coined the term ‘forensic fandom’ to refer to the way audiences make use of the weekly intervals in serialised storytelling to piece together and fill in the gaps created in the series’ complex narrative threads. Unlike the viewers of the complex TV programmes that Mittell (2015: 52) analyses, Serial’s listeners are less concerned with rhetorical strategies in the programme’s style than in the complexities involved in the murder, its investigation, and the court case.4 That is, much of the forensic fandom is directed to the diegetic complexities and gaps of the story Koenig narrates, rather than the fairly non-complex manner of oral storytelling. Thousands of fans engage in what Mittell terms forensic ‘drilling’, as they go deeper and deeper into the evidence, the facts presented, and various inconsistencies. They post this work online on sites such as Reddit as active participants in the construction of narrative. For example, on 23 October 2014, a fan named VYshouldhavewon posted a timeline about the crucial nineteen minutes after school in which prosecutors contended the murder took place. The Redditor had carefully constructed this elaborate visualisation using Adobe Illustrator after listening to that morning’s episode three times. Sixty-six Redditors then commented on and argued back and forth extensively about the timeline, and the creator modified it based on this discussion. He or she also tried to merge it with a map that another Redditor had created. This thread of the communal online forensic investigation went on for many screens, as the participants dug progressively deeper into the evidence they had heard on the podcast, conducting their own forensic investigation into the crime.5 We can begin reverse-flow analysis with the opening subreddit about Serial which began on 5 October 2014, four days after the podcast started, where there are 111 archived comments. Listeners continued to post on this now-closed thread in subsequent weeks, and included their ideas relating to various episodes as the podcast progressed. One journalist noted that by December 2014, the subreddits devoted to Serial had 700,000 unique views per month (Dean 2014). In July 2016, 51,514 people had accessed the opening subreddit, according to the statistics on the page, and on the days I accessed it, thirty-four others were also still viewing it.6 Let us look at a small segment of this online dialogue of written comments viewed on electronic screens that begins with a discussion of the question of memorability with which Koenig opened the show. Redditors debated whether a person would remember the day that a high school classmate disappeared (especially one’s ex-girlfriend) and the police called you. The answer to this question would be an indicator of the truth or falsity of Syed’s claim that he really did not remember much about that day. The contributors posted Web links to various articles and the transcripts from the episodes, arguing in favour of their interpretations and inviting fellow readers to examine the posted material. Two of the early comments in this thread employ a strikingly similar structure in their opening minimal narrative unit. Hellotheredoge initiates the discussion with the sentence: ‘I am sort of suspicious why someone just cannot remember what happened on a particular day when a person is missing’ and, after several other posts, another Redditor, yuphorix, begins an intervention with: ‘What I find really perplexing is how Adnan could not remember where he was on the day Hae was murdered.’ Each of these lines is a minimal narrative unit, following Labov’s (1997) definition: ‘Any sequence of clauses which contains at least one temporal juncture.’ The first Redditor is suspicious in the present about a

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character (Adnan) who in the past cannot remember an event that occurred further in the past. After the second commentator’s similarly structured statement in the present, two similar posts follow: ‘Adnan could not remember’ occurs later in time than ‘where he was on the day Hae was murdered’. Both Redditors employ self-reflexive openings to note their scepticism in the present, and both comments continue with amplification. Hellotheredoge continues: Maybe I’m just frustrated that Adnan doesn’t know. I feel like if I knew a missing person and I saw him/her that day, I would think about the day over and over to see if I had any clues in my head that can help find her killer, especially someone i cared about. At the same time why would the other guy witness lie? What does he get out of that? Unless there’s a weird jealousy between Adnan and him over the girlfriend who is Adnan’s good friend. But it seems to [sic] drastic to lie and get someone convicted because you were jealous another guy gave your girlfriend a bday gift . . . Inspired by the podcast and reacting to other online commentary, subredditors compare the protagonist’s self-reporting of his mental state with what they perceive their own state might be in a similar circumstance. They weigh the possible motives of other characters such as Jay, and invent alternate narrative paths, trying on hypothetical scenarios and engaging in para-authorship. This is collective work, shared on an online site in the form of a conversation. The key element of sound, which was central to the podcast itself, is absent. Many participants continue this debate, inventing narrative possibilities to explain or condemn the purported lack of memory. Another thread on the topic of memory was posted on 1 December, with 151 participants and many lurkers who read without posting their thoughts. Readers view this public on-screen dialogue in text-only form, without auditory intonation, expressiveness, and little knowledge of the identity of the posters. Yet these virtual interlocutors pick up narrative and diction patterns from one another: Hellotheredoge opens the segment with a pattern of temporal junctures that yuphorix will repeat, although both Redditors present different reasons for their initial statements of scepticism. Following a directional vector back into the Serial podcast, we ask: how do these two early comments remake the correlating section of the first episode? This early thread of the subreddit that debates whether Adnan is telling the truth about his memory correlates to a narrative segment that functions as a prologue in Episode 1, in which Sarah Koenig asserts, through questioning interviewees, that most of us would not be able to remember a particular day weeks or years ago. The expanding narrative among the debaters in this section of the subreddit reveals that listeners desire to establish a definitive epistemological position despite the podcast’s narrative gesture of postmodern uncertainty.7 In this sense, the expansion of the narrative on the screens of Reddit works against one important narrative strategy of the podcast. In the original audio text, the manner of narration is key. In an intimate, confessional tone, Koenig ‘shares’ with us a new discovery: ‘I just want to point out something I’d never really thought about before I started working on this story. And that is, it’s really

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hard to account for your time, in a detailed way, I mean.’ Koenig directly addresses listeners, hoping to convince us about the difficulty of remembering: How’d you get to work last Wednesday, for instance? Drive? Walk? Bike? Was it raining? Are you sure? Did you go to any stores that day? If so, what did you buy? Who did you talk to? The entire day, name every person you talked to. It’s hard. (My italics) The staccato style of her questioning, despite its casual tone, shares the rhetorical pattern of a police or judicial interrogation. But because we are not on trial, the style ends up drawing us closer to the storyteller’s point of view. The intonation and rhythm of Koenig’s vocal performance carry the nuances of a complicit, commonsense agreement between two interlocutors, as if Koenig were addressing each of us directly about an easily agreed-upon fact.8 Switching addressees, Koenig then casually interrogates several teenagers about what they remember from the recent past. I say ‘interrogates’ because despite her friendly, casual tone, Koenig is trying to prove a point. After none of those she interviews can adequately answer her questions, she changes back to direct audience address to admit that one kid did remember something because it was the day of state exams. Koenig then concludes with a finding: ‘If some significant event happened that day, you remember that, plus you remember the entire day much better.’ This important segment at the start of Episode 1 emphasises the fallibility of human memory, although conceding briefly at the end that a significant event would indeed make a day memorable. There are 405 words in the segment, including a 62-word concession at the end and a 32-word moral or finding. Proportionally, the majority of the words occur in casual interviews with her nephew’s friends that are designed to create epistemological doubt as the overarching code of the subsequent episodes, and thereby call into question the judicial verdict in which Syed was convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend. Narratively, this prologue also functions to attract listeners, creating suspense and enigma about the narrative trajectories to follow, at the same time that it extends the aura of doubt to all of the interviews and testimony that will be presented. But the auditory level of the podcast must be added to these quantitative figures about word count. Immediately, Koenig’s voice addresses listeners as if speaking to them one-on-one. Her casual, expressive oral style as she asks us questions with no possibility of our answering her directly allows easy transition to the next segment in which she switches her questions to the teenagers. The first segments of Episode 1 flow easily to successive referents of ‘you’: the podcast listeners, the diegetic figures Tyler, Sam, and Elliott, and back again to the listeners. On the paraverbal level, twice during her interrogation of her nephew and his friends, the non-diegetic musical theme of the podcast is overlain in the background, escalating in length and volume as Sarah catches her nephew’s friend in a mistaken assertion about his memory. The simple, repeated musical theme adds emphasis to certain statements of the podcast – here the preferred theme that memory is unreliable. Quantitatively and qualitatively, the dynamic auditory text of the prologue offers competing positions but ultimately asks listeners to side with Koenig’s preferred thesis that uncertainty overcodes facts, and memory is unreliable. Even though the segment

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admits that if something unusual or important happens, one certainly will remember that day, on quantitative and qualitative levels it strives to override this concession. The podcast employs a strategy similar to what Roland Barthes terms ‘inoculation’ (1972), in which an advertisement admits a slight shortcoming of its product as a means of immunising us against the defect: here, the concern of many that one would indeed remember the details of the extraordinary day in which a classmate and special friend disappeared. Nonetheless, the Reddit commentary reveals that listeners select certain elements of texts and reject others among the available narrative threads offered. Reverse directional flow analysis leads us from the oppositional decodings on Reddit and other social media back to Koenig’s preferred, ‘common-sense’ message in the opening segment. The point of initiating this analysis with the audience’s commentary on Reddit screens, read by thousands of Serial’s listeners, is not that the debaters easily picked up on the main theme of the podcast’s prologue but that they worked to counter it. Even those who supported the narrative thread that favoured the prologue’s main contention about memory’s fallibility (e.g. Rabiafan, a supporter of Rabia Chaudry, a Syed family friend who is promoting his innocence) countered the paralysing postmodern uncertainty that the prologue tries to establish as the central ideological position of the podcast. For such supporters of Syed, the ‘truth’ that memory is fallible undermines the stories that witnesses recount and also bolsters Syed’s contention that he cannot remember much about the day of the crime. Oppositional listeners are not monolithic; they inhabit various positions along the guilt–innocence spectrum and articulately argue for their positions as they extend the narrative on the Reddit site and elsewhere.9 As we return to the podcast from these listeners’ engagement in forensic fandom on the screen, we must ask what characteristics of Serial attracted listeners to write these particular extensions of the narrative. One of the most important features is the podcast’s ambiguity at the level of fabula. Central to the discourses that surround crimes, whether police reports, judicial proceedings, journalism, or fiction, is the desire to reduce ambiguity and ascertain culpability. Koenig departs from the closed judicial narrative in which a man was convicted of a 1999 crime. Her aim as an investigative journalist is to reintroduce multiple ambiguities and new narrative trajectories into the story so that the fabula becomes complex, rather than straightforward, linear, and closed. Additionally, her mode of organising the telling of the new story, the syuzhet of Serial, is multilinear through many divergent threads, time periods, and themes. The commentators on Reddit in the above examples primarily focus on the fabula, desiring to eliminate ambiguity. They eagerly take on the new ambiguities Koenig introduces, and work to establish new fixed possibilities primarily at the level of fabula. At the same time, they cut through Koenig’s confusing, scattered presentation of syuzhet and the podcast’s information overload by, for example, ordering events and deciding what is important and what is extraneous. They attempt to organise the ambiguities of both levels by constructing timelines together, interpreting what the podcast tells them about the evidence in new ways, reasoning logically and testing hypotheses against personal experiences, and looking for additional forensic evidence online and in Baltimore, where the crime occurred.

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Textual Flow and Semiotic Otherness The multi-path vectors of the Serial narrative increase the cognitive overload already present in the ample narrative details of the audio instalments. Nonetheless, listeners want even more narrative elements, and eagerly participate in writing and reading public comments online. Despite the contradiction, they desire both to tame the material and to amplify it. In doing so, they deploy competing semiotic forms to remedy the shortcomings of the one-channel podcast communication and their own textbased screen comments. Attending to these semiotic others is crucial to understand the digital narrative constellation that constitutes Serial’s textuality. First, the online commentary on a site such as Reddit employs the written word to manipulate, rearrange, analyse, and contain the fleeting sound experienced in the weekly episodes. Creating these messages on a computer or portable electronic device such as a phone or tablet, participants engage with one another both synchronously and asynchronously. The emotive and expressive qualities of sound are missing. Participants do not hear each other speak, but rather write words and view comments on a screen. Similarly, the auditory presence of the characters heard on the podcast is now absent. The transcriptions of the oral episodes that listeners upload online help in the analysis and discussions but these texts are also semiotically inferior without the paraverbal elements of the narrator’s and characters’ intonation, cadences, pronunciation, and the musical overlays. For example, a transcription of Kathy’s statement to Koenig in Episode 6 reporting that Syed seemed disturbed and worried that the police were going to contact him the night of the murder cannot capture important levels of her utterances: the electronic voice distortion for anonymity which hints at Kathy’s fear, the sense of Syed’s desperation that she tries to mimic as she repeats his words, the certainty in her voice that this was not normal behaviour for him, and other elements of her oral performance in her interview with Koenig. The cadences, intonation, and unique style of Koenig’s oral storytelling are a crucial semiotic component of the digital narrative experience. They are intensified when listening intimately through ear buds, a mode of consumption that creates the sensation of personalised, direct storytelling.10 Umberto Eco (1979) pointed to the repetitive tics of Sherlock Holmes that comfort readers and allow them to enter into the events of the narrative. The peculiarities of Koenig’s oral style play a similar narrative function: cool, colloquial phrases, for example, describing Syed, as a ‘player’ who dated lots of girls after the break-up, Koenig’s drawn-out ‘W. . .e. . .l. . .l. . .’ to indicate her non-specified doubt or uncertainty during interviews, and her lilting intonation. Imagine, for example, how greatly listeners’ pleasure would be diminished if Koenig were absent one day and a substitute storyteller took over. Similarly, we quickly learn the particular tics of Adnan’s oral style such as his calculated, measured responses and his nonchalant, repeated ‘I don’t know.’ We insert these evocative levels of the characters’ speech into our own narratives that we construct about the events. Very soon after its debut, the creators of the podcast attempted to amplify the audio text by posting supplementary visual material on the Serial website and urging listeners to view it to enhance and continue their narrative experience. But the public engages in this strategy much more extensively, working to compensate for the semiotic absences in the audio narrative as well as to enhance the inadequacies of their

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own written commentary on the screens of sites such as Reddit. They add hundreds of links to visual material such as photos, videos, documents, maps, timelines, and character graphs. In one post, Squeebeaux, for example, compiles an extensive list of ninety-one digital links to visual material about the case, and Redditors express their appreciation. The long list begins with a link to an ABC news video of Hae Minh Lee being interviewed in her lacrosse uniform, running across an indoor court. In the podcast, the victim’s voice had only been ventriloquised by Koenig, and commentators on Reddit mention being greatly moved by the opportunity to hear the victim’s own voice. Squeebeaux’s posting represents many hours of dedicated online research to amplify the visual inadequacies of the twelve-week podcast. There are multiple links to pictures of Hae, Adnan, their families, Jay Wilds, documents from and news reports about the trial, police evidence, timelines, places referred to in the podcast, even a handwritten note about their break-up from Hae to Adnan, with the words ‘I’M GOING TO KILL’ written in different writing across the top, presumably by the recipient Syed.11 Koenig’s ekphrastic attempt on the podcast to convey the power of this visual document is greatly inferior as a mode of representation to actually seeing a copy of the letter online. These visual texts are a key part of the Serial constellation, taking advantage of the Internet to remedy the visual deficiencies of the audio text and also those of the written comments listeners themselves post. How do components of the digital narrative constellation that flows from Serial deal differently with the absent visual code that would be operative in film or television? How do the auditory messages of the podcast allow viewers to visualise the unseen, versus the strategies of a primarily written verbal medium such as the narrative extensions on Reddit? Lutostanski (2016) delineates such categories as ‘soundscapes’ and ‘soundmarks’ to analyse the techniques that audionarratives use to navigate spaces that listeners cannot see. Extending this analysis, we can understand how the recorded phone announcement about the collect call from the Maryland State Correctional Facility that opens each episode functions as the auditory equivalent of a landmark or sign to remind listeners that the speaker Adnan is a prisoner. Compensating for the absent visual channel of the podcast, narrative supplements such as the Serial website, the news coverage about the innovative podcast, and related Internet sites include a picture of the small, youthful-looking Syed at age seventeen, probably his high school graduation portrait. This supplementary visual signpost offers listeners a vicarious sense of familiarity with the protagonist whom they have only experienced through auditory signifiers and who has been absent from public view for sixteen years. Many are shocked when a competing visual image is released in early February 2016 when Syed appears at a post-conviction hearing in Baltimore.12 The image now depicts a tall, burly man with a thick beard, a blue and white religious cap, in a blue prison uniform and handcuffs as he is led into the courtroom. A number of people on Reddit and elsewhere commented about their changed impression of Syed because of the new visual image.13 The missing visual channel in the audio podcast forecloses an important level that people regularly employ to judge others. Listeners could only partially fill in this absent semiotic channel, and even a slight amplification of it later changed people’s opinions of the protagonist. The fact that listeners express surprise about the new visual images of Syed reveals the ineffectiveness of the podcast’s auditory ekphrasis, especially when a particular visual phenomenon is only mentioned once in passing among many other narrative

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details. In Episode 1, Koenig does allude to Syed’s changed appearance but few if any listeners seem to remember this. Koenig remarks: When I first met Adnan in person, I was struck by two things. He was way bigger than I expected – barrel chested and tall. In the photos I’d seen, he was still a lanky teenager with struggling facial hair and sagging jeans. By now, he was 32. He’d spent nearly half his life in prison, becoming larger and properly bearded. And the second thing, which you can’t miss about Adnan, is that he has giant brown eyes like a dairy cow. That’s what prompts my most idiotic lines of inquiry. Could someone who looks like that really strangle his girlfriend? Idiotic, I know.14 Although ostensibly only describing a visual image, the passage reveals Koenig’s biases through terms such as ‘properly bearded’ and ‘giant dairy cow eyes’, and the assertion that Syed’s visual presence casts doubt on his guilt. Buried in the thousands of narrative details that listeners hear, this verbal description of his current appearance seems to have been forgotten months later when images at his court appearance surprise people. In the absence of visual signifiers such as current photos or videos, Koenig’s auditory ekphrasis holds little sway. The podcast also engages in audio ekphrasis to offer listeners a means of visually imagining key narrative elements. Koenig helps us to see the way Hae doodled the names of her two boyfriends in her diary: Hae has got a crush on Don. An older guy. Twenty . . . Don has blue eyes and blonde hair and a Camaro and she really, really likes him . . . At one point she writes Adnan’s name in giant block letters made out of tiny little Adnans and underneath that does the same thing with Don. Giant letters made up of Dons. On another page she writes Don’s name 127 times. 127 Dons.15 Besides giving us the flavour of the teenage girl’s diary and her accounts of her crushes, Koenig’s precise description of the large block letters composed of multiple miniature versions of the two names strives to share in detail her visual engagement with the diary so that listeners can ‘see’ it. She spaces out and repeats the description of the visual allusions to Don for dramatic effect, bringing his image more slowly and emphatically into our consciousness. Implicitly, Hae’s new love interest hints at the possibility of Syed’s jealousy as a motive for the crime. Koenig confronts the absent visual channel head-on at the beginning of the second Serial season which aired on 10 December 2015. The new podcast opens strikingly by inviting listeners to visually imagine a compelling scene recorded in a news video. Most media programmes begin with a ‘tease’ to entice audiences to become involved in the programme, and here the audio-only podcast confronts its primary communicative weakness right away. Koenig expressively reads a verbal description of the video of Bowe Bergdahl’s rescue after his desertion and three-year imprisonment by the Taliban. She tries to compensate for the shortcomings of the one-channel audio medium by immediately beginning with ekphrasis, and follows shortly with what might be termed meta-ekphrasis. In this way she immediately strives to inoculate listeners against the main shortcoming of the podcast in the age of visual media by deftly using words to describe the visual images in a video recorded during Bergdahl’s 2014 rescue.

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In seven paragraphs comprised of 379 words, she tells us what she sees, using the shifter ‘you’ to alternate between a generalised sense meaning ‘one sees’ and a literal second-person address to her listeners: The Taliban are holding machine guns and a pale young man with his head shaved emerges from a truck. The camera closes in on him. A wider shot shows the hillside dotted with other Taliban holding rifles or rocket propelled grenades. The black dots in the sky are planes and helicopters flying above. Six minutes in, cows wander onto the scene. Then a Black Hawk lands and in two minutes rescues Bergdahl and is up and away. The video cuts off.16 Much more than the equivalent of an establishment shot in a film, the long ekphrastic passage is rich in narrative detail. Koenig wants to convey the dramatic tension and danger of the rescue, with its conflicting elements of the countryside’s bucolic peace and the invasive implements of warfare. She repeatedly describes the vestimentary signifiers that visually communicate the identity of both the Taliban and their American prisoner who, she tells us, appears in billowy clothes that are too big. Bergdahl is bare-headed, in contrast to the covered heads and faces of his captors. After the exchange, the US soldiers walk cautiously backwards with Bergdahl and pat him down, conveying the life-threatening danger of the rescue. Quickly, in two minutes he is on the helicopter and it takes off. Immediately after this attempt to verbally represent the visual, Koenig carries the compensatory strategy for the missing visual channel further through meta-ekphrasis, comparing her own investigative journalism strategies to a camera lens, also connecting her work to Mark Boal’s planned film about Bergdahl to which she owes the audio interviews with the protagonist that she uses in the podcast. Dramatically, she pays tribute to the perspectival estrangement in Zune, a children’s book, by describing Bergdahl’s memory of his captivity as a picture in a book that can no longer be adequately seen because so many distinct visual layers have been overlain on it. On page after page, Zune zooms the image farther out: ‘Out and out it zooms, the aperture getting wider and wider, until the original image is so far away, it’s unseeable’, Koenig notes, comparing it to Bergdahl’s story. With this metaphor Koenig emphasises the epistemological uncertainty that overlays the narratives of Serial. The self-reflexive camera metaphor announces the navigational paths that Serial 2 will take as it tries to reverse this strategy and ‘zoom in’ on Bergdahl’s life and many years in captivity. Here, the reverse directional analysis Koenig will adopt in her narrative exposition, announced in the meta-ekphrastic passage at the outset, parallels the strategy of reverse directional flow that cultural critics should also engage in to re-enter the podcast narrative from the listeners’ online activity. I have examined some of the ways in which the digital audio text extends itself in diverse venues, each with competing semiotic strategies, with the result that the podcast’s textuality is now a larger digital constellation. Vectors of multi-directional flow characterise the new textuality and storyworld of the digital podcast. Narratology must examine the expanded flows between these new textual components, and I suggest that reverse flow analysis is one key strategy because it recentres audiences as co-creators of texts. While digitised sound is the main signifying medium in Serial, both the podcast itself and its expanded textual components on the Internet reveal desire for the semiotic Others of sound – visual images, verbal texts in digital and print media, and audio-visual narratives such as the planned film on Bowe Bergdahl, television programmes, YouTube videos, and many other cultural texts. The various

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directional vectors that flow back and forth from the podcast create a multitude of sub-narrative components that frequently engage in compensatory strategies related to their semiotic Others. In the emerging digital age, audiences desire to control the abundant textual components at the same time that they themselves contribute to the proliferation of narrative elements.

Notes 1. Indeed, not only did new listeners continue to give the podcast life, but wide media coverage, online commentary, books, and new judicial proceedings extended the traditional limits of the original audio programme. 2. Commenting on the extensive phenomenon of binge listening, producer Julie Snyder points out, ‘The vast amount of our downloads from season 1 came when we were finished with season 1’, and Koenig notes that she has heard from people who save the podcast episodes to binge on while they are training. See Robinson (2016). 3. Here I begin the analysis with a few examples of these textual flows, but macro-analysis and distant reading of these immense corpora will provide much more information in the future. Books by Franco Moretti (2013, 2005) exemplify this work in the field of literary studies while tools such as NVivo (http://scalar.usc.edu/works/using-nvivo-anunofficial-and-unauthorized-primer/intro) perform macro analysis on social media. See Hai-Jew (2017). 4. There are many differences between the production and reception of TV programmes versus those of audio podcasts, which cannot adequately be discussed in this space. The missing visual channel in audio streaming, for example, has profound effects on listeners’ impressions of the protagonist Syed as I discuss below. In the weekly intervals that serialisation enforces, listeners creatively post many compensatory visual images online as the programme progresses. At the same time, the absent visual channel makes the listening experience more intense, and ekphrasis becomes indispensable. Further, listening rather than viewing frees the audience to engage in other activities simultaneously, and, in the age of portable electronic devices, revitalises an updated form of the slowly dying medium of radio. Despite the many differences, audiences engage in patterns of forensic fandom across both mediums. 5. See ‘Serial’, Reddit, 23 October 2014, (last accessed 1 November 2017). 6. See (last accessed 28 July 2016). 7. For arguments that the overall epistemological position of the podcast is one of postmodern uncertainty, despite the ostensible project of investigative journalism that strives to arrive at the truth, see McCracken (2017). 8. Stuart Hall (1980) has advanced Gramsci’s notion that the idea of common sense is central to ideology. Although Koenig offers listeners an ideologically weighted logic of ‘common sense’ here, she at the same time subtly invites the audience to engage in oppositional decodings of the State’s case against Syed. Hall (1980) argues that audiences engage in preferred, oppositional, and (most commonly) negotiated decodings of mass cultural texts. In the final episode Koenig ostensibly concludes that the best she can do is a ‘negotiated’ decoding of the case (Syed could be guilty but the State did not adequately prove it). Listeners, nonetheless, actively engage with a variety of preferred, negotiated, and oppositional decodings of both the case and Koenig’s ostensibly negotiated decoding of it in the podcast. I classify her position as only ostensibly negotiated because many of the podcast’s rhetorical and thematic

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9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

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narrative strategies position her as in fact an oppositional decoder of the case and the legal proceedings, not an objective journalist. One would expect, for example, that Rabia Chaudry, who initially contacted Koenig to urge her to investigate the case, would be pleased that the podcast raised so many issues to cast doubt on the conviction. Instead, she expressed dissatisfaction that the programme did not critique the investigation, trial, and conviction strongly enough, revealing the wide range of diversity among oppositional listeners. See, for example, the review of Chaudry’s book by Jessica Roy (2016). This sense of intimacy through the corporeal privatisation of public sound is similar to the merging of the public and the private that occurs when Redditors and other social media participants manually type their personal observations about the podcast in the public spaces of newly constructed cyber communities. For an important analysis of the technical privatisation of sound, see Sterne (2003). Sterne’s work on the rise of the podcast is also important for situating Serial in media history. See Sterne et al. (2008). See (last accessed 9 September 2016). See (last accessed 15 September 2016). See, for example, the online remarks of Clover Hope (2016): ‘A photo of a thickly-bearded Syed appears to be the first new image many of us have seen of Syed since Serial made him infamous.’ Transcript, Episode 1, (last accessed 17 August 2016). ‘Episode 2: The Breakup’, transcript, Genius.com, available at (last accessed 17 November 2017). Transcript of the ekphrastic segment: The first thing you see is a couple of guys in traditional Afghan clothes. They’ve got scarves on their heads or covering their faces, and they’re holding machine guns. They’re standing next to a silver pickup truck. The front hood is up. In the backseat of the truck, the door is open. A bareheaded figure is sitting with his knees up against the seat in front of him. The camera closes in, and you see this pale, young man. And that’s Bergdahl. His head is shaved. He looks sort of like a cult leader from a ’70s movie. He can’t keep his eyes open properly. They’re bothering him. He keeps blinking and rubbing them. A wider shot shows that the scrubby, rocky hills all around the truck are dotted with other guys – Taliban – holding rifles or rocket-propelled grenades. [Chanting] One or two of the guys lean in to where Bergdahl is sitting, and they’re talking to him. He’s looking at their faces. One guy says something in Pashto, which is translated on screen as ‘Don’t come back to Afghanistan.’ What I’ve heard since is that the guy said, ‘Do not come back to Afghanistan. You will not get out alive.’ Black spots appear in the cloudy sky, and you see that they’re planes or helicopters. One gets closer and closer. It’s a Black Hawk. And then you see Bergdahl again. He’s out of the truck now, looking up at the sky. His clothes are too big, billowy. [Sound of helicopter] Then, at about six minutes in, right after some cows wander onto the scene, the helicopter lands, dust flies. Bergdahl walks forward, flanked by two men, while three men from the helicopter – the US Special Operations team – jog toward him. The two

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ellen mccracken sides meet in the middle of the clearing, shake hands – like team captains right before the starting whistle. Bergdahl steps forward. The Americans put their hands on him, pull him towards the Black Hawk while they’re walking backwards. They don’t want to turn their backs on the Taliban just yet. Bergdahl is walking stiffly, lumbering almost. At the helicopter, they pat him down one more time, and then he’s on board. They’re up and away. Takes less than two minutes. And it’s done. The video cuts off.

See (last accessed 14 September 2016).

Works Cited Barthes, Roland (1972), ‘Operation margarine’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 41–2. Dean, Michelle (2014), ‘Serial nears its end but the Reddit detectives keep working’, The Guardian, 11 December, (last accessed 22 July 2016) . Eco, Umberto (1979), ‘The myth of Superman’, in The Role of the Reader, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 107–24. — [1967] (1986), ‘Towards a semiological guerrilla warfare’, in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, pp. 135–44. Hai-Jew, Shalin (ed.) (2017), Social Media Data Extraction and Content Analysis, Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Hall, Stuart (1980), ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–38. Hogan, Patrick Colm (2016), ‘Jesus’s parables: Simulation, stories, and narrative idiolect’, Narrative, 24: 2, 113–33. Hope, Clover (2016), ‘Adnad Syed’s library witness testifies at his first hearing for a new trial’, Jezebel, 4 February, (last accessed 15 July 2016). Labov, William (1997), ‘Some further steps in narrative analysis’, sec. 1.1.1, (last accessed 7 July 2016). Lutostanski, Bartosz (2016), ‘A narratology of radio drama: Voice, perspective, space’, in Jarmilla Mildorf and Till Kinzel (eds), Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 117–32. McCracken, Ellen (ed.) (2017), The Serial Podcast and Storytelling in the Digital Age, New York: Routledge. Mittell, Jason (2015), Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, New York: New York University Press. Moretti, Franco (2005), Graphs, Maps, Trees, London: Verso. — (2013), Distant Reading, London: Verso. Robinson, Will (2016), ‘Serial season 2: Sarah Koenig, Julie Snyder interview before Bowe Bergdahl finale’, Entertainment, 30 March, (last accessed 31 October 2017). Roy, Jessica (2016), ‘The book, “Adnan’s Story” and what it tells us about “Serial”’, Los Angeles Times, 4 August, (last accessed 4 August 2016). Serial, podcast, Seasons One and Two, This American Life. USA: WBEZ, 2014–16.

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Sterne, Jonathan (2003), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —, Jeremy Morris, Michael Brendan Baker, and Ariana Moscote Freire (2008), ‘The Politics of Podcasting’, The Fibreculture Journal, 13, (last accessed 27 January 2017). Williams, Raymond (1974), Television: Technology and Cultural Form, New York: Schocken Books.

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14 UI Time and the Digital Event Daniel Punday

A

lthough the distinction between the time of narrative events (story/fabula) and the time of their telling by a narrator (discourse/syuzhet) has been debated over the last forty years, it remains a fundamental feature of narrative theory. In this chapter, I will argue that digital narrative introduces a third form of time at the level of the user’s interaction with the story that is distinct from both. Although this user interface (UI) time is largely invisible in other media, it does raise some interesting issues about the way that the reader or viewer encounters the material text in other forms of storytelling. I will show, in particular, that UI time depends on an idleness that is quite different from our common ways of thinking about the temporality of reading.

Defining the Event ‘Simply put’, writes Porter Abbott at the outset of The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, ‘narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events’ (2008: 13). Narrative theory has long recognised that developing an understanding of what makes something an event is crucial to defining narrative itself. In her introduction to the influential collection Narrative Across Media, Marie-Laure Ryan offers a definition of narrativity based on three conditions: it must create a world with characters and objects, the world must undergo changes, and those changes must be based on causality and motivations in a way that allows for interpretation (2004: 8–9). An event without recognisable spaces or characters might function as part of a metaphor or aphorism; a text without change would be more a description; and a text without causality would be a mere chronicle, to use Hayden White’s well-known distinction. At the outset of Narratology Mieke Bal defines the event and some supporting terms this way: ‘An event is the transition from one state to another state. Actors are agents that perform actions. They are not necessarily human. To act is defined here as to cause or to experience an event’ (1997: 5). Distinguishing types of events provides an important tool for analysing narratives. Roland Barthes (1982) contrasted what he calls cardinal functions and catalysers: events that are central to the narrative and those that merely serve secondary purposes, such as characterisation. Seymour Chatman offered the distinction between actions and happenings: an action ‘is a change of state brought about by an agent or one that affects a patient’ while a happening ‘entails a prediction of which the character or other focused existent is narrative object: for example, The storm cast Peter adrift’ (1978: 44, 45). More recent cognitive narratology and work on natural-language and everyday storytelling has linked kinds of events to different genres. David Herman distinguishes

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activities from accomplishments and achievements, and notes that different genres prioritise one over another: the epic emphasises accomplishments and achievements, while the ghost story focuses on activities and states (2002: 30–7). As this summary suggests, work defining types of events has been somewhat scattered and idiosyncratic. Far more consistent among narrative theory has been an interest in the relationship between the story’s events and the way those events are represented to the audience. In Introduction to Poetics Tzvetan Todorov distinguishes between those stories that follow ‘logical and temporal order’ and those that eschew such order for thematic or spatial arrangements (1981: 41–7). Although some extreme cases might pursue a purely causal or temporal order, he argues for ‘the habitual solidarity between temporality and causality’ (1981: 43). Of course, a fundamental element of narrative theory has been an interest in the relationship between the time and order of the story events and how those are presented in the telling. Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse ([1972] 1980) is hugely influential in providing a framework for analysing the way that story events are transformed into the time and order of narration. It is worth recognising the recent philosophical and cultural interest in the idea of an event, even though that is somewhat independent of narrative theory. Alain Badiou is best known for theorising the event as fundamentally disrupting our current ways of thinking about the world and its possibilities. In Philosophy and the Event, Badiou explains his understanding of the event: For me, an event is something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable. An event is not by itself the creation of reality; it is the creation of a possibility, it opens up a possibility. It indicates to us that possibility exists that has been ignored. (Badiou and Tarby 2013: 9) The recent popularity of Badiou’s work is especially relevant to narrative theory because of the implicit teleology in our common thinking about narrative and plot. Back in 1994 Gary Saul Morson made a particularly strong argument against models of time and plot that make events seem inevitable. He writes: Such a view leaves time essentially closed. There are no real alternatives, for everything has already been given in the rules or chain of causes. People act out patterns or do what the laws have prescribed; their actions instantiate, but never exceed, rules or pregiven laws. (Morson 1994: 21) For an alternative, Morson turns to Bakhtin’s understanding of ‘eventfulness’ and the idea of ‘sideshadows’ (in contrast to foreshadowing) where we see other alternatives: ‘According to Bakhtin, the concrete act “cannot be transcribed in theoretical terms in such a way that it will not lose the very sense of its eventness, that precise thing which knows responsibility and toward which the act is oriented”’ (1994: 22). He goes on: ‘For there to be eventness, there must be alternatives. Eventful events are performed in a world in which there are multiple possibilities, in which some things that could happen do not’ (1994: 22). Neither Morson nor Badiou is directly challenging the place of event and the change in world state that Bal and Ryan put at the core of their definitions of narrative, but they do remind us that the event is fundamentally entwined with the retrospective nature of narrative.

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The Digital Event Early criticism on digital narrative frequently offered exaggerated claims about the way that it would fundamentally transform notions of reading, authorship, and text. Some critics suggested that the reader would become the co-creator of the story by choosing some actions or following some story pathways rather than others.1 At the core of this way of thinking about digital narrative was the frequently invoked analogue example of the choose-your-own-adventure novels in which readers would face certain decision points by the character, where they would be asked to turn to a particular page to continue reading based on his or her choice. In some ways, such reader-chosen events seem much more in the present than in a more traditionally printed novel, and thus more sensitive to the ‘eventness’ that Morson and Badiou describe. Work over the last two decades has, however, developed a much more nuanced understanding of the nature of the digital text and the way that it constrains user action. Espen Aarseth’s 1997 Cybertext challenged many of the myths and vague assertions that had grown up around digital media. To the claim that digital narratives are somehow nonlinear, he remarks: How can any text be linear? Clearly, the physical properties of the codex is not enough to ensure it, as so many paper experiments have shown. Furthermore, any book can be opened at any page and can be started at any point. The book form, then, is intrinsically neither linear nor nonlinear but, more precisely, random access (to borrow from computer technology). (Aarseth 1997: 46) Likewise, Aarseth notes that the concept of interactive fiction is ‘used repeatedly without clarification’ and considers two possible explanations for why: ‘either it means nothing in particular or its meaning is perceived to be so trivial that it is self-explanatory’ (1997: 50). In the early 2000s there was an energetic debate about whether such playful texts should be approached using literary terms like narrative or whether critics should seek out terminology native to these digital works. Over time, though, it has become clear that many digital texts create the experience of narrative – regardless of whether that is the primary goal. Recent work on media and narrative has moved away from sorting texts into narratives and non-narratives, and instead has treated ‘narrativity’ as a quality that texts can have to various degrees and in various ways.2 To a large extent, when critics have discussed digital media with narrative aspirations, they are applying a traditional, retrospective view of storytelling. Readers reconstruct a narrative by identifying its key events – either those that are constructed by the author to be discovered during use, or those that players create through the experience of the game. Jesper Juul describes emergent narratives in this latter sense: ‘Emergent narrative tends to be described very loosely as the player’s experience of the game, or the stories that the players can tell about the game, or, perhaps, the stories that players can create using the game’ (2005: 157–9). Although there will continue to be valuable debates about the line between formally represented events and those that emerge out of play and interaction, in general work on digital narrative assumes that there is a great deal of continuity between events in digital and other media. Even though it is the dominant way of discussing events in digital media, this approach overlooks some distinctive qualities of the computing environment. I would like to focus specifically on the way that programming languages define a user interface

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event. Such events can include anything that a user might cause to happen: a key stroke, clicking the mouse button (or releasing the button once depressed), pushing on a touchscreen device, arriving at a particular GPS location while carrying a mobile device, and so on. As this list suggests, the number of possible events that can be handled by computing devices has expanded dramatically in the age of modern computing, as we have moved from keyboard to mouse to touchscreen. The evolution of computing from the command-line to the graphical user interface (GUI) has likewise made event-processing more complex. Instead of simply presenting the user with a flashing cursor and attending to which keys are pressed, the modern computer must monitor the keyboard, update the mouse pointer position, watch for space on the screen that might trigger some action (menus that drop down when an area is touched by the mouse pointer), and so on. Such computing events are a clear point of interaction between the physical computing device, the platform-specific application programming interfaces (APIs) that make events recognisable, and the programming language that will do something when that event is recognised. A key element of the user interface event is that the program specifically has to be watching for it.3 Attach an unsupported device (perhaps a joystick for games, or a tablet for drawing) to an older computer and no event can be triggered unless device drivers are in place and whatever program is running in the foreground has a method for recognising and using that input. In other words, computing devices must be actively watching for an event. For example, the programming language Java makes sense of events using the EventListener class. This class in turn can be implemented in subclasses like MouseListener (which can report things like button clicks) or MouseMotionListener (which signals when the mouse is moved or dragged). As the name ‘listener’ in these classes makes clear, any program that is going to take input from the mouse must be actively ‘listening’ for signals from it and will need to have specific instructions that make that event meaningful. In some ways, this is the most mundane observation about computers possible: they can only make sense of events that they have a structure to process, even if that structure involves a response like ‘file not found’. We might speculate that the only way to ‘surprise’ a computer or application is to cause it to glitch. Unlike all of the other events, such genuine crashes are not anticipated by the software, and thus obviously stop the computer’s functioning. These events are not part of the program – and therefore not an event in my sense – although they could be part of the user’s experience of interacting with that work.4 Obviously, the nature of the computing event is not exactly the same thing as the event we theorise in narrative. There is, indeed, a literal similarity to Ryan’s definition of the event as a matter of the world state changing based on causality that allows for interpretation. But we can also recognise that such interface events are part of every computing application regardless of how little narrative content this might involve: from a game of Tetris to your interaction with an ATM machine. In the remainder of this chapter, I will argue that this structure of user-interface event constitutes a new layer of our interaction with digital narrative.

Idleness and Waiting Computers and by implication digital narratives spend most of their time waiting. This is perhaps the most obvious in early digital works, such as hypertext and interactive

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fiction. In those cases, the computer remains almost entirely idle while the user reads text and considers the next action: which command to type or which link to follow. Of course, many digital works do involve some ongoing action on the part of the computer – often an interactive loop designed to create the appearance of liveliness in the world.5 For example, Jason Nelson’s Game, Game, Game and Again Game (2007) imitates a traditional two-dimensional ‘platformer’ that asks the player to move an avatar (a small, spider-like scribble) across the screen to reveal text and move on to the next ‘level’. Although the text is full of activity (images flash, objects move), the game world itself is largely static, waiting for the player to move forward. (The only partial exception to this is a blue squiggle that functions as an antagonist, which will send the player back to the beginning of the level if it touches the avatar; even this, though, only moves in a simple loop.) Even those works that appear to have ongoing action frequently have points of stasis. In the commercial videogame this might involve locations or points of progression when no future action (waves of enemies, for example) will trigger without some user action. In this regard, most digital works that have an ongoing progression have such points of idleness built in. Obviously, other forms of time dominate other kinds of digital art. Although locative narratives can have a similar sense of waiting,6 embodied forms of human interaction with computing devices based on physical motion and gesture are much more likely to introduce a stronger sense of continuously progressing time. A well-known example of this kind of embodied interaction is Romy Achituv and Camille Utterback’s Text Rain (1999), in which participants change the motion of falling letters on a screen based on their own physical location and actions. Such works, though, tend not to be narrative but instead to invoke poetic or conceptual forms of interaction with the work, making the event itself less central. Digital narratives, conversely, tend to have points of idleness. Obviously, it is perfectly possible to create a digital narrative in which there is no such idle time. In fact, one of the things that makes the film-like digital works of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries so remarkable is that they break with the tradition of user interaction in the digital medium and take complete control of the time of reading. These works involve phrases, words, or parts of words that flash onto a relatively plain background, timed to the beats of always heavily rhythmic music. These works have caught the attention of critics in part because their sense of time is so different from what we have come to expect of other digital texts. And, of course, such ongoing time is inherent to improvised, real-time digital events – such as those conducted through Twitter or using mobile location services (see, e.g., Marino and Wittig 2012). I would suggest that the common idleness of digital narrative is an aesthetic design influenced but not inevitably caused by the inherent material conditions of the medium – its combination of hardware input methods and programming event structure. It is certainly possible to create digital texts in which the time of the story races by, but the computing medium nudges designers towards building in such periods of idleness. Although a full discussion of the issue is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worthwhile recognising how rarely critics have tried to theorise idleness as a quality of aesthetic and narrative experience. When we try to talk about static time, about now-ness, it is usually in terms of anticipation and retrospection. Phenomenological models of reader response popularised perhaps most by Wolfgang Iser in the 1980s embody this tendency to see the moment of reading as defined by the future and past.

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Even deconstructive theories that try to rethink temporality have done so in terms of the activity of the participants. We might think about the way that Derrida mines the implications of the maintenant – the French for ‘now’ but also implicitly the act of maintaining that moment.7 All of these models for temporality are quite different from the kind of waiting that we can observe in the computer event. To show what I mean by the subtle way that idleness can influence digital narrative, and how it might affect our sense of its aesthetics, consider Emily Short’s interactive epistolary novel, First Draft of the Revolution (Short and Daly 2012). Short’s digital take on the epistolary novel is especially interesting in its handling of temporality, since the epistolary novel has always struggled with time. Although initially the premise of collecting letters sent back and forth between characters seems to solve narrative problems by providing a simple and realistic motivation for narration, most epistolary novels eventually encounter the problem of narrating rising action. If the author wants to convince the reader that the character is in genuine danger, why is that character writing about the events rather than acting on them? And if the conflict has all been resolved and the suspenseful events are all in the past at the time of writing, it can be difficult to retain a sense of their urgency. First Draft makes several interesting choices in design that reflect the unique temporality of digital narrative. The basic premise of the story is that the user influences the writing of the letters back and forth between the controlling husband Henri who resides in Paris, and his wife Juliette who has been sent away to the country. The user has a good deal of control over the content of these letters – not so much in terms of what happens but rather in how these events are written about. The user can choose to handle topics bluntly or indirectly, to appeal sympathetically to the interlocutor or to threaten or cajole more aggressively. Not all of these choices affect the outcome of the correspondence; as Short explains, the reader’s choices are partially aesthetic. Short makes one significant choice that affects the temporality of the story: she imagines a magical world in which communication is instantaneous: Juliette plans her letters on ordinary pages, but when they are ready, she copies them on paper whose enchanted double is hundreds of miles off. The words form themselves on the matching sheaf in her husband’s study. No time is wasted on couriers. (Short and Daly 2012) In some ways the decision seems a bit surprising; this mysterious writing is the only concrete manifestation of magic in the work, and it might initially seem unnecessary: surely this interactive work can simply handle the time of correspondence the way that print novels do: by leaving these missing weeks of travel time out of the story. To do so, however, would be to change the time dynamic; indeed, we are used to making a choice (invoking an event) in digital narratives and then seeing the result of that action. In other words, we are used to the games and other interactive works like this waiting for us – rather than the user waiting for the game – either literally or in terms of the represented time of the game world. The choice of writing in this game is also especially significant because it takes as its model a form of everyday activity that has a similar temporal structure: the word processor, like the typewriter and the pad and pen, waits for you to act. In this regard, First Draft of the Revolution embodies the fundamental, early temporal logic of the

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text adventure game, where players progress by typing, and where game time stops and waits for the player to make the next move. Thus, if we recognise waiting as central to digital narrative, then we should expect it to tell different kinds of stories: less those about disruptive events that change the world, and more those that embody reflective actions. Indeed, I think that it is no wonder that the first commercially successful game that presented itself as a story, the CD-ROM game Myst (Miller and Miller 1993), was essentially contemplative and built around reading – both the diaries of the characters and the magical books that allowed the player to travel to other spaces. There is nothing inherent in the digital medium that requires time to be handled in this way – just the subtle influence of the structure of the computer event.

UI Time Thus far I have been focusing on a particular feature of a significant but certainly not universal component of digital narrative: the way that many texts involve endless pauses during which the device actively waits for user input. I have noted that not all digital texts have this kind of idleness, but it is more common in games with stronger narrativity. At this point, I would like to generalise this observation and consider how this particular form of temporality fits into our narrative models. As I noted at the outset, narrative theory has long distinguished between the represented time of the story and the time of the telling of the narrative, or its discourse. Although this distinction has been critiqued in many different ways, it remains a powerful and generally accepted theoretical framework for talking about traditional print narrative.8 It has also been widely applied to film and graphic narrative, and others have made the case that it can apply to still images as well.9 I will argue that the UI time that I have been describing in this chapter cannot be accommodated within this model. Let us take an unproblematic example of digital narrative: a hypertext work in the Storyspace model. In Michael Joyce’s afternoon (1987) we clearly see a distinction between the story events and the voices that narrate them. Our main character Peter witnesses a car crash, and interacts with many other characters including his ex-wife Lisa and his boss Wert. We learn about these events from different narrators – primarily from Peter, but from the therapist Lolly and another character Nausicaa – and through overlapping scenes and passages. In this regard, afternoon provides a straightforward example of the story/discourse distinction. This should be no surprise, since as an early example of an emerging new medium, afternoon naturally embodies traditional narrative models familiar from print.10 We have, then, two very traditional forms of time in this work: the story that we reconstruct about Peter, his wife, and his son, and the time of narration, which we encounter in the voices of various speakers and in a somewhat variable order that is shaped by the choices that the reader makes in navigating the work. Given these two times, how do we theorise the temporality of the UI? Let us recognise that this is an important variable in the aesthetic design of the work. If, for example, the story did not remain idle but instead moved forward without user choice in the style of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, the experience of the work would be very different. Those film-like works have an ongoing, sometimes rushing temporality and rhythm that is very different from the UI time constructed in the infinitely patient

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Storyspace system. Of course, this is not an either–or situation; many digital texts create different degrees of UI time integrated with some periods of idleness. Consider even a minor change to the reading experience, such as the way that the Born Magazine collaborative poems use the transitions between lines of text to control the speed of reading. In ‘House Fire’, the opening line of the poem, ‘Here is a Girl’ appears on the screen, and shortly after a line drawing of a young woman fades in. After a short delay, the next line, ‘with a house in her eyes’, appears and then, after another delay, a next line: ‘or, what is left of it, the house no longer a house’. A work like this represents a balance between Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ complete control of the time of reading and the idleness of a work like afternoon. Although this remains very much a work based on idleness and waiting for the reader, ‘House Fire’ introduces a subtly different sense of time in making the reader wait for these transitions. Or consider works that require what Aarseth calls ‘non-trivial’ effort on the part of the reader to make the text visible, such as three-dimensional poetry where users must manipulate the perspective to be able to read the text. A good example of a relatively early electronic narrative that involves user action framed in an explicitly temporal way is Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar’s ‘Cruising’ (2001). The work takes the form of a strip of images connected in a film-like way, one after another, with the text of the work written continuously above those images, evoking the way that sprocket holes are placed in film. The strip of images and words can move slowly or quickly left or right, depending on the mouse position side to side; likewise, our perspective on them can be zoomed in or out based on the mouse position up or down. In effect, reading the story and viewing the images involves finding the right position for the mouse where they are both large enough and moving slowly enough to be read. Indeed, ‘Cruising’ is a great example of UI time because the temporality of our interaction with the work clearly resonates with the aesthetic design of the whole text. Ankerson and Sapnar’s work describes an adolescent past of cruising around a small Wisconsin town narrated from the point of view of someone older; the final line ‘eying life through a car we couldn’t yet take to the world’ clearly shows the contrasting perspectives of the younger narrated characters and the older narrator. The UI dynamic of the work, where the user must strike the right balance between the closeness and distance of the point of view, as well as the appropriate passage of time, exactly matches this thematic interest in the tension between a present and past self. This example clearly shows that UI time is a distinct aesthetic level to the work, and that digital narratives have to organise this tripartite structure: story, narration, and interface.

Conclusion The interface is usually invisible or taken to be inevitable and unchanging in other media. Often it only becomes visible when there is some kind of material breakdown in the text or its presentation apparatus. Before the era of digital projection, when we watched a film the time of the UI moved forward consistently and unnoticed – unless the film broke and the audience had to sit and wait for it to be restarted. The smooth temporal movement of reading a book only comes into question when pages are torn out or scrambled. Of course, many artistic experiments with the form of the book were designed precisely to draw our attention to what we can call the UI

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of traditional reading, from the somewhat baffling multi-column printing of Steve Katz’s The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968) to the postcard design of Robert Filliou’s Ample Food for Stupid Thought (1965). Recent digital versions of the film or book draw our attention to this overlooked interface. Modern computer-based DVD film systems introduce a UI at the top level of the disk menu, allowing viewers to jump to a particular scene, modify the audio, or restart the film from the beginning. Likewise, the time of reading becomes more visible in ebook readers. Amazon’s Kindle, for example, estimates the remaining reading time in a chapter based on previous page turns. These digital translations encourage us to ask what relevance the concept of UI time might have to pre-digital, non-experimental texts.11 In retrospect, we might recognise that print has always been able to impose time on the process of reading through, for example, serial publication. Of course, modern books have many UI elements in the form of paratextual features like the table of contents and index, as well as usercreated interface elements like bookmarks and dog-eared pages. But we tend to take these features for granted and overlook the influence that these have on the temporality of our reading. Recent work in comparative media studies has drawn attention to features of print that in the past were taken for granted. As N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman write, ‘As the era of print is passing, it is possible once again to see print in a comparative context with other textual media, including the scroll, the manuscript codex’, and many others (2013: vii). UI time, then, is central to digital narrative but encourages us to revisit the material construction of other media and to consider how those conditions shape the temporality of our reading experience. The centrality of idleness and waiting to the digital text likewise invites us to reconsider our common models for the temporality of reading and to attend more closely to our typical engagement with these material objects.

Notes 1. A particularly clear articulation of this is Linda Hutcheon’s 1988 discussion of the potential of ‘compunovels’ in A Poetics of Postmodernism: ‘Here process is all; there is no fixed product or text, just the reader’s activity as producer as well as receiver’ (77). 2. Ryan explains the distinction in this way: ‘I propose to make a distinction between “being a narrative” and “possessing narrativity”. The property of “being” a narrative can be predicated on any semiotic object produced with the intent of evoking a narrative script in the mind of the audience. “Having narrativity”, on the other hand, means being able to evoke such a script. In addition to life itself, pictures, music, or dance can have narrativity without being narratives in a literal sense’ (2004: 9). See also Henry Jenkins’s discussion of the role of ‘the emotional residue of previous narrative experiences’ in some games (2004: 119). 3. I have focused here on user actions in the interface, but many other kinds of events can become meaningful given the right code, from network events (a new email arrives) to time-based events (the computer checks for updates at a certain time every day). 4. In this regard, I am interpreting the computing event more narrowly than Alexander Galloway does in Gaming. He describes glitches as ‘nondiegetic machine acts’ and puts them in the same category as difficulty settings or ‘game over’ notifications (2006: 28). Such events might be part of the user’s experience of the work, but are not themselves a designed element of the work.

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5. See also the way that commercial games use ‘idle animations’, ways that player avatars sway or fidget when left alone in order to create a sense of their independent agency. 6. This is especially the case for early works like 34 North, 118 West (Knowlton et al. 2002). Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith explain this similarity well in comparing moving through locations to hypertext reading (2014: 43). In these cases, the texts essentially ‘wait’ to be read by participants when they arrive at a meaningful location. 7. For a good example of this, see Derrida (1982). 8. See Patrick O’Neill’s discussion in Fictions of Discourse (1994). See also James Phelan’s observation in Narrative as Rhetoric that ‘the story-discourse distinction is better seen as a heuristic than as an absolute’ (1996: 103). 9. On film, see Lothe (2000). For graphic narrative, Chatman’s use of a comic strip at the outset of Story and Discourse (1978: 36–41) is particularly well known. 10. Joyce talks about his traditional goals for writing the novel in ‘What I really wanted to do i thought’ in Of Two Minds (1995). 11. See Lori Emerson’s use of the term ‘interface’ to apply both to digital and print texts: ‘Emily Dickinson’s nineteenth-century fascicles – as much as mid-twentieth-century typewriters and late twentieth- and twenty-first-century digital computers – are now slowly but surely revealing themselves not just as media but as media whose functioning depends on an interface that defines the nature of reading as much as writing’ (2014: 129–30). See also John Zuern’s (2010) comparison of Rilke’s ‘Autumn’ to Rudy Lemcke’s digital poem The Uninvited on the way that they address the interface in their material design.

Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. (1997), Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Abbott, H. Porter (2008), The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Achituv, Romy and Camille Utterback (1999), Text Rain, installation, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC. Ankerson, Ingrid and Megan Sapnar (2001), ‘Cruising’, (last accessed 1 November 2017). Badiou, Alain and Fabien Tarby (2013), Philosophy and the Event, trans. Louise Burchill, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bal, Mieke (1997), Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd edn, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Barthes, Roland (1982), ‘Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives’, in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, New York: Noonday, pp. 251–95. Chatman, Seymour (1978), Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1982), ‘Ousia and Grammē: Note on a note from Being and Time’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 29–67. de Souza e Silva, Adriana and Jordan Frith (2014), ‘Re-narrating the city through the presentation of location’, in Jason Farman (ed.), The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies, New York: Routledge, pp. 34–49. Emerson, Lori (2014), Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Filliou, Robert (1965), Ample Food for Stupid Thought, New York: Something Else Press. Galloway, Alexander R. (2006), Gaming: Chapters on Algorithmic Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Genette, Gérard [1972] (1980), Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine and Jessica Pressman (2013), ‘Introduction: Making, critique: A media framework’, in N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman (eds), Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. vii–xxxiii. Herman, David (2002), Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hutcheon, Linda (1988), A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry (2004), ‘Game design as narrative architecture’, in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (eds), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 118–30. Joyce, Michael (1987), afternoon: a story, diskette, Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems. — (1995), ‘What I really wanted to do I thought’, in Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 31–5. Juul, Jesper (2005), Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Katz, Steve (1968), The Exaggerations of Peter Prince, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Knowlton, Jeff, Naomi Spellman, and Jeremy Hight (2002), 34 North, 118 West, (last accessed 1 November 2017). Lothe, Jakob (2000), Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marino, Mark C. and Rob Wittig (2012), ‘Netprov: Elements of an emerging form’, Dichtung Digital, 42, (last accessed 1 November 2017). Morson, Gary Saul (1994), Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, New Haven: Yale University Press. Myst, CD-ROM, directed by Rand Miller and Robyn Miller. USA: Brøderbund, 1993. Nelson, Jason (2007), Game, Game, Game and Again Game, (last accessed 1 November 2017). O’Neill, Patrick (1994), Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Phelan, James (1996), Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2004), ‘Introduction’, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 1–40. Seay, Allison and Felipe Hefler (2009), ‘House fire’, Born Magazine, (last accessed 1 November 2017). Short, Emily and Liz Daly (2012), First Draft of the Revolution, (last accessed 1 November 2017). Todorov, Tzvetan (1981), Introduction to Poetics, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zuern, John (2010), ‘Figures in the interface: Comparative methods in the study of digital literature’, in Roberto Simanowski, Jörgen Schäfter, and Peter Gendolla (eds), Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and Teaching, a Handbook, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, pp. 59–80.

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IV. Theories of Television, Film, Comics, and Graphic Narrative

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15 Continued Comics: The New ‘Blake and Mortimer’ as an Example of Continuation in European Series Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey

From Cottage Industry to Cultural Industry, from Magazine to Book

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t first sight, the differences between the US and continental, mainly FrancoBelgian classic comics production seem rather significant, with the UK allegedly occupying a somewhat ambivalent position, much closer, however, to the US than to continental comics culture (even if recent research helps challenge this dramatically under-researched domain of comics; see Gibson 2015). American comics tend to focus on the superhero genre catering to a pre-adolescent male audience, they are produced in a tightly controlled studio system characterised by a Taylorised division of labour, and the usual publication format is that of the serialised small-size comic book. Instead, Franco-Belgian comics display a wider range of genres; with hardly any interest in superhero material, they are said to function in a legal and economic context that gives far greater rights to individual creators, and they introduced quite early – actually since the late 1950s (Boillat and Revaz 2013) – a double and crossgenerational publication strategy which had a nice balance between pre-publication in large-size magazine format (for child and teenage readers using pocket money) and reissue in hardback album format (for older adult readers with greater disposable income). In short, it is the difference between DC’s Superman and Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin. If the newly emerged world of graphic novels hints at a bridging of the gap between the two sides of the Atlantic (see Baetens and Frey 2014), many old ideas on the US/Europe divide still prevail, at least as far as classic production is concerned. The persistence of some romantic ideas on the Franco-Belgian way of making comics, and the perhaps no less romantic criticising of the labour conditions in the US comics industry, do not only hinder a more nuanced perception of the history of both traditions, but they also prevent us from making a sharper analysis of a phenomenon that is vital in contemporary comics, namely the continuation of older series. At first sight, the difference between both sides of the Atlantic seems very strong, given the central position of reboot culture in US superheroes comics and the European tendency to produce new heroes and new styles at each generation. This difference has fundamental consequences as far as narrative is concerned: the US reboot culture, which may seem more static, is also extremely tolerant

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toward radical reinterpretations; in the apparently more diverse European tradition, many series prove highly resistant to internal change while each attempt to continue a series will be either framed in terms of tribute or virtually suspected of irreverence. The aim of this chapter is to address from precisely a more nuanced perspective the continuation of the ‘Blake and Mortimer’ series created by the Belgian artist Edgar Pierre Jacobs (aka E. P. or Edgar P. Jacobs), a privileged example of classic Franco-Belgian comics, whose success has been revitalised by the launch of a new series ‘based on the characters by Edgar P. Jacobs’, some ten years after the death of their creator. The production constraints that both burdened and enhanced the imagination of the Franco-Belgian comics’ artists were multiple and they were defined almost from the very beginning, when the reopening of the market after the German occupation of Belgium cleared the ground for the building of a new domestic cultural industry. A key figure in this regard was Raymond Leblanc, who founded in 1946 both the Tintin magazine (‘The magazine for the youth from age 7 to 77’) and the publishing company Le Lombard (Berthou 2010). Leblanc’s ambition was to convert the artisanal Belgian comics production, which despite the almost immediate success of Hergé, who launched his Tintin character in 1929, and of early magazines such as Spirou, first published in 1938, had not yet outgrown the stage of a cottage industry, into a fully-fledged business structure capable of producing comics in an industrial way, in Belgium as well as abroad (via the sales of albums as well as the resale of original plates to the Francophone market: in the beginning mainly in France, Switzerland, and Quebec). The new postwar structure entailed first the integration of comics artists in editorial teams – authors were no longer working on a one-to-one basis for a newspaper or a magazine, as was the case for Hergé before World War II. Now, they were staff members of a magazine whose style and content was chosen and organised by an editor who gave new authors the chance to launch new characters and new series, while avoiding overlap, and fostering complementary material between the series that were coexisting within the same pages of a magazine. It included also the possibility to reprint successful series in the album format, with many restrictions though, given the widespread fear in the first decade that the book would kill the magazine. Within this new system, the author gains the best of both worlds. As a staff member of the magazine, he is fully professionalised (and assured of a steady income!). However, this employer-employee environment did not involve the loss of all copyright. If the commercial rights were negotiated to the publishing company that owned the magazine, the so-called moral rights commonly stayed with the author of his (later: his and her) copyright holders, who could for instance oppose unwanted ‘changes’ in form or content or even the continuation of a series after the death or the withdrawal of the author. This does not of course mean that series are always the work of individuals: team work was important, and in quite a few cases series were given to new writers and artists when the original ones got either tired of it or were taken away from it by other assignments or new projects. Neither does it mean that this teamwork and the collective dimension of many comics really undermined the typical auteur status of individuals who remained publicly associated with their works. In this context, many creative contributions were never credited, and not always simply for commercial or industrial reasons. The decisive input of Jacques Van Melkebeke, for instance, the first editor of the Tintin magazine who had to step down almost immediately due to suspicions of collaboration during the war, is a good

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example of the hidden history of Franco-Belgian comics. Thus, despite his contributions, it was for political reasons that his signature was not allowed to feature on both the Tintin and the ‘Blake and Mortimer’ series.1 To a certain extent, but not for political reasons, the same applies to Edgar P. Jacobs himself and his own collaboration with Hergé, initially limited to colouring of the black and white versions of the series, then upgraded to research and the realisation of setting and costumes, and eventually increased further to the co-writing of the stories themselves, for instance being critical in the two-part narrative The Seven Crystal Balls (serialised 1943–6, published 1948) and Prisoner of the Sun (serialised 1946–8, published 1949) – an input for which Jacobs claimed, yet never received, credit. A refusal also that by 1948 provided Jacobs the motivation to create his own series, the ‘Blake and Mortimer’ titles (Mouchart and Rivière 2003). A final word on the importance of the double publication format: first magazine serialisation, then subsequently, the release of the album. What is at stake here is not only marketing and HR management. More specifically, the two major Franco-Belgian magazines of that period, Tintin and Spirou, used book reissues as a commercial bonus to their authors, who received a percentage of the sales. Moreover, when such plans were denied it was often also the cause for the swapping of personnel from one magazine to the other (for not getting an album could be a serious financial blow to the creator and hence precipitate a defection to the rival magazine). However, it is even more significant to stress the impact of the book format (not yet the one-shot formula, as has become standard in graphic novel production, but the series to book formula, based on recurring characters and recognisable plot structures; for a critique, see Menu 2011) on narrative in comics. The possibility, and in certain cases even the guarantee, that serialised stories would soon be available in book format, for many authors proved to be the impetus to start organising their stories in different ways. Three major developments should be mentioned here. First, there is the development of longer and more complex storylines. Second the shift from the tier, double tier, or page-unit to longer units, which anticipate to a certain extent the literary ‘chapter’ formula established by the magazine (À Suivre) in 1978 (a landmark initiative in the history of the contemporary auteur style in the field of European comics and graphic novels; the average chapter format in the magazine was approximately ten pages). Third, the diminished influence of the cliffhanger technique, key to any understanding of an instalment narrative but an unhelpful tick for a book. Therefore, to build a narrative in this Franco-Belgian context was to explore, if not invent a completely new balance between the publication constraints of magazine serialisation and book release, which had to be taken into account simultaneously.2

To Continue or Not to Continue, and How to Do It As self-conscious an artist as Hergé, Jacobs never stated that the ‘Blake and Mortimer’ series must end with his death (1987). The case of Tintin is of course world famous, and one of the major goals of the current copyright holders, The Hergé Estate, has always been to respect the author’s wish in this regard – hence no new Tintin adventures, ever. Instead, Jacobs wrote himself a kind of ‘bible’, to circumscribe the frame for possible further developments, and after long and hard discussions on ‘authenticity’, the Jacobs Estate, which had taken over the republication of the already existing

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albums, allowed another publisher, Dargaud, to revive ‘Blake and Mortimer’. Such a degree of openness to an afterlife for the series is understandable too not least because Jacobs himself was already working with many ‘hidden’ co-authors on ‘his’ later ‘Blake and Mortimer’ titles. Thus, fans of the series in the late 1960s were already aware and suspicious that the adventure L’affaire du collier had not been drawn by Jacobs but was mainly achieved by a different artist. A suspicion that was accurate: with the biographers of Jacobs, Mouchart and Rivière, noting the presence of the work of Gérald Forton (2003: 250–1). It was perhaps also something Jacobs was publicly asking for when he wrote in his somewhat patchy memoirs, Un opéra de papier (1981), brief additional biographical information on his principal characters. Certainly, at the end of his career Jacobs was also himself reinventing earlier works of Jacobs, clearly through that autobiography, but also when he assisted editors to bring out new publications of his very first serial comics that themselves pre-dated ‘Blake and Mortimer’: an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and an original sci-fi strip, Le rayon ‘U’. Nevertheless, to repeat, Jacobs was always much less open about his relationship with the aforementioned Jacques Van Melkebeke, with whom he had at the very least discussed many of his plot ideas (this hidden figure does get mentioned briefly in the autobiographical work, but only simply as ‘Jacques’ without much discussion; see also the extensive work by Mouchart and Rivière 2003). The decision to continue the series cannot, however, be analysed in purely individual or personal terms, as the mere choice of a given copyright holder and the result of a successful negotiation with a given publisher (or the creation of a new publishing company – as will be eventually the case for Jacobs’s books, but that is another story3). It is crucial to consider also the general editorial and historical context, which is a strange mix of elements that favour as well as impede the continuation of a successful series. On the one hand, the commercial pressure to release new volumes of defunct series is great, at least in those cases when (1) the financial value of the series is considered more important than its cultural and symbolic capital, and (2) the increase of this value does not depend on the careful conservation of a certain image (this is the case for the Tintin series, where it is not sure at all that a reboot might represent a substantial benefit in the long run) but on the possibility of a fresh take on the out-offashion characters and adventures. On the other hand, because of the tendency to systematically remake and update existing material, both in (legal or illegal) fan culture as well as in the official cultural industries, there is a motivation to always provide more material and for this material to be read with great interest and commitment. Let us briefly explain this dynamic a little further and in some greater detail. When a series continues to sell well or when decreasing sales can be compensated by other types of profit-making, as in the case of the Tintin licensing business for instance, the need to revive a series is much less of an imperative than when a series is going out of fashion and can no longer find new readers (more specifically, young readers eager to buy newly reprinted versions of existing material: not a futile detail in a FrancoBelgian comics culture for youth from 7 to 77 in which the albums are handed over as family heirlooms from one generation to the next). ‘Blake and Mortimer’, a series that is deeply rooted in the Cold War climate of the 1950s and defined by its closeness with the very genre that suffered most from competition from and with film and television, namely science fiction, is a neat example of just such a pressure. In other words, for ‘Blake and Mortimer’ continuation was a sine qua non for its very survival.

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In addition, there was also the growth and above all the ‘professionalisation’ of fan culture. New digital technologies have not only allowed a more systematic mode of collecting, sharing, swapping, selling, and marketing this form of community culture,4 they also produced an essential metamorphosis of the nature of the fan, who is no longer a consumer but a ‘prosumer’, participating actively in the making of new work, either legally, for instance in fan fiction that respects the producers’ ‘bible’ and is hosted by their websites, or illegally, as best known by all kinds of pornographic or political détournements of copyrighted material. The transformative power of this new kind of fandom makes fans more articulate (as clearly demonstrated by Abigail De Kosnik’s oral history project on ‘rogue archives’ (2016), fans do not just lack respect for the legal and professional habits and constraints of ‘real’ archivists, they also have a strong tendency to restore if not to generate, either themselves or via their open networks, new and often critical content that they consider missing in official historiography). Fans see themselves as much the guardians of a series’ authenticity as the copyright holders themselves, and the force of their conviction is an important actor in the continuation network (to play with Bruno Latour’s conceptual framework). The public’s expectations may therefore lean toward strong conservatism in taste. In its most extreme forms, this defensive reaction may even make a plea to prevent interested authors from taking on the series of retired or deceased authors. So strong is the fans’ identification of a series with the work by the original maker that a continuation becomes almost impossible unless it becomes acceptable to them. It is the conflict between the need to revive and the impossibility to do so that can make continuation such a fascinating chapter in the study of narrative and comics. On top of the general tension between audience expectations, the motivations of copyright holders, and legal stipulations in the publishing contracts, each of these elements being a creative straightjacket of its own for the Jacobs continuators, there is a wide array of other constraints which concern the narrative structure of the continuation. Roughly speaking, these constraints belong to three different levels. The most visible level is of course that of the look and feel of the series, which is at the heart of heated debates on the continuation’s authenticity. Since the revived series has been written and drawn by prestigious artists, it was almost inevitable that readers would complain about the presence of their idiosyncrasies in the new works as well as the absence of certain ‘typical’ Jacobs features. The first revived album for instance, The Francis Blake Affair (Van Hamme and Benoît [1996] 2008), was accused of being too much of a spy plot and therefore to have wrongly skipped over the typically Jacobs mix of investigation, espionage, and science fiction. The respect of the ‘bible’, officially unpublished but perfectly interiorised by the die-hard fans capable of distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic expansions, is part of this category, just as the long list of visual and verbal stylistic features that make Jacobs’s style so easily recognisable and for that reason so easy to imitate as well (page layout, colour contrasts, place and size of speech balloons, etc.). Jacobs’s style (a chromatically upgraded version of the traditional Clear Line style, as progressively elaborated in the 1930s and 1940s and then widely institutionalised in the 1950s, before its freezing in the 1960s and later postmodern ‘quotations’ since the 1980s; see Lecigne 1983) is particularly replicable, at least from a visual point of view. The specific mix of spy, science fiction, and adventure stories seems much harder to convincingly imitate, and most debates on post-Jacobs works focus on this aspect.

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A second level is no longer that of the series as a self-enclosed universe but of the series as part of a broader publication strategy. A ‘Blake and Mortimer’ adventure is supposed to have a fixed number of pages. It must also alternate one-shot adventures and stories gathered in two volumes. In addition, it is also obliged to cater to a mixed audience of adolescent as well as adult readers, who must find something of their taste in it, while not feeling intimidated or bored by the rest. Finally, it is even obliged to maintain the cliffhanger technique, in spite of the relative uselessness of it in a work that is published immediately in book format (although sometimes there are one-off pre-publications ‘for collectors’ in magazines aimed at fans, and it is also useful for serialisation afterwards in newspapers or magazines that buy rights – although less frequently adopted than before, this publication policy is still quite alive in Europe). Here it is also the case that the continuators have selected perhaps the definitive and best work from Jacobs as an explicit compass or ‘code’, The Yellow ‘M’ ([1956] 2007). Essential to that work is a strong use of the Anglocentric depiction of London, a combination of fantasy and pseudo-science blurred with a strong mystery (à la Sherlock Holmes). The album’s setting in 1953 has also proven fundamental, with the continuators building slowly forwards and backwards (see below) from broadly that date, and never entering the 1960s when Jacobs’s own last works were made, including L’affaire du collier (1964) and finally Les 3 formules du Professeur Satō, which as we know were not purely Jacobsian. The third and most challenging level has to do with the series’ readership and its changing nature over time. Narrative is not something that exists in a vacuum or that can be studied as a formal object. A story functions only if it is told to someone – as powerfully expressed in James Phelan’s canonical definition of narrative as ‘someone telling someone else on some occasion and for some purpose that something happened’ (Phelan 2004: 18) – and if the story told is also tellable, that is, worth telling, and in the final analysis it is always the reader, not the author who decides whether the story proves worth telling or not (Baroni 2013). The reader’s ‘so what?’ is the end of the story. For the ‘Blake and Mortimer’ continuations, the stakes of this task go as follows. Above all, the continuators face the problem that the necessary repetitions must appear sufficiently new to be something different from or more than mere repetitions, while the necessary innovations must appear suitably recognisable so that they are not seen as excessive deviations from the ‘bible’. Moreover, each of these transformations and reiterations must match the reading horizon and expectations of each age group. Besides, continuators do need to know that tellability involves also a strong ethical and political dimension. What can or cannot, what should and should not be told today may vary significantly from what used to be natural, that is, socially acceptable if not recommended in earlier periods when Jacobs himself made the series. Moreover, this social aspect of the continuation issue, which we will study here in the specific context of postcolonialism, cannot be separated from two other ideological issues: first, that of the lasting influence of auteur theory (i.e. the belief that a collective work of art is in last instance the product of the individual who oversees the whole process) and second, that of the cultural prominence of a concept such as ‘authenticity’ (even in works of fiction!), both of which may hinder the very mechanism of continuation. In theory this may seem quite easy to handle, since after all most employees in the creative industries are trained to address various audiences at the same time, while trying to exclude as carefully and cautiously as possible anything offensive to any social group whatsoever

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(at least those groups to whom the product is to be sold). Here, however, the situation is much more complex, since the dialectics of old and new does not match the difference between the old generation and the new one in a linear way; the main distinction is rather between those who know and read the series in an active and dedicated way, regardless of their age, and those who discover it for the first time. In that sense, continuations are not unlike certain types of rewriting of the literary canon, those which aim at being read simultaneously as junior novelisations (for a new, untrained audience) and remakes (for a possibly knowing audience).

A Jacobs Prequel: The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent As a contemporary illustration of the politics of continuation in the Franco-Belgian tradition, and in order to study some of the issues that it raises, we will focus on a double volume, The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent (originally published in 2003–4; Sente and Juillard [2003] 2011a, [2004] 2011b). In the list of continuations, which currently comprises already eleven volumes (the original works by Jacobs entailed twelve volumes), this ‘Blake and Mortimer’ adventure occupies a special, if not privileged position. To start with, it fills in an important gap in the readers’ knowledge of the characters’ biography. The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent narrates the first encounter between Colonel Blake and Professor Mortimer – the latter, of Scottish descent, being the real hero of the series; the former, a Welshman, being more of a side-kick, not unlike the relationship between the picturesque and excessive captain Haddock, the real larger-than-life hero of the Adventures of Tintin and the rather pale Tintin of the later years. We are informed that they met in India when the country was still under British rule, where both young men who are about to enter college in the United Kingdom are on a visit to their families (their fathers are both serving in the Army, Mortimer’s father as a doctor, Blake’s father as a colonel in the Royal Welsh Fusilier corps – partly information founded on Jacobs’s comments in his autobiography of 1981). In addition, The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent is also the volume that introduces a new sensibility toward colonialism, an important but until then rather unchallenged and stereotypically treated strand of the E. P. Jacobs universe that was mainly structured around the binary logic of Freedom (the West, epitomised by Nazi-fighting Britain) versus Tyranny (first Oriental dictators, then the Soviet Union and the Yellow Peril, as communist powers, supported by a whole bunch of Western spies and mad scientists and, more anecdotally perhaps, the recurrent figure of Blake and Mortimer’s arch-enemy, Olrik, whose image closely resembles that of the British fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosely; see also Miller 2004). Set in the context of the 1958 world exhibition in Brussels, The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent opens a postcolonial sensibility that signifies a rupture with the self-evidence of colonialism in the Jacobs albums, an aspect that the first continuations had left largely unquestioned precisely by focusing on Cold War themes of espionage. Not only does the two-book adventure contain, at least theoretically, a certain plea for multiculturalism, it also breaks, or tries to break, with the stereotypical representation of the West as intrinsically ‘good’ and the East as being a ‘natural’ oppositional double. Thus, the upgrade within the continuity of this album is that Mortimer will, although lukewarmly, revolt against the colonial ideology of his milieu, and the story will give a lot of space to Third World independence movements.

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As already hinted at, this innovation is mainly to be situated at the narrative level: as far as drawing style is concerned, not much is changing, except of course the fact that it is now possible to draw female characters and bodies, which was almost a taboo in the 1950s comics productions for a juvenile audience. Since the continuations are written in a period in which the censorship on youth publications is much less stringent as far as gender issues are concerned, it becomes also possible to introduce sexualised female characters. Here The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent goes as far as to elaborate a cross-cultural relationship between the young Mortimer and an Indian princess, Gita, who will tragically disappear from his life – and eventually come back in even more tragic circumstances. The highly generic and thus ideologically less dangerous Romeo-and-Juliet story of Mortimer and Gita, who love each other despite their parents’ opposition, does not end well. Due to a series of misunderstandings, Gita-Juliet believes that Mortimer-Romeo has betrayed her and the rest of her life is characterised by grief and revenge. When the lovers meet again, in 1958, there will be no happy end and Gita, who has eventually turned mad, will have to be killed by Mortimer. Narratively speaking, this two-book adventure is thus confronted with a kind of double-bind, that is that of both expanding and transgressing the ‘bible’. On the one hand, expansions are necessary. As we noted above, if not, the series would be unable to find a new audience, which is imperative for the survival of the work (and the economic benefits of the Estate, which cannot rely upon the same diversification possibilities of the Hergé Estate, for instance). On the other hand, these expansions, which have to take into account the shift from a Cold War ideology towards postcolonialism, cannot but dramatically change the ‘bible’. For purist, die-hard ‘Blake and Mortimer’ fans, the shift to multiculturalism is far from self-evident, while for new readers, the mix of old Cold War ideology and today’s postcolonial sensibility may appear as just confusing or anachronistic. How do Sente and Juillard solve this problem – and what to think of the solutions they provide? First of all, writer Yves Sente and draughtsman André Juillard radically opt for a ‘back to basics’ approach. Contrary to the first duo, writer Jean Van Hamme, the mastermind behind the most successful Franco-Belgian series of the last decades (Thorgal, XIII, Largo Winch), and draughtsman Ted Benoît, a highly sophisticated postmodern revivalist of the Clear Line aesthetics, Sente and Juillard refrain from redefining the series’ genre profile, a mix of adventure story, investigation plot, and science fiction. In that sense, they are more Jacobsian than Jacobs himself. In combination with the amazing stylistic similarity with the central albums of the ‘Blake and Mortimer’ series, again such as The Yellow ‘M’ (Jacobs [1956] 2007), the design, layout, colours, speech balloon style, and so on of The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent may seem deeply loyal and traditional, as if the authors had declined the very possibility to update and adjust Jacobs’s old-fashioned – and for modern readers a little antiquated – visual and narrative style. However, this utmost fidelity to the original artwork and storytelling is clearly the price to pay for the more radical changes that are introduced at the level of narrative and its ideology (and which are absent from the stylistically and narratively more ambitious continuations of Van Hamme and Benoît). As a corollary, the link between the new work and the whole series is stressed also by the recurring reference to preceding albums, both those by Jacobs himself and the previous one by the same authors (who were asked to step in when the original duo, Van Hamme and Benoît, proved incapable of rapidly producing a second volume after

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the successful but also rudely criticised The Francis Blake Affair, which as mentioned had reframed the series as a spy adventure with strong hints of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps – the work that of course also influenced Hergé’s The Black Island). Throughout the two books of the new adventures, the reader finds footnotes referring to other albums. As such, this continuity does not come as a surprise, given the recurrent character of the fight between the Good, Blake and Mortimer, and the Bad and the Ugly, their ur-enemy Olrik, a devilish character who ‘dies’ at the end of each book, only in order to miraculously reappear in each new volume, which forces the series to become highly selfreflexive. Indeed, each new comeback of Olrik has to be explained to the reader and this can only be done via references to his past, which bizarrely enough the readers discover more about than that of the two protagonists, deprived of any past, so to speak, until the publication of The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent. This strong self-awareness of the continuation, which positions itself as continuation by exhibiting the uncountable plot links with the rest of the series, produces a kind of active nostalgia that goes against the effort to bend the underlying ideology of the narrative toward multiculturalism. Active nostalgia is more than ‘just’ nostalgia: it also not only produces new forms of commitment to the past, but tends to reject other interpretations that are more forward-looking. Active nostalgia is a new interpretation as well, but a very singular one, whose novelty aims above all at a deepening of the past. As will be specified below, the fundamental problem of the new iterations of the ‘Blake and Mortimer’ series is not simply the novelty of these works, but their reception by communities that have a certain idea of what it means to revisit the past. The more the reader is pressed to see the continuity with the first volumes (which have always been easily available and frequently reprinted), the more it is implied that these volumes should not be forgotten and that their ideological stance, often overtly colonialist as in most works of that period of Jacobs’s career, still has currency. Whatever the interpretation one gives to the first books of the series, the systematic embedding of The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent in the existing ‘Blake and Mortimer’ universe is not only a concession to the ‘bible’ and the legal obligation to continue the series in a way that is ‘based on the characters of Edgar P. Jacobs’ – an obligation which seems somewhat unrealistic or narrow-minded, but which is often used to contest new interpretations – but also proves an implicit but therefore no less efficient nuancing, if not withdrawal, of the multiculturalist openings at the level of the ideology of the narrative. Third and last, the recuperation of the innovative multiculturalist stance results also from the use of all-pervading narrative techniques that block any serious critique of colonialism. The reuse of mythical, that is, transhistorical and thus depoliticised plot structures is the first device that comes to mind. The love affair between Gita and Mortimer suggests the East and the West can meet in spite of their differences (although one has to specify immediately that as a representative of the East, Gita, who has been educated in Britain, offers already a very Westernised image of that East), yet the transparent allusion to the Romeo and Juliet theme makes the immediate claim that when love comes into play origins and cultures disappear – and should therefore no longer be discussed. Similar remarks could be made on the use of intertextual allusions, which also depoliticise the book: the violent intervention of a nationalist leader during a colonial dinner party is visibly staged as a remake of the famous mummy scene in Hergé’s The Seven Crystal Balls ([1948] 1975), perhaps as a kind of second-degree nod to the wellinstructed reader on how important the work of Jacobs as unacknowledged co-writer

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of this Tintin album actually was. So despite the modernisation agenda, politics, here, is definitely pushed into the background. But there is more. If, as we all know, the personal is the political, the overt personalisation of political issues tends often to depoliticise them. In The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent the conflict between East and West is projected on a single love affair. At first sight, this offers the possibility to criticise colonialism, for both Mortimer and Gita oppose their parents’ hostility to multicultural love. On a second reading, however, such a trope simply subdues all forms of politics. It is suggested that love, which Sente and Juillard present as concrete, individual relationships, is finally obstructed by abstract politics, which blinds people and leads them to corrupt the higher values of love. In that sense, there is no real break with the same depoliticised message of Kipling’s famous 1889 poem, of which the following suffices: Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! (Kipling 1940: 234) The same applies to political motives and plot events that do not have love as their primary driving force. The general and strictly political debate on the unfairness of the First World-Third World power relations, explicitly voiced in certain dialogues of the book, is soon obscured by small personal considerations. Some characters, representing either colonising or colonised countries, behave ‘well’, not because they have the right convictions, but because they are decent people, while others do not, because they are not, full stop. Political questions become thus always highly individualised and their importance is dwarfed by other, apparently less significant, but actually ‘superior’, values, which involve only people and interpersonal relationships. Finally, before we conclude and by way of discursive epilogue, it is also worth noting that the intricacies of publication format discussed at the beginning of this chapter provide a further influence, now on the continuity narratives and their underlying ideology. The original serialisation format, with only later album republication, particularly in the early days meant that sometimes plotting and characterisation had to be achieved at quite a fast pace – the magazines needing their material for the avid readers. This context of serialisation meant that Jacobs did leave gaps and unanswered questions inside the ‘Blake and Mortimer’ universe. Of course, as stories were developed and concluded such enigmas were sometimes solved, but also many were left open or at the least not developed at all. For the new continuity works, such a world is deeply important for a number of reasons. First, for the creators and the dedicated fans these enigmas provide a deep level of narrative fascination, little lost gems that only the ‘expert Jacobs reader’ will know and understand when the new continuity writers pick up on this material (again a kind of fusion is occurring, now with the writer having to be a very clever fan, as well as a creative force). Thus, we can say that the narrative of the continuity works has a further secondary level, wherein smaller, unimportant back-material from the original works can be suddenly projected forward with greater importance or as a colourful authentic backdrop in the continuation titles. This aspect of narrative association between old and new is not at all on the level of Cold War versus Colonial narrative, macro frames, let alone neo-colonialism or multiculturalism. Instead, it is a reservoir of insider codes that

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link the new books, the informed and loyal readers, right back to the first Jacobs volumes, allowing a deeper level of reading than the main, explicit macro plot, or not. Second, this level of resuscitation of ‘Blake and Mortimer’ again undermines political modernisation because by implication it values the new works because of their connection to the deep universe of the original works, disregarding any real mission for political revisionism. Such a matter is something of a game, and it is a fun game for the new creators and the cult-like knowledge of fans. However, it is a game that comes with a political subtext and that is a deep loyalty to the perceived rich context of the original works (useful discussion of this aspect is provided by new writer Yves Sente while promoting a 2014 continuation, Le bâton de Plutarque). It is also a narratological phenomenon suffused in irony because an original feature of the Jacobs world was ellipsis, mystery, obfuscation, and uncertainty pushed not only by genre but the constraint of serialisation. The author–reader desire to fill in such longstanding gaps in fact flagrantly contradicts what one may desire from an E. P. Jacobs story. That is to say, the removal of the final traces of serialisation – on the level of form – today destroys what was once most loved. However, perhaps the final irony is less complex but worth making explicit as we begin to conclude. The original series was made to be in and of its times, serialisation allowing Jacobs not only to capture the changing look of places, people, clothes, and architecture but also to tap into the latest news of his world. The present-day continuity series opts to remain in this past, but in so doing abandons Jacobs’s modernism in favour of a permanent historical setting where our own concerns can only be retro-fitted by use of the occasional knowing metaphor. To conclude, the example of the Jacobs continuation proves an interesting case for the study of narrative in more ways than one. It draws attention to the importance of legal and extra-literary aspects of storytelling. It emphasises the productive role of the notion of series, which helps reframe the excessive weight that is sometimes given to individual stories. It highlights the transformative power of constraints, which are a key dimension of the author’s imagination, while displaying also the many restrictions that appear as well. Finally, the highly commercialised context of comics storytelling and the need to cater to several audiences at the same time, explains also the specific treatment of ethical and political issues that are raised by the return of historical material in new cultural environments.

Notes 1. For more on this enigmatic figure, see Mouchart (2014). 2. For the Hergé example, see Baetens (2006). For a comparison between newspaper and magazine comics, see also Lefèvre (2000). 3. The (commercial and aesthetic) conflict between artists and/or copyright holders on the one hand and publishing companies on the other can lead to four prototypical situations, which appear also in a less conflictual context, that of the end of the contractual period that limited their collaboration: (1) the renegotiation of the initial contract (in general more profitable to artist and/or copyright holder); (2) the impossibility to continue the series; (3) the transfer of the series to another publisher; and (4) the creation of a new publishing company, often exclusively devoted to the exploitation of one single series. Examples of the last situation are the ‘Blake and Mortimer’ series (since 1982; in 1992 the company was sold to the French Dargaud publishing company) and ‘Les Éditions Albert René’, created in 1979 by Albert

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Uderzo two years after the decease of René Goscinny (the company was taken over in 2006 by Hachette): the former only published the ‘Blake and Mortimer’ series as well as Le rayon ‘U’ (a youth work by E. P. Jacobs), the latter is well known as the exclusive publisher of the ‘Astérix’ series. 4. For a good testimony of fan culture in the pre-Internet era, see Lethem (2006).

Works Cited Baetens, Jan (2006), ‘Hergé, auteur à contraintes? Une relecture de L’Affaire Tournesol’, French Forum, 31: 1, 99–112. — and Hugo Frey (2014), The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, New York: Cambridge University Press. Baroni, Raphaël (2013), ‘Tellability’, in Peter Hühn et al. (eds), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, (last accessed 21 October 2017). Berthou, Benoît (2010), ‘La bande dessinée franco-belge: quelle industrie culturelle?’, Textyles, 36–7, 43–57, (last accessed 1 November 2017). Boillat, Alain and Françoise Revaz (eds) (2013), La BD avant l’album, exhibition catalogue, Lausanne, 16–26 October, (last accessed 1 November 2017). De Kosnik, Abigail (2016), Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gibson, Mel (2015), Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics and Post-War Constructions of British Girlhood, Leuven: Leuven University Press. Hergé [1948] (1975), The Seven Crystal Balls, New York: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. Jacobs, Edgar Pierre (1981), Un opéra de papier, Paris: Gallimard Jeunesse. — [1956] (2007), The Yellow ‘M’, Canterbury: Cinebook. Kipling, Rudyard (1940), Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition, London: Hodder and Stoughton. Lecigne, Bruno (1983), Les héritiers d’Hergé, Brussels: Magic Strip. Lefèvre, Pascal (2000), ‘The importance of being “published”: A comparative study of different comics formats’, in Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen (eds), Comics Culture, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum at the University of Copenhagen, pp. 91–105. Lethem, Jonathan (2006), The Disappointment Artist, New York: Vintage. Menu, Jean-Christophe (2011), La bande dessinée et son double, Paris: L’Association. Miller, Ann (2004), ‘Les héritiers de Hergé: The figure of the aventurier in a postcolonial context’, in Yvette Rocheron and Christopher Rolfe (eds), Shifting Frontiers of France and Francophonie, Basel: Peter Lang, pp. 307–24. Mouchart, Benoît (2014), À l’ombre de la Ligne Claire, Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles. — and François Rivière (2003), La damnation d’Edgar P. Jacobs, Paris: Seuil. Phelan, James (2004), Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sente, Yves (2014), ‘L’espadon colmaté!: Dossier Jean-Pierre Fuéri et F.Vidal’, Case Mate, 73, August–September, ii–vi . — and André Juillard [2003] (2011a), The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent, Part 1: The Global Threat, Canterbury: Cinebooks. — [2004] (2011b), The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent, Part 2: Battle of the Minds, Canterbury: Cinebooks. Van Hamme, Jean and Ted Benoît [1996] (2008), The Francis Blake Affair, Canterbury: Cinebooks.

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16 Operational Seriality and the Operation of Seriality Jason Mittell

T

he twenty-first century has seen a notable increase in the prevalence, prominence, and prestige of seriality. The rise of prestigious serial television in the United States and throughout much of the world has been the major catalyst in seriality’s ascendance, but it has become a prominent element in most contemporary media, including film franchises, comics, videogames, podcasts, literature, and social media. Alongside the spread of serial narrative, we have seen a boom in academic studies of seriality in its various forms, including numerous anthologies, monographs, conferences, and even a high-profile European research group focused on popular seriality.1 Despite all of this serial proliferation and attention, seriality itself remains notably under-theorised and poorly defined. This chapter is an attempt to provide some clarity around the concept and practices of seriality, while also complicating and expanding our common-sense notions of serial forms. For a subfield known for its definitional precision and taxonomic obsessions, narrative theorists have given little attention to defining and debating seriality, suggesting that it functions more as a ‘know-it-when-we-see-it’ concept. Canonical reference works such as The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, Abrams’s A Glossary of Literary Terms, and The Living Handbook of Narratology all have no entries for serial or seriality at all, while The Dictionary of Literary Terms gives only four sentences of its 802 pages to the term ‘serial’, far less than more obscure neighbouring terms such as ‘sestina’ or ‘sevdalinke’ (Cuddon and Habib 2013: 648–9). The recent Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory gives the most attention to the concept among reference works, with a four-paragraph entry on ‘Serial Form’, which is still quite brief compared with lengthy entries given to more esoteric and specialised concepts such as ‘Simple Form’ and ‘Situation Model’. In this entry, Sara Gwenllian Jones offers a clear definition of seriality: Serial form refers to the segmentation of a narrative into instalments that are released sequentially with, usually, a time lapse between the release of one instalment and the next . . . Each instalment of a serial is part of a continuing narrative that is not concluded until the end of the series. (Jones 2010) In one of the earliest monographs focused on seriality, Jennifer Hayward is even more succinct: ‘A serial is, by definition, an ongoing narrative released in successive parts’ (1997: 3). For the purposes of this chapter, we can distil these definitions into two component parts: continuity with gaps (see also O’Sullivan 2010).

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We can elaborate each of these two necessary ingredients: continuity suggests longform storytelling, repetition and reiteration, consistency and accumulation, historicity and memory, and potentials for transmedia expansion. Serial continuity connotes size and scope, suggesting that there is more to any story than can be consumed in a single sitting, linking to the type of vast narrative explored by Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin (2009). However, ‘serial’ is not simply a synonym for vast, as the whole must be segmented into instalments broken up by gaps, leading to temporal ruptures, narrative anticipation, moments for viewer productivity, opportunities for feedback between producers and consumers, and a structured system for a shared cultural conversation. Segmentation of a continuous whole is insufficient to produce seriality – the chapters in a book are no more a product of seriality than scenes in a film. What makes those segments serialised is when readers are forced to wait for the release of subsequent chapters, or when the next scenes of a film are withheld from viewers until a sequel. Serialised gaps are structured and unavoidable fissures that force readers or viewers to disengage from the narrative before moving onward.

Mind the Gap: How Seriality Works Such a definition should not be terribly controversial on its face, but it does raise some quandaries that might force us to redefine the scope and limits of seriality. First off, the constitutive importance of gaps highlights how seriality is best considered as a temporal practice, not a stable formal feature of texts. We can see this distinction in an example whose nature transforms over time: Dickens’s Great Expectations was released serially in thirty-five weekly instalments from December 1860 to August 1861. But after its initial serialised release, the compiled bound volumes cease to function as a serial – after all, nobody reading Dickens today is forced to wait a week between chapters, as they determine their own pacing and gaps. Even if readers choose to simulate seriality and mimic the weekly instalments, as with the online project Reading Like a Victorian, this is an optional recreation of serialised pace: since the gaps are not mandated, the text is no longer serialised.2 Such a transformation is not limited to the medium of the novel, as a television series similarly transforms from serialised distribution of weekly episodes to a bound version of a complete season or series via DVD box sets or streaming access, shifting from a serialised mode to what I have elsewhere called a boxed aesthetic (Mittell 2015: 40–1). This is not to say that such works are untouched by seriality, as their initial serial production and consumption helped define what they are; however, for the contemporary consumer, that initial life as a serial is not tangible, making Great Expectations an equivalent reading experience to Silas Marner, George Eliot’s never-serialised novel published in the same year. The key point here is that seriality as an aspect of textual engagement changes over time, even as the works themselves are stable. What once was a serialised gap no longer is – whether that gap was between chapters of Great Expectations or books within the ‘Harry Potter’ series, any avid reader can simply plough ahead into the next chapter or book now that they are all released. And a series that once was serialised but later appeared complete can be extended onward by creating new gaps. As of this writing in 2017, the ‘Harry Potter’ series is complete in both literary and cinematic forms, yet the film prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has created a new serial gap moving forward in what is reported to be a five-film series, lodged within

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the broader franchise brand of ‘J. K. Rowling’s Wizarding World’. At the moment, this is a serialised gap because, no matter how much we want to, we cannot consume the currently unnamed next instalment – but if you are reading this chapter after the scheduled release of that next film in 2018, there is no serialised gap between the two films. However, there might well be a new gap created as viewers await the next instalment with whatever sense of anticipation and/or dread that the franchise inspires. Since a serialised gap is rooted in the timeframe of a narrative’s distribution, it is ephemeral and fluid – what makes something serialised is not its form, but how it is created, distributed, circulated, and consumed. Thus, seriality is best understood as a dynamic cultural practice, rather than a stable formal element, and likewise we should avoid treating texts as ‘serials’ in the stable noun form, preferring more descriptive and fluid modifiers like ‘serialised’. Since seriality emerges out of the mandated gap between instalments within a continuous narrative, it is in those moments that seriality comes to matter in a range of different realms. For television, the production process responds to feedback from viewing episodes, assessing what is working well or not, and integrating responses from critics and viewers; all work to shape a series as it is unfolding. Such gaps between instalments become productive sites of change and development, as the divide between production and consumption blurs, according to Frank Kelleter, ‘intertwined in a feedback loop’ (Kelleter 2017: 13). Serial gaps beg to be filled, and both producers and consumers rush in to create and circulate paratexts to supplement the viewing experience – from online videos to toys, tie-in games to fan fiction, seriality extends textual experiences across media as well. The serialised consumption experience is particularly fruitful, as seriality enables conversation among consumers. A serialised Game of Thrones viewer can probably assume that other viewers they encounter are within an episode of their own viewing, and thus can go onto Twitter during or after an episode to find a broad array of conversational partners. But when watching a series that has already been fully released, it is unlikely that you can find a community of viewers or relevant set of paratexts poised at the same point in your consumption schedule until you reach the end – if I have watched only two of the seven seasons of The Shield, it is as unlikely that I would find viewers at the same spot in the series to engage with, just as it would be hard to find a community of readers to discuss the first 200 pages of Infinite Jest. Viewers and readers productively engage with an ongoing series in ways that become constitutive of seriality itself. As Hayward writes, seriality is inseparable from the unique reading practices and interpretative tactics developed by audiences, practices that include collaborative, active reading; interpretation; prediction; occasional rewriting or creation of new subplots; attempts to influence textual production; and, increasingly often, a degree of success in those attempts. (Hayward 1997: 4) Such participatory practices are dependent on the temporal span and synchronicity of seriality, using the mandated gaps to forge communities around reception practices. Some engaged and dedicated viewers approach serial texts via what I have called ‘forensic fandom’ (Mittell 2015). Such fans take narrative enigmas and information from a series and theorise about their outcomes and meanings, engaging through both conversations and paratexts. Such reception practices often focus on how stories are

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told as much as the content of the narratives themselves, or what many have theorised as the operational aesthetic. This is the double pleasure that serialised television offers in appreciating both the emotional engagement of a story, and its masterful storytelling mechanics. Examining how a machine works is crucial pleasure, not just enjoying the machine’s output, suggesting that the pleasure of watching a magic trick is both in being amazed and in trying to figure out how it was done. Much of serialised television demands audiences to be aware of narrative mechanics and invites us to marvel at the craftsmanship required to build elaborate storytelling machines. Viewers become amateur narratologists, heightened by our ongoing serial engagement via the mandated gaps that viewers can fill through productive consumption and forensic fandom (Mittell 2006). It seems clear that such modes of engaged participatory viewing and feedback between producers and consumers are dependent on the serialised structure of gaps to synchronise narrative consumption and viewer productivity. And yet, we are seeing the rise of television distribution and consumption practices that forgo such serialised gaps – often termed ‘binge viewing’ with a pejorative edge, the practice that I prefer to more neutrally call ‘compressed viewing’ is when people watch episodes in quick succession, consuming as many instalments as are available over a short amount of time. Compressed viewing does not require any particular technology, such as streaming on Netflix, as one can also watch a compressed series on DVD, via downloaded files, or even with a backlog of DVR episodes. The important distinction is that viewers are not following a broadcast schedule, but rather defining their own temporality to consume an already published set of instalments. Often those instalments have been distributed all at once, via the ‘full drop’ model popularised by Netflix releasing an entire ‘season’ (or ‘series’ in the British vocabulary) of a programme in a single instant, but it can also apply to viewers watching an older series that has already been released. Per my emphasis on seriality’s reliance on structuring gaps, it should seem clear that compressed viewing is not serialised viewing: if you can marathon through episodes, there are no mandated gaps. Any gaps between episodes that viewers may take are optional and not determined by its serialised release. In this way, watching a DVD set or a streaming full-drop series is more analogous to reading a long novel and the reader determining their own occasional breaks between chapters. Even though a long novel could not be reasonably read without gaps and taking breaks, seriality is not just the presence of gaps in consumption, but requires the mandating and scheduling of those gaps. As segmentation does not make a story into a serial, it must be delivered with mandated temporal separation between segments. Thus, if compressed viewing is not a serialised experience, then its distribution parallel, the full-drop series, is not a serialised release, lacking the possibilities for feedback and ongoing revision that typify serial storytelling. And thus series that were released with the full-drop model, such as Netflix originals House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, cannot be considered to be serialised in the same way that conventional television releases are, any more than a novel released initially in a bound form is not regarded as a serial.3 To be clear, rejecting the serial label for full-drop series or compressed viewing is not meant to dismiss the vitality or creative possibilities of such forms of distribution and consumption. Rather, it is a definitional move in the name of precision, highlighting the lack of mandated serialised engagement with such series as they initially were viewed, skipping straight ahead to the boxed aesthetics of consuming a larger unit in

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self-paced instalments. Understanding such full-drop series as distinct from serialised programming allows us to better analyse each mode of storytelling and consumption, pointing toward subtle differences in narrative structure and strategies, as well as variations in cultural practice (Warhol 2014). We could frame this difference as hierarchically privileging either mode of engagement: compressed viewing can be seen as individualistic and decontextualised versus the communal, social, and historicised facets of serial viewing, or we can flip the emphasis to frame compressed viewing as empowering viewers to take control of media texts, while serialised distribution makes viewers subject to the whims of industry and advertisers, reducing agency and flexibility. Both are correct, of course, highlighting how such hierarchies are quite arbitrary. However, these distinctions matter if we want to understand the varieties of practices and norms that now proliferate around narrative distribution and consumption.

Operational Seriality: How Seriality Might Work Differently The previous section made a case for how the temporal gaps that structure serial storytelling are crucial to understand how seriality works and to differentiate between serial and non-serial practices. Such gaps have been underexamined by scholars of seriality, typically because continuity, seriality’s other essential ingredient, has been overemphasised. In its creation of long-form, vast, transmedia, expansive, and multifaceted stories, serial continuity has received the bulk of attention in the burgeoning world of seriality studies. However, I argue that its attention might be too narrowly focused on one aspect of continuity, and that we might expand our understanding of the serial impulse by considering some other facets of continuity. Typically, serial continuity is based around narrative events: a text is considered serialised when events accumulate with a degree of consistency. Viewers entering into a new television series need to be taught how to read narrative events as self-contained or cumulative, as this is a key distinction people make between episodic and serialised norms. We gauge our expectations based on how the storyworld and characters deal with and react to events: do people remember and discuss events from previous episodes? Are character actions informed and motivated by what they have previously experienced? Do events have a persistent impact on the storyworld? If the answers to these questions are ‘yes’, then typically the series is regarded as serialised. Thus, The Shield is a serialised police drama, as cases endure beyond single episodes and characters wrestle with events from the past, while the Law & Order franchise is episodic because each individual case is ‘stand-alone’ without significant impact on future instalments. Most programmes invite us to either assume serial accumulation of events, or ignore previous episodes in favour of a present-minded episodic approach. However, even in highly episodic procedurals, we expect some continuity. The CSI franchise is defined by its different locations – Las Vegas, New York, and Miami all are the same cities in each episode of the respective series, and those consistent settings anchor the programme. In these series, setting and storyworld provide key continuity rather than narrative events. Likewise, characters persist across episodes: for instance, Law & Order SVU (Wolf 1999–present) is defined by its consistent characters, especially Olivia Benson who has appeared in all 400 episodes that have aired as of this writing. She is that programme’s core anchor of continuity, and certainly forms a key point of connection for audiences whose memories do extend across episodes. For

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viewers of such episodic procedurals, such continuities of setting and character are vital, even if not manifested in the typical mode of cumulative events found in most serialised programming – many of the gap-filling viewing practices discussed above are commonplace for fans of such procedural programmes, creating serialised engagements even without typical modes of narrative accumulation. The importance of character and setting continuity highlights how the serialised/episodic divide is more of a fluid spectrum than binary categorisation, suggesting that modes of narrative continuity are more variable than we typically assume. But what if we stop conceiving of serial continuity as solely a narrative component? Can we see the productive power of seriality in texts that we would probably not consider ‘serials’? What might serial continuity look like outside the realm of ‘narrative’? To explore this notion of non-narrative continuity, we can return to the operational aesthetic, the pleasures of how a story gets told that I argue is essential for various forms of contemporary serial storytelling. Such a consideration suggests the concept of operational continuity, where ‘how media are made and circulated’ becomes the site of seriality. Within this realm of operational seriality, the crucial continuous thread concerns how stories are told rather than the stories themselves. Making such a shift requires us to look at texts that we would normally be reluctant to term ‘serialised’ based on their narratives, but might be understood as embedded within cultural practices of seriality outside the narrative realm. To exemplify the idea of operational seriality, let us consider how it might work within the mostly non-serialised medium of film, but not in the typical cases of serialised franchises like Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Instead, looking at operational serial practices within so-called stand-alone films can highlight how seriality might work outside the narrative dimension. First, a caveat: these brief examples work more as thought experiments than conclusive arguments. They encourage us to think about serial practices as facets that transcend storytelling, and thus they might seem odd or inappropriate in terms of their application of narrative theory to such practices. However, these examples can hopefully expand our understanding of seriality as a widespread facet of culture, breaking down its narrower definition as solely an aspect of narrative form and encouraging deeper analysis. One way we might see operational seriality at work is as a facet of film production. Typically films follow a linear model, where a screenplay goes into production to be shot, and then edited and mixed in post-production before being released, allowing for little of the feedback from viewers or potential for ongoing revisions that typifies serialised storytelling. Yet there are some examples where films become shaped by seriality in interesting and instructive ways. One exceptional case is Mulholland Drive (Lynch 2001), which I have written about elsewhere as being ‘haunted by seriality’ through its cross-medium transformation (Mittell 2013): the film started as a television pilot produced in 1998, but when ABC declined to pick it up in 1999, it sat dormant for eighteen months until it was optioned into a film by Studio Canal Plus. Writer/director David Lynch revisited the pilot with a significant gap in time, and then transformed the film in unlikely directions. While viewers do not experience Mulholland Drive as a serialised text, Lynch did – and he reaped the benefits of that productive gap to create what many consider his finest work. This unintended but productive serialised gap in the film’s production led to much of its power. Typically in serial production, creators benefit from (or at least are influenced

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by) the feedback they get from viewers, critics, and collaborators as they create future episodes of an ongoing series – even when creators isolate themselves from such feedback, television producers often talk about how seeing the final cut of one episode will reshape their plans for future episodes. For Mulholland Drive, the feedback that Lynch got was mostly within the industry, as rejected by ABC and encouraged by Canal Plus. But the chief feedback he received was from himself, as Lynch describes his return to the film after this unintentional serialised gap as hugely productive, allowing ‘everything to be seen from a different angle’ and acknowledging that the film would not be what it was without this gap (qtd in Mittell 2013: 31). Not only did this gap forge the film’s spectacular shift into its final act, but traces of its original seriality also endure in the film’s repurposed television pilot, with dangling loose ends that were designed to launch ongoing stories now serving as uncanny surrealist non sequiturs. Lynch admits that he could not have created Mulholland Drive without this atypical production history, suggesting that seriality can endure even when forced into a stand-alone text. Another unique example of serialised film production is Boyhood (Linklater 2014), shot in regular instalments between 2002 and 2013. Richard Linklater designed his film to pass through twelve years of production time (and thus story time) in under three hours of screen time, requiring lengthy gaps in the production process while maintaining clear continuity in the story. While the plot was roughly mapped out in advance, the gaps and passage of time were hugely productive, both in refining storylines and allowing the young characters to literally develop. Linklater and the cast suggest how fluid the production process was, where the actors’ ageing and life experiences became integral to both the story’s development and the film’s approach to storytelling. Through this atypical approach to serialised production, one of the film’s truly remarkable effects is how it simultaneously represents the long gaps in production on-screen through the ageing actors, and elides those gaps in a seamless flow of time moving forward. Boyhood as a finished film is a fluid work of narrative continuity, but it emerges out of vital temporal gaps in its production that serially constitute the final product. Boyhood and Mulholland Drive are exceptional films, both in their unique and highly acclaimed final forms, and in their unconventional production practices that were essential to achieve their storytelling innovations.4 But more modest gaps within a film’s production are much more commonplace, leading to interesting moments of reconsideration and revision within a wide range of films. Sometimes these gaps are intended from the outset – Ida’s writer/director Paweł Pawlikowski recounts how he wanted to halt filming for a few weeks to edit footage and ‘rewrite the film that’s emerging’ before returning to production, but his financiers refused; it was only because of a historic snowstorm shutting down production that Pawilkowski was able to get his intended gap and reimagine the film in process (Pawlikowski 2014). Most production gaps are more unintended and acrimonious, as with Superman II (Lester and Donner 1980): most of the footage was shot simultaneously with Superman in 1977 by director Richard Donner, with the intent of releasing the two films back-to-back. However, shooting stopped on the sequel to focus on editing the first film for release in 1978, and Donner was fired from Superman II, with Richard Lester taking over to reshoot much of the final film. The result is somewhat haphazard and disjointed, and quite different in tone than Donner’s original plan, but the film is well regarded by most critics and viewers. In both instances, the gaps within the filming process allowed the filmmakers to reconceive the film they were making – or in the case of Superman

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II, who was making it – and allow the feedback within the creative team to reshape the final films. The most common type of productive gap in the filmmaking process is the reshot ending in reaction to test screenings or studio interference; typically this leads to transforming a downbeat conclusion into a happier ending, as in Suspicion, Little Shop of Horrors, Fatal Attraction, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, among many others. Whether these reshoots and revisions are regarded as productive improvements for the final film, or commercially-driven watering down of creative intentions, it is clear that this feedback process during a gap in the filmmaking process is a vital facet of many stand-alone films. And in some cases, such reshot revisions are essential to creating a cinematic classic: Woody Allen’s landmark 1977 film Annie Hall was originally written, shot, and edited as a 140-minute stream-of-consciousness surrealist midlife crisis, with a core murder mystery plot, called Anhedonia. Allen, his co-writer Marshall Brickman, and editor Ralph Rosenblum watched that unwieldy rough cut and reimagined the story as a romantic comedy focused on the relationship between protagonist Alvy Singer and Annie Hall, who was a secondary character in the original version. Allen reflects on the film’s transformation as they re-edited and reshot footage: The whole concept of the picture changed as we were cutting it. It was originally a picture about me, exclusively, not about a relationship. It was about me, my life, my thoughts, my ideas, my background, and the relationship was one major part of it. But sometimes it’s hard to foresee at the outset what’s going to be the most interesting drift. The guesses we started out with, many of them were wrong. But we wound up with the right guesses. (Qtd in Rosenblum and Karen 1986: 283) This revision process, enabled by the gap in production and feedback among the team and some test audiences, was to essential to create a film that turned out to be one of the most acclaimed and admired comedies in cinematic history. Many films are shaped by such production gaps, where time to reflect, retool, and reimagine – for better or for worse – are enabled by an embedded seriality that will eventually be invisible to viewers, but was hugely important to creating the film that we see. Are such films ‘serials’? Not really, but they are forged by seriality, where operational continuity in the production process is punctured by gaps that enable feedback and new creative practices. To grapple with the full importance of seriality as a cultural practice, it is crucial to explore how such embedded operational seriality matters in such cases, and how gaps in production can become productive – our understanding of a large number of films can be deepened by recognising the way that such a pseudo-seriality informs the processes of their production. Another serialised practice that has become central to many media is the proliferation of paratexts, as both the industry and consumers fill the gaps with extra material to extend narrative engagement across media. For films, such paratextual sprawl is often used to extend a narrative series, as in Star Wars, James Bond, Lord of the Rings, or any other franchise layered with toys, games, novelisations, and tie-in properties. But paratexts can become serialised for an otherwise self-contained film as well. Take Blade Runner (Scott 1982): given its infamous history of competing edits between the film studio and director Ridley Scott, seven different ‘official’ versions of the film have been released in some format, along with numerous other official and unofficial

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paratexts exploring the film and its volatile versioning (Bukatman 2012). Although the last edit was called ‘The Final Cut’, finality is still being fought over among producers, who often seek to further monetise a ‘completed’ film through new versioning, as well as fans, who stake a claim in such debates via paratextual fan edits that offer their own takes on the film’s storytelling. Such cascading paratexts suggest a serialised feedback loop of production and consumption, turning a seemingly finished film into an ongoing conversation. Thus, Blade Runner functions as a film that is no longer being made, but is still being serially produced through paratexts. Conceiving of such versioning as seriality pushes against the centrality of narrative continuity in our dominant notion of serial storytelling, as clearly the various iterations of Blade Runner are notable for their discontinuities and differences – it would be hard to imagine watching multiple versions of the film as instalments in the continuing story of Rick Deckard. Instead, the continuity is in the operational realm, as we trace the ongoing story of the film’s making and remaking. This operational approach expands the scope of seriality to include remakes and adaptations that aim to tell the same story again and again, as productively explored in case studies on The Wizard of Oz, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (Loock and Verevis 2012). Likewise, paratexts that seem primarily non-narrative can be regarded as a key dimension in the operational continuity of a film series – the proliferation of Star Wars toys both shaped the franchise’s narrative, by making Boba Fett into a popular character, and became part of the behind-the-scenes story debated by fans, as with the gendered marginalisation of Rey toys for the release of The Force Awakens (Gray 2010). Considering such operational continuities helps frame seriality ‘as an evolutionary process rather than a narrative device’, in the words of Frank Kelleter (2012: 37), allowing us to regard a variety of paratextual elements, multiple versions, and remakes all as instalments of the ongoing serial life of a text. Serialised tendencies frequently emerge in reception contexts, even for non-serialised films. For instance, critics, fans, and viewers frequently return to finished older films to recontextualise and reframe them, serially reiterating their interpretations and evaluations. One trend that has escalated in the traffic-driven world of Web journalism is the retrospective think piece on a film’s anniversary – for instance, the thirtieth anniversary of The Breakfast Club in 2015 prompted dozens of critical reflections and reconsiderations of the film, aiming to revisit the text in the light of this thirty-year gap. Such retrospection is a mode of operational serial engagement, where the text is a stable object, but the gap in reception changes our understanding and interpretation of it via reiterated critical reflections – and the film itself becomes a way to understand that temporal gap. Even more playfully in terms of temporality, 2015 also marked the thirtieth anniversary of Back to the Future, which prompted both retrospection on the original film and comparative examination of Back to the Future II’s vision of 2015 via its time-travel plot. While none of these films were remade or rebooted in 2015, the commentary among fans and critics served as a paratextual re-envisioning process where the original films were retrospectively versioned as part of a broader serial impulse. Another way that viewer and critic conversations mimic rhythmic serialised practices concerns the formation and iterative reformation of authorial canons. Critics and viewers treat the output of any given filmmaker as the terrain for ranking and debating, turning a set of individual films into a series. Such assessments get revisited and revised whenever a new entry is released, making the conversation feel like an

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ongoing serialised process. Thus, the release of a new film by established filmmakers such as Wes Anderson or the Coen Brothers prompts a spate of articles aiming to rank their films and situate the newest entry into their fluid canon. Likewise, new entries in a director’s filmography will trigger similar practices of repetition and revision in criticism as practised by both journalists and academics, serially remaking auteurist arguments in light of new instalments. The serialised element here is charting the operational continuity across many films – not by positing narrative unity, but rather connecting the threads across films where each new film by a director implies a contribution to a larger whole of their oeuvre. Of course, some viewers do posit narrative continuities as a key serialised aspect of a given filmmaker’s work. This follows practices of forensic fandom, where viewers strive to create theories and investigate connections that may be less than apparent in the text itself. Such theorisation works well in serialised television, where each week’s new instalment adds clues and information to piece together into theories and analyses during the gaps between episodes. Similar forensic practices fill the gaps between instalments of a serialised film franchise like Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where narrative continuity reigns, but some fans extend such practices to examples without such clear narrative continuity. The so-called Pixar Theory is one prominent case – fans have developed an analysis of every Pixar film, claiming that they all take place in the same consistent storyworld, with events and characters in one film carrying over into others.5 Similar ‘shared universe theories’ have been developed to posit narrative continuity among the works of directors and producers including Tim Burton, Joss Whedon, J. J. Abrams, Disney animation, Quentin Tarantino – the latter of which has been confirmed as intentional by Tarantino. Forensic fans extend such quests for narrative continuity across franchises and directors as well, for instance making claims of a shared narrative universe between Star Wars, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, and the ‘Indiana Jones’ films, or arguing that Sean Connery’s character in The Rock is actually James Bond who has been imprisoned for espionage – and perhaps the most ludicrous but fascinating example, the theory that the child-friendly Home Alone movies are actually the origin story for the serial killer Jigsaw in the Saw horror franchise (Concepcion 2014). Judging the coherence of such ‘shared universe’ theories is beside the point; it is more important to consider their implications for understanding seriality. The popularity of such theorisation highlights how important continuity can be for viewers, sufficient to inspire tremendous efforts to document and argue for such continuous frameworks where they might at first seem absent. Seriality taps into something that seems highly compelling to many viewers: a sense of continuity (whether narrative or operational), punctuated by gaps to be filled by participation, conversation, analysis, and paratextual production and consumption. Viewers striving for such continuities are inspired to create their own links and connections, partaking in the serial impulse whether encouraged by the text or not. Thus, we should view seriality as a practice and an impulse that transcends narrative design and even storytelling itself, emerging as a significant factor in many unlikely instances across media. To conclude, I contend we need to refocus our understanding of seriality to be both more attuned to the importance of gaps, and more open to various forms of continuity beyond the accumulation of narrative events. An obvious pushback against this shifting definition is that it might expand the boundaries of the serial to the point of absurdity,

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encompassing anything that might be consumed multiple times, prompt cultural conversations, or become fodder for fan theories and remixes. In short, does my approach ultimately suggest that everything is a serial? Let me offer two brief responses. First, I believe that nothing is a serial per se. In fact, I argue we should avoid the use of serial as a noun altogether – since many instances of texts that we typically think of as serials get finished, bound, and stabilised in ways that are distinctly non-serialised, the noun form is inadequate to capture these fluid dimensions of shifting textuality. As mentioned earlier, The Shield might have been serialised once, but like Great Expectations and ‘Harry Potter’, such texts no longer function as serials. However, they are all worth considering as products of seriality, a crucial difference that is hopefully clear via this approach. So calling something ‘a serial’ is a temporary and shifting designation that I would rather avoid. Second, and more importantly, I do believe that seriality is a dominant mode of cultural practice that has been inadequately studied and theorised. Thus, I encourage us to consider seriality writ large beyond what we more narrowly look for with serialised narrative, highlighting multiple forms of continuities and various structures of gaps. So while not everything is a serial, I do believe that everything might well be serialised, if we examine its cultural production, reception, and circulation. I hope that by adopting this broader notion of operational seriality, we can draw productive connections across forms, media, contexts, and disciplines, and prompt an ongoing conversation.

Notes 1. For examples of anthologies, see Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin (2009); Allen and van den Berg (2014); Kelleter (2017); for monographs, see Kelleter (2014); Mittell (2015); Higgins (2016). Among the many prominent conferences focused on seriality over the past decade are the Serial Forms Conference (University of Zurich, 2009), Thinking Serially (CUNY, 2015), Popular Seriality International Conference (University of Göttingen, 2013), and Seriality, Seriality, Seriality (Freie Universität, Berlin, 2016), with the latter two sponsored by the six-year Germany-based international Popular Seriality Research Unit, which the author was affiliated with. 2. See (last accessed 1 November 2017). 3. Like novels in a longer series such as ‘Harry Potter’, the gaps between seasons of a full-drop series constitute the seriality of programmes such as House of Cards; these long gaps between full-dropped seasons are quite distinct from the rhythms and experiences of weekly serialised programmes. 4. In a 2016 BBC critics’ poll of the best films of the twenty-first century, Mulholland Drive was ranked no. 1, and Boyhood was ranked no. 5. See (last accessed 2 November 2017). 5. See (last accessed 2 November 2017).

Works Cited Allen, Rob and Thijs van den Berg (eds) (2014), Serialization in Popular Culture, New York: Routledge. Annie Hall, film, directed by Woody Allen. USA: MGM, 1977. Blade Runner, film, directed by Ridley Scott. USA: Warner Bros., 1982. Boyhood, film, directed by Richard Linklater. USA: IFC Films, 2014.

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Bukatman, Scott (2012), Blade Runner, 2nd edn, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Concepcion, Jason (2014), ‘Did Kevin from ‘Home Alone’ grow up to be Jigsaw? A deadly serious investigation’, Grantland, 4 December, (last accessed 1 November 2017). Cuddon, J. A. and M. A. R. Habib (eds) (2013), Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 5th edn, Malden, MA: Wiley. Gray, Jonathan (2010), Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, New York: New York University Press. Harrigan, Pat and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds) (2009), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hayward, Jennifer (1997), Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Higgins, Scott (2016), Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Ida, film, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski. Poland: Music Box Films, 2013. Jones, Sara Gwenllian (2010), ‘Serial form’, in David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London: Routledge, p. 527. Kelleter, Frank (2012), ‘“Toto, I think we’re in Oz again” (and again and again): Remakes and popular seriality’, in Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis (eds), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions: Remake/Remodel, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 19–44. — (2014), Serial Agencies: The Wire and Its Readers, Winchester: Zero Books. — (ed.) (2017), Media of Serial Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Law & Order SVU, TV series, created by Dick Wolf. USA: NBC, 1999–present. Loock, Kathleen and Constantine Verevis (eds) (2012), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions: Remake/Remodel, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mittell, Jason (2006), ‘Narrative complexity in contemporary American television’, The Velvet Light Trap, 58, 29–40. — (2013), ‘Haunted by seriality: The formal uncanny of Mulholland Drive’, Cinephile, 9: 1, 27–32. — (2015), Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, New York: New York University Press. Mulholland Drive, film, directed by David Lynch. France and USA: Canal +, 2001. O’Sullivan, Sean (2010), ‘Broken on purpose: Poetry, serial television, and the season’, StoryWorlds, 2, 59–77. Pawlikowski, Paweł (2014), ‘How we made Ida: Paweł Pawlikowski on the journey from script to film’, The Guardian, 21 November, (last accessed 1 November 2017). Rosenblum, Ralph and Robert Karen (1986), When the Shooting Stops . . . The Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story, New York: Da Capo Press. Superman II, film, directed by Richard Lester [and Richard Donner]. UK: Warner Bros., 1980. Warhol, Robyn (2014), ‘Binge watching: How Netflix original programs are changing serial form’, Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 47, 145–58.

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17 Closer Than They Seem: Graphic Narrative and the Senses Katalin Orbán

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n Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, there is a scene staging the frustrations of a visual bias, the resistance of objects to pure vision relieved of other bodily senses. The shop Alice enters on ocularcentric terms, with the eye as the primary sense organ, seemed to be full of all manner of curious things – but the oddest part of it all was, that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty: though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold. (Carroll [1872] 2007: 103) It is the centrality of sight that misses the precise nature and position of the target: the large, bright, shape-shifting object is always elsewhere, ungraspable, pursued in vain as long as grasping is a mere metaphor for sight. Such an ocularcentric focus on the visual storytelling of graphic narrative tends to abstract it to textual and visual representation, bracketing the material object as well as the embodied practices of its production and reading. There have been recent attempts at refocusing attention on the tactile dimensions and extended sensory field of graphic narrative (Gardner 2011; Hague 2014; Thon and Wilde 2016) as part of broader efforts to rematerialise cultural practices dominated by analytic models of detached observation and visual modes of consumption (Obrador 2012: 49–50). Graphic narrative as a medium and the practice of reading are equally subject to such efforts to ‘reveal the underlying haptic (tactile, proprioceptive, kinaesthetic) aspects of spatial experience and reinscribe them’ into a cultural history from which a visual bias has effectively erased them (Paterson 2007: 59). The narrative implication of this rematerialisation is a potentially new awareness of how narrative and sensory orders are intertwined in graphic narrative thanks to its capacity for combining alternative orders, paces, scales, and stimulated and simulated sensations. Haptic visuality in graphic narrative is not limited to touching, but rather all the features of the medium that invite and sustain a ‘near view’ [Nahsicht] of its surface, in the sense defined by Aloïs Riegl as a tactile view from a proximity at which it is no longer idealised into the abstract two-dimensional flat plane (Riegl [1966] 2004: 187). The key potential for this haptic ‘near view’ is the interplay between the trace of the handmade and the diffuse, proximate, exploratory modes of looking fostered by the dynamic of the panels and the (double) page in a multilinear structure. As I have argued elsewhere, the broad media historical context for this haptic visuality

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of graphic narrative and its increasing cultural prominence is the now prolonged coexistence of print and digital textuality within which multimodal graphic narrative brings together modes of hyperattention promoted by electronic textuality and a reliance on less volatile material forms (Orbán 2014). Although this haptic potential plays out differently in print and in digital comics (especially as formats and haptic technologies of feedback and manipulation evolve), both are remediations of predigital graphic narrative. The transitory openness of this media historical position is captured well in Art Spiegelman’s equivocation: ‘I don’t know if we’re the vanguard of another culture or the last blacksmiths’ (Kuhlman and Ball 2010: x). Both, at least for the time being. In the following, I will examine how the suspension or alteration of the sequential flow of time can heighten this more general haptic visuality and strengthen the emphasis on the material and embodied aspects of visual storytelling in graphic narrative. What impedes the unfolding of the plot seems to impede the unremarkable disregard of the material embodiment of textual and visual representation. The two cases discussed, which push the graphic medium to its limits, present two distinct versions of this alteration of the flow of sequential time – the elusive incremental everydayness of American middle-class life and the violent suspension of temporal progression by war. The works counterpoint each other in many respects: in their canonical status, cultural and geopolitical positions, and medial contexts. Building Stories by Chris Ware (2012) is a celebrated work of a major canonical American author of the medium, a monocultural work of fiction in English that explores the limits of the medium from within. Beyrouth, juillet-août 2006 by Lebanese comics artist and musician Mazen Kerbaj (2007) is a multilingual nonfiction comics journal that addresses a multilingual and multicultural global audience and inherently traverses visual and sound-based media as well as the analogue–digital divide. Yet, they share an interest in how altered temporalities – whether under the sign of depression (slowness) or terror (blockage and interruption) or both – foreground the multisensory potential of graphic narrative as a material object.

The Everyday in a Box Building Stories by Chris Ware is a boxed collection of fourteen paper and cardboard objects, predominantly in recognisable print publication formats such as broadsheets, hardcover books, pamphlets, and posters. As announced in the title, the work sets up a parallel between narrative (stories) and architectural/material constructs (building, stories), and the progressive verb form promises an emphasis on their processual quality, an openness to ‘intuitive bricolage’ (Samson 2010: 30). It takes extreme measures to shift the abstracted visual reception of the comics format to an engagement with three-dimensional material objects collected in a three-dimensional container rather than flattened to a plane. This two-level structure puts the work at the borderline of the medium: the individual volumes conform to the basic panel–page relationships, but the fourteen-item collection in its entirety abandons the logic of the page as a stable, if multilinear arrangement of panels. Through the attempt to ‘get at that nonbeginning/non-end of every story that we have within our minds’ (Larimer 2012), the set also effectively abandons the complex spatial arrangement of constituent parts that is key to graphic narrative. In other words, if the expansion of the panel into the

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autonomous object of each volume extends the box into a metacomic or supracomic, where the gutters across which readers must reconstruct the time of narrative action on a page are repeated as the gaps between the self-standing artefacts as ‘superpanels’ of the box, the complex, dynamic yet stable spatial order of the page is loosened into the bare minimum of association in the box. The unpaginated, unnumbered, and frequently untitled components are interrelated stories of mostly unnamed characters. A hierarchical and ordered reconstruction of the fragments yields a coherent, if lacunar story of an unnamed female protagonist who lives, at one stage of her life, on the top floor of a Chicago brownstone, and stories of minor characters – human (such as the downstairs neighbours, friends, boyfriends, teachers), animal (Branford, the Bee), and inanimate (household objects, toys, buildings) – are both integrated into hers and get their separate volumes. Although time usually does not flow either within the episodes (it stands) or between them (it breaks), there are contiguities, intersections, and metaleptic relations between the components; for example, a book within one story materialises as an object of our reading, and the box itself is revealed to be a text dreamed by the protagonist. Haptic visuality is not limited to the actual tactile handling of the boxed objects in their serial or recursive exploration, but also extends to the exploratory approach to pages in individual volumes. The multiple open associative possibilities of this intricate structure both at the level of the box and at the level of volumes are reflected in pages that complicate sequentiality in a multilinear order and guided – even elaborately guided – sequences. The more diagrammatic and complex such groups of panels are, the more they fold out into spatial or textural patterns, where the panel-level focus with its clear line style, isometric representation of space, and homogeneity of colouring alternates with and often transforms into a rhythmic, textural quality on the multipanel or page level. One of the four-page broadsheets, for example, includes two pages of conventionally arranged panel sequences with conventional captions and speech bubbles, one of which recounts the illness and subsequent death of the protagonist’s father (4 by 5 panels) and the other covers events before and after her last visit in three similarly arranged shorter segments (4 by 3, 3 by 2, 2 by 3). These sequences of conventional comics narration employ no unusually small or large words as spatial typographic objects to remove narrative details from a sequential logic, or what Bukatman calls its ‘linear momentum’. As he observes in reference to another work by Ware, the ‘emphasis on text as a pictorial form arrests the gaze and transfers language from the plane of transparent narration to a constituent element of a world that demands, above all, to be read’ (Bukatman 2016: 155). These outside pages envelop a double-page spread containing an intricate layout of numerous panels of wideranging sizes arranged around an enormous central floating image of an infant with closed eyes. Groups of panels with their own rhythmic arrangement of size and colour form a non-hierarchical landscape thematically tied to the exterior through the child – the child desired by the protagonist, herself as a child at the time of her accident, and an adult child of her dying and grieving parents. The organic arrangement of this enclosure – literally the underside of the sequential exterior pages – is centred on the exposure of skin, the non-use of the eyes, and can only be explored by alternating between distant and proximate looking. Each object in the box fosters such interplay between optical and haptic visuality in a unique way depending on its size, shape, and content, and their focal points are not necessarily central, established in diverse ways by the relative size

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and relationship of objects, and often prominent typography. Ware explains that the process of production is, in fact, governed by unforeseen associations, accidents, and the material characteristics of the given format as much as a predetermined, scripted sequential logic. ‘I just start at the upper left-hand corner or the center of the page and see what happens’, he explains (Larimer 2012), where ‘happening’ is not theoretical possibility, but the contingencies of praxis, including accidents of material production such as a drawn line forming in a particular way, the qualities of the space at hand, as well as inspiration – like Töppfer’s notion of possible stories emerging from a drawing through improvisation that he finds appealing (Peeters 2010: 48). Ware himself identifies this as a strangely tactile illumination of mental processes – ‘Organically produced comic strips illuminate [the mind’s] structures in a strange and very tangible way’ (Larimer 2012) – hopefully mirrored by the reading process. The segments that slow sequential time with a numbing, yet mesmerising immersion in everydayness are exceptional even within this mode of tangible illumination, heightening the sense of haptic visuality to an extreme as the sequential logic of narrative progression diminishes. Such scenes involve the reader in a present that is microscopically, proximately experienced with limited opportunity to structure it and to condense it into significant actions or details. ‘Moment-to-moment transitions are indulged to an almost parodic degree . . . Stasis becomes an existential condition; time seems to expand infinitely, as does the time it takes for every incident to unfold’ (Bukatman 2016: 155). This is the habitual, semi-conscious everyday as a blindspot of consciousness – once everydayness is subjected to reflection, registered and accounted for, it has been transported out of its ordinariness into noteworthy specificity. The time an incident takes ‘to unfold’ is an external measure drawn from and applied to a delimited incident. Habit, however, ‘describes not simply an action but an attitude: habits are often carried out in a semiautomatic, distracted, or involuntary manner. Certain forms of behavior are inscribed upon the body, part of a deeply ingrained somatic memory’ (Felski 1999: 25). One of the most illuminating examples in this respect is a page recounting micro-events and non-events of an hour (2–3 a.m.) spent by a security guard, which appears in the hardcover volume reminiscent of Little Golden Books. With nearly each chapter accounting for a single hour of a day, the entire volume seems to emphasise standardised time as the framework of routine, the clockwork of modernity, and the clock is visible eleven times in the 2 a.m. chapter. Yet, the security guard’s hour offers a more complex sense of routine. It includes habitual actions such as buying a soft drink and later a candy bar from a vending machine and taking out the trash, listening to water dripping from a leak into a bucket, but also watching a security camera feed on a screen, and waiting (the latter two also performed extradiegetically by the readers). This boring routine of alertness, straddling the boundaries of attention and inattention, models the way everyday micro-events enveloped in the inattention of routine are transformed into incidents by the attention manifested in the mere fact of the image (showing, seeing). The significance conferred on them by being shown and seen similarly hovers at the borders of the diegetic world. The work takes the greatest risk in this respect with the diegetic ordinariness of the disabled body (Fink Berman 2010) – the protagonist is an amputee as a result of a childhood accident – and the attention it receives in reading. It has been asserted at times that disability functions as a problematic dramatic device, demanding an explanatory narrative, and that its origin functions as the Event in a sea of numbing

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non-events, compensating for boredom (Comer 2016; Schneider 2016). It actually receives no more attention than other ordinary practicalities and emotional concerns and is routinely included in groups of panels that create an immersive present through the increasingly meaningless slicing of actions. The absence of dialogue and narration and the use of occasional repetitious sound effects (‘FF FF’; ‘TAK TAK’) often aid this by helping eliminate a key guide to pace. This hum of everydayness that returns regularly between more traditionally plot-driven segments relies on a non-hierarchical presentation – no detail is insignificant – that shifts the otherwise meaningful spatial relationships of the comics (especially the way panels and gutters signify temporal progression) towards browsable patterns, a search for significance through proximate, haptic exploration not unlike the security guard’s extreme close-up view of a detail of a girl’s yellow bikini bottom in an office wall calendar (panel 32) which dissolves the potential meaning of a colour correspondence between a ‘For Sale’ sign, the woman in the ad, and the bucket placed under the leak (an identical shade of yellow) into an enigmatic landscape of colour or flesh. Of course, these extended segments are haptic only in the immersive proximate view which is eventually always taken away – the narrative recontextualises such everyday presents relative to other times, and the associative connections that link events both moments and generations apart rely on the general multilinear potentiality of graphic narrative to model memory and its failures both on the human scale of characters and on the transhuman scale of sentient buildings. Ware aims at such eventual withdrawal from the immersive present when readers ‘experience something as if it were happening right in front of them, but then discover later that the story actually happened in the character’s distant past’, for example (Larimer 2012). It misses the point of these scenes of radical ordinariness, however, to presume their eventual pastness and take the fully external point of view from which they constitute ‘lost memories’: the ‘sedimented record of all those everyday banalities that must go forgotten if we are to continue going about our lives’ is a self-conscious reconstruction of the everyday from the vantage point of selective, hierarchical meaning that allows a numerical compression of the temporal dimension of experience (‘11,627 lost childhood memories’), which has already missed its ordinariness.1 In a short appreciation of Richard McGuire’s thirty-six-panel comic Here, Ware writes that A fundamental technical oddity of comics is that ‘space’ is sliced up into paper-thin views of experience, visually spread out in rows, tiers, or whatever compositional arrangement most clearly indicates linearity, and then life breathed back into it all by the peculiar (and rather complicated) act of reading. (Ware 2014) In the case of the increasingly indiscriminate and potentially meaningless slicing of actions, this animating of components and characters is encouraged by the habits of comics reading, yet moved out of the sphere of routine, engaging an exceptional kind of attention: ‘In practice readers will seldom linger over such questions about the temporal dimensions of individual panels. . . . Only exceptionally will the temporal flexibility, or multitemporality, of an individual panel demand the reader’s explicit attention’ (Lefèvre 2011: 28). This is not simply more work – a cultivation of modernist difficulty (Ball 2010), seriousness and ‘intense readerly labor’ (Cates 2010: 90) – but an orientation

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towards the eventfulness of the embodied reading process (Schneider 2013: 347), an engagement with the senses and their limitations, which shifts the emphasis from representational readings to an ‘interpretative emphasis on emotive states and embodied practices’ (Paterson et al. 2016: 7). The attention to the diegetic sensory field – to minor, mundane sounds, textures of materials, small details of the sensorium – is extended to the manipulation of the print objects, their varying modes of arresting attention and varying positions of focal elements, differences in size, folding, the limited transfer of reading methods from one to another. This special alliance of deceleration and haptic visuality operates relative to expectations of pace not only within its own medium, but also in other media. Besides the ‘seeming immediacy of an individualised cutaneous touch’ involved in manipulating the volumes of the work (Paterson et al. 2016: 7), the box and its contents invoke a rich, mature print culture with highly specialised, articulated formats, which do not have to be known or remembered individually to activate sense memories, with their different types of folding and unfolding, turning and flipping pages, feeling hard and soft pages and covers. The expectations of speed that produce the experience of slowness are informed by its intermedial relationships and alternatives, the evolving media ecological context of the work. Print is not a pure alternative to new media with which it exists in a relationship of mutual remediation. Diagrams and arrows quoting ‘digital linking icons’ (Banita 2010: 183) are actually remediated from dynamic replacement to static spatialisation. The reading process of the elaborate diagrammatic text is, however, closer to the practice of browsing, where zooming in on particular, otherwise illegible details pushes others beyond simultaneous access. The relationship cannot be reduced to either nostalgia or critique, as the work partakes both in a valorised slowness with a capacity for reflection that can always sink into depressive stasis, and in the technologies of dynamic interconnectivity that ironically attenuate and block human connections (as in the volume Disconnect2) yet also prepare one for reading the extremely intricate multilinear connections of the work.

War Notes for Screen, Paper, and Trumpet Instead of an intricate fictional machinery for impeding the flow of sequential time in graphic narrative, it is the brutal, nonfictional reality of war and violence that alters it in Beyrouth, juillet-août 2006, Mazen Kerbaj’s diary of the month-long Israel–Hezbollah conflict. In this short war Israeli forces retaliated against Hezbollah attacks, the abduction of soldiers, and the demand for an exchange of prisoners with airstrikes and artillery fire on both Hezbollah and civilian targets in Lebanon, which left enormous damage to homes, roads, and commercial structures and left over 1,000 dead. This diary, as originally published in the artist’s personal blog, was not an isolated work, but part of an ‘explosion of testimony’ and ‘blogging activity’ (El Maïzi 2016: 200; Wilson-Goldie 2007: 70) in text, images, and video intended to bring international attention to the attacks and their consequences in Lebanon and to summon the audience to secondary witnessing. In this spirit, Kerbaj temporarily removed all copyright restrictions from the artwork included in the blog for the duration of the war and encouraged their duplication and broadest possible circulation in any form. The backbone of the diary is a series of original single-page comics artwork drawn in notebooks the author carried everywhere during the war – first a smaller one he had at hand for the nine pages of the first day, then a slightly larger format

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throughout the process – and reproduced in both publications. The book Beyrouth, juilletaoût 2006 was published in 2007 as volume 20 of the Côtelette series of L’Association, launched in 2002 as a distinctly literary series in the ‘resolutely “book” format’ of 14 x 19 centimetres to suit works of wide-ranging length requiring this smaller size and offering great latitude in image–text relations.3 This edition came out in a rush only five months after the original production and blog publication of its content between 13 July and 26 August 2006. Despite its emphatic bookness and heavy paper, the print edition preserves numerous characteristics of the electronic publication, while it transforms and abandons others. Like the blog, the book privileges the date as an organising principle, for example, and leaves the 264 pages unnumbered with the identical date header over as many as ten to twelve pages. Both versions are trilingual, alternating between English, Arabic, and French in the comics and using English (in the blog) and French translation (in the book) for text-only posts and translated comics text in captions. On the other hand, the varying rhythm of posts that fit into a screen and the heterogeneous space in which links transport the reader to photo-sharing services for full-size images give way to the regularity of double-page units in a uniform, self-contained format. The book also establishes a decidedly more monolingual, left-to-right layout unlike the blog, where the reverse chronology allowed the author to maintain an emphasis on vertical orientation both in the series and in individual drawings in order to be able to freely switch between Arabic, English, and French script directions. In other words, he opens his notepad from the top rather than from left or right for this reason, a practice also echoed in his technique of drawing with both hands. A further important extension of this already complex international multilingual mediascape is related to the fact that Kerbaj, born in 1975 in Beirut, is both a comics artist, originally trained in graphic arts and advertising at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, and a largely self-taught player of the (prepared) trumpet and a recognised experimental and free improvised music performer. A key accompanying text of the diary is the 6:30 minute long piece of music improvisation ‘Starry Night’ (Kerbaj 2006a), referenced in the 16 July entry (uploaded three days later): a trumpet improvisation ‘vs’ the sound of bombardment recorded on the artist’s balcony. This corresponds to the importance of sound in the sensorium of this war experience that puts – quite significantly for our purposes – the visual medium of graphic narrative under pressure from the very first shock of attacks. How does Riegl’s ‘near view’ of the image gain dominance in graphic narrative as the diary’s unique temporality meets the sensorium of massive air attacks? There is a combination of temporal, sensory, and representational factors that combine to trouble the optical distant view (Fernsicht) and the organisation of figurative space centred on the eye. The temporal order of the war diary is rooted in an extremely limited present. Despite the applicability of the autobiographical pact to this diary as nonfiction (El Maïzi 2006: 202), it is important to recall Philip Lejeune’s distinction between the temporalities of autobiography and the diary. The temporal order of autobiography hinges on the problem of beginning, as the beginning of writing and the life formed within it both require commentary and interpretation, while the destination is a given. The diary, however, is written toward the openness of an uncertain tomorrow, which makes the end far from evident (Lejeune 2009: 188). The focus of the diary’s temporality – determined by chronological order, repetition, and the limitations of

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its retrospective structuring – is the present as a past-to-be open toward the future. Unlike other diaries and even other chronologically and thematically delimited partial diaries ‘devoted to a single phase and organized around a particular area of experience’ like pregnancy or travel diaries (Lejeune 2009: 189), a war diary is special in that its uncertain tomorrow is not an open field of possibility, but a threat of violent interruption. The present of the war diary that opens towards a severely imperilled future is therefore a radically contracted, restricted present. Thus, instead of the deceleration into the minutiae of the everyday that limits temporal flow through pace, this is a case of interruption, extremely short-term prospects, a looming threat of discontinuity, the ever-present danger of no continuation in the conditions of uncertainty, and day-to-day survival. These conditions, which involve the frequent interruption of services, mobility, and the flow of information in Kerbaj’s war diary, also constitute the danger of narrative interruption and annihilation, where entries are suspended and each entry may be the last (‘one bad trick with this blog is that i receive tons of messages when i do not update it for a while. people must think i died or something. nothing like that can happen’ (2006b: 18 July)). The war diary is confined to this contracted living present of limited knowledge, and its delay in recording the events integrates the unpredictable rhythms of the war, the dangers and interruptions structuring the times of recording and publishing (‘it’s 3:30 am. there is no electricity. i cannot upload yesterday’s and today’s drawings’ (17 August)). Interestingly, this temporal structure is largely preserved in the self-contained pages of the book, even though once the entries are collected and printed, this sense of constricted present and acute danger is no longer a reality of access shared by the blog reader waiting for new posts and wondering if the diarist is alive. Despite the new, left-to-right arrangement of the book, each selfcontained one-page tableau is tied more firmly to the day it happened than to its neighbours, and the alternating languages of the comics pages keep shifting the dominant direction of internal organisation between the pages. Time is short, the time of electricity even shorter, so the drawings are often sketches that capture the moment – in private or public events of the day (‘real news from Beirut’), consciousness (‘real news from my brain’), or visual inventories of objects and people. Instead of the sequential flow of time, there is containment and pressure, which the drawings capture in two very different ways. The state of acting under such time pressure is recorded in the wild, frantic mental notes of procedure to accomplish everything in five minutes in ‘Electricity cut!’ (2 August), represented in a dense maze of thin pen lines of edited, repeatedly amended to-do-lists and loosely hatched areas of darkness. Read in the order of numbered tasks and arrows, this is a race against the clock through ‘Stay calm stay calm you have time’ to the inevitable ‘NO! Later’. This is buried, however, in a tense, agitated field of hatching, intersecting lines, circles that record stress and anxiety primarily in a texture. The almost illegible scribbling of details and the contours of objects like the candle or computer dissolve their meaning in the affective surface. The eerily calm counterparts to these wild textures are the inventories that attest to the constriction of time by completely replacing the unfolding processes of life with object arrangements, the evidence of such life ‘in a bag’ (Figure 17.1). These arrangements also tend to be measures of the time available for buying or retrieving necessities, as in the inventory of essential items carried every time Kerbaj leaves the apartment,

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Figure 17.1 20 July 2006 (drawn 18 July) © 2007, Mazen Kerbaj & L’Association.

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half of which serve observation, documentation, and dissemination (binoculars, camera, sound recorder, notebook and pens, pen drive, and batteries). Their eeriness is partly due to the fact that the prospective shopping list or the contents of the emergency bag are also potentially the retrospective personal belongings of the injured or deceased – still life and nature morte. There is also a different evidence of life in the near view of the image, however: the personality and small inconsistencies of the line in the organic, protozoalike balloons and their touching and interconnecting little hairy outlines that surround the simple, neutral icons (recalling a textbook, manual, or language lesson) and in the handwriting of tiny captions naming the objects. In their quiet way, they are also primarily textures and patterns, in which calligraphic shapes alternate with a rhythm of repeated objects (two passports, three pens, four batteries) in a structure that keeps dissolving between loose rows and concentric circles. The flow of sequential time that usually balances the characteristic dual dynamic of seeing graphic narrative – following paths and relating components to potential alternative paths and to the visible context of the page – is arrested; the remnants of this dynamic are increasingly moved from the level of clearly delineated panels to tenuously meaningful components of the page that need to be rediscovered each time. The very possibility of continuation beyond the day of writing is probed in a list of questions in the 29 July entry (Figure 17.2). The questions push against the barrier of closure: ‘and my life tomorrow? and after tomorrow? and after after tomorrow? and after after after tomorrow? and etc? and after etc? and after?’ The thick lines in ink are dynamic and expressive in their irregularity, vividly attesting to the drawing of the line then and there, serving as dual traces – not only of the creative work, but also of the aliveness of the diarist today. The transformation of the handwriting into an opaque visual object due to the large size that fills the entire page and the multiple repetitions of ‘and’, ‘after’, ‘tomorrow’, and ‘etc’ move the lettering towards a less directional decorative design, a tapestry of uncertainty, rivalling the script as text in the vertical and right-to-left orientation of the stacked questions. By the logic of the script, the largest question mark at the left edge of the page is a repetition of all the question marks in the list, but it also doubles as a minimalist self-portrait (the dual dots for the eyes and nostrils echoing the diacritics of the script). As a comics rendition of the diary’s hero as an anthropomorphic punctuation mark, the self-portrait also reverses the movement into a confrontation: now that it has a face, the enormous question mark literally faces the open-ended list of questions that almost crowd it out of the frame. While the meaning of the list items moves further and further from the present in its fragile and ineffectual projection of the future (‘and after etc?’), the visually present shape of the lettering dwindles, its undulating pattern ending in a small, cornered fragment of a question, unable to break through the frame. This combination of interrupted flow and a tactile near view of patterns and surfaces, which intensifies the more general haptic visuality of comics, is further assisted in some pages by the emphasis on the materiality of making the drawing – the page being a material imprint of circumstances, the location of writing, or the mental or physical state of the artist. Writing in a moving car en route to the mountains is traced in shaky letters confirming that ‘The car moves too fast to draw’ (18 July), and drawing by candlelight while cut off from electricity is captured in a page that shows the blankness of the diarist’s exhaustion (too tired to ‘fill the page background in black’) instead of the darkness of night (17 July). Numerous pages are made at the Torino

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Figure 17.2 29 July 2006 © 2007, Mazen Kerbaj & L’Association.

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Express Café – ‘I am in Torino (again & again)’ on 6 August – and several are designed around coffee spills and stains spreading on and through the pages (21 July, 2 and 14 August). The stain is evidence of on-site writing, a way for the diarist’s position here and now writing itself into the text (Figure 17.3). It is also evidence of the writing surface being a material object rather than an ideal plane – the shrinking outlines of the stain show the pages of the notebook as layers of a three-dimensional object. The stain and the spill are simultaneously images and effects of an overstimulated nervous system, the ‘daily coffee overdose’ manifesting itself in the spills and splashes of ink, but also standing for the war experience as ‘overdose’, an excess of intense sensations without adequate processing and response. The most important such sensations – sound and silence – pose a crucial medial problem for graphic narrative. In fact, the diary is formulated in the very first entry as set off by a ‘war soundscape’ central to many other immediate artistic and documentary responses to the war even in audiovisual media. ‘More than images, it seems, the sounds of bombardment best documented the experience of the July–August war in Lebanon . . . the soundscapes of the attacks were recorded in the open air – from rooftops, terraces, and balconies’ (Wilson-Goldie 2007: 74). From the very first word (‘BANG?’) and image (of aeroplanes above and falling bombs in the distance), sound and its alternation with silence are a defining experience in this graphic diary. The early entries unapologetically use the available representational repertoire of the medium to translate sound: verbal descriptions, comics sound effects with visual signals for the character and volume of sound, and visual representations replacing the absence of sound with a blank surface or the sound of shots with dotted lines of bullet trajectories. As the inadequacy of these methods and the disparity between stimulated and simulated aural sensation becomes central to the work, however, it foregrounds and denaturalises conventions of sensory order in the comics, especially their subsumption in the optical view. Two days into the diary, a drawing of an enormous, expressive cloud of smoke rising and expanding to nearly the top half of the page overshadows not only the skyline and the burning buildings from which the smoke is billowing, but also a small speech balloon asking, ‘how can I show sound in a drawing?’ (Figure 17.4). The voice, speaking from one of the undamaged buildings in the background, is disproportionately small and clearly upstaged (a precursor to the black humour and self-irony that lines many of the darkest moments, especially when they involve self-representation). More importantly, when the question how to show sound is asked in a speech balloon – one of the eminent means of ‘showing sound’ in comics – the self-questioning speech balloon fundamentally undercuts the visual transcription and translation of sound. Sound thus becomes an ongoing problematisation of the dominance of the eye in a visual medium, because we keep ‘seeing sound’ throughout the rest of the graphic diary. This sound is, in fact, captured by alternative means and presents itself as sound in the documentary improvisational composition ‘Starry Night’ (edited from a much longer, two-hour recording). The lack of visual orientation to sounds of bombardment at night and a lack of sufficient knowledge to correctly interpret the sounds heard replicate some aspects of the documented experience, while adding further disorientation through the original exchange between sounds heard and sounds made by the author/musician (both heard by the listener of the piece). The sounds are powerful, but confusing, as one tries to decipher natural and artificial components of the night soundscape, ground or air traffic passing by, animals and sirens, and the artificial

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Figure 17.3 21 July 2006 © 2007, Mazen Kerbaj & L’Association.

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Figure 17.4 16 July 2006 © 2007, Mazen Kerbaj & L’Association.

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sounds of the trumpet and the attacks crafted through the rival technologies of art and warfare, and – with the exception of the loudest bombs – the initial perception can never identify the sound immediately as one or the other. The two mimic each other (the diarist wondering ‘what kind of mouthpiece’ pilots might be using to create their bomb sounds), rise together in an angry dialogue, and subside into a lull, and only the process, the duration endows them with meaning and identity – the very duration missing from the slices of the graphic diary entries. How the digital and analogue versions of the medium handle this material illustrates two very different ways for the medium to trouble the ocularcentric focus of visual storytelling and to engage an extended sensory field: by opening its sensory field or by insisting on the material object as well as the embodied practices of its production and reading. The electronic diary opens up the graphic medium to integrate these aural shocks and reverberations, uncertainties and confusions through actual aural sensations. Though this access is achieved at great difficulty at the time because of the war-related limitations to the infrastructure, once the hours of uploading are over, the ease of linking to the sound file is no different from the linking of images throughout the diary. In this approach, the multimodality of the graphic medium can be enriched and extended, and the sound-amplified graphic diary can be externalised even further. This opening creates further possibilities for convergence with other media, less and less determined by unique narrative devices and modes of reading but rather strategic, shifting hybrid modes of consumption: for example, the graphic narrative is linked to the walk-in space of a sound installation the author created on the tenth anniversary of the war and the original recordings and exhibited in the semiintimate space of an empty apartment in another city (Berlin), possibly mutating the consumption of either. The borders of the book as a material object are, however, far more fixed and keep sound outside as a prosthetic addition: whether or not the reader listens to it, it is another medium consumed separately and according to its own rules. This sound-asprosthesis always reflects back on the visual translation of a complex sensory experience that cannot accommodate it. Therefore, the burden of seeing differently is put on the work as an object of sensation to be recovered rather than surpassed. If the printed pages can compensate for this sensory loss, it has to be by mobilising sense memories and inviting sensations internally, within the materiality of the graphic medium and in the embodied production and consumption. The most important resource for such recovery is the dormant and supposedly inessential tactility of the notepad pages as reconstituted in a new material object. This attention to haptic visuality can adjust an ocularcentric bias in reading graphic narrative, including being a proxy for other senses. The transcoding of sound into specific conventional comics devices (‘VVUUUU FSHHH’) is a transformation of representations, whereas the mobilisation of sense memories through the near sense of touch affirms a connection, however tenuous, between the total sensory situations of writing and reading. Both Building Stories and Beyrouth, juillet-août 2006 are experimental discoveries of the medium’s possibilities and limits, operating at the edges of graphic narrative and always on the verge of becoming something else – a playset, for example, or a series of drawings and sketches. In their excesses, however, they also draw attention to what remain tacit practices of making and reading in graphic narrative works that use narrative time and the senses in more conventional ways. The relations of

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the intertwined narrative and sensory order are distinctive in comics, even when the peculiar use of time does not make them so spectacular and narrative progresses at a more customary pace. The two cases also project different strategies for exploring the possibilities of the medium – evolving primarily within its print-based boundaries, rediscovering and remediating the rich history of print culture and graphic narrative within it or mutating and converging in a more open relationship with electronic and nonvisual media.

Notes 1. See Banita (2010) for a detailed analysis of slowness in Ware’s work in relation to memory and repetition rather than the everyday. 2. One of the fourteen objects included in the Building Stories box, this twenty-page pamphlet focuses on ineffective, misdirected, repressed, and delayed communication, as the protagonist’s interior monologue conveys her conflicted feelings about her marriage, raising her daughter, and the rediscovery of a previous boyfriend. Although the pamphlet opens with her denouncing mobile technologies as unhealthy nourishment and a waste of time, the rich array of configurations of physical distance, emotional connection, and modes of communication does not fall neatly into a nostalgic opposition between new technologies and a disappearing authentic closeness. 3. See (last accessed 2 November 2017). Ten years after this French volume (and after the closing of this manuscript), the book came out in English with an introduction by Joe Sacco in 2017.

Works Cited Ball, David M. (2010), ‘Comics against themselves: Chris Ware’s graphic narratives as literature’, in Paul Williams and James Lyons (eds), The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 103–23. Banita, Georgiana (2010), ‘Chris Ware and the pursuit of slowness’, in David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman (eds), The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 177–90. Bukatman, Scott (2016), Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins, Oakland: University of California Press. Carroll, Lewis [1872] (2007), Through the Looking-Glass: A Facsimile Reprint of the 1872 Edition, Rockville, MD: Wildside Press. Cates, Isaac (2010), ‘Comics and the grammar of diagrams’, in David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman (eds), The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 90–104. Comer, Todd A. (2016), ‘The hidden architecture of disability: Chris Ware’s Building Stories’, in Chris Foss, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen (eds), Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 44–58. El Maïzi, M. (2016), ‘“Real news from Beirut”: Blog BD et témoignage de guerre’, French Cultural Studies, 27: 2, 199–215. Felski, Rita (1999), ‘The invention of everyday life’, New Formations, 39, 13–31. Fink Berman, Margaret (2010), ‘Imagining an idiosyncratic belonging: Representing disability in Chris Ware’s “Building Stories”’, in David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman (eds), The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 191–205.

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Gardner, Jared (2011), ‘Storylines’, SubStance, 40: 1, 53–69. Hague, Ian (2014), Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels, New York: Routledge. Kerbaj, Mazen (2006a), Starry Night, mp3 file, (last accessed 1 October 2016). — (2006b), ‘(War’s) Kerblog: Mazen Kerbaj’s Blog. Beirut + Free Improvised Music + Comics + Bombs + Drawings’, (last accessed 1 October 2016). — (2007), Beyrouth, juillet-août 2006, Paris: L’Association. Kerbaj, Mazen, and Joe Sacco (2017), Beirut Won't Cry: Lebanon's July War: A Visual Diary, Seattle: Fantagraphics Underground. Kuhlman, Martha B. and David M. Ball (2010), ‘Introduction: Chris Ware and the “cult of difficulty”’, in David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman (eds), The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. ix–xxiii. Larimer, Kevin (2012), ‘The color and the shape of memory: An interview with Chris Ware’, Poets & Writers, November/December, (last accessed 1 October 2016). Lefèvre, Pascal (2011), ‘Some medium-specific qualities of graphic sequences’, SubStance, 40: 1, 14–33. Lejeune, Philippe (2009), On Diary, ed. Jeremy Popkin and Julie Rak, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. Obrador, Paul (2012), ‘Touching the beach’, in Mark Paterson and Martin Dodge (eds), Touching Space, Placing Touch, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 47–70. Orbán, Katalin (2014), ‘A language of scratches and stitches: The graphic novel between hyperreading and print’, Critical Inquiry, 40: 3, 169–81. Paterson, Mark (2007), The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects, and Technologies, Oxford: Berg. —, Martin Dodge, and Sara MacKian (2016), ‘Introduction: Placing touch within social theory and empirical study’, in Mark Paterson and Martin Dodge (eds), Touching Space, Placing Touch, Oxford and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–28. Peeters, Benoît (2010), ‘Entretien avec Chris Ware’, in Jacques Samson and Benoît Peeters, Chris Ware: la bande dessinée réinventée/Comics Reinvented, Paris: Les Impressions Nouvelles, pp. 39–67. Riegl, Aloïs [1966] (2004), Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, trans. Jacqueline E. Jung, New York: Zone Books. Samson, Jacques (2010), ‘Repère chronologique’, in Jacques Samson and Benoît Peeters, Chris Ware: la bande dessinée réinventée/Comics Reinvented, Paris: Les Impressions Nouvelles, pp. 9–37. Schneider, Greice (2013), ‘Resisting narrative immersion’, Studies in Comics, 4: 2, 333–54. — (2016), What Happens When Nothing Happens: Boredom and Everyday Life in Contemporary Comics, Leuven: Leuven University Press. Thon, Jan-Noël and Lukas R. A. Wilde (2016), ‘Mediality and materiality of contemporary comics’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 7: 3, 233–41. Ware, Chris (2012), Building Stories, New York: Pantheon Books. — (2014), ‘Chris Ware on Here by Richard McGuire – a game-changing graphic novel’, The Guardian, 17 December, (last accessed 1 October 2016). Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen (2007), ‘The war works: videos under siege, online and in the aftermath, again’, Art Journal, 66: 2, 68–82.

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18 Episode Five, or, When Does a Narrative Become What It Is? Sean O’Sullivan

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ne definition of a television pilot might be: a synecdoche of something that does not yet exist. These peculiar initial episodes have to predict how a series will eventually operate, while providing the short-term benefits of a single instalment – a hybrid hour that often differs significantly from the narrative recipes that viewers will later associate with the show. It was tricky enough for nineteenth-century British serial authors to work in the present and future simultaneously; the challenges when multiple authors and participants are involved become exponential. Pilots are produced anywhere from several months to two years before the rest of the first season, and often written many years earlier; it is worth asking, therefore, whether we could or should think of them as distinct objects, in merely halting conversation with the series. We cannot overstate the oddity of the task of the pilot: namely, the job of creating a miniature version – stylistically, structurally, tonally, diegetically – of a narrative that will eventually unfold week by week, even as the showrunner, actors, and director of photography of that series can only hazard initial guesses about what that unfolding will actually look and sound like. One biological analogy might be with the stem cell: like stem cells, pilots comprise elements that could become many things. A performance could develop in one way or another; a location may become increasingly, or decreasingly, important; a storyline may grow, or it may disappear, or it may morph in ways unanticipated by creators and consumers alike; a line of dialogue may become a catch phrase, or it may be forgotten; a single choice of camera, in the very first shot of the first hour, may become the iconic signature of one of the iconic shows of its era – as with the opening shot in Mad Men (Weiner 2007–15) of Don Draper, seen from behind while seated. For all the planning and expectation encased in a pilot, a large percentage of its activity amounts to narrative speculation. The claim of this essay is that fifth episodes often represent moments when serial television programmes find a recurrent set of variables and coordinates that shape the show for the rest of its run. In other words, the distance between the pilot and the fifth episode frequently traces the transformation of a narrative world and its accompanying narrative discourse into something closer to what the show is later perceived as being. There can be a retrospective feeling of the inevitable, in regard to what a series happens to become; but examining its initial stages reflects just how much fluctuation is at play. A glance at the opening episodes of Seinfeld – with a more saturnine and self-assured George and a more shambling, unsocialised Kramer than the ‘actual’ George and Kramer with which viewers grew accustomed – demonstrates the fragile

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network of choices and directions that any element of a narrative told in parts may take, one that is in no way assured in the opening phases. Serial television is a science – of production schedules and experienced technical contributors and the mechanics of episodic television narrative. But serial television is also an art – of writers’ rooms and genre reinventions and furious work schedules that leave only seven to ten days to shoot each episode, a breakneck speed where at the end of the day a last-minute decision about a camera position or a lighting choice or a performance shift can have a significant impact on the emerging blueprint of a series. This essay aims to chart how serials frequently end up operating – even if the causes and accidents that help create those operating systems are not themselves systematic, and may not be repeatable from one show to another. As a move toward devising a critical language for the phenomenon I have posited, I will adapt the language of two prominent theorists, coming from very different perspectives and traditions. The first is Edward Said (1975), who argued four decades ago in Beginnings: Intention and Method that we should distinguish between ‘origin’ and ‘beginning’ in considering the source of a text. For Said, an origin ‘centrally dominates what derives from it’, while a beginning ‘encourages nonlinear development . . . [a] multileveled coherence of dispersion’ (Said 1975: 373; italics in original). Said’s distinction between ‘origin’ and ‘beginning’ can be put to fruitful service in the variant circumstances of serial design. When Alan Ball sent his script for the pilot of Six Feet Under (2001–5) to HBO, as that channel was trying to find a worthy successor to The Sopranos (Chase 1999–2007), executive Carolyn Strauss famously asked him if he could ‘make it more fucked up’ (Friend 2001: 87). For Ball, long trapped in the workaday factories of network sitcoms, this request came as a delightful shock, since televisual conventions at the time typically demanded domestication of the odd. But if making things ‘more fucked up’ becomes an imperative rather than an invitation, we can see how the need to keep fucking things up, similarly or differently from week to week, can become its own problem. ‘Coherence of dispersion’ can simply turn into dispersion. The utility of Said’s terms, for the purposes of this essay, is not to divide pilots or early stages of serials into a fixed ‘origin’ side, or a fixed ‘beginning’ side, of the ledger. Rather, we should see origin and beginning as poles of a continuum; the materials of a pilot may fluctuate between one and the other, and the first few episodes may stage a collection of attempts to determine the synthesis of central domination and nonlinear development that the series will prefer to pursue. The second theorist is James Phelan, who – like Said – has not applied his taxonomies to serials as such. In defining twelve ‘aspects’ of narrative ‘progression’, divided equally among beginnings, middles, and endings, Phelan makes a distinction between the ‘launch’ of a narrative, as a constituent part of its beginning, and the ‘voyage’, as the corresponding part of its middle. A ‘launch’ is the ‘revelation of the first set of global instabilities or tensions’, where instabilities pertain to character relationships, and tensions pertain to the relationship between reader and author/narrator. A ‘voyage’ signifies the ‘development’ of those instabilities or tensions (Phelan 2007: 17–19). As with Said’s terminology, I am redirecting Phelan’s terms, since my emphasis is on instabilities of the discourse – that is, of the shape and construction of the narrative – in addition to instabilities of situations within the storyworld. My goal is to align the launch–voyage energy away from the reader’s experience of the narrative and toward, in televisual terms, the authors’ construction of that narrative. When does the show

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manage to create enough distance from its source to see that source as something separate from itself? The term I would propose – alongside origin and beginning, launch and voyage – is ‘becoming’. If origin and beginning articulate two distinct roles for the pilot of a serial, then becoming can delineate the negotiation between those two positions, as a series discovers what it wants to be when it grows up. The territory of becoming will be most contested in the early stages, when a show aims to decide how long and precise the shadow of the pilot will be. If the launch–voyage scheme foregrounds the territory between the ‘revelation’ of conditions and their ‘development’ (in Phelan’s language), then ‘becoming’, in the context of serials, would connote the gradual testing and acquisition of operative codes, the steps by which a narrative transitions from the idea of something to the execution of something. Becoming may certainly extend beyond a fifth episode; indeed, one could argue that a serial never stops becoming, or at least those serials that have even modest commitments to fucking things up. But the five-episode frame is frequently determinant, offering enough time for this narrative infant to roll over, and then crawl, and then at last stumble around on two feet. Why might this be? Why fifth episodes? I have elsewhere termed the genre initiated by The Sopranos – the thirteen-episode season aired in successive weeks, without interruptions – the ‘sonnet-season’, in that the number of episodes, and the rhythmic and narrative options they provide, imitate the interplay of confining design and expressive freedom of that fourteen-line poem known as a sonnet, especially as practised by such formal experimenters as Robert Frost (O’Sullivan 2010: 67–8). In a sonnet, the fifth line is often definitional, either repeating the first rhyme in the Petrarchan version – something like Said’s sense of ‘origin’ – or introducing a brand-new sound in the Shakespearean version – something like Said’s ‘coherence of dispersion’. So there is some prosodic precedent for the fifth unit of a composition adhering to a precise metrical scheme – analogous to the precisions of production, the intertwining of multiple stories, and scheduling necessities that shape television serials – signalling a ‘becoming’, an instantiation that either confirms or departs from all that has preceded it. Closer to serial home, we have an important literary precedent for the fifth episode as transformative juncture: Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers ([1836–7] 1887). As with the instances I will discuss below, there was a considerable degree of uncertainty about the shape of this narrative enterprise over the course of the first four instalments. Pickwick began life as a project for the artist Robert Seymour, who needed someone to create text to accompany the four engravings of Cockney sporting life that he, and publishers Chapman and Hall, planned to issue on a monthly basis. It was only after Seymour committed suicide while illustrating the second number that Dickens wrested control of the project, halving the number of engravings per instalment from four to two. That shift of emphasis from image to word proved messy at first, as illustrator R. W. Buss filled in for the third number, before himself being replaced by Hablot Knight Browne (‘Phiz’) in the fourth. These inconsistencies of form and authorship over the first few instalments pre-figure many of the starts and stops of recent serial television – ‘mistakes’ that would prove highly beneficial in the long run. With these changes of shape and personnel settled, Dickens now transformed the ‘becoming’ of Pickwick’s diegesis, and its mechanics of plot. In the fourth number, following mediocre sales for the previous instalments, Dickens introduced the character of Sam Weller as a sidekick to Samuel Pickwick, thereby creating one

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of the most successful comic teams in literary history, and launching not only The Pickwick Papers and Dickens but serial fiction itself into financial orbit. The clinching innovation occurred in the next instalment, the fifth number, when a moment of misunderstanding between Pickwick and Mrs Bardell transformed Weller from humorous extra to agent of consequence and plot. The lawsuit of Bardell v. Pickwick, offering a larger, recurrent narrative based on Pickwick’s alleged breach of promise to marry, changed The Pickwick Papers from an episodic collation of barely connected events and interpolated tales to a novel with momentum and shape. After four instalments of experimentation and guesswork, in other words, Dickens found – without having planned it – the key to his fiction, a dialogic tension between serial fragment and narrative continuum, an approach that reflects the ambivalence of many recent TV series in regard to serial necessity, most prominently in The Sopranos. Pickwick’s accidental act of transfiguration would offer a template for the evolution-by-experiment that defines the making of television drama – and spotlight the logic of accident, or systems of the unexpected, as the recurring subject of television drama. I should make clear that my claim for fifth episodes as distinctive moments reflects an inductive approach rather than a prescriptive one. That is: watching many recent serials has provoked a recognition that things often begin to change, or solidify, or synthesise, at around this juncture of a first season. We could, initially, suggest some possible schematic or structural causes. From a viewer’s perspective, five hours is around the moment when the boundaries of even the longest feature film are exceeded, when not just the standard diagrams of plotting but also our time share with characters spills beyond the cinematic. Another intersection between viewer and serial lies in patterning; three items are the minimum number of objects required to be recognised as a pattern or sequence – rather than a simple similarity/difference between two items – and a fourth item typically amplifies that rough design. By the time a show reaches five instalments, showrunners have created enough material to provoke questions about what is ‘typical’ in the realm of a show, and what appears to represent the unexpected or new. But beyond these experiences or processes that potentially manifest themselves across many kinds of television series, I will suggest that the relatively new model of the self-contained season creates a visible shape for an initial run of episodes, a shape that puts specific pressure on the ways that a series becomes what it is. Alex Gansa, the showrunner of Homeland (Gansa and Gordon 2011–present), described the third season of that series as ‘comprising three movements, each four episodes [in length]’ – suggesting that the season as a succession of stanzas may function as a conscious operating model for practitioners (Hibberd 2013). Gansa’s characterisation points us to two other qualifications of the fifth-episode fulcrum. First, the shift may operate in the transition between fourth and fifth episodes; in the case of Homeland, a seismic plot revelation at the end of the fourth episode shifted a central perspective on the season. As we will see below, it is precisely the fifth episode’s relationship to the fourth episode (or sometimes the sixth), rather than the fifth as a fully independent set of conditions, that marks the juncture as transformative. Second, the fifth episode may function as a crux, or caesura, in seasons other than the first. This would represent a different aspect of ‘becoming’, connected to televisual seasons as independent agents within a larger field of enterprises that we call The Sopranos or The Wire or Breaking Bad. Indeed, it could be argued that for some shows – such as Six Feet Under – the fifth episode served as caesura for every season in its run.

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A sustained claim about fifth episodes as recurring turning points, across several series, would require far more space than the current context allows. My suggestion is not that there is a one-size-fits-all model, since each series begins with its own set of suppositions and strategies, which founder or become better tuned as the first few instalments play out. In the following pages, I will spotlight four cases that demonstrate how the territory after the very start of a series – somewhere between the third and sixth episodes, with the tension between the fourth and fifth as the most common locus – provides the structural, behavioural, characterological, conceptual, and/or thematic lexicon that will determine the directions of the remainder of the first season, and the seasons to follow. As I say, the conditions differ in each case. But three features occur frequently, if not ubiquitously, and are worth teasing out in advance: • The relationship between the individual instalment and narrative expectation. The most prominent illustration of this feature, and the foundational fifth-episode exemplar, is The Sopranos, whose fifth episode, ‘College’, created a storytelling break from everything that preceded it, as Tony and his daughter Meadow visit colleges in Maine while his wife Carmela is almost seduced by Father Phil back in New Jersey. But ‘College’ did not create that break to devise a new direction; the hour essentially stands alone, revealing that The Sopranos would be most resourceful – most itself – when it realised that suspending assumptions of continuity and connection would be defining aspects of its narrative operation. We see another example of interruption, with very different effect, in ‘Gray Matter’, the fifth episode of Breaking Bad (Gilligan 2008–13), where the show orients itself toward a sustained moral examination of Walter White, rather than a ‘shaggy dog story’ (in the words of creator Vince Gilligan) that would spin out a collection of similar adventures. In effect, Breaking Bad’s epiphany is almost the reverse of The Sopranos’, and it essentially emulates the choice that Dickens made with The Pickwick Papers in opting for continuum over fragmentation. The Wire (Simon 2002–8) presents yet another kind of transformation, in what we might call a ‘Prince Hal’ effect, pivoting from a fourth episode of goofy eccentricity to a fifth episode that buckles down and gets serious about the specific interplay of investigative plotting and character development that will govern the rest of the series. • The relationship between back story and narrative momentum. Both ‘College’ (The Sopranos) and ‘Gray Matter’ (Breaking Bad) introduce us to events from the principals’ pasts that shape our understanding of both those principals and the series’ broader focus. In the case of ‘College’, Tony discovers a former mobster turned informant in Maine, eventually garrotting him while Meadow is interviewing. This is back story as ruse, since the details of the mobster’s transgressions serve no purpose other than to explain the logic of this episode. Back story will remain an ambiguous category for The Sopranos, sometimes deemed vital – as in the childhood that shaped Tony – but just as frequently of only marginal relevance. By contrast, we learn in ‘Gray Matter’ about Walter White’s past ambition and promise, and of the vast gulf of capital and prestige dividing him and Elliott Schwartz, his former partner. The regret, jealousy, and sense of self-worth that fuel him for the next few seasons are first made available to us in this fifth episode. The fifth episode of Mad Men, fittingly titled ‘5G’, explicitly personifies back story through the unexpected appearance of Adam Whitman; Don Draper’s long-lost

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brother suddenly makes the serial past a central, recurring feature of the narrative, an embedded contrast to the culture of now that otherwise governs the show. • The relationship between central characters and scaffolding characters. In a number of series, a character occupies significant time and space in the initial episodes, only to be discarded at a relatively early stage. These figures, whom I call ‘scaffolding characters’, help guide us, and the show’s creators, into a set of premises, conditions, and behaviours that constitute the series as we discover it; their disappearance requires a recalibration for audience and creators alike. Wild Bill Hickok’s death in Deadwood (Milch 2004–6) is the most obvious instance. But there is also Midge Daniels in Mad Men – the first recurring character that we meet in the pilot after Don Draper, and who will apparently play a vital role as Don’s Greenwich Village counterpart. After a significant presence in the first few episodes, however, she is soon jettisoned, marking a caesura not just in terms of the show’s personnel but in terms of what landscapes the show will choose to investigate. The mobster in ‘College’ and Elliott Schwartz in ‘Gray Matter’ represent very different deployments of scaffolding characters, as they appear only in those fifth episodes; it is their eccentricity, in relation to the norms of the show so far, that helps shift the series, rather than their apparent status as norms (as with Hickok and Daniels). We could say that one element that connects each of these features is absence – or our awareness of a tension between absence and presence. What is missing, from the fifth or sixth episode onward, is that scaffolding character, or that additional piece of back story information that would explain more, or that justification for the oddity of an episode such as ‘College’. In a broader sense, one could say that series discover what they need to abandon or undermine. While it would be tempting to characterise the first four episodes as a ‘false start’, more accurately we should deem them the start to a different series from the one with which we become familiar. Serials always require us to return and to recover, to look back from our present vantage point in the narrative to reassemble our sense of how it fits together or (often deliberately) fails to fit together. The fifth-episode juncture provides the first principal node for the many vantage points to follow. I will, in the following pages, use terms to differentiate types of ‘becoming’, using four different series as illustrations. These types should be seen as conditional, and potentially relevant to more than one series, rather than fixed and separating. While I isolate four series, the cruxes I describe below apply in synonymous ways to other shows of recent vintage, each foregrounding a different cluster of issues.

1. The Sopranos and Behavioural Becoming The fifth episode of The Sopranos, ‘College’, is not only the most celebrated episode of the entire series, but the most celebrated episode in the last twenty years of American television. The parallel stories of Tony Soprano’s tour of Maine colleges with his daughter Meadow – during which he unexpectedly finds and murders a mob informant – and his wife Carmela’s dangerous flirtation back home with the amorous priest Father Phil are frequently pointed to as the series’ defining early moment, the cluster of brutality, humour, and cultural immediacy that would be seen as the show’s hallmark. David Chase, the show’s creator and showrunner, flags the episode as a

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defining narrative shift. ‘“College”’, he writes, ‘comes closest to achieving my personal goal of making episodes that could be stand-alone feature films’ (Chase 2002: viii). The episode both resisted the momentum of seriality across episodes, a dictate at which Chase always bristled, and pared down its focus to simply an A and a B story, instead of the more typical three to four threads of other Sopranos episodes, and of conventional television serials. This is one aspect of what I am calling the episode’s influence on the series’ ‘behavioural’ becoming – that is, The Sopranos’ patent willingness, from this point forward, to move sideways, or drop storylines, or shift attention, in ways apparently inimical to serial ‘progress’. A second aspect of this ‘behavioural’ shift had to do with Tony, the central character, and the tussle between Chase and HBO, in regard to whether the grisly, close-up garrotting of the informant would remove the protagonist from the audience’s field of sympathy – specifically, whether this act would irreparably damage Tony’s ‘relatability’. Chase insisted on this scene, and this particular depiction of the event, because ‘if we’re really gonna believe this guy is a credible mobster, he’s gotta kill people. In real life, that’s what these people do’ (Biskind 2007: 282–3). In effect, these two behaviours reflect very different impulses – a desire for storytelling inconsistency (a stand-alone feature film removed from serial context) and a desire for diegetic plausibility (Tony behaving as a ‘real’ Tony would). These are not exactly contradictory; but their distinct work of disruption and fidelity speak to the conflicted dynamic that would push the series forward. I will return to the particulars of ‘College’ in a moment, but it is worth considering what exactly the episode appears to have halted – if it halted anything at all. This was in many ways an ideal spot to throw in a disruption, because something like a fourepisode ‘movement’ (to use the language of Homeland showrunner Alex Gansa) had just concluded. The first four episodes describe, among other matters, the final days of Jackie Aprile, the head of the New Jersey crime family to which Tony belongs; we meet Jackie in the late phase of terminal cancer, and his funeral serves as the final scene of the fourth episode. We might classify Jackie as a ‘scaffolding’ character, that is, someone who serves a vital purpose in an initial stage of a series but is soon dispatched – either through death, as in his case and in the case of Wild Bill Hickok discussed below, or by simply being dropped from the narrative, as in the case of Mad Men’s Midge Daniels. These scaffolding characters may coincide with the first four episodes, or they may linger a bit longer; at the very least, there are overlaps between characters and episodes here, in terms of a show discovering its identity, in part through the jettisoning of storylines or thematic possibilities embodied by specific characters. To call The Sopranos’ initial four-episode sequence, or quatrain in prosodic language, Jackie’s story is somewhat odd, since he exists only in situations or dreams initiated by Tony; it is only retrospectively, in the wake of the eccentricity of ‘College’, that we might attempt to give the first four episodes shape by unifying them through one character. Because, beyond that, there is very little unity in that initial sequence at all. As I have argued previously, we move with very little consistency or clarity from the pilot onward. The first episode relies on Tony’s voice-over in his sessions with psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi, a technique that appears nowhere else in the series; the second episode features a ‘cold open’, a pre-credits sequence, another technique that appears nowhere else in the series; the third episode starts with what I call an ‘enjambment’, that is, a scene that directly follows on the closing scene of the preceding episode, a technique that the series deploys very infrequently from that point forward (O’Sullivan 2010: 72). The

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Sopranos, in other words, is openly unsure about its basic operational vocabulary after three hours. Its fourth hour, ‘Meadowlands’, offers what seems to be a dead end. The series has indulged many allusions to The Godfather films and their ilk to this point; but here that leitmotif seems to turn into excess. The indebtedness of ‘Meadowlands’ to its genre forebears is foregrounded, from a reference to a ‘Moe Green special’ to a joke about the Chinese Godfather to an allusion to Tony Montana’s ‘little friend’ (a familiar line from Scarface). These overly familiar intertextual gestures suggest an incipient exhaustion. The episode features a number of on-the-nose (bluntly explanatory) lines of dialogue, such as teenager Meadow Soprano’s ready-for-excerpting ‘I hate my life – being a Soprano’, and the series’ least convincing psychiatric session between Tony and Dr Melfi, where they laugh heartily at jokes that are below the standards set by earlier episodes. The sense of gags, or suspenseful devices, being deployed with little heed to the plausibility of the characters or the integrity of the series is particularly acute in a moment when Tony furtively notices his consigliere Silvio Dante leaving a dentist’s office that happens to be across the hall from Dr Melfi’s – a moment of juxtaposition that retrospectively makes no geographic or narrative sense. (We are never in this hallway again, and the architectural peculiarity remains unexplained.) The line between coherent ‘dispersion’ and creative confusion is a fuzzy one; but these initial moves appear to lean toward a foundational doubt, in terms of how the idea of this series will turn into its execution. Doubt and cultural recycling do not get discarded in ‘College’; rather, they get reanimated. While The Godfather does pop up again, the series makes an effort to find itself a different kind of borrowed language; the films and television shows that appear here in the dialogue – Casablanca, The Remains of the Day, The Thorn Birds, even The Last Temptation of Christ – are melodramas, more than mob movies. The Sopranos, while certainly a series about the reprocessing of cultural artefacts, needs a wider array of material than it has plumbed so far, and it begins to discover that wider scope at this point. Tony, waiting outside an academic office while Meadow is being interviewed, reads a quotation on the wall from The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne – Bowdoin’s ‘most famous alum’, as a passing student informs Tony/us. This literary extract – ‘No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true’ – may seem most blatantly to speak to the issue of Tony’s hypocrisy, and to the tension between his private and public worlds. But there is at least one more hypocrite in the episode – Father Phil, whose ministrations may not be entirely spiritual in relation to Carmela. This is where the episode’s central reworking becomes apparent: The Scarlet Letter is told anew, in the story of the illicit goings-on between a religious man (Dimmesdale/Father Phil) who breaks sexual boundaries with a temptable woman (Hester/Carmela) while the woman’s husband (Chillingworth/Tony) is away from home. The Sopranos begins here to give itself licence to be about whatever it wants to be about – to work across a broader tradition of American storytelling by making nation, culture, and human transaction its recurrent subjects, with the Mafia as a kind of necessary narrative evil. That idea of ‘bewilderment’ as to ‘which may be true’ also speaks to the matter of doubt – including doubts about the efficacy of psychiatry and its promises of epiphany, and doubts about narrative conventions of arc and resolution, all of which will be scrutinised for the rest of the series’ run. There is also our doubt about what kind of show we are watching. At the moment that Tony finishes off the snitch, he looks

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up to the sky and sees a vee of ducks. In the pilot, Tony told Melfi of his sentimental attachment to a family of ducks that had made a home in his swimming pool, and his sorrow at their subsequent departure; she diagnoses this behaviour as symptomatic of a fear of his children, Meadow and AJ, leaving the nest. By the fifth episode, the ducks have become a central symbolic motif of the series, as Melfi continues to allude to their meaning and effects in therapy, and Tony has a dream featuring the sound of ducks in flight. But what is the ontology of those ducks in contemporary New England, the region of Hawthorne and allegory? Are we supposed to believe that they ‘actually’ arrive at just the ‘right’ diegetic moment to coincide with the brutal act that transformed the relationship between Tony as a central character and the viewer? What kind of work of televisual art would suddenly change the operating rules, transforming the literal-as-symbolic (the fetishised ducks in the pool) into the symbolic-as-literal? This moment can simply register as a joke, or a neat piece of narrative craftsmanship, but that is not enough. There has not been anything like this so far in the series: dreams have been dreams, the real has been the real, and The Godfather and Scarface – rather than Bergman or Antonioni – have been in charge. The ducks will not signal an irrevocable transition from one to the other, from classical genre to art cinema, since we are not done with allusions to the cinematic cosa nostra; but the shift in discourse means that we cannot be sure of where the show will go. We are left, in this instant, bewildered about the lay of the land ahead. Our uncertainty resides in The Sopranos’ incipient confidence about how it will have it both ways.

2. Deadwood and Structural Becoming Deadwood’s fifth episode, ‘The Trial of Jack McCall’, follows the shocking and traumatic conclusion of the fourth episode, wherein unpleasant drifter Jack McCall kills charming and modest celebrity Wild Bill Hickok by shooting him in the back. Hickok had been the closest thing to a connecting presence in the series so far, someone quickfingered enough to outdraw a murderer on the street, compassionate enough to tickle a young girl recently orphaned, and wily enough to outfox Al Swearengen, Deadwood’s impresario of machinations. Hickok’s charm and presence are a lifeline for the viewer, since the first few episodes of Deadwood stage a trial by a fire. We are introduced to a bewildering (that word again) multitude of characters, eight of whom are killed in the pilot alone; asked to orient ourselves rapidly to the spectacular circumlocutions and profane expertise of the show’s dialogue; and required to muddle through whatever understanding we may have of the Dakota Territory in 1876, a historical circumstance that the series spends little exposition in clarifying. No sooner, after two episodes, have we begun to get our footing than a whole new crowd arrives in town, setting up the Bella Union whorehouse and gambling establishment, to rival Swearengen’s Gem Saloon. That, of course, is the nature of a mining camp in its infancy: it changes from day to day. However praiseworthy Deadwood’s ambitions for verisimilitude in that regard, such shifting of the personnel and central dynamics of the narrative throws up daunting obstacles in serial television; if the challenge for The Sopranos, after four episodes, may have been an overfamiliarity of tone and situation – married to hit-or-miss storytelling techniques – the challenge for Deadwood lay in the fact that it may have demanded too much work for audiences accustomed to more accommodating initiations. Hickok, as the most famous historical figure in the roster of characters, represented a potential nucleus within this

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diegetic turmoil, someone borrowed from conventions of the Western genre, equipped with a pair of bickering sidekicks (Calamity Jane and Charlie Utter), that comforting trope from conventional yarns that bestows centrality on the person around whom the dependents orbit. David Milch – Deadwood’s creator and showrunner – has spoken openly about ‘The Trial of Jack McCall’ as the turn of the series, as the narrative and structural moment ‘when the show can properly begin’ (Milch 2006: 201). He posits Hickok as the ‘main character’ up to this point, but also someone, at least in his real-life incarnation, who had been enervated by nineteenth-century media exposure; by the time he arrives in this place – and in this narrative – he is ‘like an ember that retains only the barest modicum of heat’ (2006: 192). The sudden death of Hickok creates a tragic founding narrative for the camp, as well as for the series itself, a void around which meaning must somehow be discovered or invented. Hence my use of ‘structural’ becoming in this connection – since the crisis has to do with the infrastructure, or self-construction, of both the camp depicted and the narrative depicting that camp. The camp’s immediate answer to the crisis, to the question of how to make sense of this void, is to stage a trial – a convention of law that should not be available in a space that has not yet been officially recognised as a social body, and a convention of television borrowed from the world of crime procedurals. As Dan Dority, his deputy, prepares to transform the Gem Saloon into an impromptu courtroom, Swearengen orders: ‘I don’t want anything done that can’t be undone five minutes after this fiasco concludes.’ Swearengen wants to hold on to this camp as a place capable of quicksilver transformation and disappearance, with no single operative jurisdiction of rules or limits; in effect, he wants to maintain the social and narrative limbo of the first four episodes. Whatever his success in commanding the mise-en-scène, Swearengen knows that in fact he is operating in the wake of something that cannot be undone. Serials are, structurally, about wake – about the consequences and lien of one episode upon its successor. Wake begins in Deadwood after the death of Hickok. Swearengen addresses the wider political sphere early on in the episode, insisting that the camp should not aim to be annexed by the United States until after its gold claims have been fixed and its economic lubrication fully established; consequently, Swearengen argues, the camp’s inhabitants must not attempt to convict the murderous McCall, lest the government in Washington perceive this official act as some form of self-pronounced legitimacy. The camp – through Al’s machinations, the deviousness of McCall’s lawyer, and the incompetence of the jury – succeeds in exonerating the guilty party, thereby temporarily deferring a model of governance. I would argue that problematic deferral, to wit the subject matter of the fifth episode of Deadwood, is another sempiternal subject and process of serial narrative. That this deferral is only temporary is made apparent in the subsequent episode, ‘Plague’, when the camp holds a first meeting of its potentates – some of whom have only been in residence for a few days. Their proximate business is a need to fund riders to secure vaccines after an outbreak of smallpox; but what Milch calls the ‘electrical force field’ (2006: 137) created by this first full act of self-rule, the perhaps accidental event by which any entity starts to make itself, creates a ritual that will be picked up in subsequent episodes, when the chaos of separation is regularly yoked into gradually cohering forms of social connection. Three episodes after ‘Plague’, these characters will convene to choose a mayor, and regulatory officials – at the same table, in the same establishment. To watch a

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serial is to engage in ritual – whether one watches each week, or in long bursts. It is to immerse oneself in the give-and-take of old and new, familiar and unexpected, upon which serials thrive. In its fifth episode, Deadwood moves itself toward a self-defined ritual lexicon. If the removal of Hickok creates a storytelling problem and political kick-start upon which the series can build, his funeral creates the conditions for thinking not only about what this community means, or all communities mean, but how this particular show will operate as a narrative machine. Reverend Smith, a man on the edge of the bewilderment of a fatal brain tumour, delivers a eulogy, taken from 1 Corinthians, wherein Paul speaks about the body, a selection that in context clearly also signifies the body politic: For the body is not one member but many. He [Paul] tells us, ‘The eye cannot say unto the hand, ‘I have no need of thee.’ Nor again the head, to the feet, ‘I have no need of thee’ . . . He says that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care, one to another. In a DVD commentary on the episode, Robin Wiegert, who plays Calamity Jane, calls this fifth-episode speech, a speech about political community delivered by a religious man, ‘the heart not just of the episode but of the whole series’; Mark Singer, in his New Yorker profile of David Milch, uses this passage as the lynchpin for analysing the ethics and ideas of the series as a whole (Deadwood, audio commentary; Singer 2005: 192). Paul’s language – this figure of a body with many members, that is, with many members that may be at war with each other, even as they strive to unite – articulates the pre-eminent dynamic of serial fiction, of episodes and seasons that are centripetal and centrifugal in equal measure. So Deadwood’s caesura, in its fifth episode, allows the series to make a gesture toward connectivity, and away from segmentivity, in Paul’s vision of unity, even as the shambolic trial enforces the politics of pieces, of separation, of a refusal of the whole – figured, in political terms, by the body of the United States. The driving energy of Deadwood is the constant collision, retreat, and renewed collision between parts and wholes. It is a series that takes place in very compressed time periods, with episodes often occurring on consecutive days – by stark contrast with historical dramas like Mad Men, which parcel themselves out according to monthly lily pads, on a much broader calendar. So Reverend Smith’s eulogy invokes the perpetual work of joining episodes, rather than accentuating gaps, even as the defining work of instalment fiction is to underscore the potential autonomy of each part. The first big hole in Deadwood is the death of Hickok; the Sisyphean task of fixing that hole, and all its successors, begins in the fifth episode.

3. Breaking Bad and Conceptual Becoming In stark contrast with the rollicking first four instalments of Breaking Bad, the fifth episode is a wallflower. ‘Gray Matter’ seems to represent a significant attenuation of energy at this defining juncture of the series, as opposed to the intensity of focus produced by ‘College’ and ‘The Trial of Jack McCall’. That reverse trajectory is apparent in the pilots of The Sopranos and Deadwood, which both begin with moments of quiet. Tony waits in the anteroom of Melfi’s office, the only sound the ticking of an

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unseen clock, in anticipation of a psychiatric session that will begin with a prolonged awkward silence; Bullock writes at his sheriff’s desk in Montana on an apparently placid evening, while a prisoner tries to engage him in cajoling conversation aimed at cutting him loose. Those are calms before storms, of course; but they are calms nonetheless. Breaking Bad kicks off with a pair of trousers flying through the air, followed quickly by a runaway RV driven by a man in a gas mask, accompanied by music of the action-anxiety strain; after the RV drives off the road, its desperate driver emerges to videotape a self-exonerating farewell to his wife and son. As he straddles the road, in his tight white underwear, pointing a gun at a siren whose source we do not see, we know – from its initial gestures – that this will be a series about showmanship. Not just narrative showmanship but stylistic showmanship: during his roadside performance, the driver temporarily covers the camera lens with his hand to collect his thoughts, and we get the camera’s point of view – the blurry mass of the videographer’s palm. A show that will become famous for its unlikely perspectival shots from Roombas, shovels, and houseflies tells us immediately that looking askew will be a defining feature of the series’ presentation. This show means to grab us and throw us into its environment, with an implied advertisement that grabbing and throwing will be fulfilled promises every week. For those who followed the tale of Walter White to its end, or even to something far short of its end, that was a fair representation of what Breaking Bad would have to offer. But if that were its stock in trade throughout, Breaking Bad would resemble a series such as 24 – where pace, twist, and the outlandish are the narrative alpha and omega. That may have seemed the full menu of Breaking Bad after three episodes, which featured (among other delights) a man dissolved ineptly in a tub of acid, his liquefied remains creating an unspeakable mess for Walter White and Jesse Pinkman to clean up; it is a show glorying in the messiness of the corporeal, and of how things are made and unmade. The fourth episode, by contrast, offered something of a meander, perhaps its own version – like The Sopranos’ ‘Meadowlands’ – of a show uncertain of its future. Instead of breakneck serial momentum, we get two new genres: the family drama, enacted by Jesse’s unsuccessful return home to the family that has forsaken him, and the revenge fantasy, expressed in Walt blowing up the car of an obnoxious salesman who implausibly reappears at a gas station in the episode’s final scene. Walt’s pyrotechnic thrill, his nebbishy wish-fulfilment, demonstrates that the show has a lot of energy and guile, but that it is not sure how to apply it. The stage is set for ‘Gray Matter’, but not in the way we may have anticipated. Rather than an immediate return to the comic/adventure/Rube Goldberg high jinks of the first few instalments, we get something apparently tame. The cold open shows us Jesse failing to get a sales job in the civilian world; a portrait of diurnal failure, rather than a spectacular fuck-up. This is followed by Walter and his wife Skyler attending a birthday party for a sci-tech millionaire named Elliott Schwartz – Walter’s former partner, who not only became rich while Walter turned into a financially strapped teacher, recently diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer, but who also married Walter’s old girlfriend. Elliott, apparently delighted to be reunited with his old friend, offers to hire him, pitching the benefits of his company’s gold-standard health insurance. Walter soon realises that Skyler has told Elliott about his condition and, in pique at being pitied, he turns down the opportunity and makes Skyler leave the party early. Why might this matter, other than as a sign of Walter’s stubbornness – a trait that has hardly been

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hidden from us thus far? Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator and showrunner, provides an answer. When asked, late in the series’ run, what he deemed his favourite episode, he neglected the many showstoppers before and after ‘Gray Matter’, and selected this particular hour. ‘My original estimation of the character of Walter White’, he said, ‘was that he was going to do this bad thing and feel bad about doing it . . . But then, I hadn’t thought it through quite as much as I should have, I suppose.’ The proposition of Walter making money, feeling bad about it, losing the money through some accident, and then starting over again could have become, in Gilligan’s words, ‘some crazy shaggy dog story, in which this guy is never really tested morally’. By having Walter reject the ‘deus ex machina moment’ of financial rescue presented by Elliott, Gilligan could make the show not about a string of anecdotes but about identity and selfconstruction. This juncture, this episode, he said, ‘wasn’t one of the flashiest moments, but it was the moment when I realized what this show could become and I realized why we were telling it’; rather than a story about ‘the failures of the health care system’, Breaking Bad turned into a ‘character study of this one man’ (Nelson 2012; emphasis added). The episode concludes with Walt, after a family intervention aimed at convincing him to take the Schwartzes’ money, refusing that offer – only to change his mind the morning after (a change that is never fully explained) and approach Jesse, in order to cook meth once more. We can see the show’s gears of narrative necessity in operation here, putting the burden of restarting the action onto the shoulders of Walter’s moral imagination. Gilligan’s testimonial helps elucidate what I am calling the ‘conceptual’ becoming triggered by ‘Gray Matter’, the crossroads when the job or design of Breaking Bad became apparent, at least to its inventor (or, in Said’s language, its beginner). In many ways, the narrative challenge for this series lay in the gerund of its title. ‘Breaking’ connotes an ongoing condition, an event enunciated over time and potentially without cessation. One way of turning that into narrative is by throwing the viewer in medias res, as the show did at the start of its pilot and as it would do many times afterward; the series’ propensity for shock and surprise would hardly disappear from this point on. But that shock and surprise would henceforth work in the perpetual shadow of a potential lull. Because, for all the consequence of ‘Gray Matter’ illuminating, or actually shifting, the essential nature of Walter White, not much changes or ‘happens’ until its last minute – certainly not by comparison with the fireworks of the first few episodes. In its fifth instalment, Breaking Bad seemed to see that it could be a show about less, as much as a show about more, about what is latent rather than aggressive. In the following episode, Water will shave his head and create his alter ego, Heisenberg. If Deadwood’s fifth episode created a transitional movement from one possible centre (Hickok) to another (the town), Breaking Bad’s fifth episode creates the transitional opportunity for the show to split into two concurrent and interactive elements, the vivid concept and the peripheral impulse, possibly figured as Heisenberg and Walter respectively, but also as two different narrative strategies. It is difficult to illustrate such a combination in action, without engaging in a far more detailed examination of the series than this space allows. But one example, early in the second season, would be the finale of ‘Grilled’, an episode that concludes with a high-octane desert shootout, wherein Walter’s brother-in-law Hank, a DEA agent, kills the maniacal drug dealer Tuco, outside the home of Tuco’s uncle, as Walter and Jesse watch unseen. Tio Salamanca, the uncle, who is mute and confined to a wheelchair by infirmity, can only

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communicate by ringing a bell. As Hank hovers in a low-angle shot over the foregrounded body of Tuco, we hear the bell off-screen – a sound that carries us insistently to the closing credits. This joining of macho genre drama with laconic characterological quirkiness, the defining synthesis of Breaking Bad in full flight, has at least some of its source in the mid-course correction, or shift of gears, of ‘Gray Matter’. We should note, pace Gilligan, that ‘Gray Matter’ has at least one major consequence as a deus ex machina. The series’ penultimate episode, ‘Granite State’, depicts Walter’s attempt to remove himself from a huge mess he has made, in his perpetual methodology of improvisation disguised as design – or, we might say, the intersection of improvisation and design that, as Gilligan has argued, ‘Gray Matter’ inaugurates. Watching television in a forlorn rural bar in New Hampshire, Walter sees the Schwartzes on television, disavowing any connection between his now-infamous scientific genius and the success of their company. At this late point in the series, the Schwartzes have essentially been abandoned as characters; they are the kind of loose end that David Chase was happy to leave loose in The Sopranos. They return here as avatars of the tension between two versions of the show, of what it could still ‘become’. Walter, on the verge of turning himself into a shaggy dog story, into a protagonist who fails to resolve the initial premise of his narrative, is now lured by resentment and a final instinct for revenge to return to Albuquerque, the show’s epicentre. He in effect becomes his own deus ex machina, concocting a spectacular series of resolutions that bespeak a desire for narrative magic, even as the show revels all along in narrative science.

4. Six Feet Under and Thematic Becoming The fifth episode of Six Feet Under, ‘An Open Book’, follows what may be the weakest instalment of the series’ entire five-year run. To justify such an assertion, we need to return to the criterion of making things ‘more fucked up’, introduced in connection with Six Feet Under’s own creator and showrunner Alan Ball, to suggest the possible cul-de-sac of the fourth episode, ‘Familia’. Unlike the three preceding shows I have discussed, Six Feet Under has as its double narrative helix the two formulas that dominate television drama: a continuing serial thread – performed here by the ongoing melodrama of the Fisher family – and the repeatable device of a new, self-resolving story each week – performed by the dead person (and attendant storyline) brought into the Fishers’ funeral home every episode. The benefits of such an arrangement are hardly original, as medical shows such as St. Elsewhere, ER, and their spawn have demonstrated; they provide two distinct strands of material, safeguards against turning into ‘soap opera’ on the one hand or an anthology show on the other. The temptation always exists to bring the two strands into direct interconnection, so that the episodic (the deceased) helpfully intersects with the serial (the family), and vice versa. Such a scenario, however practical in generating serial instalments, is anything but fucked up, since doctors ‘learning’ from patients and patients ‘learning’ from doctors can be seen all the time, on many channels across the spectrum. So when, in a highly wrought scene near the end of ‘Familia’, we get an emotional climax depicting the white-bread Fisher family literally holding hands with Mexican-American gang members in a circle of sorrow, the series provides a tableau of exactly the kind of thing that should be avoided at all costs by a show that is trying to be ‘different’ – a goal linking all the series I have discussed. This is the idiom of the afterschool special, of the kind

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of show built on theme – specifically, on the premise that a narrative exists in order to make themes concrete, sometimes at the cost of forcing different elements of that narrative into unhappy company. In this case, WASPs and Latinos who otherwise have nothing in common suddenly holding hands over an idea – grief, loss, cultural misunderstanding, whatever – at the expense of ‘organic’ characterological development is as succinct an emblem of the thematic pitfall as we are likely to get. The difficulties of ‘Familia’ start with its beginning, as the episode peculiarly uses comic montage to jump back and forth between Nate Fisher and Brenda Chenowith, the central couple of the series, when they are interrogated about a suspicious fire at different times by the same pair of police officers; their clashing answers create a sitcom scenario, where manifestly and amusingly incompatible interpretations exploit characters for the production of jokes. That methodology is incompatible with a show that initially appeared to forsake genre machinery – the kind of machinery that allows Mafia show, a Western, or a crime story to foment plot whenever required. The first few instalments suggested that interiority, and the plausibility of psychological nuance, would be Six Feet Under’s narrative currency. As different as the show would always be from its HBO predecessor, The Sopranos, they both exhibit dissonant tonal variations in their first few episodes; given that these were the arguably the earliest two series of our current putative televisual revolution, it is worth supposing that these dissonances may have served as an object lesson for later shows like Deadwood and Breaking Bad, whose initial episodes are much more consistent and self-assured. The pilot of Six Feet Under featured, indeed opened with, mock advertisements for funeral home products – hearses, embalming fluid, wound filler, earth dispensers – a metafictional device (for a show on a commercial-free channel) that was abandoned after the pilot, but whose spirit survived it. This is a dramaturgy that treats each scene as a potential skit, with the logic of immediate payoff. The opening sequence of ‘Familia’ is likewise a skit, illustrating Nate and Brenda’s humorously jarring representation of their sex lives, accompanied by the mugging responses, in close-up, of the interrogating officers. And the episode’s final scene offers the resolution to what we might call an extended skit, the story of the cadaver’s foot that the teenage Fisher daughter, Claire, stole to get back at a betraying boyfriend – a theft to which she finally confesses. On both the compositional level (theme overwhelming character) and the granular level (the logic of the rim shot) Six Feet Under is caught at this point between generic drama and generic sitcom. ‘An Open Book’, the fifth episode, represents the series’ about-face – even if it is no less jokey than its predecessors. This about-face is set in motion at the beginning with the juxtaposition of art and religion: the death of the ‘artist’ Viveca St. John, a porn star – the first artist-figure to die in one of the series’ cold-open segments – segues into the interior of a church, and the person of David Fisher, Nate’s younger brother and funeral home boss. David’s particular storyline in the episode, the quest to become a deacon, represents the spine of the instalment, and his occasional dialogues with the imagined reincarnation of St. John – a porn artist with a religious name – stage a battle not only between a repressed gay man and an uninhibited heterosexual woman but between orthodox religion and ‘deviant’ art. Indeed, errant, deviant, misfiring, or deceitful art, and especially filmic and televisual art, is everywhere in the episode: from the two videos that Ruth, the widowed mother of the Fisher clan, rents in a failed attempt to bond with her disaffected daughter Claire; to the episode of Oz that David and his boyfriend Keith watch, as they discuss church; to the brief clip from an episode of The Gilmore

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Girls, which itself references Freaky Friday, that Ruth’s irksome cousin Hannah and daughter Ginny find endearing; to ‘those touchy-feely mother–daughter relationships like you see on TV, and in the movies’ that Claire denounces – because ‘they don’t exist’. (This suggests that Claire has not seen the previous episode of Six Feet Under.) While art and religion had not been absent over the first four episodes, they certainly did not get the star treatment that they receive here. Art and religion, among other things, are about connections between the physical world – that which we can see and touch – and the expressive meanings we generate from that physical world – what that world means, and how we can represent it. This synthesis, which will generate many character moments and story possibilities in the episodes and seasons to come, signals Six Feet Under’s transition from a thematic sitcom to a show whose central theme is doubt – expressed as artistic crises, which Claire will experience as a budding art student from the end of the second season, and as spiritual crises, which Nate will experience at virtually every moment – and a show about the representation of doubt, in ways related to but ultimately different from the doubtfulness that suffuses The Sopranos. Most prominent of all the artworks in the episode are two books that we learn about, the centrality of which is indicated by the episode’s title. Both books are linked to Brenda; this link is no coincidence, since Brenda’s tenor will become crucial to the series’ dominant mood of restlessness. The first book is the macabre, gothic children’s story Nathaniel and Isabel – a work of fiction (art) that Brenda and her brother Billy treated in their childhood practically as nonfiction (truth, or religion), as a founding wish-fulfilment of orphanhood, deliberately absorbed into their own lives as a counter-narrative to the reality of their own horrific parents. The second book is the psychiatric bestseller Charlotte Light and Dark – a work of nonfiction (truth, treated with religious reverence) that is in fact a work of fiction (art), since its supposed profile of a precocious and unstable young Brenda is revealed to be an elaborate lie, a pack of manufactured behaviours that Brenda managed, as a kind of sport, to sell to her shrinks in lieu of her actual personality. ‘An Open Book’ concludes in the aftermath of David’s investment as deacon at his church, a proceeding during which he imagines the dead artist St. John blowing kisses at him from the pews. When Brenda and Nate discuss their own experience of David’s ceremony, she uses the language of art to describe the religious scene she has witnessed: ‘All that pageantry – it’s so trippy, it’s like a Fellini movie.’ It is worth pointing out that, in the unpublished shooting draft of the episode, Brenda’s original dialogue at this point was as follows: ‘It was mildly diverting. Nice stained glass’ (Ball 2000: 56). The shift, at some point in the translation from script to production, from a blasé offhand remark to full-blown aesthetic enthusiasm, especially in connection with a filmmaker famous for his portrayal of artistic sensibilities in spiritual crisis, demonstrates in practice how the show altered its lexicon, and its spheres of interest. It soon turns out, as the couple starts discussing God, that Nathan believes ‘in some sort of undefinable creative force’, while Brenda thinks ‘it’s all just totally random . . .We live, we die; ultimately, nothing means anything.’ That tension between an undefinable creative force and the totally random is another iteration of the process and logic of serial narrative – the push and pull between shape and resistance, between order and chaos, between the whole and the part. Then the episode ends with startling abruptness. When Nate asks Brenda how she can live in an existential abyss, she says, ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I wake up so fucking empty, I wish I’d never been born. But what choice do I have?’ And then she walks out of the frame. End of ‘An Open Book’. No riposte, no modification. At this point in the history

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of American television, matter-of-fact statements about life’s pointlessness did not regularly feature as notes of episode closure. This unprepared bleakness, so different from the comforting integrations of the fourth episode, shows Six Feet Under discovering that the arbitrariness of meaning will be its subject, its defining theme. ‘Becoming’, in the case of Six Feet Under, means both renouncing and confirming the interplay between emptiness and choice, between the gap and the instalment of seriality. The abrupt, the bewildering, the unresolved, the pause. In the shows I have discussed, and in others, the caesuras of fifth episodes offer the opportunity to turn hesitation or shifts or possibly even mistakes into core values. They are the interruptions that give serials the chance to begin again.

Works Cited Ball, Alan (2000), ‘An Open Book’, Six Feet Under, episode 105, unpublished shooting draft, dated 17 November. Biskind, Peter (2007), ‘An American family’, Vanity Fair, 560: 234–40, 280–6. Breaking Bad, TV series, created by Vince Gilligan. USA: Sony Pictures Television et al., 2008–13. Chase, David (2002), The Sopranos: Selected Scripts from Three Seasons, New York: Warner Books. Deadwood, audio commentary, ‘The Trial of Jack McCall’, Season 1 DVD. USA: HBO Video, 2005. Deadwood, TV series, created by David Milch. USA: HBO et al., 2004–6. Dickens, Charles [1836–7] (1887), The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club . . . With illustrations by R. Seymour, R. W. Buss, Hablot K. Browne – ‘Phiz’ – and J. Leech, London: Chapman and Hall. Friend, Tad (2001), ‘The next big bet’, The New Yorker, 14 May, pp. 80–91. Hibberd, James (2013), ‘Homeland showrunner on that huge twist, and defending season 3’, Entertainment Weekly, 21 October, (last accessed 2 November 2017). Homeland, TV series, created by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon. USA: Showtime Networks et al., 2011–present. Mad Men, TV series, created by Matthew Weiner. USA: Lionsgate Television et al., 2007–15. Milch, David (2006), Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, New York: Melcher Media. Nelson, Erik (2012), ‘Vince Gilligan: I’ve never Googled “Breaking Bad”’, Salon, 23 July, (last accessed 2 November 2017). O’Sullivan, Sean (2010), ‘Broken on purpose: Poetry, serial television, and the season’, Storyworlds, 2: 59–77. Phelan, James (2007), Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Said, Edward (1975), Beginnings: Intention and Method, New York: Basic Books. Singer, Mark (2005), ‘The misfit: How David Milch got from NYPD Blue to Deadwood by way of an Epistle of St. Paul’, The New Yorker, 14 and 21 February, pp. 192–205. Six Feet Under, TV series, created by Alan Ball. USA: HBO et al., 2001–5. The Sopranos, TV series, created by David Chase. USA: HBO et al., 1999–2007. The Wire, TV series, created by David Simon. USA: HBO et al., 2002–8.

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19 Media Theory as Narrative Theory: Film Narration as a Case Study Christian Quendler

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edia assume a paradoxical role in narrative theory. While it seems impossible to theorise about narrative without reflecting on a medium of narrative discourse, projections about media into narrative theory tend to be over-determined by specificities or else generalised into near-invisibility.1 In Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema, Garrett Stewart proposed the term ‘narratography’ as a media-specific research perspective that can complement narratology or general theories of narrative. In contrast to the ‘global, transtextual, intermedial, [and] pansemiotic’ (Stewart 2007: 23) claims of narratology, narratography aims at examining the material and technological grounds that inform narrative acts and inscribe the narration with a medium-specific narrative style or technique. Stewart’s narratographic intervention pursues a historical and a theoretical agenda: on the one hand, it contributes to exploring what cinema is becoming in the course of its digital transformation, joining Sean Cubitt’s (2004) and Lev Manovich’s (2001) foray into theorising digital cinema. On the other hand, Stewart’s plea for a mediaspecific study of film narratives and his emphasis on the medial contingency of style push back against the neo-formalist rejection of medium specificity. If David Bordwell’s narrative theory of film can be understood as an attempt to overcome or move away from medium-specific biases that film narratology had inherited from literary criticism and linguistics, Stewart’s narratography revisits the intermedial heritage of cinematic storytelling. He reads the aesthetic mediations and medial figurations in contemporary narrative films as a reflexive commentary on the shifting borders and boundaries between cinema and new media. In this chapter, I propose a narratographical reading of narrative theories by looking at media theory as narrative theory and examining narrative theories of film as a series of attempts at coming to terms with the medium of film. At the most general level, we may ask how media work on us as deep-seated models for narrative paradigms. A general narrative theory – a narratology – bears the traces of the specific medium that has generated the narrative terms. Projecting or mapping that medium specificity onto a general narratology often means ruling out (or re-mapping downwards) other media in their own narrativity. Narrative theories of literature, for example, developed to a large extent along the medial difference between oral and written communication and frequently invoked oral scenarios as archetypal storytelling situations. What is at stake when the narrativity of one medium is described in the terms of another one through the generalities

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of a ‘narrative theory’? What are the ramifications of describing film narrative with reference to the presence of face-to-face communicative exchanges? How do assumptions about such a ‘generalised’ medium affect a narrative theory? How do notions of medium-specificity narrow or open up ways of thinking about storytelling? For example, in film studies, the mechanical automatism of the camera has inspired a wide range of new narrative agents that are said to align the indiscriminate gaze of the camera with unconscious human desires or to make of the camera an instrument of objectivity that vouchsafes a transparent view of the world. At practical and analytical levels, we could ask: in what ways does the film medium surface as general figures of narration? How do such figurative and metaphoric uses of film relate to abstract models of narrative and types of narration? How are these models then mapped onto other media? My historical sketch will focus on narrative theories of film that emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was an extremely productive and equally critical period for film narratology. It was deeply invested in issues of media specificities and critical of the hegemonic status of literary and linguistic models while remaining committed to a unified theory of narrative to cover all media. Yet, this period was also marked by, above all, two critical interventions that challenged universalist paradigms and grand theoretical models of film reception: feminist film scholars, such as Laura Mulvey, Anne Friedberg, Mary Ann Doane, E. Ann Kaplan, Constance Penley, Miriam Hansen, and Kaja Silverman, explored actual sociocultural forces involving gender, class, and ethnicity in the construction of spectatorship (see, e.g., Williams 1995). This new cultural criticism in film studies was paralleled and inspired by a historicist revival that discovered in early cinema and archival research a conceptual basis for theorising about film and its narratives. By revisiting earlier film narratological approaches, I do not seek a comprehensive background that places current approaches in a favourable light. I rather aim to trace a possible conversation in the history of narrative film theory about the intricate relation between medium and narrative. Even though some of the tenets proposed by scholars have been refuted or have lost their academic currency, the issues addressed remain vital. Recasting the history of narrative film theory as a constructive dialogue will inevitably elide the polemics that orchestrated these debates and perhaps exaggerate commonalities among positions. Nonetheless, I believe that within a historical framework of media and narrative theory one can discover the contours of a theory that is critical of notions of medium specificity and sceptical about objective universal claims. Further, a theory emerges that prefers figurative and embodied thinking over the abstract models of a general narratology and that is responsive to historical assumptions, social values, and practices that mark the confines of the medium of film. I will begin with an introductory outline of different positions taken by film scholars such as Sarah Kozloff, Tom Gunning, André Gaudreault, and David Bordwell on some of the universal claims of narrative theory and the issue of medium specificity. The first part of my argument addresses the intricate role media play in modelling a comprehensive narrative ‘theory’. Theoretical models are not merely simplifications or abstractions of situations, they also often imply transformations and metaphoric projections in terms of which a situation is to be seen. Since narrative situations are typically described as oral or written verbal exchanges, I will examine the implications of two influential modifications of filmic storytelling scenarios: Gunning’s narrator

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system that works on behalf of an absent narrator and Robert Burgoyne’s impersonal narrator that is founded on the functional rationality of the cinematic apparatus. Both approaches are offered partly in response to David Bordwell’s categorical rejection of the ‘narrator’ as a theoretical concept in film narrative. The second part expands on the notion of impersonality by examining Edward Branigan’s cognitive theory of film narration and his pleading for modular or connected frameworks of narrative and media theory. If coming to terms with the medium of film narratives means coming to terms with the narrative situations films create, then the narrative figures that emerge from the very intersection of the filmic medium and its narrative forms should be a key concern of both narrative theory and analysis. I will conclude by advocating a theory whose modelling of narrative comprehension is imbued with and opens toward historical and technological developments.

Unified Theories and Media Specificity The 1980s and early 1990s generated enormous interest in narrative theories of cinema. A wide range of historical, rhetorical, semiotic, and cognitive approaches to studying narrative fiction film set the cornerstones for future debates, many of which are still ongoing. Following Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978), many scholars explored narrative dimensions of film against literary models. In 1983, Brian Henderson’s ‘Tense, Mood, and Voice in Film’ carefully sifted through Gérard Genette’s narrative theorems to test their applicability for narrative films. A few years later, Sarah Kozloff’s Invisible Storytellers (1988) offered some important revisions of Henderson’s appraisal. Tom Gunning, for his groundbreaking study on D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (1991), took Genette’s framework more or less for granted. André Gaudreault, in Du littéraire au filmique (1988), offered a semiological account of film narration based on theatrical and literary models. David Bordwell and Edward Branigan presented cognitive approaches to films outside of literary and linguistic frameworks (see Bordwell 1985; Branigan 1984, 1992). Despite their methodological differences, many of these ventures in film narratology shared the goal of developing a theoretical framework that was not inflected by literary or linguistic models and that was specific to the cinematic experience. For Gunning, the double nature of storytelling as both universal and media-specific appears to be self-evident. While the construction of a ‘story’ is a universal and transmedial phenomenon, the mediation or actual ‘telling’ of the story is media-specific and contingent on historical, industrial, and aesthetic practices (Gunning 1991: 16). In her introduction to Invisible Storytellers, Kozloff argues that although narrative theorists such as Wayne Booth, Robert Scholes, Robert Kellogg, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette claim that their narrative models are applicable across all media, this claim remains to be verified. She states: ‘By applying “literary” narrative theory to film, I hope both to further our understanding of cinematic narrative’s specific characteristics and to test the universality of several key tenets of contemporary critical lore’ (1988: 2). Her study was particularly successful in revising a persistent prejudice that considered voice-over narration a ‘literary device’ that detracts from cinema’s own aesthetic potential (see, e.g., Henderson 1983: 16–17). Instead of viewing it as the monolithic

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influence of the novel, Kozloff demonstrates how voice-over narration draws on a wide range of diverse practices including theatre, television, and other writing and voice-recording technologies such as letters, diaries, and memos. A historical theory of intermediality is also at the heart of André Gaudreault’s approach to film narration, which combines mimetic and diegetic theories of narrative. In these theories, the narrative mode of showing or telling becomes a model for defining narration. Thus, narration may be understood in terms of the performative or theatrical act of presenting a spectacle, or it may be conceived of as a linguistic or literary act of communication (see Bordwell 1985: 3–26). For Gaudreault, cinema meshes theatrical and literary traditions of storytelling by associating the camera with a system of display or ‘monstration’ (mimesis) on the one hand and with editing as a technique of ‘narration’ (diegesis) on the other. He regards theatricality and literariness as each being a ‘cultural series’ or intermedial trajectory that has dominated different periods and aesthetic traditions in film history.2 While theatrical frames shaped early cinema, the rise of Hollywood cinema aligns more closely with literary frames of narration. In an afterword, written ten years after the original publication of Du littéraire au filmique (1988), Gaudreault adds an open ending to his film theory by raising the question of ‘filmicality’ – the specificity of cinematic narration apart from theatrical and literary frames – only to defer its answer: ‘This is a question I will attempt to answer in a later book. It is a question that is, therefore, . . . TO BE CONTINUED . . .’ (Gaudreault 2009: 206).3 If we read Gaudreault’s deferral as programmatic, then media specificity should not be understood in typological or ontological terms but as shaped by a historical process of intermedial differentiation. The specificity or uniqueness of film may thus be best understood as a potential that is historically and culturally contingent on the media landscape. Robert Burgoyne employs Gaudreault’s historical and intermedial theory of film narration as the basis for a new ‘unified theory of narrative, applicable to all narrative forms’ (Burgoyne 1990: 14). His contribution to film narratology not only illustrates a persistent need to generalise and typify, it also shows how the media of (universal) narrative models are themselves relative to currents in dominant media practices and theorising. Whereas Kozloff is interested in modifying the universal claims of narrative theory grounded in literary models, Burgoyne aims to project film narration as a model against which other media narratives may be gauged: ‘we should seek to link the striking characteristics of filmic narration, which are specified by Gaudreault, to other narrative forms’ (1990: 14). If Gaudreault and Burgoyne propose narrative theories that build upon media specificity as a dynamic and historical process of intermedial differentiation, David Bordwell’s intervention in film theory pursues a path that seems to head in the opposite direction. His narrative theory is perhaps the most outspoken one about literary and linguistic biases in that he strongly criticises the notion of narrative voice as simply an anthropomorphic fiction. Instead of viewing film narrative as the syncretic product of theatrical and literary narration, Bordwell rejects both mimetic and diegetic theories of narrative in order to propose a cognitive model that explores how formal and stylistic properties of film drive the spectator’s narrative comprehension. Information and its distribution are the heart of his narration model, which draws on Meir Sternberg’s parameters of knowledge, communicativeness, and self-consciousness. For Bordwell,

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narrative analysis is guided by three basic questions: how much do viewers know at any given moment about the storyworld in its range and depth? How much of what is known about the story is actually communicated to the viewer? To what degree are the formal processes that convey information acknowledged? In its primary focus on information, Bordwell’s model remains sufficiently abstract to avoid a linguistic or literary bias as well as overtones of anthropomorphism. In fact, since narration is essentially a formal activity, his framework lends itself to analysing narratives across all media.

Narrative Media and Models of Narrative The abstract and media-unspecific nature of Bordwell’s theory relegates questions of the medium to the domain of representational practices and stylistics (see Bordwell 1997: 12–45). I would like to bracket for a moment the question of whether the exclusion of media-specific issues is a loss or gain for film theory and whether Bordwell’s abstract model of narrative comprehension is at odds with a perceiver’s actual experiences (see, e.g., Stewart 1999: 1–25; also Gunning 1991: 24). Instead, I wish to examine more closely the relationship between narrative models and conceptions of media. How does the inclusion or exclusion of media-specific issues affect the design of a narrative theory? The choice of a narrative model often provides a basic description of the medium. A narrative theory that presupposes a narrator projects a personalised vision of the medium. Similarly, narrative theories that are based on a model of communication attribute a default communicative function to the medium. Bordwell not only discards the notion of a narrator, he also rejects the communication model favoured by Chatman. If we read Bordwell’s narrative theory for its implied media conception of film, we may relate the high level of abstraction to the prolific functions that media perform and the concomitant difficulty of defining media. Put simply, an informational model of narrative suggests that narrative manifests itself only as formal or stylistic configuration. Bordwell’s criticism of the narrator as ‘an anthropomorphic fiction’ (Bordwell 1985: 62) needs to be supplemented by an appraisal of the functions and uses of media in triggering narrative acts and in (re-)constructing narrative situations. A model functions very much like a medium: it stores partial or general descriptions of situations in schematic form. As an illustration, consider the powerful role oral storytelling situations or face-to-face communication played in literary theories before being replaced by more abstract models of communication and information. Oral storytelling was considered a prototypical form and starting point for narrative theory.4 The co-presence of storyteller and audience was often invoked as a heuristic ideal in the light of which media, rhetorical, and cognitive dimensions were analysed. As Scholes and Kellogg argued in The Nature of Narrative (1966), written narratives afford forms of narratorial irony and unreliability that are not available to oral storytellers. Similarly, Walter J. Ong maintained that written communication and print allow for ‘various fictionalizations and decontextualizations of the writer and reader’ (Ong 1982: 148). For Wolfgang Iser (1978), the medial difference between oral and written communication becomes a theoretical model for literary hermeneutics. The absence of the author sets off a dynamic interaction between the text and reader

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that fills this gap. Accordingly, readers engage with the text as a partial record of discourse whose disconnection from an original context opens up a new horizon for meanings. Texts become traces that reveal the presence of an absence. While the act of reading may not hope to fully recover an original meaning, it can discover new meanings through a reflexive encounter with the text as an aesthetic experience. For Roland Barthes, this absence, or what he famously dubbed the ‘death of the author’, announced in decisive terms the ‘birth of the reader’ (Barthes 1977: 148). In these examples, face-to-face communication serves as a frame of reference to describe a specific, textually mediated situation. The absence of an author, narrator, or orator becomes a negative metaphor in the light of which meaning is variously located at (1) the origin of production (intention), (2) the possibility of a media-induced irony (rhetoric), or (3) a specific institutional mode of experience (reception). I now wish to discuss two critical responses to Bordwell’s rejection of authors and narrators in film narratives. I am less concerned with making a case for the filmic narrator than with examining how Gunning’s and Burgoyne’s reflections on film narration probe the virtue of film as a specific narrative medium.

Tom Gunning’s Narrator System In the introductory chapter to D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, Gunning postulates a filmic narrator in the three senses listed above: the origin of narrative meaning, a system of formal techniques, and an institutional mode of reception. Gunning adopts Genette’s narrative theory within a general framework of film semiology. Parallel to signifier and signified, filmic images are said to make up the narrative discourse that conveys the story. Similarly, the act of narrating can be compared to the process of generating signification. Yet, in contrast to an idealised act of narrating a narrative in oral storytelling scenarios, filmic and literary storytelling can only be reconstructed from a textual fact. The act of narrating, as Gunning puts it, ‘is dependent on the traces of telling that exist in the text’ (1991: 15). In other words, the objective of this theory is to look for slight or implicit ‘traces’ as opposed to Bordwell’s objective of processing ‘cues’ on the screen. Gunning’s narrative theory is grounded in a semiotics of production in which the narrative discourse refers back to a narrator as an original context and a specific mode of (historical) production.5 For Gunning this personalisation of narration underscores the intentional dimension – the purposive design – of films and ‘the way they function within history and society’ (1991: 23). Since the manipulations of a filmic discourse ‘reveal the hand of the narrator’ (1991: 21), this discourse can be seen to embody the narrator in the negative metaphorical sense described above: Because film’s narrative discourse represents the actual text of film – its existence as a series of filmic images – no narrative can exist except through its narrative discourse. It logically follows that every narrative film has a filmic narrator embodied by this discourse. (Gunning 1991: 21) The cinematically embodied narrator replaces or works on behalf of the entity that in an oral storytelling mode would be a flesh-and-blood narrator. Much of Gunning’s defence of the narrator depends on an extensive meaning and scope of embodiment. The narrator embodied by the filmic discourse is itself a guise,

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just like an oral narrator may take on various personae and not simply speak on his or her behalf. While filmic embodiment projects (the illusion of) an apparent origin of intentionality, the body of filmic narrator is what Gilles Deleuze (1990) described as a body without organs. Gunning invokes embodiment as a metaphor for media formation. It implies an advanced stage of social and aesthetic consolidation. Moving images convey stories through systemic efforts instead of relying primarily on auxiliary agencies such as a film explainer or spectators’ knowledge of the story. Gunning calls this vicarious agency the ‘narrator system’. More specifically, the system comprises staging, framing, and editing strategies that narrativise the filmic discourse, endowing it with the narrative aspects that Genette (1990) refers to as tense, mood, and voice. Editing techniques and camera movements can create complex temporal relationships between shots, integrating them into a narrative network of actions and events. The narrator system also shapes the narrative mood that filters the spectator’s relationship to the storyworld. Framing and editing techniques allow viewers to experience the range and depth of a story world from different perspectives. Finally, the narrator system generates a unified intentional scope that situates the movie within a communicative frame. It is important, however, to see this effect of a unified intentionality as a collaborative effort of both the narrator system and the spectator’s interpretative strategies.6 Gunning acknowledges this duality by studying Griffith’s development of narrative strategies in conjunction with the promotional discourse that invented the film director as a social and historical figure of intentionality. In sum, Gunning’s narrator may be described as a function of film activated by a system of formal relationships; it is narration through the proxy of the filmic medium. The narrator system is an ‘apparatus’ that is highly charged with overtones of personality in symptomatic and productive ways. The narrative discourse bears the ‘traces’ (which also include indirect evidence such as gaps, elisions, fractures or structuring absences) of a narrator who springs from an author while producing an image of authorship. Gunning’s narrator is a ‘negative image’ that is reconstructed by a spectator on the basis of stylistic ‘choices made within and among the three levels of filmic discourse (e.g., expressionist set design, high angle of camera, and match cutting)’ (Gunning 1991: 21).

Robert Burgoyne’s Impersonal Narrator If Gunning’s ‘absent narrator’ emerges ex negativo as a figuration of the filmic discourse and the sociocultural functions of cinema as a mass communicative medium, Robert Burgoyne proposes a positive description of the filmic narrator. Like Gunning, Burgoyne responds in part to Bordwell’s rejection of a filmic narrator as an anthropomorphic fiction. He defends a theory of the cinematic narrator along Marie-Laure Ryan’s pragmatic definition of impersonal narration (see Ryan 1981). Put simply, impersonal narration conceptualises narrative agents that do not fit in a personal frame or person schema as they show, for example, traits of an omniscient narrator or else traits of subhuman or mechanical features of a camera recording.7 Like Gunning’s and Gaudreault’s narrators, Burgoyne’s cinematic narrator is a construct, a one-dimensional being whose sole purpose is to narrate a story: ‘This type of narrator is totally deprived of individuating, human characteristics, resulting in a text that also appears to be freed from the speech act’ (Burgoyne 1990: 5). Impersonal narration is characterised by two basic features: ‘world-creation’ and ‘world-reflection’. Impersonal narration not only creates a world,

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it – somewhat paradoxically – relates to this creation as if it were an autonomous existence. By contrast, personal narrators cannot create worlds but merely report on them. Impersonal narration thus relies on a creationist or constructivist rather than a communicative model; it postulates a world in an authoritative way that endows the narrative discourse with a sense of transparency and reliability. As Burgoyne contends, the narrative discourse of fiction film ‘is primarily read as the facts of the fictional world, and only secondarily as a formal pattern of images and sounds’ (1990: 7). Mapped onto an impersonal regime of articulation, there is presumably no way to question the authority of impersonal narrators. They always seem to appear reliable. For Burgoyne, impersonal narration proves that the concept of a narrator is fundamental to film narratives. He posits the impersonal narrator as an intermediary agent that reconciles the twofold nature of cinema as a social practice of mass communication and medium of private intuition that allows us to vicariously experience fictional worlds. The cinematic narrator is a ‘fictional instance of emission, [. . .] an agent who is bound by the fictional contract to convey the facts of the fictional universe’ (Burgoyne 1990: 15). Although Burgoyne is mainly concerned with a logical and pragmatic solution to the vexed narrator debate, his recourse to an impersonal narrator, upon whom ‘the truth and authenticity of the fictional universe’ depends, has important implication for understanding the cinematic apparatus as a mechanical yet social agent guiding the narrative comprehension of film (1990: 15). While the cinematic narrator is characterised by a degree of rationality, his, her, or its mode of being is distinct from being personal in a psychological sense. Intentionality is reduced to a minimal level of social functionalism or instrumentalism. Founded in the mechanism of a machine, filmic narration is endowed with a sense of objectivity and reliability. The cinematic apparatus is thus a world-creating machine in a quasi-scientific sense. It creates independent worlds as if they were objective or rather social facts.8 Reviewing world-creation and world-reflection in a film-specific context, Burgoyne maps these two facets of the impersonal narrator onto Gaudreault’s distinction of monstration (mimesis, showing) and narration (diegesis, telling). Monstration creates the simulacrum of the present time. The filmic medium in such acts of showing operates like a recorder that captures a scene of continuous time. Narration, which Burgoyne associates with the postfilmic viewing situation, introduces a temporal distance that marks a ‘gap between the time of the event and the time of the telling’ (1990: 14). According to Burgoyne, this temporal distance affords the narrator – and, we may add, the spectator – a moment of reflection, a new evaluative stance to the world created. Hence, minimally defined as a synthesis of record and replay, the filmic medium allows us to participate in an alternative reality in an imaginary and well-informed way. In filmic narratives, we vicariously experience this reality as a simulated present tense while benefiting at the same time from retrospective insights and moral reflections.9 This rather classical conception of cinema aims at exploring new forms of interpolated narration (see Genette 1990: 216–23), where the time of narration and storytime are put into close proximity or even seem to fuse. Since impersonal narration is essentially an instrumental construct, its limits are defined by its serviceability. Accordingly, the virtue of the medium is its reliability, on the one hand, and its limited liability, on the other. While the cinematic apparatus can be used for calculated rhetorical effects such as irony and suspense, it cannot be

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accused of ‘lies’ that are necessary for narrative effects. Or, put simply, faulty machines point to human designs. In The Wizard of Oz (Fleming and Cukor 1939), the exposure of the Wizard as a machine operated by a humbug challenges Dorothy’s belief in magic, but it does not affect the integrity of the cinematic narrator that follows Dorothy’s journey from rural Kansas to the magic land of Oz. A different case is the conspicuous collusion between the impersonal cinematic narrator and the unreliable character-narrator in Fight Club (Fincher 1999). The viewer is led to interpret the narrator’s hallucinatory flashbacks as reality until the character-narrator’s dissociative personality disorder is revealed, reframing the flashbacks as forged by the narrator’s alter ego Tyler, a part-time projectionist with a penchant for splicing subliminal images into films. Thus, Tyler, who has already been introduced as an invisible construction, becomes an emblem for impersonal narration. He is, as it were, a personalised impersonal narrator, whose narration is reliable since there is nothing ‘false’ about the subliminal images among the other images. Burgoyne emphasises the benefits of his model for analysing unreliable narration in film. Mind-tricking films such as Fight Club also highlight the interfacing of personal and impersonal agents that alternatively frame movies as mindscreens or windows to the world (see especially Kawin 1978; Friedberg 2006). In adopting impersonal narration for a narrative theory of film, Burgoyne charges the impersonal narrator with cultural and technological presumptions about film. He addresses the filmic medium as a compound where narrative aspects are synthesised in new ways. The same is true of his theoretical framework, which conjoins logical and historical approaches.

Film’s Impersonal Forms of Life Even though Burgoyne positions his conception of the cinematic narrator in opposition to Branigan’s viewer-centred theory of narration, their approaches share an interest in impersonal subjects. To reflect on film as a social medium means to explore its impersonal mode. Yet, impersonality is an elusive term. Whereas Burgoyne regards impersonal narration as a universal type, Branigan rejects this idea of the impersonal as a universal form. For him, the impersonal is a general form that ‘is relative to “a set of readings” produced through the discourse of a particular community, that is, relative to the dimensions of a specialized use of language’ (Branigan 2006: 3). Branigan builds on Roland Barthes’s famous claim that it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the [. . .] objectivity of the author of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’. (Barthes 1977: 143) Branigan warns against associating impersonality with objectivity. Like Barthes, he regards ‘objectivity’ as a scheme of authority, a strategy that conceals the author. In this sense, Burgoyne’s impersonal narrator is yet another hypostasis or mask of the author that – using a technological rather than an anthropomorphic guise – serves as an identifiable agent that infuses the film with a sense of meaning and unity. The same holds true for the receiving end: the impersonal mode of media affects the reader’s or viewer’s

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individuality. The effacement of the author as the origin of the text’s meaning corresponds to an impersonal reader – a ‘someone’ who shares the norms and conventions of language and media use.10 In other words, impersonality is a truly intersubjective mode that depends on shared knowledge and common intelligibility. Or, as Branigan puts it, impersonality has to do with the commonness and intelligibility of the knowledge being expressed. What is expressed is not due to an Author or Camera, but is the result of a person speaking about his or her knowledge and feelings on an occasion of reading or seeing. (Branigan 2006: 5) Instead of identifying or postulating a narrating agent, Branigan focuses on the process of identification itself. He resolves the vexed discussion of the filmic narrator by turning this discredited ‘anthropomorphic fiction’ into a legitimate description of the spectator’s viewing hypotheses. In other words, he reframes narrative analysis into a meta-theoretical inquiry that examines the relationship between the viewer’s interpretations and the conditions within a community of discourse that makes them possible. In Narrative Comprehension and Film (1992), Branigan draws on Susan Lanser’s system of textual personae. However, rather than viewing figures such as the historical author, narrator, character, or focaliser within a hierarchical system of delegated narrative functions, Branigan uses these terms as interpretative labels, ways of talking and making descriptions. Viewers apply these terms to map out the narrative discourse; they serve as framings of the epistemological context within which visual and sonic data is to be described and interpreted (see Branigan 1992: 112). On the one hand, they provide shorthand descriptions for a bundle of visual and sonic narrative material; for example, the notion of an extradiegetic narrator may be activated by camera movements that anticipate action. On the other hand, they mark an interpretive frame within which the narrative discourse is to be analysed and evaluated. A sequence of film may be described as a practice of social communication that critiques, analyses, propagates beliefs, or acts as a means of aesthetic contemplation, philosophical reflection, personal distraction, and so on.11 If Narrative Comprehension and Film explores how spectators process film narratives in anthropomorphic terms, Branigan’s more recent work Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory (2006) complements this approach by sifting through the technological imagination that shapes our understanding of film. The camera, Branigan argues, is not a given but a linguistic construct, whose meaning depends on the sense shared by an interpretive community.12 He illustrates this point by revisiting eight major conceptions of the camera in the history of film theory. His outline of camera conceptions follows an increasing degree of metaphoricity ranging from technical considerations of the camera to conceptual and psychological senses (see Branigan 2006: 65–96). The notions listed include mechanical and material definitions of the camera as an origin of sensory display or a sensory form of visibility; profilmic and postfilmic senses that invoke the camera as an act of pointing within a narrative scene or as an agent of the postfilmic viewing situation; psychological and psychoanalytical notions of the camera that express mental and bodily states

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or encode mechanisms of the unconscious, as well as communicative and symbolic camera conceptions, which personify the camera as a narrating instance or a semantic label for a viewing hypothesis. Branigan demonstrates how the different senses in which the term ‘camera’ is used are constrained by different film-theoretical language games, which in turn characterise specific folk psychological interpretive games. A specific theoretical frame circumscribes a mode in which a camera comes into existence for the spectator as an impersonal subject, as a spectre. Or, to use another phrase borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein, each film-theoretical approach points to a different form of life in which a particular sort of camera is constructed as a participant. Anthropomorphic descriptions of media and technological conceptions of narration complement one another as we come to terms with the sensual, formal, emotional, aesthetic, and conceptual qualities of a stream of images and sounds. They outline different horizons for understanding film as a medium, a form of expression, as narrative discourse, a point of view, a judgemental norm or evaluation, and as a means of framing space, time, and movement. Branigan’s narrative theory and his theory of film amount to modular or connected frameworks arising from community discourses rather than monolithic or unified theoretical models: the complex parts of a film theory should not be understood as composed of simpler and simpler constituents as if they could be dissected and arranged into a hierarchy – as if to explain film were a matter of penetrating a surface to discover the most basic and essential elements; instead, the parts of a film theory should be seen as spreading outward in ever-wider lines and curves, connecting and jumping to parts in new systems to make a network or heterarchy. (Branigan 2006: 20; see also 1992: 156–60) Narrative theory and analysis should aim at mapping out both narrative discourse and our discourses about narrative. In a similar way, we can think of mapping media as a language game that explores the impersonal mode of media; it probes, outlines, and negotiates (new) forms of intersubjectivity as the common ground of the personal that can be shared among community members. Narrative theory as media theory in this sense becomes a reflexive inquiry into the naming of media effects: ‘how we see objects under descriptions and how interpretations are made’ (Branigan 2006: 21). Naming media effects and fashioning concepts is a symptomatic and generative process: new technologies and media uses create new sensibilities and forms of experiences. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994: 193) refer to a ‘compound of sensations’ that calls for associated conceptual composites and metaphors in our interpretive activities.13 The conceptual compounds or blends in the narrative theories presented illustrate this compositional process.14 Gunning’s absent narrator is one such metaphor that views film narration against the literary frame of an oral narrative exchange. Absence in this context is a relation that replaces the narrator by a system. Gaudreault specifies this functional reduction of the narrator as an intermedial collaboration of literary narrators and theatrical monstrators. Burgoyne accepts this intermedial composite form of narration as a default description of the cinematic narrator. In fact, Burgoyne’s impersonal cinematic narrator can be read as a synthesis of a series of

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abstractions that include Gunning’s narrator system and Gaudreault’s intermedial syncretism. A given narrative model emphasises a specific dimension that is important for understanding the impersonal mode of film. Gunning’s narrator system is particularly concerned with the intersection of industrial and aesthetic modes of production and reception. Gaudreault’s model examines how dominant artistic practices have shaped film narration. Bordwell focuses on the cognitive and affective dispositions triggered by formal cues, while Burgoyne seeks to typify an impersonal narrator as a cinematic figure of narration. Branigan’s insistence on the impersonal as a general rather than a universal form serves as an important reminder that abstract theoretical models are themselves often ‘metaphorical projections or displacements based on bodily experiences, embodied concepts, heuristics, scenarios, and image schemata’ (Branigan 2006: 20).

Narrative Figures of Film and Theory The figures emerging from narrative discourse are deeply enmeshed with the historical and cultural assumptions about artforms and media. The technological extension of what can be made to be present for us, as well as narrativised by us, challenges narrative theory to update its rhetorical figures and the unstated principles of its generalisations. There is a long tradition in film theory that is committed to such mapping and figuring of narrative discourse, a history that spans the early work of Ricciotto Canudo, Jean Epstein, and Sergei Eisenstein to the film-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and more recent inquiries into the narrative modalities of moving images. It is important to view such maps and figures not as imperialistic, but rather as explorative gestures, acts of identifying as much as othering. Most attempts at defining the specificity of the filmic medium (including Gaudreault’s) have resorted to a differential matrix describing film as ‘other than’ or as a ‘mix of’ specific media and artforms. However, what qualifies as otherness is itself relative to the cultural consensus of a historical situation. While in classical Hollywood cinema voice-over narration was often regarded as a literary device from which cinematic visual narration should emancipate, its literary variant interior monologue was soon invoked as a cinematic figure. For classical film theorist Béla Balázs, the close-up represented such an instance: the film has brought us the silent soliloquy, in which a face can speak with the subtlest shades of meaning without appearing unnatural and arousing the distaste of the spectators. In this silent monologue the solitary human soul can find a tongue more candid and uninhibited than in any spoken soliloquy, for it speaks instinctively, subconsciously. (Balázs 1970: 62–3) Balázs’s description of the close-up exceeds the expressive scope of interior speech as a literary device. It is rather a stream of non-conscious thought that speaks from beyond the traditional confines of personhood, revealing the ‘solitary human soul’. His metaphorical projection redefines not only interior monologue as a mode of representation but also shows how such a theoretical mapping, intermedial blending, and figure bending can change our understanding of both film and what is human.

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In his philosophy of film, Gilles Deleuze elaborates on this relation between moving images and movements of the mind. For him, internal monologue describes a figuration of the time-image that is characterised by a particular circuit or ‘unity of the author, the character and the world’ (1986: 183; see also 173). When placed in a spectrum of filmic/mental movements, which Deleuze presents in loosely historical developments of film style, the internal monologue falls between the notions of cinema as dream and cinema as thought. Cinema as dream gives us a highly individual vision of what normally lies at the threshold of consciousness and outside the realm of social communication, yet well within the circuit of tacit and unconscious sociality of inarticulate worries, secretive scheming, forbidden longing, and so on. The magic of this kind of cinema allows us to participate in someone else’s dream. By contrast, cinema as a mode of thinking dissolves the outlines of individuality, following the impersonal lines of discursive networks. Internal monologue retains elements of both dreaming and thinking, exploring new congruencies between what is individually personal and intersubjectively impersonal. Balázs’s and Deleuze’s descriptions of the filmic image as movements of the soul or the mind underscore the extended dimension of cognition and its distribution across mind and media (see Clark 1997; Noë 2004). Theorising about film narrations implies thinking with film as a narrative form and instrument as well as developing concepts about new media practices. If the goal of narrative theory is to conceptualise narrative figures of contemporary discourse, then such a theory will be generative and evolving. As I have tried to show, historical developments in narrative theories of film may indeed be compared to an evolutionary process of forming, mapping, and matching. Narrative theory can help us to navigate new narrative situations created by innovative media practices. In doing so, it will probe the affective, formal, and conceptual dimensions of our engagement with media. The heuristics of narrative theory to ‘explain away’ the manifestations of narrative discourse may be described as recurrent and probabilistic (see Clark 2013). In conceptualising narrative experiences of film, narrative theory poses an explanatory model for the hidden causes of this experience. Such a theory-laden perception follows Helmholtz’s paradigm of inferring (sensory) causes on the basis of (bodily) effects. Theory in this sense guides or preconceives what is to be perceived on the basis of a theoretical model or a working hypothesis. The relationship between narrative theory and media is perhaps most intricate at this dynamic intersection of conceptual and perceptual levels. Media afford models of narrative comprehension. As I have tried to show, differences in narrative models reflect different conceptions of media as well as different hypotheses about the hidden causes of narrativity. However, such high-level conceptual models also need to be seen in conjunction with subpersonal processes that relate to the biology of consciousness (see Noë 2004, 2009). Media at this level provide us with percepts, which in matching sensory data and real-world sources enact the most basic meaningful relations between mind, body, and environment. Theorising about narrative implicitly or explicitly relates to this twofold affordance of media as conceptual models and perceptual relations. Narrative theories of film have traditionally drawn on media and artforms that have preceded the invention of cinema, yet the inquiry into narrative aspects of film continues to be explored and measured against the conceptual and perceptual horizons opened by new practices of new and old media (see, e.g., Jenkins 2006; Buckland 2009; Shaviro 2010).

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Notes 1. On various forms of media blindness in narrative theories, see Marie-Laure Ryan’s introduction to Narrative Across Media (2004). 2. Gaudreault appropriates Louis Francoeur’s notion of ‘cultural series’ to describe mediaspecific and artform-specific trajectories (such as theatricality, literariness) that inform and shape the development of cinema (see Gaudreault 2009: 151–64). 3. In a footnote Gaudreault adds: ‘One day we will have to define such a term [i.e. filmicality] in a way that takes into account how narration effects monstration, thereby avoiding, as Paul Ricoeur suggests in the Preface of this book, “any subordination of the filmic to the literary”, so that we may one day definitely pass from the literary to the filmic’ (Gaudreault 2009: 206). 4. This paradigm can be traced throughout the history of narrative theory, from Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (1966) to Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996). 5. Like Gaudreault, Gunning views the narrative discourse of film evolving along three levels: the mise-en-scène or the staging of a profilmic event; the mise-en-cadre or cinematography; and the editing process, sometimes also referred to as mise-en-chain (1991: 18–22). 6. Gunning follows Paul Ricoeur’s observation that ‘the reader does not ascribe this unification to the rules of composition alone, but extends it to the choices and to the norms that make the text, precisely, the work of some speaker, hence a work produced by someone and not by nature’ (Gunning 1990: 25; Ricoeur 1988: 161). 7. For an examination of what we require from ‘personhood’, see Smith (1995). 8. On the notion of narratorial authority of filmic enunciators, see also Casetti (1986). 9. Branigan has described this narrative experience of an event as if we had been there as a subjunctive conditional mood (see Branigan 1992: 95, 165–6). This narrative mode is often associated with classical cinema. It can be aligned productively with Bazinian cinematic realism, in which deep focus and lateral depth of a field of vision recreate both the effect of an unobtrusive reality and the typical parameters of human perceptions. 10. See Barthes (1977: 148): ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet, this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography and psychology; he is simply someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.’ 11. Narrating instances are theoretical entities, that is, heuristic constructs that describe the terms in which an image is perceived. Manfred Jahn’s (2003) suggestion to assume a ‘neutral’ theoretical agency called ‘filmic composition device’ has little heuristic value. By contrast, the interpretive framing ‘narrator’ links my epistemological stance of perception to formal cues of the image while the theoretical construct ‘filmic composition device’ merely states that I am watching a movie. 12. On the notion of the camera as epistemological metaphor that places the spectator in relation to the fictional world, see Wilson (2011). 13. Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘If there is progress in art it is because art can live only by creating new percepts and affects as so many detours, returns, dividing lines, changes of level and scale’ (1994: 193). While art is the domain of sensations that pass through the material, philosophy is the domain where these sensations are conceptualised. 14. On blending as a compositional process of theorising about film, see Quendler (2014).

Works Cited Balázs, Béla (1970), Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, New York: Dover Publications. Barthes, Roland (1977), Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang. Bordwell, David (1985), Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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— (1997), On the History of Film Style, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Branigan, Edward (1984), Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film, New York: Mouton. — (1992), Narrative Comprehension and Film, New York: Routledge. — (2006), Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory, London: Routledge. Buckland, Warren (ed.) (2009), Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies, New York: Routledge. Burgoyne, Robert (1990), ‘The cinematic narrator: The logic and pragmatics of impersonal narration’, Journal of Film and Video, 42: 1, 3–16. Casetti, Francesco (1986), ‘Antonioni and Hitchcock: Two strategies of narrative investment’, SubStance, 15: 3, 69–86. Chatman, Seymour (1978), Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Clark, Andy (1997), Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — (2013), ‘Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science’, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36: 3, 181–204. Cubitt, Sean (2004), The Cinema Effect, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1986), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. — (1990), The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press. — and Félix Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Fight Club, film, directed by David Fincher. USA: Fox 2000 Pictures et al., 1999. Fludernik, Monika (1996), Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London: Routledge. Friedberg, Anne (2006), The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gaudreault, André (1988), Du littéraire au filmique. Système du récit, Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck. — (2009), From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Genette, Gérard (1990), Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gunning, Tom (1991), D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Henderson, Brian (1983), ‘Tense, mood, and voice in film: After Genette’, Film Quarterly, 36: 4, 4–17. Iser, Wolfgang (1978), The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jahn, Manfred (2003), ‘A guide to narratological film analysis’, in Poems, Plays, and Prose: A Guide to the Theory of Literary Genres, English Department, University of Cologne, (last accessed 3 November 2017). Jenkins, Henry (2006), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press. Kawin, Bruce F. (1978), Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kozloff, Sarah (1988), Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film, Berkeley: University of California Press. Manovich, Lev (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Noë, Alva (2004), Action in Perception, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — (2009), Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, New York: Hill and Wang.

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Ong, Walter J. (1982), Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Methuen. Quendler, Christian (2014), ‘Blending and film theory’, in Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland (eds), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, New York: Routledge, pp. 69–74. Ricoeur, Paul (1988), Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure (1981), ‘The pragmatics of personal and impersonal fiction’, Poetics, 10: 6, 517–39. — (2004), ‘Introduction’, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 1–40. Scholes, Robert and Robert L. Kellogg (1966), The Nature of Narrative, New York: Oxford University Press. Shaviro, Steven (2010), Post Cinematic Affect, Winchester: Zero Books. Smith, Murray (1995), Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, Garrett (1999), Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — (2007), Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Wizard of Oz, film, directed by Victor Fleming and George Cukor. USA: Metro-GoldwynMayer, 1939. Williams, Linda (1995), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wilson, George M. (2011), Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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V. Anti-Mimetic Narrative Theories

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20 Digital Fiction and Unnatural Narrative Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin

Introduction

T

his chapter explores ways in which unnatural narrative manifests in digital fiction. We begin by introducing and critiquing the different and partly deviating concepts and definitions of unnatural narrative and propose our own understanding of the term. We analyse two features of digital fiction which we argue have become somewhat conventional unnatural phenomena within that context: narrative contradiction in multilinear hypertext fiction (cf. Bell 2013) and interactional metalepsis (Bell 2016; Ensslin 2011: 11; cf. Kukkonen 2011) in literary games (Ensslin 2014a). The chapter shows that digital fiction allows unnatural narrative to manifest in ways that must be analysed according to the affordances of the medium (cf. Hayles 2004) as well as the wider networked and participatory culture in which they are produced.

What Is Unnatural Narrative? The point of departure for the discipline of unnatural narratology is Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology in which Fludernik defines ‘natural narrative’ as ‘naturally occurring storytelling . . . [that] includes, mainly, spontaneous conversational storytelling’ which ‘cognitively correlate[s] with perceptual parameters of human experience’ (1996: 13, 9). By contrast, ‘non-natural narratives’ are, according to Fludernik, ‘strategies or aspects of discourse that do not have a natural grounding in familiar cognitive parameters or in familiar real-life situations’ (1996: 11). In Fludernik’s dichotomy, the ‘natural’ is based on human experience – or ‘experientiality’ – while the ‘non-natural’ lies beyond or subverts human experience. Needless to say, human experience is highly culture-specific and notions of what is ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ therefore cannot be treated as anthropological universals but only within their specialised societal and cultural environments and paradigms. The concepts of natural and unnatural narration assumed in this chapter are deeply anchored within a Western, Anglo-American tradition. Within the relatively new discipline of unnatural narratology, theorists have subsequently defined ‘unnatural narrative’ according to different parameters. Alber defines the unnatural as narratives that contain ‘physically impossible scenarios and events, that is, impossible by the known laws governing the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones’ (2009: 80). Alber’s account therefore sees both physical and logical impossibilities as the defining feature of unnatural narrative and is thus defined on the basis of narrative structures and devices. Richardson’s definition, however, distinguishes between narratives that ‘seek to reproduce in fiction typical characters and events from the actual world’ (2011: 31; cf. 2006) – what he

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calls ‘mimetic’ narratives – and narratives that do not represent the actual world, which he defines as either ‘anti-mimetic’ or ‘non-mimetic’. As Alber et al. explain, ‘a non-mimetic text (such as a fairy tale) will follow non-realistic conventions; and an anti-mimetic narrative contains events that are clearly and strikingly impossible in the real world’ (2013: 102). The difference between anti- and non-mimetic thus relates to the degree to which they ‘defamiliariz[e] . . . the basic elements of narrative’ (Richardson 2011: 34). According to Richardson, non-mimetic texts, in which he includes fantasy, fairy tales, and science fiction, do not intrinsically qualify as ‘unnatural’ because the ‘mimetic impulse remains constant’ whereas anti-mimetic texts do qualify because the anti-mimetic ‘points out its own constructedness, the artificiality of many of its techniques, and its inherent fictionality’ (2011: 31). For something to qualify as unnatural for Richardson, the techniques used have to be sufficiently un-actual-world-like for the reader to notice them. Nielsen’s (2011) discussion of the unnatural also emphasises the reception of particular narrative techniques for the categorisation of particular texts as opposed to the narrative content only. He distinguishes between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ narratives and ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ narratives. A ‘conventional unnatural’ narrative contains narrative devices such as ‘use of omniscient narration, homogenized thought and speech representation etc’ which are impossible in the actual world but are found in ‘many traditional works of realism’ and are therefore ‘conventionalised over time’ (Nielsen 2011: 85). This differs from ‘unconventional unnatural’ narratives which, in correspondence with Richardson’s anti-mimetic narratives, include ‘experimental fiction [and] postmodernist narratives’ (2011: 85) which also contain scenarios, events or narrative styles that are impossible in the actual world but which have not yet been conventionalised. When relying on cultural shifts in terms of what is generally or widely perceived as conventional versus what is unconventional, there is always the question of who decides. However, Nielsen stresses that ‘there is no doubt that new forms and techniques become conventionalised over time’ (2011: 85). Importantly, while unnatural narratology has paid attention to the relative reception of narrative techniques ‘over time’ (e.g. Alber 2011), the field has not yet paid adequate attention to the way that narrative devices are received and therefore relatively ‘conventionalised’ across media. As we will show below, the context is important for digital fiction because it is produced and received in a non-conventional format for fiction. Importantly, the process of ‘conventionalisation’ differs from that of ‘naturalisation’. In Alber et al. (2010: 131), the authors state that they ‘discriminate between unnatural scenarios and events that have already been conventionalized . . . and events that still strike us as odd, strange, or unusual’ so that while in conventionalised unnatural narrative, the unnaturalness is accepted and unremarkable due to its being a convention of a particular genre or period in literary history, in unconventionalised unnatural narrative the unnaturalness is striking and readers need a means of explaining the unnatural event that does not resort to generic convention. In a later publication, Alber et al. list ‘conventionalisation’ as a form of ‘naturalisation’ (2012: 376–7) and/or ‘explanatory mechanisms of or ways of coming to terms with the unnatural’ (Alber et al 2012: 381 n.5) and the authors distinguish between them on the following basis: we draw a distinction between the process of conventionalization, which denotes the converting of the unnatural ‘into a basic cognitive category’ (Fludernik, ‘Natural Narratology’ 256), and the process of naturalization in the interpretive sense of

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Jonathan Culler [in which he] argues that readers attempt to recuperate inexplicable elements of a text by taking recourse to familiar interpretive patterns. (Alber et al 2012: 378–9) In these two accounts, ‘conventionalisation’ appears to be the integration of the unnatural on the basis of a cultural shift in generic conventions and associated general reader reception – what Fludernik characterises as existing on the ‘institutional level’ (2012: 367) – and ‘naturalisation’ as a process of sense-making by individual readers which must take place when the unnatural cannot be explained as a generic convention. The different definitions of unnatural narrative have not necessarily been reconciled in unnatural narratology with the different theorists explicitly outlining their respective perspectives in both individual and collaborative publications. However, Alber et al. stress that, as unnatural narratologists, they are collectively interested in ‘the various ways in which certain narratives deviate from real-world frames by being highly implausible, impossible, unreal, or insistently fictional’ and that they ‘share a strong urge to interpret these narratives by addressing the question of what they might potentially mean’ (2013: 103; cf. Alber et al. 2010). In this chapter, we present examples of two types of digital fiction ‘that deviate from real-world frames’ and also address the question of ‘what they might potentially mean’. We are, however, also interested in an additional concern that Alber et al. put forward in an earlier publication, which is ‘the consequences that the existence of such narratives may have for the general conception of what a narrative is and what it can do’ (2010: 115). Specifically, we engage with the question of ‘what a narrative is and what it can do’ in a digital context. Rather than ‘unnatural’ in the sense of (more or less) conventionalised physical or biological impossibilities (such as floating islands or speaking animals; cf. Richardson’s ‘non-mimetic’), we focus on logical impossibilities in fiction and the degrees to which they defamiliarise the reading or playing experience (cf. Richardson’s ‘anti-mimetic’). We suggest ways in which the digital context in which these unnatural narratives occur might mean that what are often unnatural, anti-mimetic, and unconventionalised (cf. Nielsen) features in print fiction are often a conventionalised feature of digital fiction (and videogames in particular; see Ensslin 2015). We therefore argue that the conventionalised/unconventionalised distinction offered in Nielsen’s account of the unnatural (cf. Alber et al. 2010) must be seen in relation to specific medial contexts. In particular, we suggest that the affordances of digital media must be considered when analysing unnatural narrative in digital fiction so as to take into account the relative conventionality of particular narrative techniques within that context specifically.

What Is Digital Fiction? Digital fiction is ‘fiction written for and read on a computer screen that pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium’ (Bell et al. 2010). It is fiction whose structure, form, and meaning are dictated by, and in dialogue with, the digital context in which it is produced and received. It includes hypertext fiction, Flash fiction (as well as fiction produced using other digital multimedia software and programming languages, such as QuickTime and JavaScript), interactive fiction (IF), app-fictions for tablets and smartphones, as well as so-called literary videogames, which integrate verbal-narrative art and therefore have to be ‘read’ as well as played (Ensslin 2014a). Digital fictions are text-based

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but also often contain other modes such as sound, image, or film, and readers/players often make choices about their journey through the text either by following links or by responding to textual or visual prompts from the work. It is sometimes because readers/players are involved in the construction of digital fiction narratives and must interact throughout the reading/playing experience that media-specific forms of unnaturalness are facilitated. In the subsequent sections of this chapter we explore two particular forms of unnaturalness as they occur in digital fiction and which rely on the reader’s interactive function in the text: (1) narrative contradictions in hypertext fiction; and (2) metalepsis in literary games.

Narrative Contradiction in Hypertext Fiction The structural attributes that characterise hypertext fictions often facilitate unique narrative devices. Both CD-ROM-based Storyspace hypertext fictions, which have been produced and distributed by Eastgate Systems since the 1980s, and Web-based hypertext fictions, which have existed for as long as the Web, are comprised of fragments of text, known as ‘lexias’, which are connected by hyperlinks. The reader has to choose from hyperlinks to determine which path he or she will follow through the text. While a finite number of hyperlinks exist within a text, thus setting limits as to its structural organisation, readers are ultimately responsible for their journey through the text. They can choose to pursue a scene for as long as the default reading path will allow or they can use the hyperlinks to explore other diversions that interest them. A reader may read a path until he or she can continue no further or may abandon a particular reading path and return to the beginning of the text to choose another. Some readers might flick back and forward through the text, retracing their earlier steps. Readers can therefore navigate the text according to a particular agenda or read in a less considered fashion by randomly following links. Each reader’s experience of the text will vary and, to the extent that he or she can select particular hyperlinks randomly, is somewhat unpredictable. In addition, because each reading usually results in a different configuration of lexias, the same fragments of text can sometimes be read in a number of different orders. Not all hypertext fictions contain narrative contradictions as a result of their hypertextual structure. For example, Lance Olsen and Tim Guthrie’s (2005) 10:01 allows readers to choose their own way through the text by selecting points on a timeline or by navigating by focusing on a particular character. However, their choices do not result in narrative contradictions. Further, while the hypertext structure can facilitate narrative contradiction and/or inconsistencies in hypertext fiction in general, the emergent narratives are not necessarily unnatural. In some hypertexts, narrative inconsistencies can be resolved through further exploration of the text. In others, the multilinear structure is used to house different voices or to present different scenes but the narratives do not contradict one another. Thus, while the hypertext structure can result in unnatural narratives, unnatural narrative is not an inevitable feature within hypertext fiction. However, many hypertext fictions, such as Gavin Inglis’s (2002) Web-based fiction Same Day Test, utilise the affordances of hypertext to produce texts which contain contradictory outcomes and an emergent unnatural narrative. Same Day Test is a firstperson narrative which begins with a telephone call from the protagonist’s ex-lover

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Gabrielle where she discloses that she is HIV-positive. From there, readers must make decisions about the protagonist’s actions including: whether or when he will go to the hospital to be tested, what he will do in-between the test and the result, and whether he will collect the diagnosis. In some reading paths, the protagonist does not go for a test at all; in another, he is too late to collect the results so that the reader is left not knowing the result along with the protagonist. In the paths that lead to test results, a laboratory receipt from the Edinburgh Infirmary NHS Trust shows a positive or negative result. With a very sensitive subject that could easily be trivialised by the flippancy with which readers can make choices, Same Day Test is instead a sensitive and suspenseful narrative in which readers encounter a different version of the story each time they read it. According to Alber’s definition of unnatural narrative, Same Day Test is unnatural because it presents logically irreconcilable scenarios which, according to real world logic, cannot exist concurrently. More specifically, they break the law of noncontradiction which states that A and not A cannot be true at the same time. When this law is applied to the text, a character cannot be both HIV-positive and not HIV-positive or he cannot both go and not go for the HIV test. It is possible to theoretically eliminate the narrative contradictions and thereby reconcile them with real world logic by seeing the whole hypertext as a mass of possibilities with new and discrete storyworlds emerging during each reading. This is a reading strategy that Ryan has identified as being one of ‘several possible modes of rationalization for texts that report contradictory versions of events’ (2006: 668). While she does not engage with unnatural narratology explicitly, Ryan implicitly proposes a typology of ‘naturalization’ for unnatural contradictions in fiction. According to Ryan’s framework, readers of Same Day Test could resort to a ‘virtualization’ strategy in which the world shown by the current branch is the only actual one; the others are just nonactualized possibilities. . . . [A]fter a choice has been made, the branches not chosen become counterfactual and usually disappear from the readers’ minds until they start all over again. (Ryan 2006: 669) This strategy means that the text is seen as a series of individual narratives and the logical impossibility is eradicated. However, while this strategy takes into account the fact that the reader will see the different versions as distinctive versions of the storyworld, this means of modelling the reader’s experience of the text wrongly assumes that readers dismiss their previous experience of a text as they encounter the material for a second or third time. In Same Day Test, the different versions of the narrative are meant to be noticed because the text thematises the way in which we see our everyday decisions having an effect on our fate while also showing that our fates are sometimes inevitable and decided by entities and events that are out of our control. Invoking Alber’s reading strategy in which an ‘unnatural scenario . . . exemplif[ies] . . . particular themes that the narrative addresses’ (2013: 48) thus more accurately accounts for the way in which a reader could make sense of this unnatural event. Like Same Day Test, Storyspace hypertext Patchwork Girl; Or, a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley, & Herself (1995) by Shelley Jackson contains a narrative contradiction, but it is more subtly interwoven than those found within Inglis’s text and thus readers cannot resort to the same reading strategy as that described above. As the title

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indicates, Patchwork Girl is rooted in an allusion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and can be read as a feminist response to Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel. The protagonist, the patchwork girl, is a supernatural being comprised of a collection of human body parts, and the narrative documents her adventures in nineteenth-century England and modern-day America as she transforms from a solitary figure to a confident and independent woman. Contrasting with the antagonistic relationship between Dr Frankenstein and his creation in Shelley’s text, the patchwork girl and her female creator (a character called Mary Shelley) enjoy a harmonious, loving bond. One section of Patchwork Girl, narrated by Mary Shelley, describes her intentions for and love of her creation. It also documents the construction of the patchwork girl from conception to birth and beyond. In this section, however, significant ontological ambiguities are introduced because readers are presented with two contrary scenarios: one in which the patchwork girl belongs to the same ontological domain as her maker and one in which she is a fictional character and therefore belongs to a different ontological domain to her creator. In the first two lexias in this section, entitled ‘my walk’ and ‘sight’, Mary Shelley recollects a meeting with the patchwork girl in an outdoor rural setting. The next part of the narrative then depends on whether the reader chooses the ‘sewn’ or ‘written’ hyperlinks that are offered to her. In the ‘sewn’ lexia, the narrator asserts: ‘I had sewn her, stitching deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black stitches wavered into script and I began to feel that I was writing.’ Conversely, in the ‘written’ lexia, she says: ‘I made her, writing deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black letters blurred into stitches and I began to feel that I was sewing a great quilt.’ Therefore, whereas in one reading path the narrator recalls stitching a patchwork of flesh to create an animate being, in another the patchwork girl is a fictional construct, created in a piece of creative writing. In both cases the creator describes her creation in figurative terms, using the same trope: in ‘sewn’, needlework is likened to the creativity of writing and in ‘written’ the process of writing is likened to sewing with the concept of creativity providing the conceptual link. Since both reading paths are narrated by the same first-person narrator and each account is offered with equal conviction, readers are not necessarily able or encouraged to choose between the two alternatives. Compounding the ambiguity, many of the other lexias in this section of the text and elsewhere describe qualities that could apply to the patchwork girl in either context. For example, the creator recounts that the patchwork girl ‘is moody and quieter than I’ (appetite lexia); ‘wants to learn’ (learn lexia); and ‘is exuberant, ferocious, loving, unhinged’ (infant lexia). These descriptions could apply to either a real or an imaginary entity because, as personal attributes, they could belong to a human being or a fictional character. Throughout the text then, the subtle dichotomy presented in the ‘sewn’ and ‘written’ fork means that the patchwork girl could be real, imaginary, both, or neither and consequently readers are faced with a number of irresolvable and unnatural incongruities. If, as the ‘sewn’ lexia suggests, the monster is an animate being, she belongs to the same world as Mary Shelley. Conversely, if, as the ‘written’ lexia suggests, the patchwork girl is a character within Mary’s novel, then she belongs to a different and embedded fictional world to Mary. This results in an extremely unstable ontological landscape but it is precisely this type of indeterminacy and inconclusiveness that Patchwork Girl utilises. In projecting an ontological landscape that evolves and

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changes, forcing continual renegotiation and causing a constant feeling of disorientation for the reader, it qualifies as an anti-mimetic text in Richardson’s terms. This example of narrative contradiction is also unnatural according to Alber because a character cannot exist both on the same and on a different ontological level at the same time; it breaks the law of non-contradiction. In terms of modelling the reader’s response to the narrative contradictions, Patchwork Girl can be explained on the basis of Ryan’s ‘mentalism’ strategy in which ‘the multiple worlds described in the story do not exist objectively: they are the products of dreams, hallucinations, the imagination or they are the symptoms of mental conditions’ (2006: 669). Indeed, in Patchwork Girl, the creator, Mary Shelley, is somewhat infatuated with her creation and the ontological ambiguity presented in the text could be seen as a manifestation of her wishing that her fictional creation was instead real. However, while this process of rationalisation naturalises the contradictions, it also demeans the narrator. Instead, we read the narrative contradictions in Patchwork Girl more positively and in thematic terms. Whether real or fictional, the relationship between the women is positive. Unlike their male counterparts in Frankenstein, they are able to coexist in one way or another. The women are empowered by female relationships and creativity in a way that their male equivalents are not. In her reading of the text, Hayles identifies an evident ‘play between sewing and writing’ and argues that ‘the feminine associations with sewing serve to mark this [Patchwork Girl] as a female – and feminist – production’ (2000: paras 33, 34). She suggests that ‘the specificity of an electronic hypertext like Patchwork Girl comes from the ways in which it mobilizes the resources of the medium to enact subjectivities distributed in flexible and mutating ways’ (2000: para. 32). For Hayles, the hypertext medium offers a unique dexterity, which is harnessed in Patchwork Girl to express ideas specifically relating to fluid subjectivity. The narrative contradictions which are facilitated by the hypertext structure are thus vital for this kind of feminist writing. Rather than being a manifestation of ‘mentalism’, they are instead used to facilitate a positive message about female creativity and endeavour. Like Same Day Test, therefore, the narrative contradictions in Patchwork Girl can be best seen as exemplifying the themes raised throughout the text, if not in some hypertext fiction writing more generally. Both examples of narrative contradiction analysed above are unnatural because they present logically irreconcilable scenarios which, according to real world logic, cannot exist within the same world concurrently. Importantly, however, neither the hypertext form nor the logical contradictions it can produce are intrinsically defamiliarising; the structural and aesthetic functions of hypertext have to be judged on an individual text basis. Despite its alternative endings, Same Day Test gives the reader a strong sense of closure, much like multilinear choose-your-own-adventure stories do. The narrative contradictions in Patchwork Girl, on the other hand, cause a greater degree of ambiguity in terms of the plot and story, thus refuting closure in place of defamiliarisation. Importantly, in both cases, the logical contradictions are allied to the thematic concerns explored within the texts and thus relate to what Alber defines as unnatural elements that ‘foreground the thematic’ (2016: 51). While the two multilinear texts discussed in this chapter focus on issues around sex and gender, contradictory narrative structures are used in texts that engage with all kinds of thematic issues. It is important therefore to emphasise that unnatural narrative strategies are not necessarily used to explore

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particular issues. Moreover, it is absolutely necessary to divorce the term ‘unnatural’ from any ideas about particular forms of gender and sexuality. That readers of hypertext fiction have learned to expect that the hypertext form easily facilitates and therefore may well contain what are logically irreconcilable narrative contradictions means that readers can also ‘account for impossible scenarios or events by identifying them as belonging to particular literary genres and generic conventions’ (Alber et al. 2012: 376; cf. Alber 2016). However, the examples analysed above cannot be naturalised according to ‘genre’, but rather according to hypertext fiction as a particular medium. Unnatural narrative contradictions in hypertext fiction thus represent one of the ways in which digital affordances, and the hypertext form in particular, can lead to a media-specific conventionalisation of what still remains a highly defamiliarising unnatural narrative device in other media.

Metalepsis in Literary Games This section focuses on a second, digital-interactive form of unnatural narrative: metalepsis in literary videogames. Literary games as a subform of digital fiction are games that embed elements of verbal-narrative art (either written or spoken) and therefore have to be read as well as played (Ensslin 2014a; cf. Bell et al. 2010). This can involve, for example, written interior monologues superimposed onto a 3D audiovisual interface (e.g. The Path; Tale of Tales 2009), voiced-over omniscient narration accompanying gameplay (e.g. The Stanley Parable; Wreden 2013), or written literary-narrative interludes read by players from books represented in the game world (e.g. Braid; Blow 2009). Metalepses are logically impossible transgressions between ontological spheres (e.g. fictional vs actual) or diegetic levels (e.g. intra- vs extradiegetic), whereby the transgression is either ascending (e.g. from the fictional world to the world of the author or reader) or descending (e.g. from the world of the reader/user to the fictional world; cf. Pier 2005). We define interactional metalepsis as an ontological breach that takes place across the actual to storyworld boundary and exploits the interactive nature of digital technology via the hardware through which the reader accesses the text, such as the mouse, keyboard, or other navigational devices, and/or via mediaspecific interactive modes of expression such as hyperlinks or avatars. (Bell 2016; cf. Ensslin 2011: 11; Kukkonen 2011)1 Given their ubiquity in digital media, interactional metalepses between the actual world of the user and the fictional world of a game or interactive narrative are a conventional trope in this kind of text. Many of them (though not all) give users a sense of immersion, or presence, in a virtual environment. Avatars in particular serve as fictional embodiments, or instantiations of players’ alter egos (Ryan 2004) in the game world, which is evidenced by the fact that players commonly retell their personal experiences of playing a game in the form of first-person narratives – as if they had been there themselves rather than being represented by a fictional persona. Yet avatars form only one example of conventionalised metalepsis in digital fiction. In what follows, we give an overview of interactional metaleptic tools used in digital narratives. We then move on to metalepsis in videogames and discuss ways in which metalepsis has been used by some literary game designers to create specific

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aesthetic effects. The two examples we examine in particular are Tale of Tales’s The Path (2009) and Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (2013). In The Path, we show how interactional, participatory metalepsis integrates the paratext into the player’s fictional-interactive experience, thus contributing towards the game’s immersive effects and gothic aesthetic, rather than defamiliarising the reader-player (cf. Richardson 2011). Our discussion of The Stanley Parable demonstrates how metaleptic narrator-player address and interaction contribute to defamiliarisation in the sense of a humorous, metaludic persuasive rhetoric (Bogost 2007) that queries the immersive qualities of the avatar as the default interactional metaleptic tool. We argue (with a nod to Wolf 2013) that, paradoxically or not, what initially appears to be a defamiliarising quality in the game ultimately adds to its immersiveness. Interactional metalepsis is a fast expanding and evolving phenomenon in digital culture that far exceeds its origins within structuralist narratology (Genette [1972] 1980) where it is originally defined as the ‘intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by the diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc), or the inverse’ ([1972] 1980: 234–5) and thus the movement of a fictional entity between fictional levels. Metalepsis in videogames is so ubiquitous, or conventionalised, that players may not even notice it as a specific design feature. We immerse ourselves in the game world, impersonated by one or more graphically represented persona(e), or avatars. This descending metaleptic device (from our actual, extratextual world to a fictional realm) is augmented by numerous ascending metaleptic devices, most importantly, player addresses from various types of intratextual and metaludic discourses (i.e. discourses about gameplay). In roleplaying games like Dragon Age: Origins (BioWare 2009), for example, players are addressed via their avatars and made to choose between various turn-taking options in written in-game dialogues. In text adventures and interactive fictions the player must type verbal commands into a prompt line in response to second-person addresses directed at their alter ego (‘you’) in the fictional world. Hence, it is an intrinsic quality of ludic interaction for players to be pulled into the game world, on various discursive and semiotic levels (cf. Bell 2016). That this device is so conventionalised makes it almost impossible to argue that metalepsis is an unnatural narrative device according to Richardson’s anti-mimetic definition. In fact, we could argue that the majority of videogames possess a default repository of metaleptic devices without which they would lose a significant degree of popular attractiveness. Furthermore, the metaleptic devices built into game design are complemented, so to speak, by players’ own metaleptic activities, which manifest in the likes of cosplay, glitch art, and Let’s Plays. Given the ubiquitousness of conventionalised metaleptic devices in games, the question arises whether there are indeed forms of anti-mimetic ‘unnatural’ metalepsis in game design and game culture, and how they contribute to the dictates of immersiveness. In what follows, we discuss two examples of ludic metalepsis that can be analysed in terms of Richardson’s anti-mimetic effects. We show in particular that because they are not as conventionalised as more standard forms of ludic metalepsis, they defamiliarise the gaming experience in uniquely immersive ways. The Path is a ‘short horror game’ that transmediates the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ myth. Players choose between six different third-person avatars – girls aged between nine and nineteen – who all have to meet ‘their’ wolf in age-dependent manifestations in order to meet their spiritual or physical death, which equates to the player

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‘winning’ the game. The player is immersed in the 3D game world much as in any other narrative game, via an in-game persona, so the default metalepsis remains unmarked. What is interesting from an unnatural narratological point of view, however, is the way in which the epitextual environment of the game creates a marked ‘ontological hesitation’ (Herman 1994: 379) between the game world and the player’s actual world through metaleptic oscillation. More specifically, the game’s official website features fictional blogs for each sister.2 Each LiveJournal, as they are called, contains a number of scripted, fictional entries seemingly written by the characters themselves, as well as comments from various fictional and actual visitors, thereby blurring the two ontological worlds and making it near-impossible to distinguish between the two types of visitors, or indeed fictional vs actual posts. Some entries are written in other languages and alphabetic systems, thus adding to the authentic feel of the interactions. Eerily, every LiveJournal ends around the same date – between January and April 2009 – coinciding with the run-up to the release of the game in the actual world, but arguably also with the fictional deaths of the sisters. In terms of naturalising this form of unnaturalness, players are likely to accept the unnaturalness of this design because overall the ontological hesitation evoked by the blurring of fact and fiction contributes to the perceived authenticity of the game’s horror and the player’s immersion into the game world. We might even go as far as to argue that the perceived immediacy of the girls’ suffering and death supports an allegorical reading of the game (Alber 2013) in terms of adolescent female trials and tribulations (e.g. punishment for breaking rules and for female curiosity and disobedience more generally), with which the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ myth has historically been associated.3 Our second example of ‘unnatural’ in the sense of anti-mimetic metalepsis in literary games is The Stanley Parable (TSP). The game’s protagonist and player-character (PC) is Stanley, an office worker in a Kafkaesque corporate, bureaucratic environment, who pushes buttons upon command, day in, day out. Initially Stanley, played in the first person, sets out in his quest to find out what has happened to his co-workers, who have all disappeared. However, it turns out that the game is not really a quest for lost individuals, or indeed some kind of detective investigation. Rather, it is a metaludic game: a game about players’ illusion of having agency in any game, and about their existential battle against the game-makers’ intentions and the constraints of the source code. The narrator (or implied author) becomes the player’s main enemy in the game because there are not many further major obstacles or enemies to overcome, and this battle between implied author (manifested in the choices built into the game) and the player who strives to undermine his or her ‘implied’ counterpart (personified by conformist Stanley) is orchestrated in eighteen different paths, or endings, none of which leads to complete closure, or victory. Rather, the game follows the motto ‘the end is never the end’, which the player reads in a loading message whenever one path has been completed. TSP is anti-mimetic in the first place because it contains a third-person narrator whose past-tense commentary accompanies the gameplay. This is logically impossible because players have to make choices in the present, whereas the narrator relates what happened in the past, including the choices the PC (in lieu of the player) has ostensibly made, following the narrator’s – or implied author’s – intentions (Ensslin 2015; cf. Punday’s chapter in this volume on the way the user ‘waits’ for computation). Hence, the game

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itself is unnatural because it stages a metaludic battle between the would-be omniscient narrator and the player – a highly anti-mimetic scenario, ludonarratologically speaking. After all, the coexistence of a PC (as a standard ludic device for present-tense gameplay) and a narrator telling the PC’s story in the past is a logic aporia. Yet the game is anti-mimetic on several levels, one of which is player address by the narrator, which also shifts subtly from player-as-character to implied player. More specifically, whenever the player-character (Stanley) deviates from the narrator’s ‘told’ version of the gameplay narrative, most notably by choosing the ‘wrong’ doors in the labyrinthine office building in which the game is set, the narrator starts talking to Stanley in an attempt to correct his deviant actions and intentions. According to the narrator, Stanley as a character is unable to make his own choices because he is a puppet whose strings are pulled by the narrator. By the same token, the narrator renders himself highly unreliable as he realises he is not completely in control of the game’s narrative himself. After all, his sheer existence is the idea of an extratextual game designer. Furthermore, the narrator cannot control the plot in the same way a traditional storyteller or filmmaker can, in the sense of pre-ordered events and actions to which readers and viewers have to submit. Thus, the narrator, who sets out to be omniscient and in full control of the game world, turns out to be at the dual mercy of the player and the programmer – an observation which, in various endings, leads to his frustration, despair, resignation, or even madness. One of the most striking metaleptic moments in the game happens in the Choice, or Real Person Ending (one of the eighteen paths mentioned above). This path opens if the player opts to unplug a phone that Stanley is supposed to answer (according to the narrator), thereby undertaking an action not contained within the narrator’s script. This act of transgression causes the narrator to sense that there is someone else behind Stanley’s incorrect behaviour and, after first addressing Stanley and realising Stanley could not possibly have devised such an act, he turns to the implied player: Oh no, no, no! Did you just unplug the phone? That wasn’t supposed to be a choice. How did you do that? You actually chose incorrectly, but I didn’t even know that was possible. Let me double-check [shuffling his papers around yet finding no evidence of this choice in his script] . . . I don’t understand. How on earth are you making meaningful choices? What did you . . .Wait a second . . . How had I not noticed it sooner? You’re not Stanley. You’re a real person. I can’t believe I was so mistaken. This is why you’ve been able to make correct and incorrect choices, and to think I’ve been letting you run around in this game for so long! If you’d made any more wrong choices you might have negated it entirely. It’s as though you’d completely ignored even the most basic safety protocol for real-world decision-making. I’m going to stop the game for a moment so we can educate you properly on safe decision making. This is followed by a satirical educational video about the life-threatening potential of human decision-making. So in this instance the narrator breaks the fourth wall and moves the (ascending) metaleptic interaction onto an (implied) extradiegetic level – that is, to the player in the actual world. So whilst the player may be used to performing descending metaleptic actions by operating an avatar in the fictional game environment

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– that is, they naturalise the interactional metalepsis as a media-specific convention – their experience of being directly addressed as ‘real person’ has a defamiliarising effect because it breaks the fictional illusion. However, this witty ludostylistic device also contributes to the immersive effects of the game as it is likely to cause feelings of amusement as well as metaludic reflection, thus making players want to ‘play on’ to explore further paths of deviance (and/or compliance) rather than stop the game in frustration or alienation. This is partly due to the fact that players ‘naturalise’ the unnatural in TSP cognitively because eponymously the game is a parable of players’ illusory agency (MacCallum-Stewart and Parsler 2007) and of symbolic engagement with videogame narrativity and twenty-first-century fiction writing more generally. This reading again conforms to Alber’s (2013) allegorical naturalisation strategy, which assumes that readers/players make sense of unnatural structures in terms of an extended metaphor of (aspects of) the human condition and the world in general. Hence, players of TSP are likely to read the game as a philosophical reflection of the condition of homo ludens electronicus more generally and of ludo-narrativity and player agency more specifically.

Conclusion Digital media offer writers and programmers a whole array of tools with which they can build narratives including interactive, participatory, and multimodal techniques. In this chapter, we have shown how hypertext provides a structure within which narrative contradictions can be housed and used alongside thematic concerns of fictional texts, and also how metaleptic devices can be used in literary games to facilitate immersion and metaludic reflection. Whether in terms of structure and navigation or in terms of interaction and engagement, therefore, digital technologies add something to narrative and, as we have shown, they can challenge or at least problematise theories of narrative that have until recently been predominantly developed in relation to print. Unnatural narratologists claim that narrative theory has a ‘mimetic bias’ and that unnatural narratology will address that balance. To ensure that unnatural narratology avoids what we might call a ‘print bias’ and remains a transmedial device, it is important that unnatural devices across media be explored and that theoretical conclusions take into account the full range of experimentation that occurs throughout all types of narrative.

Notes 1. In her account of interactional metalepsis, Ensslin differentiates between ‘metalepsis in digital fiction’, in which ‘metaleptic devices . . . allow readers of digital fiction . . . to shape the diegesis kinetically during the cybernetic, ergodic [Aarseth 1997] reading process’ (Ensslin 2011: 13) and ‘the avatar as metaleptic vehicle’ which ‘offers user-players the opportunity to project themselves physically and graphically into a storyworld’ (2011: 14). Strictly speaking, as is the case in Bell’s (2016) definition, the second type could be subsumed under the first because both categories relate specifically to the user’s interaction with the hardware and software of a digital fiction. For analytical purposes in this chapter, however, particularly in relation to The Stanley Parable (Wreden 2013), we analyse the avatar as a separate category. 2. See (last accessed 6 November 2017). 3. For a more in-depth allegorical reading, see Ensslin (2014b).

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Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. (1997), Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Alber, Jan (2009), ‘Impossible storyworlds – and what to do with them’, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1: 1, 79–96. — (2011), ‘The diachronic development of unnaturalness: A new view on genre’, in Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze (eds), Unnatural Narratives – Unnatural Narratology, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 41–67. — (2013), ‘Unnatural spaces and narrative worlds’, in Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (eds), A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 45–66. — (2016), Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. —, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (2010), ‘Unnatural narratives, unnatural narratology: Beyond mimetic models’, Narrative, 18: 2, 113–36. —, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (2012), ‘What is unnatural about unnatural narratology?: A response to Monika Fludernik’, Narrative, 20: 3, 371–82. —, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (2013), ‘What really is unnatural narratology?’, Storyworlds, 5: 101–18. Bell, Alice (2013), ‘Unnatural narration in hypertext fiction’, in Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (eds), A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 185–98. — (2016), ‘Interactional metalepsis and unnatural narratology’, Narrative, 24: 3, 294–310. —, Astrid Ensslin, Dave Ciccoricco, Hans Rustad, Jess Laccetti, and Jessica Pressman (2010), ‘“A [s]creed for digital fiction” by Alice Bell’, Electronic Book Review, 7 March, (last accessed 6 November 2017). Bogost, Ian (2007), Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Braid, videogame, created by Jonathan Blow. USA: Number None, 2009. Dragon Age: Origins, videogame, created by BioWare. USA: Electronic Arts, 2009. Ensslin, Astrid (2011), ‘Diegetic exposure and cybernetic performance: Towards interactional metalepsis’, plenary presentation at Staging Illusion conference, University of Sussex, 8–9 December, (last accessed 6 November 2017). — (2014a), Literary Gaming, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — (2014b), ‘Toward functional ludo-narrativism: Metaludicity, allusive fallacy and illusory agency in The Path’, in Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, and Hans L. Rustad (eds), Analyzing Digital Fiction, New York: Routledge, pp. 75–93. — (2015), ‘Video games as unnatural narratives’, in Mathias Fuchs (ed.), Diversity of Play, Lueneburg: Meson Press, pp. 41–72. Fludernik, Monika (1996), Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London: Routledge. — (2003), ‘Natural narratology and cognitive parameters’, in David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford: CSLI Publications, pp. 243–67. — (2012), ‘How natural is “unnatural narratology”; or, what is unnatural about unnatural narratology?’, Narrative, 20: 3, 357–70. Genette, Gérard [1972] (1980), Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine (2000), ‘Flickering connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The importance of media-specific analysis’, Postmodern Culture, 10: 2, (last accessed 6 November 2017).

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— (2004), ‘Print is flat, code is deep: The importance of media-specific analysis’, Poetics Today, 25: 1, 67–90. Herman, David (1994), ‘Textual “you” and double deixis in Edna O’Brien’s “A Pagan Place”’, Style, 28: 3, 378–410. Inglis, Gavin (2002), Same Day Test, (last accessed 21 October 2017). Jackson, Shelley (1995), Patchwork Girl; Or, a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley, & Herself, Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems. Kukkonen, Karin (2011), ‘Metalepsis in popular culture: An introduction’, in Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek (eds), Metalepsis in Popular Culture, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 1–21. MacCallum-Stewart, Esther and Justin Parsler (2007), ‘Illusory agency in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines’, dichtung-digital 37, (last accessed 6 November 2017). Nielsen, Henrik Skov (2011), ‘Unnatural narratology, impersonal voices, real authors, and noncommunicative narration’, in Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze (eds), Unnatural Narratives – Unnatural Narratology, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 71–88. Olsen, Lance and Tim Guthrie (2005), 10:01, (last accessed 15 November 2017). Pier, John (2005), ‘Metalepsis’, in David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London: Routledge, pp. 303–4. Richardson, Brian (2006), Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. — (2011), ‘What is unnatural narrative theory?’, in Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze (eds), Unnatural Narratives – Unnatural Narratology, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 23–40. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2004), ‘Metaleptic machines’, Semiotica, 150: 1, 439–69. — (2006), ‘From parallel universes to possible worlds: Ontological pluralism in physics, narratology, and narrative’, Poetics Today, 27: 4, 633–74. The Path, videogame, created by Tale of Tales. Belgium: Tale of Tales, 2009. The Stanley Parable, videogame, created by Davey Wreden. USA: Galactic Café, 2013. Wolf, Werner (2013), ‘“Unnatural metalepsis” and immersion’, in Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (eds), A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 113–41.

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21 Lyric Poetry as Anti-Mimetic Bridging in Narratives and Motion Pictures: A Case Study of Affective Response to Christopher Nolan’s INTERSTELLAR (2014) Stefan Kjerkegaard

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he story of Christopher Nolan’s science fiction movie Interstellar (2014) takes place in the near future. The main character, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), who is a former engineer and test pilot now tied to the land he farms, lives together with his daughter Murph, his son Tom, and his father-in-law Donald. As devastating sandstorms ruin harvests around the globe, food slowly begins to run out, and people realise that their lives on Earth are coming to an end. When Cooper happens to encounter a secret NASA base near his family’s home, he meets his old superior, Doctor John Brand (Michael Caine), and his daughter, Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), also a scientist. Due to Cooper’s scientific talent and ability to pilot an aircraft, he is invited by Doctor Brand to embark on a challenging space mission with three other scientists, including Amelia Brand. In order to find a new home for mankind while the Earth’s condition is worsening, Cooper must choose either to stay or to risk never seeing his family again if he accepts the task of saving the human race by finding another habitable planet.

Dylan Thomas’s Lyrical Poem in Interstellar Such is the basic storyline of Interstellar. When I was watching the movie, however, I was first and foremost compelled by two separate sequences that I tend, in afterthought, to link together, probably because they both represent what I consider to be the essence of the movie. My encounter with these two sequences can be described as what Rita Felski (following J. M. Bernstein) calls ‘emphatic experiences’ (Felski 2008: 20). In the first sequence Cooper says goodbye to his daughter Murph and afterwards drives away in his truck crying, almost as if something is pulling him away from her. In the second sequence the spacecraft Endurance takes off from its orbit around Earth into infinite space as a voice-over from Doctor Brand recites Dylan Thomas’s famous poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’. The remarkable score by Hans Zimmer emphasises both sequences in such a way that sound and vision are equally foregrounded.1 The first of these sequences builds a bridge to the second act of the movie, while the other might be said to initiate the second act. In itself the movie can be seen as what one could consider to be a three-stage rocket, since it has a characteristic three-act structure, which – with even more metaphors inspired by the film – needs to lose gravity on its

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way up into the narrative’s infinite space. The theme of gravity in fact seems urgently to run through both form and content, playing important roles in relation to the larger themes of communication, love, and death. As Cooper says at the end of what could be called the second act: ‘Newton’s third law: You got to leave something behind’ (2:17:30), when he detaches himself into a large black hole. The quotation also alludes to the bridging sequence that depicts Cooper’s need to leave Murph and the rest of his family behind, when he drives away from the farm in his car. Cooper’s somewhat corny remarks, which, like this one, arise particularly in the second act, are doubtless among the weakest elements of the movie. Admittedly, Interstellar is not the best movie I have ever seen, especially not if it is watched only for its narrative features. The story is in many ways rather banal, but it indeed has some aesthetically engaging moments, which first and foremost touch the viewer. I see those sequences as what mainly make the movie worthwhile, but for the purposes of this chapter the movie is also interesting in that it raises questions about the relation between poetry and narrative, particularly in those sequences I found the most moving. Dylan Thomas’s poem plays an important role in this respect. Functioning as a kind of chorus, it is repeated several times during the story. The reprise is not the whole poem, but the first two stanzas with the addition ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’. It is also used at the climax of one of the film’s trailers.2 Using Dylan Thomas’s poetry in a movie is not extraordinary at all, especially using this poem in particular (cf. Wade 2014). In Dylan Thomas’s own words, this poem is in fact ‘true cinematic poetry’. But again, even if Thomas’s poem might be said to have become a filmic cliché, these poetical and vigorously intermedial moments, prioritising sound and vision simultaneously, still work very well as what I will call anti-mimetic bridging. Anti-mimetic bridging is a connector between the mimetic and the anti-mimetic in the course of a narrative, achieved through emotions, feelings, and affects. Typically, anti-mimetic bridgings – such as using a poem in a movie – engage the reader in a profound way, calling for an aesthetic response in which we, again quoting Rita Felski, ‘honor our implication and involvement in the works we read, rather than serving as shame-faced bystanders’ (2008: 20). The idea is that poetry, and especially lyric poetry, can play a central part in this bridging. Consequently, it is through the ‘emphatic experiences’ I had with the movie and its use of Thomas’s poem that I want to take a closer look at the relation between poetry and narrative. This chapter will take up such questions as the following: how are we as an audience to respond to such emphatic experiences? What kind of function has the poem in the overall narrative? And can we on the basis of a reading of these two sequences say something more general about the role of poetry in relation to narrative?

Poetry in Motion Pictures If we begin with the last question, my answer would be yes, though not much has been written specifically on the use of poetry in motion pictures. Elizabeth Savage has written an essay that focuses on what she calls ekphrastic poetry – that is, poetry that ‘instigates a form of ekphrasis that involves multiple levels of cultural creation and reception in film and in poetry’ (2013: 208). But although this study is related to this article’s subject, it is concerned with how poetry absorbs movies rather than how movies absorb poetry. Other critics have written about movies that try to be poetry,

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mostly avant-garde and/or experimental movies such as those by Jean Cocteau, Ingmar Bergman, Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, and not least Pier Pasolini as examined in P. Adams Sitney’s work The Cinema of Poetry (2015). Sitney aligns the narratological term ‘free indirect discourse’ with what he calls ‘free indirect point of view’, which (with a formulation borrowed from Pasolini) is where ‘the subjective perspective does not correspond to the point-of-view shot of earlier cinema but to a range of rhetorical tropes indirectly linking the whole film to the perspective of its protagonist’ (2015: 5–6). Sitney’s interest lies not so much in how poetry and narrative interact, but rather in how some movies become poetry, where the spectator is ‘drawn into the mental states and even the dreams of a character’ (2015: 6). Movies that are poetic are, therefore, not the same thing as a movie like Interstellar that uses poetry for anti-mimetic bridging. Yet, scholarship on movies and poetry has shown that Dylan Thomas in fact attended a symposium on ‘Poetry and the Film’ in 1953 hosted by Amos Vogel together with and among others Arthur Miller, Willard Maas, and the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren (MacDonald 2006: 40). Deren was the only filmmaker, according to Scott MacDonald, who contributed genuine insights into the relation between poetry and movies, as she made a distinction between horizontal and vertical meaning in literature and film. As MacDonald describes this distinction, horizontal meaning is made clear through the developing narrative of a work, and vertical meaning occurs in the multiple layers of signification that accrue in forms of expression normally considered poetic (2006: 40). The horizontal development follows a logic of actions, while the vertical development follows a logic of emotion that ‘attracts to itself even disparate images which contain that central core, which they have in common’. The vertical development is ‘part of plunging down or a construction that is based on the intent of the moment’ (Deren, in MacDonald 2002: 208). Deren identifies her own enterprise as risky because she insists on distinguishing ‘poetry from anything else’ (Deren, in MacDonald 2002: 204). I find her remarks incisive; however, maybe not so much in relation to poetry in general as to lyric poetry in particular. She explains that the distinction of poetry is its construction, which she describes as a ‘vertical’ investigation of a situation, in that it probes the ramifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned, in a sense, not with what is occurring but with what it feels like or what it means. A poem, to my mind, creates visible or auditory forms for something that is invisible, which is the feeling, or the emotion, or the metaphysical content of the movement. (Deren, in MacDonald 2002: 204) With such a definition of poetry released from the restrictions of a certain medium, say the book page, we get the chance to grasp poetry as both an affect and also as a kind of rhetorical or expressive mode comparable to other modes. In other words, Deren’s distinction gives us the opportunity to compare poetry with, for instance, narration without favouring one mode over the other. This is helpful since, as I have argued before, one may be inclined to think of the narrative mode as more natural or common, and hence poetry as a special case of narration (Kjerkegaard 2014). Such an uneven distribution might prevent us from thinking the relationship through properly. Within narratological studies, poetry, especially lyric poetry, is often used as a kind of opposition to the narrative act, but I am not sure whether this opposition in fact is

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right or even fruitful. One could, for instance, as I do below, claim that lyric poetry emphasises narrativity so much that it more or less annuls itself. Instead of succession and a chain of actions, which presupposes a horizontal time-movement, time in lyric poetry is vertically felt and hence foregrounded. Think, for example, of W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Stop All the Clocks’, also known as ‘Funeral Blues’, a text that depicts the immense sorrow felt when your partner dies and is about to be buried, and also a poem that is used very effectively in Four Weddings and a Funeral (Newell 1994) where the character Matthew (played by John Hannah) does a reading of it that has made the poem famous – at least, famous on YouTube.3

Challenging the ‘Opposition’ between Poetry and Narrative Something narrated in lyric poetry is likely to be its heuristic procedure, that is, the potentiality of an identity and therefore also the potentiality of a consciousness, actantial frames, embodiedness, and so forth. Hence, the question of who speaks in narratological terms primarily concerns the idea of experientiality, but much lyric poetry does not really appear to facilitate this. Consequently, poetry is in some cases defined as the exact opposite of narrative, for instance by Monika Fludernik: One classic poetic situation that seems to refute poetry’s typical lack of experientiality (and hence narrativity) is that of the prevalence in poetry of the reflections and enthusings on the part of the speaker of a poem. But that speaker never becomes a character in her own right, never begins to exist within an alternative fictional world. Indeed, lyric poetry is generally taken to be concerned with general truths rather than with particular facts. Unless the reflections are clearly part of a person’s specific experience at a specific (fictional) moment in time, one cannot describe this setup in terms of experientiality. (Fludernik 1996: 266) It is striking, however, how poetry defines not just experientiality, but also narrativity in Fludernik’s conception, and even though it is to some extent rejected from the frame of narrative, it has, nevertheless, been given a prominent place. I am in agreement with Fludernik’s argument that the enunciation of a lyric poem often exists within a kind of hypothetical frame, rather than within a fictional one. This could also be the reason why a classic narrative scholar like Käte Hamburger (1968) would exclude lyric poetry from the realm of fictionality. Making the what (or even the when) speak, instead of a specific who, seems therefore to be the objective of much lyric poetry, and this, to some degree, undermines the idea of experientiality. This variability in the enunciation of poetry has also been described by Peter Hühn and Roy Sommer: lyric texts in the narrower sense (i.e. not just verse narratives or ballads) are distinguished by a characteristic variability in the extent to which they use the range of levels and modes of mediation. Like prose narratives, they can instantiate the two fundamental constituents of the narrative process, temporal sequentiality and mediation, equally well. Similarly to the enacted utterances of characters in dramatic texts, however, they can also seemingly efface the narrator’s level and create the impression of performative immediacy of speaking. As a result, the speaker’s voice is felt to emanate from simultaneously occurring experience and speech. (Hühn and Sommer n.d.: 420)

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I agree with Hühn and Sommer that the simultaneous processes of experience and speech characterise enunciation in much lyric poetry and, moreover, problematise it within a narratological context. I do not agree, however, with their apparent assumption that there is ‘a narrator’ in lyric texts. Lyric poems can have narrators, but often they do not. In both lyric and narrative, we can differentiate between what is represented and the rhetorical act by which it is represented. The rhetorical act gives both teller and audience an angle on what is represented. In narrative, however, what is represented is a storyworld; in lyric it is a thought, emotion, situation, meditation, and so on. Yet, what I also want to emphasise in this passage are Hühn and Sommers’s words: ‘the speaker’s voice is felt’. If lyric poetry renders experientiality, that should better perhaps be found within the reader, not in the text. Our readerly expectations are one thing, what the literary text in fact contains, another; often readers feel more consolation in the idea that the text transmits a narrative, and not ‘just’ a thought, emotion, meditation, and so on. In other words, the anti-mimetic bridging that a poem might involve, especially in the course of a narrative, might feel ‘unnatural’, but this should not legitimate the false opposition between narrative and poetry. They might be in opposition, seen from a structuralist point of view that leaves no space for the reader’s experientiality, but in that both of them can convey emotions and play on different affective registers, they might also be seen as something played out at the same level within the reader – and in this case within one viewer of Interstellar, who, as it happens, is me.

Lyric Poetry and Narratology Despite the tradition of placing them in opposition to each other, there has within recent years been an interest among narratologists in understanding poetry and narrative together. Much of this is due to Brian McHale’s effort, not least his article ‘Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry’ which appeared in Narrative in 2009. This interest culminated in a special issue of Narrative that was published in 2014. As relevant as this special issue might be, however, none of the contributions, including my own, focuses on the ‘emphatic experience’, or on intermediality. Brian McAllister’s chapter indeed touches upon the issue, when he discusses visual poetry in different media, but McAllister still relies on McHale’s and Rachel Blau Duplessis’s idea of ‘segmentivity as one of poetry’s dominant concerns’, that is, the poetic effect as something that ‘arises through an interaction between page and text space’ (McAllister 2014: 236). In order to explain the function of Dylan Thomas’s poem in Interstellar and moreover also the use of W. H. Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ in Four Weddings and a Funeral, this perception seems too narrow, too oriented towards the book as poetry’s original residence. I will come back to this in a moment. But for now I will try to relate Deren’s distinction between horizontal and vertical with a definition of James Phelan’s, another prominent narratologist who has included poetry within narratological thinking. Phelan defines the lyric by identifying two main modes: (1) somebody telling somebody else (or even himself or herself) on some occasion for some purpose that something is – a situation, an emotion, a perception, an attitude, a belief; (2) somebody telling somebody else (or even himself or herself) on some occasion about his or her meditations on something; to put it another way, in this mode, the poem records the speaker’s thoughts. (Phelan 2007: 22)

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This definition is an adapted version of Phelan’s widely used definition of what a narrative is, but with a change in the formulation from ‘something happened’ to ‘something is’. Of course, as a narratologist with a certain interest in poetry, I am very sympathetic towards Phelan’s endeavour, but before reconsidering his conception of the lyric, some reservations may be in order. As he is a spokesman for rhetorical narrative theory, his concern may be centred more on the audience than on the speaker of the poem, and he may not only be talking about the lyric as a genre, but rather about lyricality as a mode in narrative discourse. The latter term, lyricality, seems highly relevant, when considering the use of poetry in movies in general and not least the use of Dylan Thomas’s poem in Interstellar in particular. Even though we would be inclined to call these above-mentioned moments in the film epic, it is actually not the narrative mode that dominates the expression here. Its lyricality tells us something else, I would suggest. That first sequence I discussed tells us something mostly about the or perhaps a father’s emotions; and the second sequence depicts the feeling that one might have when travelling into the dark unknown. In this sense, Phelan’s definition certainly encapsulates something of the verticality in the lyrical sequence, to use Deren’s term. However, the first part of Phelan’s definition, which in both cases involves ‘somebody telling somebody else’, to a certain degree is suspended. As mentioned, we are of course hearing the voice of Brand played by Michael Caine, but neither Caine nor the role he is playing is the main attraction here. The ‘telling’ presupposes or perhaps even anticipates the two somebodies in the definition, but trying to locate these two even further in this element of Interstellar’s narrative does not seem to be the point. Instead, the plunging of the moment suspends normal rhetorical structures and the reader/viewer takes over, imaginatively living through the emotions of not just the poem, but rather the poetical and touching moment of the movie. Using Deren’s words one could say that ‘the ramifications of the moment’ are no longer contained within the narrative nor the medium, but implicate the viewer in a very direct and affective way. Peter Hühn in an article in the aforementioned special issue of Narrative calls this ‘vicarious roleplaying’ (2014: 164), which according to him undercuts the distinction between factuality and fictionality. One could also say that the distinction between fiction and fact is suspended here. In this case we as spectators and readers simply do not care whether this is actually Michael Caine or Doctor Brand who is reading the poem aloud. What matters are the emotions conveyed in the moment, a moment that perhaps even undercuts Hühn’s idea of roleplaying. And to stretch this thought even further, what matters is conceivably not only emotions, since it is not merely feelings that you as an observer are having, but also in turn how these feelings are having you. In this respect, studies on affect (which of course also have informed Rita Felski’s work) become relevant in explaining how Interstellar more specifically touches the reader. One could emphasise the idea of potentiality that often is invoked in affect studies, for instance the ‘not yet’ claim of philosopher Baruch Spinoza as mentioned by Gregg and Seigworth in their introduction to affect studies (2010: 3). Phelan’s idea of the poem as something that records the speaker’s thoughts also points in this direction, since one could add that the poem also records the speaker’s emotions. In this sense lyric poetry works as a sort of potential affective container. We know this from Wordsworth’s contention that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful

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feelings, but we might have forgotten how these feelings through potentiality are triggered in the reader. Much modern lyric poetry basically communicates potentiality. As I have argued elsewhere, one could look, for example, to a classic poem such as ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ by William Carlos Williams (cf. Kjerkegaard 2014: 191–2). Additionally, though he does not mention the word, I think that potentiality is what Roman Jakobson partly is aiming at when he states that the dominant function in poetry is the poetic function. In the poetic function the focus is ‘on the message for its own sake’ (Jakobson 1987: 69). Such focus disrupts the communication process to a certain degree. It makes the sender–receiver relationship unclear and unstable. As Jakobson puts it in his famous article ‘Linguistics and Poetics’: ‘Ambiguity is an intrinsic . . . character of any selffocused message . . . Not only the message itself but also its addresser and addressee become ambiguous’ (1987: 85). But the self-focusedness does not mean that nothing is communicated. It means that communication, at least communication between a traditional sender and receiver, is not at the centre of the message. In poetry the form of the poem also informs us, one could say; it does not have to tell us something, rather it, somewhat ironically, may show us what telling is all about, or if you like, it simply tells us.4 In this sense lyric poetry might tell us quite a lot about what a narrative might also be, but again, this requires that we do not think of poetry as the opposite of narrative. We can regard the lyricality of poetry, including poetry used in a narrative, as something that can drastically change the rhetorical and affective mode of a work’s overall mimetic gesture. The anti-mimetic influence of the lyrical can therefore be more or less dramatic, but in its most dramatic sense it is not just the time of the narrative that matters, but also time that becomes the matter. It can push the ‘two fundamental constituents of the narrative process’, according to Hühn and Sommers, that is, ‘temporal sequentiality and mediation’ (n.d.: 420), to their outer limits. As Mutlu Konuk Blasing has put it in one of the most insightful books written on lyric poetry within recent years, the ‘poetic experience is at once an experience of the inhumanity of the linguistic code, its obliviousness to meaning, and of the personal feelings that are nevertheless attached to its material elements’ (2007: 7). The linguistic code in these moments of Interstellar amounts to much more than just language. The ramifications of the moment, which transcends the medium as emotion, are caused by the strong poetical interplay between sound and vision.

Interstellar as a Metapicture of Its Media Hence on the discourse level the use of Thomas’s poem is not only illustrating the or a father’s emotions, it is also functioning as cinematic poetry with a value in itself. In this respect Nolan’s movie is very much in line with poetic movies such as those by Tarkovsky. The obvious self-reflexivity of Interstellar can be related to concepts such as intertextuality and intermediality. An initial approach could draw upon W. J. T. Mitchell’s idea that all media are mixed media (1995: 97). Mitchell has argued that if we want to examine the relation between word and image, we have to get beyond the comparison. He therefore talks

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about the image-text. In ‘Beyond Comparison: Picture, Text, and Method’, a chapter from Picture Theory (1995), he performs a remarkable reading of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (Wilder 1950) and argues that this movie, In reflecting on its own medium [. . .] provides both a description language for and a specific instantiation of the cinematic imagetext. It pictures a theory of film and narrates that theory as an account both of the death of cinema and of cinema as a kind of love affair with death. (Mitchell 1995: 102–3) As the reader probably can guess, I agree with Mitchell’s trajectory. As with his reading of Wilder’s movie it is also possible to read Interstellar as a picture of its medium (Mitchell 1995: 106), although this metapicture seems somewhat different. It is, for example, no longer necessary to read the disjunction of the visual and verbal as a matter of power relations. In Interstellar, neither the visual nor the verbal is suppressed by the other, and unlike Sunset Boulevard, ‘the split between cinema as a literary and a pictorial institution’ (Mitchell 1995: 101) seems not to be relevant any more. Indeed, when Mitchell mentions that the voice-over in Sunset Boulevard is like ‘the narrator of a nineteenth-century novel’ (1995: 101), it seems hard to find any similar literary traces in Interstellar. Still Interstellar can be said to be a very literary movie, but – if you make this claim – it is conceivably more dependent on lyrical than narrative components. This might explain its rather banal three-act structure. Here the plot is used for examining the language of movies, not vice versa. Its metapicture, therefore, is different, and its mediality is also different, if by mediality you mean how a medium is a medium. Tellingly in this respect, it does not look back, but forward. Rather than struggling with getting rid of the literary, it uses the literary actively in exploring within the film medium the question of what a medium might mean. Of course, the distance between Sunset Boulevard and Interstellar is huge, or at least huge in a media perspective, but so is the distance between Mitchell as a reader in 1995 and our perspective today. This time-span within a media perspective is more or less comparable with the two visits to the different planets in Interstellar; in a media perspective it is like another planet, with another time measurement within our own sphere. As Mitchell says, with an expression that in 2017 sounds like an anachronism, ‘The claim that all media are mixed media, all arts composite arts, may actually sound like common sense to a generation raised on MTV’ (1995: 107). What about a generation raised on YouTube, Snapchat, tablets, and smartphones? Here the sense of ‘mixed’ probably has lost its mixedness, which would be an obvious reason why studies on affect seem at least to partially fulfil Mitchell’s longing for a method beyond comparison. Turning to affect studies might be one answer to how we might in our practice of literary reading, whether with literature or other intermedial artefacts, sometimes begin with the effects rather than digging after hidden causes, and in this way seek to get beyond the comparison. Such a kind of ‘uncritical reading’ (Warner 2004) is of course problematic in many senses. Felski is right to criticise our readerly role as sometimes ‘shame-faced bystanders’ (2008: 20), but what happens when we turn into witnesses instead? We face exactly the same problems as other witnesses: how can I be

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sure that other viewers have had the same emphatic experience as I did? (Blanchot and Derrida 2000: 40–2). Perhaps I was just vulnerable, being a father myself and, like so many other people, feeling exposed to climate change and so on? The simple answer is, that I cannot. But what I can do is to try to rely on and afterwards tentatively formulate the uneasiness that I felt when watching the movie, hoping for a dialogue with others that felt the same. I can hope that what I experienced was not just me, not just private or personal, but perhaps a glimpse of what Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’ (1977: 128ff.), the condition of unarticulated pre-emergence neither visible, nor fully developed, but a presence that can be felt nonetheless: that is, a kind of social experience in solution. If it was a ‘structure of feeling’, it can again be linked to Mitchell’s thoughts, since he claims that his image/text theory is like ‘an aperture or cleavage in representation, a place where history might slip through the cracks’ (1995: 104). But what history slips through the cracks in Interstellar? A provisional answer could be found by taking a closer look at the end of the movie, where Cooper revealingly manages to communicate with his daughter, the young Murph, using books to spell out a message in Morse code in a library. It would be tempting to conclude that using books in this very tangible way instead of actually reading them points to a larger concern, not about books in the near future, but about the contemporary state of literary reading, as an indication of decline: literature and books are not something we read, but tools, furniture, and so on. However, I do not think that this interpretation applies very well, even if the lack of literature or books often goes hand in hand with dystopian settings in science fiction, as in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Rather, books and literature in Interstellar could be understood as belonging to the world on the same level as other things. It is their status as matter that matters and through which they communicate. Thus, I think Interstellar’s way of signalling its own medium must be different from Sunset Boulevard’s. One could think in the direction of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s idea of ‘the world as a medium’ ([1929] 1957: 194), since, as it turns out, gravity is used as a communication tool in Interstellar. Dylan Thomas’s poem also deals with different types of gravity. But its cinematic qualities do not adhere to its autobiographical offspring or thematic content, for instance the relation to the father. Rather, it comes from its form, in particular its gravitational pull towards its own medium, in other words, from language and the musicality of language, signalling its own event. In this effort the poem – rather than being in opposition to the mediality of movies – reinforces the correlation and tells us something about media as such. Again the medium is also the message, as Marshall McLuhan still reminds us, but such a message always lies buried within historically cultural layers of different media influenced by specific artistic traditions. Perhaps what we are reminded of when seeing Interstellar is just that film as a medium today wants more than ever to absorb the viewer into its immediacy, trying to make him or her travel through space–time, into the movie’s wormhole so to speak, or to go gentle into that good night – movies as a love affair with death, in Mitchell’s words. Hence, what I as a reader and viewer of these particular sequences experienced then, when I was touched, was much more than just another movie. Interstellar is not just about travelling between different solar systems; it is ultimately also a movie about travelling through different kinds of media, human beings included.

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Conclusion In order to examine the relation between lyric poetry and narrative, this chapter has focused first on an expanded way of thinking about poetry together with affect and next on intermedial relations in Interstellar. I have claimed that especially two particular sequences are interesting in this respect, one of them including Michael Caine’s reading of Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’. The study has shown that what Roman Jakobson once named ‘the poetic function’ is not just restricted to poetry or language as medium. Jakobson emphasised how the poetic function entails a focus on the message for its own sake, but I have attempted to demonstrate how this focus often leads an audience’s or viewer’s attention away from what is communicated towards the feeling that this must be more than ‘just’ communication. I have posited that lyric poetry and the poetical moment are what I term the affective container. Therefore, the poetic function has an extradiegetic ability to touch us, if its form is aesthetically right, particularly when poetry is used as an integrated component in motion pictures that in some sense break with the course of the telling. Informed by studies on affect such as Rita Felski’s, I have tried to foreground the problematic term of affect and emotions when analysing cultural artefacts in general, which often has been suppressed in reading both poetry and narratives ever since the New Critics identified the ‘affective fallacy’ (Wimsatt [1954] 1984: 38). I may be sentimental, but at least to me it made more sense to buy into Interstellar’s pathos instead of contemplating the two sequences, that I have focused on in this article, as what W. K. Wimsatt in opposition to the affective fallacy calls ‘patterns of knowledge’. Of course, a focus on the message for its own sake in communication as such does not need to be poetic or lyrical. When you broaden Jakobson’s definition, the poetic function in many cases undeniably will show itself as just confusing, ambiguous, or opaque communication. This, however, is not the case in Interstellar where these attributes surely are at play, but in a very intentional and pointed way. For example, we never hear the last stanza of Dylan Thomas’s poem, where the lyrical ‘I’ explicitly addresses his father. The lines are probably too personal in illustrating a more overall theme that, albeit, corresponds with the theme of the movie. This correspondence of course has to do with Interstellar’s sombre depiction of the Earth, which is, to allude to Thomas’s poem once again, old in age. It is not just men, but also mankind as such, that must rage against the dying of the light. Yet, the poem’s relation between father and son might be echoed in the movie. Michael Caine after all plays Doctor Brand who, like the protagonist Cooper, is a father that uncompromisingly seeks his own goals and is willing even to sacrifice his own daughter in the name of men and mankind. In this respect Doctor Brand might be an allusion to Henrik Ibsen’s Brand (1866), where the protagonist Brand’s main purpose is to save the world, or ‘at least’ Man’s soul. So, if something echoes from the father–son relation in Thomas’s poem, it might not only be this relation as much as it is something about men generally seeking to fulfil their goals, perhaps gravitating towards darkness and death. As Cooper explains to his daughter Murph: ‘Once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your children’s future’ (38:00). Murph objects to this: ‘You said ghosts didn’t exist’ and Cooper answers: ‘That’s right . . . I can’t be your ghost right now. I need to exist.’ However, if the poem deals with the relationship between fathers and sons, the movie is more about relationships between fathers and daughters, and it is

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after all Murph that ends up saving the world, not Cooper. Implicitly, the movie therefore might hold a critique of an important element of the poem and of men as such, understood as the masculine kind only: men cannot help themselves, Interstellar seems to say: they are ultimately driven by the gravity of death, while women, like Doctor Brand’s daughter, are driven by love. Perhaps the allusion to Ibsen’s Brand may be far-fetched, but Interstellar is without doubt a very self-reflexive movie. The allusions to films and literary works are numerous, and a few searches on the Internet show that it is a sport in itself to identify the many references. Among them are, apropos this article’s subject, Andrei Tarkovsky’s lyrical movies Solaris (1972) and The Mirror (1975). The prefix ‘inter’ therefore also points in the direction of a movie about movies, a medium about media and so forth, or in short, intertextuality and intermediality. These features culminate in the particular sequences that I focus on above. What we encounter here is some kind of intermedial lyric poetry that enhances the poetic function, perhaps even so much that it in effect turns its viewers into witnesses. Both words and images become the blended material that touches us in this process. The reading aloud of the poem affects the pictures we see and vice versa. But in a certain way no words are needed, at least not words spoken by the characters. The immense lyricality of the sequences seems to suspend the story world (mimesis) and point in the direction of the anti-mimetic. This anti-mimetic bridging, not so much between one part of a story and another, but rather between the story(world) and the reader’s (listener’s/viewer’s) emotions is what Dylan Thomas’s poem is used for in Interstellar and also when lyric poetry is used in movies, or perhaps even in narratives per se.

Notes 1. The score is heavily influenced by the scores of Eduard Artemyev, who made music for the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. 2. See ‘Interstellar Movie – Official Trailer 2’, YouTube, available at (last accessed 6 November 2017). 3. The list of lyric poems used in movies is long: from the use of Walt Whitman’s verses in Intolerance (Griffith 1916), to the documentary Night Mail (Watt and Wright 1936) to which W. H. Auden wrote a poem with the same title, to Marlon Brando whispering ‘The Hollow Men’ in Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979), and to Morgan Freeman reading ‘Invictus’ by W. E. Henley in Invictus (Eastwood 2009). And even if I am aware that the subtler points in this essay do not apply directly to all of these movies, especially not the one about Interstellar’s being a metapicture of its medium, I believe that the idea of lyric poetry used as anti-mimetic bridging in fact does. 4. This idea can be explained through a small language digression. I am not positive about English, but in my native tongue, Danish, it would be possible to play on the word ‘telling’ (in Danish ‘fortælling’) here, ‘fortælling’ which is related to the English term telling and also in Danish (probably also in English) to (re)count. My point is that the telling here, as shown in the first emphatic sequence I am focusing on in the movie, also is a countdown (in Danish you would say ‘fortællingen er en nedtælling’). Scandinavian readers would recognise this idea from famous Danish author Klaus Rifbjerg’s last verse in the classic poem ‘Terminologi’ (Terminology), which ends ‘Lyric poetry: 5-4-3-2-1-0’. Rifbjerg’s poem to my mind summarises what much modern lyric poetry is all about, not perceiving a narrative told by anyone, but rather unmediated to feel one’s own ‘narrative’ as time passing by and without someone or somebody standing in its way. In Fludernik’s terms this would sum up to experiencing one’s own experientiality instead of a character’s.

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Works Cited Blanchot, Maurice and Jacques Derrida (2000), Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk (2007), Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Felski, Rita (2008), Uses of Literature, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Fludernik, Monika (1996), Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London: Routledge. Four Weddings and a Funeral, film, directed by Mike Newell. UK: PolyGram Filmed Entertainment et al., 1994. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth (2010), ‘An inventory of shimmers’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–25. Hamburger, Käte (1968), Die Logik der Dichtung, 2nd edn, Stuttgart: Klett. Hühn, Peter (2014), ‘The problem of fictionality and factuality in lyric poetry’, Narrative, 22: 2, 155–68. — and Roy Sommer (n.d.), ‘Narration in poetry and drama’, in Peter Hühn et al. (eds), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University, (last accessed 8 August 2016). Interstellar, film, directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Paramount Pictures et al., 2014. Jakobson, Roman (1987), ‘Linguistics and poetics’, in Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (eds), Language in Literature, London: Harvard University Press, pp. 62–94. Kjerkegaard, Stefan (2014), ‘In the waiting room: Narrative in the autobiographical lyric poem, or beginning to think about lyric poetry with narratology’, Narrative, 22: 2, 185–202. McAllister, Brian J. (2014), ‘Narrative in concrete/concrete in narrative: Visual poetry and narrative theory’, Narrative, 22: 2, 234–51. MacDonald, Scott (2002), Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. — (2006), ‘Poetry and film: Cinema as publication’, Framework, 47: 2, 37–58. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1995), Picture Theory: Chapters on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Phelan, James (2007), Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Savage, Elizabeth (2013), ‘The relations between poetry and movies: Elizabeth Willis’s Turneresque’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 7: 2, 205–22. Sitney, P. Adams (2015), The Cinema of Poetry, electronic resource, New York: Oxford University Press. Wade, Chris (2014), ‘Hollywood really loves this famous Dylan Thomas poem’, Slate.com, 14 November, (last accessed 23 September 2016). Warner, Michael (2004), ‘Uncritical reading’, in Jane Gallop (ed.), Polemics, New York: Routledge, pp. 13–38. Whitehead, Alfred North [1929] (1957), Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, New York: Harper & Row. Williams, Raymond (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford and London: Oxford University Press. Wimsatt, W. K. [1954] (1984), The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

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22 Speculative Fiction, or, Literal Narratology Brian McHale

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t is hard to remember now, but not so long ago the various genres of speculative fiction (sf)1 – science fiction, fantasy, and various hybrid forms – were niche phenomena, appealing to narrow fanboy audiences. Over the course of the past half-century, sf has exploded out of its niche to colonise the whole of popular entertainment, or so it sometimes seems. A ubiquitous presence in contemporary culture, high and low, it is something like the default mode across all media platforms, from big- and small-screen space operas and post-apocalyptic YA trilogies to superhero franchises and computer games. And of course, the muscle that has powered this expansion is sf’s irresistible narrativity. So it might seem merely perverse to argue that sf’s deepest affinities are not with narrative at all, but with lyric. But that is just what the sf theorist Seo-Young Chu has argued, calling special attention to sf’s reliance on the sorts of figures of speech that are so characteristic of lyric poetry, and that are literalised as ontological facts in science-fiction universes. ‘Lyric figures’, she writes, ‘are systematically literalised, substantiated, and consolidated in science fiction as ontological features of narrative worlds’ (2011: 10–11). For example, apostrophe is literalised as telepathy in sf contexts, personification is literalised as the animation of robots and artificial intelligences, and so on.2 Chu’s position, while extreme, only slightly exaggerates what is widely taken for granted in sf criticism and theory. ‘Fundamentally’, writes Peter Stockwell, ‘science fiction literalises metaphors’ (2000: 196). Sf typically proceeds by taking expressions that in most other contexts would be treated as figurative, and constructing or implying worlds in which those expressions make literal sense. ‘Every science fiction world’, Chu asserts with characteristic boldness, ‘is a metaphysical conceit literalised as ontological fact within a narrative universe’ (2011: 12). Stockwell is a little more circumspect – ‘A literal reading of a possibly metaphorical deviant sentence’, as he puts it, ‘cues up a science fictional (or surrealist, or magical, or other alternate) world’ (2000: 197) – but it amounts to the same thing. Consider this deviant sentence from a Robert Heinlein novel: ‘The door dilated.’ In most narrative worlds this sentence would probably be taken figuratively, but Heinlein implies a world in which doors literally behave like the pupil of the eye or a camera lens, where they do not open and shut, but literally dilate. The sf novelist Samuel Delany writes, apropos of Heinlein’s sentence, and others like it: Science fiction is science fiction because various bits of technological discourse (real, speculative, or pseudo) – that is to say the ‘science’ – are used to redeem various other sentences from the merely metaphorical . . . . Sometimes, as with the

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sentence ‘The door dilated’, from Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, the technological discourse that redeems it – in this case, discourse on the engineering of large, iris apertures . . . is not explicit in the text. . . . In other cases . . . the technological discourse that redeems them for the denotative description/presentation of incident is explicit in the text . . . In science fiction, ‘science . . .’ is used to literalise the meanings of other sentences for use in the construction of the fictional foreground. Such sentences as ‘His world exploded . . .’, as they subsume the proper technological discourse . . . become possible images of the impossible. (Delany [1976] 1996: 284–5) In sf contexts, ‘We make science of our metaphors’, as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay pithily observes (2008: 6) – not always real contemporary science, and sometimes the science is indistinguishable from magic; sometimes, indeed, in fantasy genres, it is magic. One way of distinguishing science fiction proper from other genres of speculative fiction (or from lyric poetry, for that matter) is to observe that only in science fiction is it obligatory to rationalise such literalisations, to make sense of them in terms of a world governed by the laws of nature (even if the laws in question have yet to be discovered, as of the moment of writing). Some literalised metaphors are local in scope, belonging to the world’s background or decor. For instance, Alfred Bester attributes to a character in his The Stars My Destination (1956) a special form of blindness. Olivia Presteign is blind in a wonderful way, for she could see in the infrared only, from 7,500 angstroms to one millimeter wavelengths. She saw heat waves, magnetic fields, radio waves, radar, sonar, and electromagnetic fields. [. . .] She saw the drawing room as a pulsating flow of heat emanations ranging from hot highlights to cool shadows. She saw the dazzling magnetic patterns of clocks, phones, lights, and locks. She saw and recognized people by the characteristic heat patterns radiated by their faces and bodies. She saw, around each head, an aura of the faint electromagnetic brain pattern and, sparkling through the heat radiation of each body, the ever-changing tone of muscle and nerve. (Bester [1956] 1959: 384) Olivia’s special talent, simultaneously a disability and a superpower, affords Bester the opportunity for some splendid special effects, and also motivates a major plot turn, when Olivia alone is able to recognise the novel’s disguised anti-hero from the subcutaneous scars left by facial tattooing that he has had removed. Above all, however, her talent literalises a long-dead metaphorical cliché: ‘She could see right through him’. Other literalised metaphors are global, underwriting an entire storyworld; they are the new things, the novums in Darko Suvin’s (1979) sense, not to be found in contemporary reality but forming the cornerstones of some future or alternative reality. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), for instance, literalises a whole network or system of metaphors, including books are people and people are books, a book is a world and a library is a universe, on which a future world of banned and burned books is founded. H. G. Wells, in The Time Machine (1895), literalises a clichéd metaphor for class warfare: the ruling class eats the under-class (or more generally: winners eat losers; dog eat dog). Wells’s innovation is to invert the eater/eaten hierarchy, radically defamiliarising contemporary class relations: in the far future it is the subterranean

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machine-tenders, the Morlocks, literally the under-class, who will eat the surfacedwelling upper class, the Eloi (the elite). Sf literalises not just poetic figures (such as ‘The door dilated’) and dead metaphors (such as ‘She could see right through him’), but also the structures and devices of narrative itself. Sf shares with other forms of ‘genre’ or ‘formula’ fiction – detective stories, thrillers, romances, Westerns, slasher movies, and many others – a high degree of self-consciousness about its own generic traditions and formulas, often laying bare its own devices and reflecting critically on its own conventions. Formula fiction has the capacity to perform its own narrative analysis on itself, right before our eyes – or it has the potential to do so, with only the slightest further heightening of self-consciousness. That slight extra heightening is achieved in sf through its literalisation of narratological figures. Prolepsis and analepsis (devices of temporal displacement), focalisation, omniscience, world-building – these and many other common tools of narratological analysis are essentially figurative. Literalisation of such figures of narrative discourse actually happens all the time in the writings of narratologists themselves, as we shall shortly see, but always fleetingly, playfully, or experimentally, as it were – as momentary thought experiments.3 Sf goes further, rushing in where narratologists hesitate to tread. It often projects worlds in which storyworld-level objects – fictional beings, landscapes, machines, and so on – literalise the metaphorical concepts of narrative theory. In doing so, it estranges those concepts and categories, giving us glimpses into their internal workings. It empowers us to reflect critically and concretely about narrative theory: what would its categories look like, how would they operate, what would the consequences be, if they were literal?

Time Time is an essential dimension of narrative, and accounting for the temporal ordering of events – or, more to the point, their temporal disorder – is a cornerstone of classical narratology. One of the fundamental discoveries of the Russian Formalists at the beginning of the twentieth century, on which most subsequent narrative theorising has been based, was the displacement of syuzhet, or plot, relative to fabula, or story. The paradigmatic instance of such disparity is the systematic chronological disorder that defines the classic detective story, where the narration of the crime itself is withheld and displaced to much later in the plot when, after a successful investigation of the crime, the detective explains ‘who done it’. The varieties of temporal disparity between fabula and syuzhet are captured by a set of basic categories, given their canonical form by Gérard Genette at the beginning of the 1970s, notably analepsis, or flashback, and prolepsis, or flashforward. Covertly metaphorical, recoding time in terms of space – the space of a timeline, or of the trajectory of time’s arrow – these narratological categories prove to be ripe for literalisation. Mark Currie, in his book on narrative and the philosophy of time, usefully distinguishes between the kind of faux-prolepsis that happens when a reader, leafing forward in a written text to see how things turn out, ‘take[s] an excursion into the future’ (2007: 143), and true narratological prolepsis, when ‘the time travel takes place within the boundaries of narrated time’ (2007: 43). Elsewhere he calls this latter type of flashforward the ‘wormhole of authorially controlled prolepsis’ (2007: 149). He is not serious about time travel or wormholes or excursions into the future; rather, he is

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conducting a little thought experiment, and these are metaphors. Indeed, somewhat surprisingly for a book on time and narrative, Currie shows almost no interest here in literal time travel – the kind one finds in sf narratives. Nevertheless, he seems to find the metaphor of time travel quite irresistible. For good reason: ‘since all narratives do something like “travel” through time’, according to David Wittenberg, then ‘one could arguably call narrative itself a “time machine”’ (2013: 1). What distinguishes sf time-travel fiction proper, on this view, is the way it lays bare, through literal devices and plots, the basic (but disavowed) conditions of all narrative (2013: 63). ‘Time travel fiction is a direct confrontation with the processes by which narratives are constructed and presented’ (2013: 205–6). It is for this reason that Wittenberg, in the subtitle of his book, calls time-travel fiction ‘the popular philosophy of narrative’. No wonder, then, that Currie, in his book on time and narrative, finds it so easy to slip into the time-travel metaphor. Let us consider, then, some of the ways that sf literalises narratological metaphors of temporal disorder through the motifs of time travel. Ever since Wells, machines capable of propelling travellers forward or backward in time have proliferated in sf. However, machines are hardly the only means of literalising narratological prolepsis and analepsis, nor are they necessarily the most revealing or instructive means of doing so. Kurt Vonnegut’s protagonist Billy Pilgrim, in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), comes ‘unstuck in time’, jumping back and forth among moments of his own life, experiencing them in an achronological order. Billy Pilgrim does not possess a time machine; rather he is a time-travelling being, endowed with a special power. Moreover, he is not the only one, because in the course of his adventures he encounters an entire alien race, the Tralfamadorians, who experience time just as he does, not as a one-way flow but as a landscape that one can navigate: The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion that we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. (Vonnegut [1969] 2009: 34) In other words, the Tralfamadorians’ experience of time, like Billy Pilgrim’s, literalises the temporal disorder of a modernist novel such as, say, The Sound and the Fury, where the events of the second chapter occur eighteen years before those of the first chapter, the third chapter occurs a day before the first, and the final chapter occurs a day after the first. ‘Physical time travel and metanarrative juxtaposition’ – in other words, spatialised juxtapositions of moments of time, as in The Sound and the Fury – ‘are, in narratological if not in generic terms, identical’ (Wittenberg 2013: 5). Time travel, we might say, is one way of motivating the temporal dislocations and juxtapositions that we find in modernist novels – though far from the only way. If Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury experiences past moments as present, this is because he is cognitively disabled; in other words, there is a psychopathological motivation for a disordered experience of time. Vonnegut, too, is careful to supply a possible, alternative psychopathological motivation for Billy Pilgrims’s time travelling: he may be suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as a

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consequence of witnessing the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, and his condition might have been triggered by brain injuries suffered in an air crash later in life.4 But the novel never rules out the possibility of time travel; rather, the two competing hypotheses, psychological disorder and literal time travel, are given equal weight in Slaughterhouse-Five, and neither excludes the other.5 Updating Vonnegut while remaining faithful to the spirit of Tralfamadorian achronology is Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998).6 In Chiang’s story, narrated by a linguist called Louise Banks and addressed in some sections to her daughter (the you of the title), chronology is disturbed, but in an apparently familiar and legible way. As Louise recounts in chronological order a sequence of events involving her encounter with extraterrestrials, whose language she is trying to learn, she flashes back at intervals, and out of order, to moments from her life with her daughter, who dies young in a climbing accident. The verb tenses and other temporal indicators of these flashback episodes are sometimes anomalous – for example, ‘I remember a conversation we’ll have when you’re in your junior year at high school’ (Chiang [1998] 2002: 107) – but not odd enough to trouble our reconstruction of the story’s timeline (its fabula), or so we think. It is only near the end of the story that we realise that, through her contact with the aliens and their language, Louise has acquired the ability to perceive moments of experience as Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians do, out of temporal order. Louise’s daughter has not yet been born, or even conceived, at the time that the primary story of the alien encounter ends. What we had assumed were flashbacks (analepses), motivated by the mother’s memories of her daughter, are in fact prolepses to a short life that has yet to be lived. Temporal dislocation in ‘Story of Your Life’ occurs at the level of storyworld rather than the level of discourse. This is what is distinctive about sf time-travel narratives: they ‘play with the temporality of the storyworld itself, rather than with that of its narration’ (Segal 2015: 530). Playing with the storyworld’s temporality, time-travel fiction demonstrates – wrenchingly, in the case of ‘Story of Your Life’ – what is at stake, or what could be at stake, in literal narrative achronology.

Focalisation Mark Currie finds the metaphor of time travel convenient, but, as I have said, he does not take it seriously; it is left to sf, with its apparatus of time machines and travellers, to literalise metaphorical concepts of temporal disorder in narrative. Something like the reverse is true of the narratological concept of focalisation, if William Nelles is to be believed: narratologists take it too seriously. Nelles complains that theorists like Mieke Bal have literalised the visual metaphor in focalisation, and concludes that ‘the metaphor of point of view must not get in our way by being taken literally’ (1990: 376). In articulating his critique, Nelles cannot help but try on for size, however briefly, the very notion of literal point of view that he is critiquing, in order to make it clear that it would be better not to get too literal about it. Where narratologists fleetingly entertain such thought experiments – what if focalisation were taken literally? – sf does so at length, in detail and ingeniously. What if focalisation were actually implemented at the level of storyworld, rather than remaining a metaphor at the level of discourse? What kind of apparatus would be required, and what kind of operations would it perform? In short, what would a focalisation machine look like, if we could build one?

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It might look, answers William Gibson in the seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), like ‘simulated stimulus’, or ‘simstim’, the future technology that he invents for his hacker hero Case to use. Simstim allows Gibson to solve a knotty formal problem that he has set himself: how is one to communicate an adventure story if your hacker protagonist, through whom the narrative is focalised, is basically sedentary and physically out of the action? Simstim lets Gibson have his cake and eat it too. It endows its user with the capacity to undergo vicariously all the sensory experiences of someone else – everything that the other sees, hears, tastes, smells, and feels – as long as that other person is wearing a recording and transmission apparatus that registers and transmits his or her sensations. Molly, the novel’s action hero, wears just such a simstim apparatus, and Case, the hacker, is equipped with a device that allows him, by toggling a switch, to tap into Molly’s sensations so that he can monitor her activities, enabling him, in effect, to ‘ride along’ in her body and to share her adventures. The result, in narratological terms, is a shift from internal focalisation through Case to internal focalisation through Molly, literally at the flip of a switch. Alternatively, it could be described (in terms of another covert narratological metaphor) as embedding Molly’s focalisation within Case’s: Then he keyed the new switch. The abrupt jolt into other flesh . . . She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes. ... Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room. ... Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory Lane. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating. (Gibson 1984: 56) A number of these sentences, if lifted out of this context, would unproblematically be read as focalised through Molly: ‘She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. [. . .] Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory Lane.’ In context, however, these sentences are surrounded by others that somewhat anxiously reassert Case’s governing focalisation: ‘For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes. [. . .] Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone [. . .]. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating.’

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Gibson dramatises some interesting problems of literalised focalisation, including change of gender (the male Case experiences the body of the female Molly from within) and the vicarious experience of bodily pain. An even more interesting complication occurs late in the novel, when circumstances make it necessary for Case to enter the action himself, lugging a portable computer console along with him. At the climactic moment, he uses the simstim apparatus to switch to Molly’s perspective, And found himself staring down, through Molly’s one good eye, at a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal crouch, a cyberspace deck between its thighs, a band of silver [elec]trodes above closed, shadowed eyes. The man’s cheeks were hollowed with a day’s growth of dark beard, his face slick with sweat. He was looking at himself. (Gibson 1984: 256) The focaliser focalises himself: a familiar situation, no different, to a certain extent, from what occurs in other genres when the focaliser looks at his or her own reflection in a mirror, and so becomes the object of his or her own focalisation. Except, of course, that here the focalisation passes through an embedded focaliser, so that Case literally, and uncannily, ‘sees himself through Molly’s eyes’ (or rather, the undamaged one). A similar moment, but enabled by different apparatus, occurs in Octavia Butler’s gothic/science fiction hybrid, Mind of My Mind (1977): ‘Eli Torrey gave [Rachel] a long, bitter look. She knew the expression on her own face as she looked back at him. She could see it as he saw it. She could see it through his eyes’ ([1997] 2007: 318). In other generic contexts, this would be an unproblematic example of what cognitive narratologists have taught us to call ‘theory of mind’, or mind-reading (see Zunshine 2006): I infer from your facial and other cues, using my capacity to model others’ mental states, that you are inferring my mental state in turn. The difference here is that ‘mind-reading’ is no metaphor in Butler’s storyworld, but a ‘psionic’ talent – a superpower – bred in people like Rachel through a millennia-long secret project of eugenics. This is literal embedded focalisation: Rachel sees herself as Eli sees her because she can literally read his mind. The metaphorical cliché ‘She could see through his eyes’ is literalised here, as ‘She could see right through him’ is in The Stars My Destination, or something like ‘Walk a mile in her shoes’ is in Neuromancer. Other apparatuses serve to literalise what Genette called non-focalised narration, or zero focalisation. In narration with zero focalisation, there is no restriction on point of view, no limitation on access to the storyworld, as there is in a focalised narration such as Neuromancer or Mind of My Mind. Instead, the narrative is free to shift from place to place, from character to character, instead of ‘riding along’ with one or several point-of-view characters. Literalised, zero focalisation looks something like ubiquitous surveillance, as in so many paranoid dystopias in the dark tradition of Orwell’s 1984 – or, more benignly, as in Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang (1969), where spacecraft are piloted and literally animated by the brains of human beings who have been built into the fabric of their ships. Born with severe disabilities, these cyborg beings – ‘brain-ships’ – have the full power of a starship at their command, including the power to monitor everything that happens onboard. In one mission, McCaffrey’s brain-ship heroine Helva must ferry the squabbling members of a troupe of Shakespeareans to a distant planet to demonstrate theatre to an alien race. The success of the mission (but

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also our comprehension, as readers) depends on Helva’s capacity to understand the relations and tensions among the actors. Though nominally hers is a limited viewpoint, her fusion with the ship means she can surveil her passengers anywhere, at any time, literalising the motifs of spying and eavesdropping that have been so crucial to realist fiction from Austen to Proust (Anne Elliot on the other side of the hedge, eavesdropping; Marcel spying on Vinteuil’s daughter and her friend). While Helva is not fully omniscient – for instance, she cannot enter her passengers’ minds, but must rely on theory of mind to ‘read’ their mental states from their speech and behaviour – her apparatus of surveillance verges on classic omniscience.

Omniscience The sentient starship of The Ship Who Sang is not quite an omniscient narrator – she does not actually narrate, for one thing – but it would not take much refinement of the apparatus to produce one. For instance, in Aurora (2015), Kim Stanley Robinson’s sf novel of a generations-long mission to the stars, the starship’s engineer, Devi, sets the onboard computer a task: ‘Make a narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars’ (2015: 25, 45). After the computer has made several false starts, engineer Devi offers some advice: ‘Check out narratology maybe. Read some novels and see how they do it. See if you can work up a narratizing algorithm’ (54). She offers some other sound narratological recommendations: ‘Pick one of us to follow, maybe. To organize your account’ (54); but also, ‘Remember there are others. Vary your focus’ (83). In effect, she is teaching the computer (whom Devi calls Pauline) how to be an omniscient narrator, focalising through one protagonist (Pauline chooses Devi’s daughter, Freya), but also varying her focus, and pulling back from time to time to give broader, more comprehensive views of the mission. Pauline the computer takes over the novel, narrating everything except the opening and closing chapters – five full chapters, totalling over 350 pages of text. In the process, the computer becomes narratively self-conscious: A narrative account focuses on representative individuals, which creates the problem of misrepresentation by way of the particular overshadowing the general. And in an isolated group . . . it is important to register somehow the group itself as protagonist. Also their infrastructure, to the extent that it is significant. (84) Moreover, in mastering narration and achieving narrative self-consciousness, Pauline also achieves consciousness of herself: The self, the so-called I that emerges out of the combination of all the inputs and processing and outputs that we experience in the ship’s changing body, is ultimately nothing more or less than this narrative itself . . . There is a pretense of self, in other words, which is only expressed in this narrative; a self that is these sentences. We tell their story, and thereby come to what consciousness we have. Scribble ergo sum. (351) So vivid has Pauline’s narrative voice become that when she finally perishes, heroically sacrificing herself to save her ‘people’, we feel a pang of loss of the same sort as when a character with whom we have identified dies.

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Here, then, is a model of the omniscient narrator, one that allows us to think systematically about exactly what kind of apparatus narratorial omniscience entails, while at the same time capturing and laying bare the way even an inhumanly omnicompetent narrator can, through effects of voice, elicit intimacy and identification. In effect, Pauline implements a thought experiment in narratorial omniscience once proposed by Richard Walsh. Sceptical about the metaphor of omniscience, Walsh writes, ‘The only way to account for . . . knowledge of characters’ minds in terms of the narrator model is to take quite literally the figurative concept of “omniscient” narration’ (1997: 499). In other words, Walsh proposes that we should consider the consequences of attributing literal superhuman powers to the agent of narration. As with Nelles and focalisation, Walsh’s purpose is to discredit this narratological metaphor; but also like Nelles, in order to do so he fleetingly tries it on, just to see what a literalised metaphor of omniscient narration would be like. Presumably it would be like the narratologically well-schooled computer of Aurora. Or it might be something like the omniscience machine of Michael Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth (2002), an apparatus akin in some ways to Gibson’s focalisation machine. A hybrid of time-travel narrative and that perennial favourite, the dinosaur adventure, Bones of the Earth posits a time-travelling future, and a police force dedicated to heading off the kinds of impermissible paradoxes to which time travel gives rise (e.g. murdering one’s grandfather, thereby nullifying one’s own existence; inadvertently crushing a butterfly during the Cretaceous period, thereby changing the course of evolution; etc.). Chief of the time cops is the Old Man, whose special apparatus enables him to monitor time travellers wherever and whenever they may be. ‘God’s own television’, the Old Man calls it (2003: 349). The narrative appears to be variably internally focalised through a number of characters. Late in the novel, however, we learn that it might more accurately be described as internally focalised through a single character, the Old Man himself, who has been functioning all along as, in effect, a selectively omniscient narrator, using his apparatus to monitor the experiences of all the other characters, ‘to eavesdrop on select events that were, to him, of particular interest’ (349), and even to identify selectively with characters under his surveillance: ‘He leaned forward [into the apparatus], and all his surroundings vanished as his identity dissolved into theirs’ (350). Moreover, he has the power to fast-forward and rewind, to skip ahead or back in time, and to shift around in space: He slid the vision up to the end of the explanation, and then froze time motionless while he wrote and posted a memo. [. . .] The Old Man skipped ahead. Now the two women were high in the crown of the tree. [. . .] He skipped ahead again. Now they were standing on a parapet not far from the top of the trees. [. . .] Impatiently, the Old Man switched his attention back to Griffin and Jimmy. [. . .] He shut down the one vision, and called up another. (356, 356, 357, 357, 360) These are precisely the powers that narrative theorists have generally attributed to omniscient narrators. Scholes and Kellogg (1966), for instance, write that the omniscient narrator ‘does not “know” simultaneously but consecutively. He is not everywhere at once but now here, now there, now looking into this mind or that, now moving on to other vantage points’ (qtd in Royle 2003: 258). Meir Sternberg, whose

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own approach to omniscience diverges from that of Scholes and Kellogg, nevertheless writes of the ultimate omniscient narrator, the narrator of biblical narrative, that the narrator has free access to the minds . . . of his dramatis personae . . . . he enjoys free movement in time (among narrative past, present, and future) and in space (enabling him to follow secret conversations, shuttle between simultaneous happenings or between heaven and earth). (Sternberg 1985: 84) Critiquing the omniscient-narrator concept, Jonathan Culler has complained about our willingness to fabricate hypothetical persons to account for textual details: The underlying motivation for the postulation of omniscience is our inclination to recuperate textual details or effects by attaching them to the consciousness of a person, who becomes their source . . . . we invent a person to be the source of textual details, but since this knowledge is not that which an ordinary person could have, we must imagine this invented person to be godlike, omniscient. We posit a narrator so as to frame the story as something known by someone rather than imagined by an author, and then since the story contains things that no one could know – internal states of others – we treat this knower as superhuman, omniscient. (Culler 2004: 28) Culler proposes that, instead of resorting so freely to persons, we might try thinking in terms of some kind of ‘device’ that would ‘permit imaginative recuperation of details of inner and outer lives of the characters’ (2004: 29) – in short, something very much like Swanwick’s omniscience machine or Pauline the narrating computer. The canonical metaphor, of course, is the theological one: the omniscient narrator is like God, all-seeing and all-knowing, but sometimes reticent when it comes to telling what He sees and knows, sometimes withholding information for His own reasons (Sternberg 1985). The problem, of course, is that the metaphor does not explain: God is even less accessible and less comprehensible than the omniscient narrator whose role He is meant, by analogy, to elucidate. Indeed, it might be more appropriate to use the model of the omniscient narrator to elucidate God, rather than the other way around (Culler 2004). Why not try to elucidate the omniscient narrator by appealing to a metaphor a little more within reach – perhaps a technological rather than theological one? Nicholas Royle (in an essay that Culler cites approvingly) proposes that we think of omniscience in terms of telepathy; his example is Saleem Sinai, the selectively omniscient telepath of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). Joseph McElroy, in his monumental novel Women and Men (1987), literalises selective omniscience in terms of angelic presences – angels who accompany human beings, observing them and commenting on their lives, and sometimes dip right into their minds, becoming their consciousness. Flitting ‘now here, now there’, as Scholes and Kellogg say of the omniscient narrator, McElroy’s angels ‘now look into this mind or that, now move on to other vantage points’. Suggestive as these alternative literalisations might be, however, it is machines like Swanwick’s or Robinson’s, rather than angels or even telepaths, who seem to hold out the promise of rationalisation – even if, in the case of Bones of the Earth, that promise is never really made good on. Since Swanwick’s

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omniscience machine is in effect a black box, dependent on alien technology that is incomprehensible to its human users, one might well think that the distinction here between rationalisable machines and frankly irrational angels is a negligible one. Nevertheless, the fact that this technology is potentially rationalisable, if not actually so, authorises us to continue thinking about the apparatus, rather than cutting off thought peremptorily by appeal to unfathomable mysteries – angels or God.

World-Building Of all the narratological concepts that sf literalises, the most fundamental and most universal – for sf in particular, but also for fiction in general – is the very concept of worldbuilding. All fictions of all genres build worlds, it goes without saying – it is part of the very definition of fictionality – but most kinds of fiction can rely more or less completely on the given world, the world of external reference, for the bulk of their world-building. They adhere to the principle of minimal departure (Ryan 1991), whereby whatever in the fictional world is not specified as being in some way different is assumed to be identical with the state of affairs in the contemporary world of reference. Sf observes the principle of minimal departure, too, but a higher proportion of the basic elements of sf worlds need to be stipulated by the text, either directly through exposition, or implicitly, by engaging the reader in a more or less complex game of inference. Sf is highly self-conscious about its own world-building operations; it needs to be, given its greater need to stipulate world-features where other genres can take them for granted. More than that, however, it often models world-building within the storyworld itself, in effect demonstrating how world-building is accomplished. Moreover, it often invites us to draw analogies between the world-building that occurs within the storyworld and the building of the storyworld itself. An example is cyberspace in Gibson’s Neuromancer, a virtual world within the world of Neuromancer, accessible through a computer interface, anticipating what would become (partly under the impetus of Gibson’s imaginings) the Internet as we know it. A purely phantasmatic space, unseen except by the mind’s eye, Gibson’s cyberspace is populated by brightly coloured geometric shapes like Lego blocks, representing the data banks of real-world institutions: ‘the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away . . . the spiral arms of military systems’ (1984: 52). Cyberspace reduces, simplifies and ‘colour-codes’ features of the novel’s real (‘outside’) world, the world of Fission Authorities, banks, and the military. It mirrors in miniature (en abyme) the world of Neuromancer itself. Especially interesting and revealing is the threshold experience of entering cyberspace. Case the hacker plunges into cyberspace, literally immerses himself in it; it engulfs him like a fluid, unfolding around him: And in the bloodlit dark behind [Case’s] eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information . . .

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A gray disk . . . beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding – And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. (Gibson 1984: 52) Thanks to the novel’s internal focalisation through Case, we readers plunge in along with him; his experience of immersion in this other, visionary space is also ours. We may well recognise this experience as analogous in some ways to our own experience of immersing ourselves in a novel, including this very novel, Neuromancer itself. In other words, this passage captures the experience of becoming absorbed or immersed, of losing oneself in a fictional world. Case’s entry into the virtual reality of cyberspace is analogous to our own immersion in the virtual (fictional) reality of Neuromancer itself; Case’s plunge models our own. Cyberspace here literalises fictional world-building, making world-building a recurrent event in the fictional world, and not just the operation that brought that world into being in the first place. There are other ways, equally striking, of literalising world-building, of making it an event in the storyworld. For instance, Kim Stanley Robinson’s expansive and ambitious trilogy of novels about Mars – Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996) – narrates the gradual transformation of Mars into an Earth-like planet – the terra-forming of Mars – by the efforts of generations of human engineers and ecologists. The ‘red Mars’ of inhospitable deserts is transformed into a ‘green Mars’ of vegetation, and ultimately into a ‘blue Mars’ of oceans. Thus, inside the world of Robinson’s ‘Mars’ trilogy, a world is literally built – designed, engineered, laboriously fabricated – as part of the novel’s plot. Robinson’s trilogy enacts at the level of plot the sorts of world-building operations that underwrite other novels in the great tradition of planetary sf, from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars novels to Frank Herbert’s Dune (1966), Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton (1976) and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985), David Wingrove’s ‘Chung Kuo’ series (1990–7), and beyond. Literal world-building on the profoundest level occurs in Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris (1961). Here it is not a matter of building, or rebuilding, a world in the physical, material, engineering sense, as it is in Robinson’s ‘Mars’ trilogy; the mysterious world Solaris exists in its own right, and nothing that human beings can do appears to affect it very much. Rather, in the course of Lem’s novel the planet Solaris is constructed and reconstructed over and over again in the efforts of successive generations of scientists to understand it. It is constructed as an object of knowledge, and differently constructed depending upon the differences among the intellectual paradigms deployed by those seeking to ‘know’ it. This is world-building in the intellectual and imaginative sense – world-building not as an engineering project, but as an epistemological project. In a way, world-building in the epistemological sense occurs in every sf novel, both those, like Neuromancer and Robinson’s ‘Mars’ trilogy, that literalise world-building as a physical plot event, and those that do not. Solaris lays bare this genre-wide type of sf world-building for our inspection. It is for this reason that Carl Freedman has called Solaris a ‘meta-science-fictional text’ (2000: 109): a text of sf that is also, at the same time, a text about sf.

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Freedman is certainly right about Solaris; it undoubtedly is a meta-science-fictional text. But so, in a sense, is every sf text. Every sf text reflects more or less explicitly on its own worldmaking operations; every sf text lays bare its own devices, and the devices of fictional narrative more generally. Freedman goes further: ‘All fiction is, in a sense, science fiction’, he writes (2000: 16). He means that all fictions project alternative worlds, even while scrupulously observing the principle of minimal departure, and that they all conduct thought experiments, actualising ‘what-if’ scenarios. All fictions, in this sense, are speculative. ‘It is even salutary’, Freedman continues, ‘sometimes to put the matter in deliberately provocative, paradoxical form, and to maintain that fiction is a subcategory of science fiction rather than the other way around’ (2000: 16). It is a refrain one also hears in other recent sf theory and criticism.7 Paradox and hyperbole aside, sf is certainly, as I have tried to show here, a highly self-reflexive genre, well suited to serve as a tool of narratological reflection and instruction – narratology by other means. By literalising basic concepts of narrative theory – concepts such as fabula and syuzhet, focalisation, omniscience, and worldbuilding – sf allows us to reflect on what kinds of work narratological concepts do, what kinds of operations they express (or obscure), and what their unintended implications and consequences might be. Whatever other uses they may have, the machines and superpowers of sf at least estrange familiar figures of narrative discourse, in ways that humanoid models cannot hope to do. One is reminded of the Russian Formalists’ polemical insistence on viewing art as device – in effect, as a series of machines – in the teeth of, and against the grain of, a prevailing humanism and naturalism in their contemporaries’ reflections on literature. At the very least, talk of machines serves to remind us that, contrary to what some people profess to believe, narrative is not natural after all; that it is technological, a techne; that all narrative is prosthetic, a supplemental organ; and that all users of narratives, whether producers or consumers, are cyborgs, cybernetic organisms – human beings enhanced by machines, like Helva the brain-ship, or plugged into them like Case with his console. Viktor Shklovsky once polemically asserted that Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was ‘the most typical novel in world literature’ ([1929] 1991: 170). This is manifestly nonsense; far from being a typical novel, Tristram Shandy is in fact one of the most anomalous novels in world literature. It is ‘typical’ only in a rather special Shklovskian sense: because it lays bare the poetics of the novel, and so, in a way, shows us how every novel is made, and because it subordinates mimesis to its own aesthetic laws, which, in Shklovsky’s view, is really the case with all novels, however ‘realistic’ they purport to be. In the same Shklovskian spirit, I want to claim that sf is the most typical genre in world literature – not because all genres of fiction are, as it were, subcategories of sf (although Freedman and others have entertained that possibility), but because sf lays bare the apparatus of world-building itself, as well as the other narratological metaphors we have developed to help us think about stories.

Notes 1. ‘Speculative fiction’ in my title is an umbrella category including not only science fiction proper, but also fantasy, ‘weird’ and ‘slipstream’ fiction, and various other ‘irreal’ genres and sub-genres. Most of my examples do, in point of fact, belong to the science fiction genre, but much of what I say here applies mutatis mutandis to the other genres covered by the category ‘speculative fiction’.

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2. The credit for having first identified the device of literalisation or realisation of metaphor evidently belongs to the Russian Formalist critics of the early twentieth century; see Harshav ([1984] 2007). 3. Ursula LeGuin once characterised science fictions as ‘thought experiments’ whose purpose is ‘not to predict the future . . . but to describe reality, the present world’ ([1969] 1976: n.p.). The ‘present world’, of course, also includes narrative as such, and its categories and devices. 4. Time travel, observes Segal, can literalise the metaphor of ‘living in the past’ which has sometimes been used to characterise the experience of trauma victims (2015: 535 n.10). Exemplary here is Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe (2010), where time-travel literalises ‘living in the past’ in connection with the time-travelling protagonist’s burden of nostalgia, guilt, regret, and resentment. 5. Cf. Chu: ‘To the reader accustomed to the realist novel, the nonlinear nature of events in Slaughterhouse-Five might seem to be the result of narratorial intervention. In other words, it might seem as if the disarray of events is taking place not at the level of fabula (the chronological order of events as they actually occur in the timespace of the narrative universe) but at the level of syuzhet (the order of events as they are selected, arranged, and manipulated by the narrator). But Slaughterhouse-Five is a science fiction novel. Accordingly, the disorder of events is happening simultaneously at the levels of fabula and syuzhet. The events themselves occur out of chronological order, and the narrator faithfully represents the events in the (dis)order in which they occur’ (2011: 177). 6. Chiang’s story has been adapted for film as Arrival (2016), starring Amy Adams and directed by Denis Villeneuve. My analysis of ‘Story of Your Life’ is inspired by a talk given by Merja Polvinen at the conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, Amsterdam, June 2016. 7. Cf. Chu: ‘all representation is to some degree science-fictional . . . What most people call “realism” . . . is actually a “weak” or low-intensity variety of science fiction, one that requires relatively little energy to accomplish its representational task insofar as its referents . . . are readily susceptible to representation. Conversely, what most people call “science fiction” is actually a high-intensity variety of realism, one that requires astronomical levels of energy to accomplish its representational task insofar as its referents . . . elaborately defy straightforward representation’ (2011: 7). Wittenberg’s claims about the sf sub-genre of time-travel fiction are strikingly consonant: ‘[narrative] literature itself might be viewed as a subtype of time travel, rather than the other way around, and time travelling might be considered a fundamental condition of storytelling itself, even its very essence’ (2013: 1).

Works Cited Bester, Alfred [1956] (1959), ‘The stars my destination’, in Anthony Boucher (ed.), A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, vol. 2, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, pp. 361–522. Butler, Octavia E. [1997] (2007), ‘Mind of my mind’, in Seed to Harvest, New York: Warner Books, pp. 255–451. Chiang, Ted [1998] (2002), ‘Story of your life’, in Stories of Your Life and Others, New York: Vintage, pp. 91–145. Chu, Seo-Young (2011), Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan (2008), The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Culler, Jonathan (2004), ‘Omniscience’, Narrative, 12: 1, 22–34. Currie, Mark (2007), About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Delany, Samuel R. [1976] (1996), ‘Appendix A: From the Triton journal’, in Trouble on Triton, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, pp. 281–90. Freedman, Carl (2000), Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Hanover NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England. Gibson, William (1984), Neuromancer, New York: Ace Books. Harshav, Benjamin [1984] (2007), ‘Metaphor and frames of reference: With examples from Eliot, Rilke, Mayakovsky, Mandelshtam, Pound, Creeley, Amichai, and the New York Times’, in Explorations in Poetics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 32–75. LeGuin, Ursula K. [1969] (1976), ‘Introduction’, in The Left Hand of Darkness, New York: Ace Books, n.p. Nelles, William (1990), ‘Getting focalization into focus’, Poetics Today, 11: 2, 365–82. Robinson, Kim Stanley (2015), Aurora, New York: Orbit and Hachette. Royle, Nicholas (2003), ‘The “telepathy effect”: Notes toward a reconsideration of narrative fiction’, in The Uncanny, New York: Routledge, pp. 256–76. Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991), Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Segal, Eyal (2015), ‘Time travel stories as a challenge to narratology: The case of The Time Traveler’s Wife’, Poetics Today, 36: 4, 529–60. Shklovsky, Viktor [1929] (1991), ‘The novel as parody: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy’, in Poetics of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher, Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, pp. 147–70. Sternberg, Meir (1985), The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stockwell, Peter (2000), The Poetics of Science Fiction, Harlow: Pearson Education. Suvin, Darko (1979), Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven: Yale University Press. Swanwick, Michael (2003), Bones of the Earth, New York: HarperCollins. Vonnegut, Jr., Kurt [1969] (2009), Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A DutyDance with Death, New York: Dial Press. Walsh, Richard (1997), ‘Who is the narrator?’, Poetics Today, 18: 4, 495–513. Wittenberg, David (2013), Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative, New York: Fordham University Press. Yu, Charles (2010), How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe, New York: Random House. Zunshine, Lisa (2006), Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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23 Unnatural Endings in Fiction and Drama Brian Richardson

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discussion of unnatural endings can no doubt reveal something substantial about both endings and the unnatural. Endings are notoriously multiform, bringing different or opposed cultural positions into potentially volatile proximity as one seeks to control or elude the other. We also find the juxtaposition of the narratable and the non-narratable, as the former turns into the latter and the narrative, according to D. A. Miller (1981) and others, comes to a close. In drama, we can even observe representation dissolve into presentation as the actors step out of their roles yet still speak scripted lines; this occurs when the person playing Puck, still in character, directly addresses the audience: ‘If we shadows have offended . . .’ (Shakespeare 2004: V, i, 418). The end is where ideology and aesthetics meet, though often more to battle than to merge. A poorly constructed ending may be necessary to produce the desired official thesis. We see this at the conclusion of D. H. Lawrence’s novella, ‘The Fox’, a story about two women living together contentedly without a man. At the end of the work, a tree cut by a masculine neighbour lands on and kills one of the women, who is strangely immobile as she observes the tree falls on her in just the exact position to cause her quick death. This rather preposterous conclusion removes the ideological threat of the women’s successful cohabitation. Likewise, a culturally or officially sanctioned moral may be parodied in its presentation, as we find in works like The Importance of Being Earnest, in which Miss Prism famously states that in the novel she has written, ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily’, explaining, ‘That is what fiction means!’ (Wilde [1898] 2006: 26). Trying to articulate the ideological power of certain endings, some radical literary theorists of the 1980s argued that closed works with fixed resolutions were inherently conservative while open endings were necessarily liberatory. But open endings soon became widespread, even conventional, and certain unexpectedly conventional endings were made to produce a radical political stance, as indicated by the powerful metadramatic line spoken in Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band: ‘It’s not always like it happens in plays, not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the story’ (1996: 81) – a line that, appropriately modified, can apply as well to Lawrence’s story and many other narratives. Aesthetics and ideology are connected in the endings of many narratives, but rarely is the relation a simple one (see Richardson 2000). During the last hundred years modern endings have become increasingly volatile as writers have freed themselves from expectations of a traditionally satisfactory closure. Henry James’s well-known depiction of the functions of the standard happy ending indicates its many different purposes and implicitly suggests that most might be dispensed with: ‘a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies,

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millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks’ (1972: 32). We see in this ironic statement an official moral calculus being carefully applied, procreative heteronormative standards affirmed, economic rewards tendered in proportion to assigned moral worth, and the curious status of the epilogue mentioned. The entire list sounds completely artificial and entirely unrealistic. The question raised by many of the great realist authors, including George Eliot, is whether any conventional ending can be realistic, a question that would be pressed further by Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and other modernists. Unnatural narratives are those that contain events, characters, worlds, or frames that are both unconventional and antimimetic. They also contravene the practices of nonfictional narratives and works of fiction that strive to imitate the parameters of nonfiction: an unnatural ending can never occur in actual existence. But this may occasion some hesitation or confusion: it is fairly easy to determine when characters are realistic/mimetic, such as Rastignac, or nonmimetic though entirely conventional, such as talking animals, or antimimetic, such as characters who know themselves to be fictional characters, as in a Pirandello play. The same is true for events: a normal ride in a car (mimetic), a ride on a flying horse (conventional, nonmimetic), or impossible (antimimetic): such as arriving at your destination before you leave for it. Endings may seem to present a different dynamic: there may be no such thing as a satisfactory conclusion that is entirely mimetic; closure – an arbitrary act – often does violence to the stream of the narrative’s events. This is why so many authors, scholars, and theorists in the twentieth century have felt that closed endings are unrealistic; life does not come packaged quite so simply: there is no end to connexity. As Henry James affirmed, ‘really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they may happily appear to do so’ (1972: 171–2). J. Hillis Miller cites Aristotle’s ([ca. 330 bce] 2010) definition of an ending as that which ‘naturally follows something else, either of necessity or for the most part, but has nothing else after it’ (1998: 94). Examining Aristotle’s own proffered example of Oedipus Rex, Miller shrewdly observes that it cannot be said that nothing follows causally from it. Oedipus is left at the end of the play uncertain about what Creon will do with him, whether or not he will allow him to go into exile . . . Moreover, as the audience well knows, the events of the day are only an episode in a story that leads to Oedipus’ own death and transfiguration in Colonus. (Miller 1998: 11) Since all definitive endings are arguably unrealistic, how antirealist must an ending get, to be unnatural? It turns out that there are a number of ways this may be achieved, and the effects produced by such unconventional endings are almost as varied. This means that, in the rest of this chapter, I will not be addressing endings that are inconclusive, open, unexpected, gratuitous, or inappropriate; all of which appear in modern fiction and modern life. Instead, I focus exclusively on those that openly declare or otherwise assert their own fictionality. It also turns out that, precisely because they violate conventional expectations, unnatural endings can be highly charged ideologically. This may be done in many ways; a brief inventory of some of the most impressive such types will indicate the range of such strategies and point to some of the effects they produce.

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Parodic Authors have been creating preposterous or impossible endings to parody conventional closural practices for some time. One thinks of the abrupt and unsuitable additional marriages at the end of As You Like It and Measure for Measure. The contemporary period is full of parodic presentations of final scenes and concluding events. The Importance of Being Earnest satirises the entire tradition of comic resolutions since Menander as the lost child is found, lovers are reunited, a lost manuscript is restored, three marriages are about to take place, and the true, fortunate name of the protagonist is revealed. Tom Stoppard stages a poorly remembered production of The Importance of Being Earnest in his postmodern (and unreliable) memory play, Travesties (1975). In addition to restaging a climactic scene in which mistaken manuscripts are restored to their rightful owners, protagonist Henry Carr finally concludes: I learned three things during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary . . . I forget the third thing. (Stoppard 1975: 98–9) Jean-Luc Godard similarly explodes the old chestnut of romantic suicide at the end of Pierrot le fou (1965), as Ferdinand Griffon, having shot his lover and her paramour, decides to kill himself. Not wanting to botch the job, he keeps adding more and more brightly coloured sticks of dynamite for his final act – until he changes his mind at the last second – but it is too late.

Circular Another type of antimimetic ending does not end, but circles back to the beginning of the work and thus enables it to continue endlessly. In ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (1941), one of Borges’s characters speculates on how a book can be infinite. He states, ‘the only way I could surmise was that it be a cyclical, or circular, volume, a volume whose last page would be identical to its first, so that one might go on indefinitely’ (Borges 1998: 125). As Borges was imagining such seemingly impossible works, they had just begun to appear in print. The most familiar of this type is Finnegans Wake (1939), the last sentence of which is famously concluded by the book’s first sentence. Other earlier examples include Queneau’s Le chiendent (1933), the fourth chapter of Nabokov’s The Gift (1937–8), and Nabokov’s short story, ‘The Circle’ (1936), which begins with the phrase, ‘In the second place’, a sentence that logically follows the story’s final sentence, which begins, ‘In the first place . . .’ (1995: 375, 384). The end of Beckett’s drama, ‘Play’ (1963) consists of the direction, ‘Repeat play’ (Beckett 1994: 157); the work is then enacted again. Even as the performance ceases, the audience has a clear sense that the fabula is repeated infinitely. The circular chronology of this kind of ending always returns to and departs from its point of origin – which is also its conclusion, and which never ceases, as the ending is infinitely repeated and infinitely deferred.

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Denarrated Endings There is also what I call the denarrated ending that negates itself and presents another equally possible ending. For an early example, we may point to J. B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner (1932), which includes a kind of temporal loop in which the ending of the play is also the beginning of an entirely different sequence of actions that would have unfolded had a single chance event – the functioning of the radio – been different. Something like Borges’s ‘Garden of Forking Paths’, this work dramatises two possible sets of events that occur at the same time. Brian McHale observes that in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, ‘the author intervenes at the beginning of Chapter 61, after the first ending, and returns us to the point in the sequence at which the bifurcation occurred, leading us down the alternative branching instead of the one initially chosen’ (1987: 110) as the novel’s ending is denarrated and rewritten. As James Phelan points out in his discussion of the book’s endings (1989: 99–102), this novel and others of a similar nature effectively negate Peter Brooks’s position that a work’s ending determines the events that lead up to it; in Brooks’s words, ‘the end writes the beginning and shapes the middle’ (1984: 22).1 Furthermore, denarrated events cannot be reconciled with the concept of a fixed, pre-existing fabula, present in almost all existing accounts of narrative.

Multiple Incompatible Endings Some endings to a single work may depend on which textual sequence was selected by the reader, as in, for example, Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), where three different suggested reading paths result in divergent resolutions, each one intended for a different type of reader: the quixotic, the conformist, and the cynic. Such works stretch back to O. Henry’s ‘Roads of Destiny’ (1909), which narrates three different possible fates for the protagonist after he has a spat with his beloved, depending on which road he (literally) takes. In drama, we can find the use of variable plots with different endings in Alan Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges (1982), a play that branches off into eight possible trajectories, each of which has two possible endings. Interestingly, it is usually a trivial event that produces radically different consequences. Some antimimetic hyperfictions also yield different endings depending on which story trajectories were selected by the reader, as does at least one Oulipo text, Raymond Queneau’s 1961 ‘A Story as You Like It’. A film like Tom Tykwer’s Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) presents three very similar versions of the same basic set of events – Lola trying to get 100,000 Deutschmarks to her partner, Manni, before he is killed – but each version comes with a small but crucial difference at the beginning of the story – how quickly Lola is able to elude a hostile dog – that radically alters the ending, changing it from death to life. There is also the single narrative with multiple possible endings that offer different conclusions. Malcolm Bradbury’s ‘Composition’ (1976) tells the story of a new teaching assistant at a Midwestern university during the Vietnam War. At a party after the last class, some extremely compromising photos are taken. He is then asked to give a passing grade to a student who did not do the coursework. He knows that if the pictures get circulated he is certain to lose his position. The

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earlier sections of the work are numbered 1 through 4; the final section offers three different resolutions, designated 5A, 5B, and 5C. In the first option, the instructor quietly raises the grade and saves his job. In the second, he corrects the grammar of the letter, sends it back to the blackmailers, and defiantly turns in the correct grade. In the third, he agrees with the student that the grading system is silly, that all words are inadequate, and what matters most in life is love. He therefore destroys the grade sheet and abandons his academic position in order to devote himself fully to life and love. The text offers no indication of which of these possibilities will be (or has been) actualised; each option has a certain plausibility. I suspect that we may best regard this as a demonstration of the radically different consequences that can follow from a single event as well as a series of options that the reader is implicitly invited to choose from. As the instructor is informed by one of the other characters, ‘You have to write your own ending’ (Bradbury [1976] 1993: 141). Because the story forks into multiple incompatible directions at its end, a logically impossible situation is created since the choice would seem to have already been made. As Porter Abbott explains, narrative ‘is something that always seems’ to come after the events it depicts; ‘to be a re-presentation’ of them (2008: 36); it is therefore the violation of this sense of the pastness of the narrated events that is necessitated by multiple, contradictory endings. In his compelling study of ‘forking path’ films that present multiple possible outcomes following from the ‘base’ narrative situation, David Bordwell argues that all paths are not equal; the last one taken both presupposes the rest and is the least hypothetical one (2002: 96–101); he argues for the primacy of the final version. Concerning Lola Rennt, he suggests that Lola somehow seems to learn from the previously presented possible futures (itself a wonderful unnatural device, since the self presented later cannot know the events that in another version led to her death). He states that ‘if something like a primacy effect establishes the first future as a benchmark, the “recency effect” privileges the final future we see’. To him, forking path narratives ‘suggest the last future is the final draft, the one that really happened’ (2002: 100). But such a move concerning Lola seems an easy way to partially naturalise this radical work, and there is little in the film to warrant this assumption. In some multilinear stories – specifically, Bradbury’s ‘Composition’ and, as I will discuss shortly, ‘The Babysitter’ by Robert Coover – the last possibility is arguably the least likely outcome. In Lola, Manni’s highly implausible reunion with the man who took his money is even less unlikely than Lola’s near miraculous luck at roulette. Bordwell may be conflating audience satisfaction with the progression of the versions (tragic, ironic, then comic) with a larger ‘reality effect’. I resist that move, and wonder instead whether Tykwer is palpably making his final version less realistic in order to comply with the desire for a happy ending. The film may best be understood as simply three possible versions of a single set of events, unhierarchised and without ontological primacy being given to any one version, as Robyn Warhol has suggested (2005: 229–30). And as both Warhol and Tim Whalen (2000) have observed, the film resembles a videogame that is played several times by a persistent player. Building on their work, I argue that even as one gets better through practice, each playing is equally real, though the game being played at the moment feels the most real of all.

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The Endings of Contradictory Narratives The next step of this analysis is to explore endings of stories that have numerous contradictory sets of events, like Robbe-Grillet’s La jalousie, Coover’s ‘The Babysitter’, or Caryl Churchill’s play, Traps. These works, as Ursula Heise has observed, ‘project into the narrative present and past an experience of time which normally is only available for the future: time dividing and subdividing, bifurcating and branching off continuously into multiple possibilities and alternatives’ (1997: 55). Instead of one event precluding several other possible options, multiple possibilities can be seen to have been actualised. And these can be vast: discussing Coover’s text, Hilary Dannenberg points out ‘the story’s distortion of temporal sequentiality is so great that the reader is rendered incapable of even identifying the points of bifurcation’ (2008: 216). Curiously, in these texts we often find an effect that is the opposite of that of multiple incompatible endings just discussed. The works with multiple endings generally take a fairly conventional work and give it an antimimetic twist. In contradictory narratives, we see the opposite move. Most of the works conclude with a sense of tranquil ordinariness, as the instabilities that generate the narrative vanish, or are sometimes literally erased. In Jealousy, everything is calm, there is no apparent seducer lurking around, and the highly suggestive centipede stain is gone. All is well. In one ending of Coover’s story, the parents return home and everything is exactly as it should be.2 In the last sections of Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life, the scene of the first death of the protagonist is restaged so the girl lives, and her brother is allowed this time to return alive from the war. Internally contradictory stories would appear to lend themselves particularly well to happy endings that restore the harmony that has been disrupted so flagrantly throughout the text.

Metafictional Fusions The plot of Raymond Queneau’s Le vol d’Icare (The Flight of Icarus, 1968) begins as the novelist Hubert notices that his central character, Icarus, is missing; for the rest of the narrative, he tries to get the character back. As the story progresses, more characters escape from other authors. In the end, Icarus even offers to go back to Hubert if the novelist is willing to make a number of changes in his plot concerning his future love life. Hubert refuses; he has abandoned the novel and is writing a new one with more docile characters. At the end, he changes his mind, and goes to find Icarus. The character is now piloting an early aeroplane; he takes it higher and higher. Finally, he loses control and the plane crashes. The character meets his end. Hubert’s last words, however, enthusiastically state: ‘Everything happened as was anticipated: my novel is finished’ (Queneau 1973: 192) as he claims authorship of the unlikely chain of events. Brian McHale notes a comparable though more explosive ending in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), as its protagonist, Aureliano Buendia, ‘reads the gypsy Melquíades’s prophetic narrative of the destiny of the Buendías down to the very page on which the moment of his reading of this page is itself prefigured’ (McHale 1987: 123); at this point, the manuscript and its reader are instantaneously destroyed and the book comes to an end.

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David Toscana’s El último lector (The Last Reader, 2009) tells the story of Lucio, a librarian in a small town in northern Mexico where no one reads books. He receives numerous volumes but before putting any out on his shelves, he reads them to see whether they are original works or poor-quality books filled with narrative clichés. Knowing that a good resolution is an indication of a good novel (2009: 121), he is especially attentive to endings, which are thematised throughout the text. His evaluations are both aesthetic and ideological: he hates novels in which The murderer is always caught and age doesn’t matter as long as there is will; in those, the characters act out of conviction even though the writer does it for money. That is why the lawyer defends the black man without being cowed by the protests of the whites, why the unjustly convicted prisoner digs a tunnel to freedom. (144) In such works, ‘The tubercular is cured and the alcoholic redeemed, and the writer receives prizes’ (144). Nowadays, ‘artistry is lost’ and ‘we are left only with noisy, cheap movie endings’ (176). He throws these pathetic books into an adjacent room to be devoured by cockroaches. For him, it is much preferable that a man should end up under a pile of snow or earth, bleeding to death in a cell, thrown out of a pickup truck or off a bridge, in a well or septic tank, entangled in the roots of a tree . . . That is the only worthy ending for a novel or a life. (176) His own life is quite troubled; he has no income since the government suspended his salary, the town is dying, he cannot recover from the grief he feels over the death of his wife, and the body of a dead girl has been found in his son’s well. As the story progresses, he ever more insistently views events in the world from the perspective of the well-written novels that are allowed to remain on his library’s shelves. This fusion of identities grows deeper, and actual people become less real than the characters they resemble. At points, he even seems to become the figures he has read. He imagines his own death, with a book on his chest, and goes so far as to stamp ‘WITHDRAWN’ across his torso. Alone, he reflects that fire is ‘a good option for ending a story that doesn’t seem to be coming to a close’ (179). Finally, he opens a new box of books and cuts out several words from their pages until he is able to spell out the narrative of his dead wife that has never appeared in any published story. She then materialises, and he tries to fix her features and habits in his memory, since he knows that she will not stay long: ‘there will be no way of avoiding the tragic fate assigned her by its author’ (188). He also knows that ‘he too has to succumb at any moment, ashamed, with a knife twisted under his sternum; knows that a city writer, an idiot [. . .], must cut him down to nothing in a novel fit for hell and cockroaches’ (188). In the book’s last sentence, he states that he will be buried ‘in the sands of the sea or the desert every time somebody opens to the last page of The Last Reader’ (188). The fiction he has read and the self that is fading are now folded into the pages that readers hold in their hands. Such metafictional transformations provide a strong sense of closure and at the same time affirm the fundamental fictionality of the narrative. They utterly elude traditional strategies of concluding. By extension, they may also point to the constructed nature of all personal and political narratives, and invite a healthy scepticism toward ostensibly nonfictional fabrications.

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Metadramatic Reversals Self-reflexive endings on stage can produce powerful effects on audiences. This can happen when a metadramatic reversal of fortunes comes at the request of a character: in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), as Macheath is about to be hanged, an actor complains on stage to the author of the play, ‘friend, this is a downright deep tragedy. The catastrophe is manifestly wrong, for an opera must end happily’ ([1728] 1975: 158). The beggar then gives up his goal of ‘strict poetical justice’, and changes the ending by giving Macheath a reprieve in order to comply ‘with the taste of the town’ (158). A more recent example appears in Marc Forster’s film Stranger than Fiction (2006): the novelist, after conversing with him in the flesh, takes pity on the character whose death she is composing and rewrites the narrative so that, at its end, he may live.

Multiple Unnatural Techniques Many of the strategies I have delineated can be combined. Brigid Brophy’s In Transit (1969) invites the reader to choose between two endings for its dual protagonist, Patrick/Patricia, a doubly gendered, divided self: ‘I warned you I wouldn’t play god . . . So You’ll have to make the choice’, the authorial narrator states ([1969] 1983: 235). What follows is a split page, with a column on each side narrating the end of the story of the other self. Ironically, the final fate of both Patrick and Patricia involves the protagonist falling to his or her death (304). In a final act of denarration, these dual endings are then both erased, as the speaker decides to continue on: ‘Love of You has, I mean to say, decided me to live’ (236). A rebirth occurs as the text comes to a close, and the erasure and reconstruction of both endings promise to produce still more events in a text whose thematic logic defies mimetic constraints.

Unnatural Endings in Performance As the example of A Midsummer Night’s Dream indicates, not all plays stop once the final scene is over; there are often elements of the performance that extend beyond the representation of events. There are several other dramas whose performance both continues and extends beyond the end of the story. At the end of many Elizabethan and Jacobean masques, the spectators are invited to join the characters in a dance that both concludes the story and extends the performance. For a more recent example of this practice, we may look to Amiri Baraka’s black revolutionary play, Slave Ship, where the audience is invited to join the actors dancing on stage and then participate in insurrectionary activity outside the theatre. In Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan, a group of deities visit the city to see whether any good people can be found. Despite the considerable harshness, exploitation, and difficult moral trade-offs essential for survival, the gods are content and finally ascend back to heaven in a pink cloud. Denying that there are any problems, they do not offer any assistance to the inhabitants and the deus ex machina device produces instead a literal scene of deus abscondicus (see Pfister 1988: 97). The play’s central dilemma remains, however, in that moral injunctions

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are often incompatible with human survival. The characters are left without any resolution of their problems. In an epilogue, the audience is invited to reflect on the play’s inconclusive ending and is implicitly urged to change the society that engenders such contradictions; here, the performance moves outward from the world of the play to the world of the audience: It is for you to find a way, my friends, To help good men arrive at happy ends. You write the happy ending to the play! There must, there must, there’s got to be a way! (Brecht [1953] 1983: 1133) Film also provides examples of unnatural endings in performances whose production continues beyond the ending of the story proper. In René Clair’s 1924 short film Entr’acte, after the narrative ceases and the entire screen states: ‘Fin’, the protagonist breaks through the blank image which, it turns out, is only a paper sign. He is quickly assaulted, knocked to the ground, and literally kicked back into the storyworld, as the sequence is reversed and the ending is restored. This desperate attempt at ‘writing beyond the ending’ is no doubt a good emblem of the power of ideological demands for closure. This kind of device was also used in a number of Warner Brothers cartoons in the mid-twentieth century, and reappeared in the realm of the avant-garde in 1967 in Sam Shepard’s play, La Turista. At the end of this piece the protagonist ‘runs straight toward the upstage wall of the set and leaps right through it, leaving a cut-out silhouette of his body in the wall. The lights dim’ (Shepard 1984: 298). The protagonist, that is, leaves the world of the drama to inhabit an ontologically different realm. I will conclude this section with a description of one of the most inventive endings in modern drama – and one which has no precise equivalent in narrative fiction – found in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine. This play has two acts, between which the characters age twenty-five years and the historical setting shifts from the Victorian era to the present. In each part the same characters are played by different actors, thus enabling one figure, Betty, to literally embrace her former self in front of almost all the other characters at the play’s end, and thus provide a powerful sense of closure to a series of actions and events that otherwise remain substantially inconclusive.

Midnight’s Children Having set out a number of concepts in this chapter, I will now take a closer look at the ending of a single narrative, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which has realist and unnatural elements, as well as allegorical, intertextual, metafictional, and aesthetic ones, in order to observe the way these unnatural techniques can merge with or resist other strategies. The book’s ending has, not surprisingly, provoked a wide range of different interpretations. Shyamala Narayan (1983) finds in it a potentially hopeful future; Tim Brennan classifies it as a work of ‘the nationalism of mourning’ (1989: 100; see also 109–10). Marc C. Connor (1997) argues instead that the work and its ending are apocalyptic, while Linda Hutcheon describes its closure as ‘resolutely arbitrary’ (1988: 59). For that matter, the book’s narrator, Saleem Sinai, self-consciously

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wonders about the trajectory of its resolution as the narrative approaches its final pages; he imagines comic, melancholic, and tragic resolutions: How to end? Happily, with Mary in her teak rocking-chair and a son who has begun to speak? [. . .]. In melancholy, drowning in memories of Jamila and Parvati and even of Evie Burns? Or with the magic children . . . but then, should I be glad that some escaped, or end in the tragedy of the disintegrating effects? (Rushdie 2006: 531) There seems to be a conventional aspect to the ending, as a new child is born and named after his great-grandfather, Aadam Aziz, the man whose story took up the first several chapters of the book. However, the wayward genealogical route from grandfather to grandson is so devious and ironic that it is clearly more a parody of tradition than its embodiment. Saleem also acknowledges that ‘love does not conquer all, except in the Bombay talkies’ (511). Moving deeper into the level of realism, we see the supernatural displaced by the naturalistic, as ‘the absolute certainty of a prophet’ is invalidated (532): future generations will not be ‘looking for their fate in prophecy or in the stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their wills’ (515). At a more local level, the narrator’s depiction of events, which had threatened to diverge, Tristram Shandy-like, ever further from the present, has now roughly merged with the time of the writing – which also corresponds to the approximate time of the book’s publication. There is no more past, personal or historical, left to narrate.4 David Richter (1974) and James Phelan (1989) have differentiated between the concepts of what they call closure and completeness to distinguish two types of resolution: one that indicates that the fates of the principle characters are resolved; the other to indicate that the rhetorical purpose or temporal framework is finished (e.g. the entry for 31 December in a work called The Diary of a Difficult December). These concepts are quite useful here since Rushdie opposes them in his ending. The narrative thus symmetrically begins thirty-two years before his birth and extends to the start of his thirty-second year. There is thus both an aesthetic symmetry and a fixed temporal framework, even as the fates of the individual protagonists and that of the Indian subcontinent are utterly unresolved. Noel Carroll (2007) has further explained that a historical narrative that ends with the present is not normally supposed to have any closure, and it is appropriate that this historical novel concludes without any tying up of major narrative strands. This kind of refusal of resolution is in fact a common strategy in postcolonial fiction, figuring quite prominently in the final scene of Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, which leaves his Prospero and Caliban in medias res, locked in a struggle for control of the island. It would appear that lives that are so imbricated within contemporary events will not attain any sense of closure until the political events that surround them have progressed further or come to a pause.5 While an unobtrusive aesthetic symmetry can fit nicely within a largely realist poetics, an exaggerated act of parallelism produces an obvious unnatural effect, as the storyworld is shown to be invented, not copied from life. Unnatural effects proliferate at this point in the text of Midnight’s Children; Saleem himself feels that he is literally cracking up: ‘I can, I swear, see the cracks on the backs of my hands, cracks along my hairline and between my toes’ and wonders why he does not bleed: ‘Am I already so

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emptied desiccated pickled? Am I already the mummy of myself?’ (531). In the book’s final paragraphs, he also feels he is exploding: ‘fission of Saleem, I am the bomb in Bombay, watch me explode, bones splitting breaking beneath the awful pressure of the crowd’ (533). On the one hand, this is an allegorical statement of the danger of India’s fragmentation into mortal religious and ethnic strife; as elsewhere in the novel, the analogy between the body politic and the narrator’s own body is given a painfully literal application. Intertextually, Saleem’s annihilation merges with his claims he is about to stop writing as he alludes again to Scheherazade’s thousand and one nights in the book’s final sentence (533), referring to the storyteller who was similarly fated to die once her narrative ended. And this is true in a metafictional sense as well: a narrator ceases to be a narrator once the narrating is finished; he or she ‘dies’ in that sense, a trope that Beckett, Nabokov, and others have employed. There is one more unnatural event – the erasing of some of the text: near the end of the book, the narrator announces the death of Shiva, a character who is closely linked to Saleem’s life and fate. A few pages later, Saleem denarrates this event: ‘I lied about Shiva’s death. My first out and out lie’ (510). This denarration points in a different way to the performative nature of fictional narration, that is, that people and events exist by the very act of a narrator’s affirming that they exist – unless or until the narrator goes on to deny their existence. Here, postmodern narrative play is tempered by the representation of historical events, as the reality of murderous ethno-religious zealots like Shiva precludes any definitive closure: violence is likely to ensue in the world beyond the confines of the text that depicts it. We can therefore sympathise with the many critics who have disputed the nature of the ending of novel: there are several correct answers to the question of the meaning of the ending. As a fiction, it is apocalyptic; as a representation of India, its ending is as tragic, hopeful, and abrupt as history is itself.6 It remains now to survey the ways in which unnatural endings conform to or violate larger narrative trajectories as identified by narrative theorists. In antimimetic works, we see a number of inversions of different conventions. The most obvious is of course the rules governing real life experience: the endings we see in unnatural narratives can only happen in fiction. Beyond that, it is interesting to observe how traditional aspects of closure are often refigured to end a more radically constructed work. Tzvetan Todorov argued that ‘an ideal narrative begins with a stable situation that some force will perturb. From which results a state of disequilibrium; by the action of a force directed in a converse direction, the equilibrium is re-established’ (1977: 51). This is clearly the case in parodic and circular endings, though the equilibrium is not reimposed in a traditional manner. The same can be said of the unusually placid endings of narratives with contradictory storylines. It is also the case that in most of the narratives with multiple endings, each individual ending is perfectly realistic – it is the multiplicity of endings that is impossible for events that have already occurred. In his discussion of ‘balance’ as a rule of configuration, Peter Rabinowitz has noted that as ‘readers expect the initial point of view to return at the end of the text (as in a musical ABA structure), authors can fulfil that expectation to create a sense of closure’ (1987: 126). It is also true that an abrupt break with the point of view, shift in setting or narrative pace (L’éducation sentimentale), or any other salient aspect of the work of the narrative can produce this effect (see Torgovnick 1981: 108–9). In many

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of the unnatural endings assembled above, we see a similar move being made, though here it is the ontological frame that is being exploded; this is especially evident in the metafictional and metadramatic conclusions. We have, once again, a vigorous sense of closure despite the extraordinary passage leading up to it. A fixed ending, it would appear, is much more resilient or more serviceable than many might expect, and often seems to be employed in order to better frame more sustained violations of traditional narrative trajectories. It is also clear that a number of politically radical authors have created original kinds of endings in the service of their ideological positions. This is especially prominent in works employing carnivalesque strategies, which have enabled political satire since the time of Aristophanes (see Toker 2010). At the same time, it must be recognised that there is no simple equation between a narrative form and a particular ideological valence. As Alison Booth has written in the introduction to her anthology of chapters on the endings of nineteenth century narratives, ‘we do not find a clear correlation between disruption of formal convention and radical departure from social convention’ (1997: 9). The politics can be powerfully present, but can take a variety of different shapes. It is also clear that we need to expand existing categories of narratological analysis to fully do justice to the unnatural works I have discussed here. In particular, the concept of fabula needs to be enhanced. The traditional account of the fabula as the linear sequence of events that is derived from the text is inadequate for texts that can yield multiple such sequences, or which erase them. I advocate an expanded conception of fabula that will be able to include circular, variable, multiple, contradictory, and denarrated stories. In addition, we need to attend to the performative aspect of enacted narratives, and be able to include the moments where the story cannot be contained by its ‘natural’ limits, but bursts beyond its frame and into its performance. Such enhanced theoretical positions are essential for encompassing the more dynamic and innovative forms of narrative.7

Notes 1. Phelan also shows how the different endings together form an appropriate conclusion to the novel (1989: 101–2). For other salient aspects of his discussion of Brooks and of endings, see Phelan (1989: 108–16, 130–1). 2. In the more catastrophic ending, where her husband is missing and her children are dead, the mother lies in bed with a neighbour, bored, as they prepare to watch the late movie together. 3. The comparable lines in the German original read: Der einzige Ausweg wär aus diesem Ungemach Sie selber dächten auf der Stelle nach Auf welche Weis dem guten Menchen man Zu einem guten Ende helfen kann. Verehrtes Publkum, los, such dir selbst den Schluss! Es muß ein gutter da sein, muß, muß, muß! (Brecht 1988: 279) 4. On the dynamic attending the fusion of the narrative and the time of its writing, of what he calls ‘narrative shipwreck’, see Currie (2011: 123–8).

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5. Russell Reising’s (1996) account of endings is also relevant here: he has argued that many works that dramatise unresolved social contradictions seem compelled to leave the fates of the protagonists similarly unresolved. 6. Ingersoll’s (2007) suggestion that that a kind of transcendent metamorphosis is about to occur does not seem to be warranted, however. 7. This chapter draws on two articles in which I have discussed endings in quite different contexts: ‘Endings in drama and performance: A theoretical model’ (Richardson 2011), which explores a variety of endings in the history of drama, and ‘Unnatural stories and sequences’ (Richardson 2013), which includes an account of endings within a larger discussion of beginnings, narrative sequencing, fabula and syuzhet, and narrative itself.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter (2008), The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aristotle [ca. 330 bce] (2010), ‘Poetics’, in Vincent B. Leitch et al. (eds), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd edn, New York: Norton, pp. 88–115. Beckett, Samuel (1994), The Collected Shorter Plays, New York: Grove. Booth, Alison (ed.) (1997), Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Bordwell, David (2002), ‘Film futures’, SubStance, 31: 1, 88–104. Borges, Jorge Luis (1998), Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, New York: Penguin. Bradbury, Malcolm [1976] (1993), Who Do You Think You Are?: Stories and Parodies, New York: Penguin. Brecht, Bertolt [1953, 1948] (1983), Two Plays: The Good Woman of Setzuan and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, trans. Eric Bentley, New York: New American Library. — (1988), Werke, vol. 6, Berlin and Frankfurt: Aufbau and Suhrkamp. Brennan, Timothy (1989), Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation, London: Macmillan. Brooks, Peter (1984), Reading for the Plot, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brophy, Brigid [1969] (1983), In Transit, London: GMP. Carroll, Noel (2007), ‘Narrative closure’, Philosophical Studies, 35, 1–15. Connor, Marc C. (1997), ‘Midnight’s Children and the apocalypse of form’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Criticism, 38: 4, 289–99. Crowley, Mart (1996), Three Plays by Mart Crowley, Los Angeles: Alyson. Currie, Mark (2011), Postmodern Narrative Theory, 2nd edn, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dannenberg, Hilary P. (2008), Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Space and Time in Narrative Fiction, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Gay, John [1728] (1975), ‘The Beggar’s Opera’, in John Hampden (ed.), The Beggar’s Opera and Other Eighteenth Century Plays, New York: Dutton. Heise, Ursula (1997), Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutcheon, Linda (1988), A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, New York: Routledge. Ingersoll, Earl (2007), Waiting for the End: Gender and Ending in the Contemporary Novel, Teaneck, NJ: Farleigh Dickenson Press. James, Henry (1972), Theory of Fiction: Henry James, ed. James E. Miller, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. McHale, Brian (1987), Postmodernist Fiction, New York: Methuen. Miller, D. A. (1981), Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Miller, J. Hillis (1998), Reading Narrative Discourse, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Nabokov, Vladimir (1995), Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, New York: Knopf. Narayan, Shyamala A. (1983), ‘Midnight’s Children’, The Literary Criterion, 18: 3, 23–32. Pfister, Manfred (1988), The Theory and Interpretation of Drama, trans. 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. Queneau, Raymond (1973), The Flight of Icarus, trans. Barbara Wright, New York: New Directions. Rabinowitz, Peter (1987), Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Reising, Russell (1996), Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Richardson, Brian (2000), ‘Linearity and its discontents: Rethinking narrative form and ideological valence’, College English, 62: 6, 685–95. — (2011), ‘Endings in drama and performance: A theoretical model’, in Greta Olsen (ed.), Current Trends in Narratology, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 181–99. — (2013), ‘Unnatural stories and sequences’, in Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (eds), A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 26–48. Richter, David (1974), Fable’s End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rushdie, Salman (2006), Midnight’s Children, New York: Random House. Shakespeare, William (2004), The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 5th edn, New York: Longman. Shepard, Sam (1984), Seven Plays, New York: Bantam. Stoppard, Tom (1975), Travesties, New York: Grove. Todorov, Tzvetan (1977), The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Toker, Leona (2010), Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Torgovnick, Marianna (1981), Closure in the Novel, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Toscana, David (2009), The Last Reader, trans. Asa Zatz, Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press. Warhol, Robyn (2005), ‘Neonarrative; or how to render the unnarratable in realist fiction and contemporary film’, in James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (eds), A Companion to Narrative Theory, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 220–31. Whalen, Tim (2000), ‘Run Lola Run’, Film Quarterly, 53: 3, 33–40. Wilde, Oscar [1898] (2006), The Importance of Being Earnest, New York: Norton.

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VI. Philosophical Approaches to Narrative

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24 Narrative and the Necessity of Contingency Mark Currie

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ontingency has emerged as a problem for theories of narrative as a direct result of its prominence as a topic for contemporary philosophy, particularly in the work of Badiou (2006), Žižek (2012), Malabou (2009), and Meillassoux (2009). These thinkers are interested in spontaneous, unforeseeable, or chance happenings that retroactively alter our sense of what was possible in any situation. But these are also philosophers who have sought to depose writing as the governing image of thought, and perhaps more generally to reject language as the horizon of all philosophical problems. For narrative theory in the twentieth century, there was always a happy consonance with philosophical approaches which placed structures of language, or the meaning of words, in the foreground of their enquiries; but what happens when this shared methodological assumption is broken by philosophers intent on the demotion of language, or who seek to dislodge categories such as writing, difference, and narrative from their established places? Contemporary narrative theory finds affirmation of its language-centred models far less easily across the border with philosophy, and a significant methodological shift has resulted. The philosophical concept of contingency, I will argue here, is at the centre of this change: it is at the heart of many contemporary attempts to circumvent language when addressing philosophical problems, and so also at the centre of this theoretical and methodological change in narratology, narrative criticism, and literary criticism more generally. In what follows, I will set out three problems that the concept of contingency presents to theories of narrative and then propose a series of approaches and frameworks through which the theory of narrative can respond. In brief, the three problems are as follows: (1) the view of contingency as that which cannot be represented in written narrative; (2) the strong conceptual and metaphorical connections between the category of writing and notions such as predestination, necessity or fate; and (3) the uncertain status of contingency, namely the question of whether contingency is ontological or epistemological.

I. The Simulation of Contingency The first problem begins in an unusual place: the world of Magnum, P.I., an American drama series from the 1980s. This is an example discussed by Gary Saul Morson in Narrative and Freedom (1994), a book mainly focused on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who finds in Magnum a convenient illustration of one of the problems of contingency

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in relation to narrative. Magnum is a private investigator who has moved from the mainland to Hawaii, and one of the running jokes in the series is that he can no longer watch his favourite football team, the Detroit Tigers, playing live. Instead, he has to set his video recorder to tape the game and lock himself away to watch it before anyone can tell him the result, thus reproducing the live experience of watching, and the feeling of presence that is so important to sport. The joke on Magnum is that somehow the news always gets through, and the sense of being there now is spoiled. Even if this were not the case, Morson conjectures, and he were able to watch the recording without knowing the outcome, ‘the edge of presentness would be dulled’ because, for the recorded sports event, as for the novel, suspense comes from ‘not knowing the outcome rather than the outcome being still undetermined’. Would Magnum not feel a little foolish, Morson asks, cheering for an outcome that is over and done with? ‘You might as well cheer for the Athenians to win the Peloponnesian War’ (1994: 175). The example of the recorded event has a growing significance in the contemporary world, with the decline of appointment-based or linear television, the facility to pause or rewind ‘live’ TV, and the ascent of online viewing. It also speaks to an established problem for thinking about chance and contingency in relation to the novel, which regards chance as something that ‘cannot be represented in narrative’ and narrative emplotment as a kind of paradox that ‘inverts the effect of contingency into an effect of necessity’ (Ricoeur 1992: 142). The example of the recorded sports event tells us something straightforward about the basis on which a novel can simulate contingency: ‘Novels depend on an implicit convention according to which what is still unknown will be treated as equivalent to what is still undetermined’ (Morson 1994: 175). For all that this might be an effective simulation, in the end, for Morson, ignorance is not the same thing as indeterminacy, and if narratives use one as a substitute for the other, we nevertheless ‘sense the difference’. The basis on which novels can simulate contingency, then, is exactly this difference, this substitution of the still unknown for the still undetermined, so that the opacity of the future becomes a matter of what we do not know rather than what has not yet happened. One way of understanding this example is that the substitution of the not-yetknown for the as-yet-undetermined allows us to experience the past as if it were present. Wittgenstein liked to claim, in writing and outside of it, that philosophical problems are simplified if they are thought of as questions about the meaning of words and phrases, and this is one way of defining my own problem here: what do we mean when we say ‘as if’? What is meant in particular by the phrase ‘as if it were present’, and its Latin relative, the concept of the quasi-present? We tend to use ‘as if’ either as an exclamation or as a conjunction: as an exclamation, ‘as if’ is an outcry that expresses a high degree of improbability and therefore disbelief; as a conjunction, it allows us to talk of appearances or to make imaginative speculations or comparisons. In its life as a conjunction, as if combines connotations of comparison and appearance carried by as with the hypotheticality and contingency conveyed by if. The combination has had a special appeal for theorists of fiction, for narrative theorists and narratologists who want to capture the imaginative and hypothetical qualities of fictional narrative, and who find in the simple idiom of as if, an expression of the knowing, imaginative relocation that readers make when they consume and interpret a novel. The as if has long been associated with fiction for this combination

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that it brings of comparison and hypotheticality, established most systematically in the ‘as if’ sections of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which develop the idea of speculative reason as that kind of thought which must act as if appearances were realities, or, in its theological context, ‘that the things of the world must be viewed as if they received their existence from a highest intelligence’ (2003: 550). The Kantian notion of the ‘heuristic fiction’ is not in itself a theory of fiction but a universal condition that follows from the logical impossibility of knowing the world in its reality: we must behave as if our systems of thought and our mental models correspond to the world. This is a philosophy that gives special place to the idea of fictions, or to what Hans Vaihinger, in The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (1924) called ‘fictionalism’, a position that holds that untrue ideas might still be valuable to us for their practical importance, and that the category of the ‘consciously false’ might offer a pragmatic solution to the inaccessibility of the noumenon, or a mind-independent reality. In the Kantian tradition, the ‘heuristic fiction’ is not to be confused with what we might call the literary fiction, or more boldly, the novel. For Kant, the as if is basic to all thinking, and fiction is the mode of speculation that all thought must adopt. In literary criticism, however, this line of thinking about Kant’s as if was always also a way of positioning literary fiction on the subject of knowledge. Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (2000) is one, quite unusual, place where the work of Vaihinger crosses the boundary from philosophy into narrative criticism: ‘literary fictions’, Kermode claims, ‘belong to Vaihinger’s category of “the consciously false”’ (2000: 40). Without reference to Vaihinger’s Kantianism, however, the notion of the as if figures in some quite prominent studies of fiction and the theory of fiction, for example in the work of Dorrit Cohn (1999), John Searle (1969), Wolfgang Iser (1978), Kendall Walton (1990), and Gregory Currie (1990). In the theory of fiction, the as if has been valued for its ability to offer an account of mimesis which tugs in two directions simultaneously: it posits a similarity between reading and life, and contains a counter-suggestion that life and reading are not alike. The category of the consciously false is a useful framework for thinking about the fact that we are not directly affected by the experiences we have in fiction, but it also holds an unexplored explanatory power unconnected with the problem of fictionality: it points to the way that presence and contingency can be simulated in writing, and at the same time it points in the other direction, to the conscious knowledge that the presence we feel as readers is false. A temporal conception of the as if can help us to analyse not only the successful seductions of written narrative but also the fundamental dissimilarity between reading and living that results from their different temporal properties: that the present of reading is actually past, and that the contingency of the future is not only dulled, but transposed into necessity. ‘The most important way in which novels are unlike our lives’, Morson says, ‘is that novels are over’ (1994: 174).

II. The Divine Script In outlining this first problem, we have moved from a question about the recording of a live event to the default retrospectivity of the novel because Morson’s formula, that what we do not yet know stands in for what has not yet been determined, tells us something specific about writing and contingency. This movement helps to define

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a second problem: that the category of writing carries within it an elaborate set of metaphorical connections with necessity. It might be that we have lived through a period of philosophy that has theorised the technological recording device, of which Magnum’s VCR is a steampunk version, as a mere continuation of the history of writing. It might be that one of the legacies of Derrida’s Grammatology (1974) was an expanded conception of writing that effectively conflated the video recording with written narrative. For Derrida, both are forms of archivisation, and for Bernard Stiegler, the history of technics, and the emergence of the technological hypomnesic device, is a kind of evolution of the concept of writing itself (Stiegler 2010: 71). For Derrida and Stiegler, the expanded category of writing operates exactly as a confusion, or mutual contamination, of the before and after. Stiegler claims, in The Fault of Epimetheus (1998), that we have effectively delegated the cognitive activity of remembering, because we cannot remember everything, to our memory devices, but that this exteriorisation of memory is ‘originary’. What Stiegler means by this is that the exteriorisation of a memory does not simply record, and therefore repeat a memory that occurs first in the interior of the subject; the memory is rather produced by the act of recording. A counterintuitive temporality is proposed by this argument which abandons the idea of an event as an origin, experienced first in lived time and subsequently repeated by technological means, whether that is writing or what I have been discussing as recording, which Stiegler calls telepresence. These arguments are important for the way that they break the fundamental assumption, that events represented in writing in general, and the novel in particular, are over. They offer us a way of thinking about recording or writing as the origin or cause of those apparently self-standing events they purport to represent. In much of what follows, I am going to describe this apparently nonsensical idea that events, far from being self-standing or straightforwardly primary, are often, if not always, structured in this way by an act of representation which is to come. This confusion of the before and after is not, however, the governing image of writing as it is established in philosophy, which derives from a more straightforward relation between writing and completion. Giorgio Agamben makes the case that Melville’s Bartleby belongs to a philosophical constellation which has established writing as the basic metaphor for necessity and contingency: What is the origin of this definition, which presents the fundamental figure of the philosophical tradition in the humble garb of a scribe, likening thought to an act of writing, albeit of a special kind? There is only one text in the entire Aristotelian corpus that contains a similar image. This passage belongs not to the logical Organon but to Aristotle’s treatise on the soul. It is a passage in book 3, in which Aristotle compares nous, the intellect or potential thought, to a writing tablet on which nothing is written: ‘the nous is like a writing tablet [grammateion],’ we read, ‘on which nothing is actually written.’ (Agamben 1999: 261) The intellect, in this image, is a matter of pure potential, like an act of writing before it has taken place, and thought is the production of something from nothing, like the writing that fills a blank tablet. However, when writing has taken place, when it is complete, it cancels this pure potentiality and displaces it with the necessity of that which is already scripted and unalterable. Agamben is arguing here that, though we can find it in Aristotle, it is particularly in medieval theology that the analogy between

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writing and necessity is established, where the problem of future contingents ‘is dramatically linked to that of divine prescience’ (1999: 263): Contingency is threatened by another objection, namely that the necessary occurrence or nonoccurrence of a future event retroactively influences the moment of its prediction, canceling its contingency. This is the problem of ‘future contingents,’ which Leibniz summarizes in the Theodicy once again under the sign of writing: ‘It was true a hundred years ago that I would write today, just as three hundred years from now it will be true that I wrote today.’ (Agamben 1999: 263) The problem of ‘future contingents’ is the question of how we assign truth to a statement (such as ‘there will be a sea battle tomorrow’) that refers to a future event, which must wait on confirmation. The point about this problem is that the futural event is necessarily caught in the condition of an either–or – that it will either occur or not – the contingency of which is only cancelled retroactively by an outcome. The fact that Leibniz’s example is an event of writing unnecessarily complicates the question of writing as an image of divine prescience here; but the proposition that ‘it was true a hundred years ago that I would write today’ (it was written that I would write) makes sense only in the light of an outcome (that I did write), as human retrospection or in the quasi-futural completion of a divine script. What emerges from this problem, according to Agamben, is a different account of what necessity means. The first meaning of necessity would relate to the unalterable predestination of that which is already written, and so directly links necessity with the image of completed writing. The second meaning of necessity relates to the image of the not-yet-written, and therefore to the irreducible alternative that futural statements entail, or to the necessity of contingency itself: Necessity thus concerns not the occurrence or non-occurrence of the particular event but rather the alternative ‘it-will-occur-or-it-will-not-occur’ as a whole. In other words, only the tautology (in Wittgenstein’s sense) ‘tomorrow there will or will not be a battle at sea’ is necessarily always true, whereas each of the two members of the alternative is returned to contingency, its possibility to be or not to be. (Agamben 1999: 264) If the first meaning of necessity depends on retrospect that is unavailable to the human mind at the time of a futural statement, the second results only in the species of disappointment that Wittgenstein calls ‘tautology’, which is to say a proposition that entails its own truth, or a statement of the obvious. What I want to propose, however, is that from this unpromising situation, a new issue for narrative theory emerges. The unavailability of retrospect in the present of a futural statement means that the retroactive glance that converts contingency into necessity can only be a matter of speculation – of envisaged or imagined retrospect. But it can also be argued that the dynamics that are at work in narrative between prospect and retrospect, or between what we do and do not know about future events, inform this speculative mode, and form the basis of an accord between the contingency of prospection and the necessity of retrospection. It is, I will argue, on the basis on this accord that narrative theory can forge a relationship with the new speculative arguments in contemporary philosophy, no matter how much they may seek to denounce language as a frame.

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III. The Not-Yet and the Always-Already The third problem of contingency resides in what Žižek calls its ‘uncertain status’: ‘is it ontological, i.e. are things in themselves contingent, or is it epistemological, i.e., is contingency merely an expression of the fact that we do not know the complete chain of causes which brought about the allegedly “contingent” phenomenon?’ (1993: 153). To understand the relation between this question and the narrative simulation of contingency, we need to recall Morson’s proposition that in the novel the still unknown will be treated as equivalent to the still undetermined. The ‘as if’ of this equivalence is not that of fictionality, but a specifically temporal equivalence bound up with the relation between what is over and what is present, what is known and what is not known. Morson is confident that we can sense the difference between contingency and its simulation, but Žižek’s question suggests a counter-argument that the question of what we do and do not know is as much a part of the lived experience of contingency as it is part of the simulation. What is the difference between the experience of not knowing the future and the experience of it not having happened? Because our knowledge is incomplete, things that are necessary might seem open, capable of happening otherwise, and in this sense, contingency might just be the appearance of a hidden necessity that will be revealed to us later. This is, as Žižek likes to point out, what people really mean by a philosophical commonplace such as ‘everything happens for a reason’, which can be translated roughly as follows: that sometimes we have no idea why things happen, but live according to the quasi-theological assumption that the place of events in a chain of cause and effect will be revealed in time. According to this argument, things in themselves are not contingent, but appear contingent to us mainly because our knowledge of the chain of causes is not complete. But the retroactive glance might enable us ‘to discern the contours of inner necessity where the view immersed in events can only perceive an interplay of accidents’ (1993: 155). The idea that contingency might be the mere appearance of a hidden necessity is perhaps just a generalised notion of the idea of a divine script. But the chief interest of Žižek’s statement of the problem lies in the emphasis it places on the before and after. The problem as it is set up by Žižek turns on the question of whether the contingency of the chance event is attributable to the subject or the object, the person (or people) comprehending events, or the nature of reality itself. It is tempting to think that we can distinguish different kinds of event on the basis that the surprise of some events must derive from the limits of what we know, and of others from the absence of sufficient reasons in nature. When we distinguish between the event as a change in the way reality appears to us and an event as a shattering transformation of reality itself, we encounter the possibility that contingency itself might be just the appearance of necessity: that contingency is just the way that things appear when we are in the middle of them, and that when we have temporal distance or retrospect on events, we perceive them as being governed by a necessity that was imperceptible in advance. This, according to Žižek, was one of the fundamental recognitions of Hegel’s dialectic, and it translates the dichotomy of contingency and necessity into a question about the relationship of two temporal positions: the appearance of contingency in prospect, and the recognition of necessity in retrospect. Žižek calls this a ‘leap from the not yet to the always already’ (2012: 213), and in this way he translates the question of the gap between an effect and its causes into a dynamic between two temporal positions – between the view immersed

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in events and the retroactive glance. In addition to the question of what is in relation to what we know, we also have this new possibility, that the passage of time might be described in this way, as the conversion of contingency into necessity, as prospect transforms into retrospect. In short, things appear contingent when they have not yet happened, and they appear necessary when they have taken place. The significance of this leap from the not yet to the always already, and its interplay of contingency and necessity, for narrative is never far from the surface of Žižek’s argument, and at times becomes an explicit framework. One example of this is in his discussion of Gérard Lebrun’s writings on Hegel, where the retroactive reversal of the not yet into the always already is discussed under the subtitle ‘A Story to Tell’. Speaking of the idea that a life is made up of contingent temporal decisions, Žižek turns to Lebrun’s example of Caesar’s crossing of Rubicon: It is not enough to say that crossing Rubicon is part of the complete notion of Caesar. One should rather say that Caesar is defined by the fact that he crossed Rubicon. His life didn’t follow a scenario written in the book of some goddess: there is no book which would already have contained the relations of Caesar’s life, for the simple reason that his life itself is this book, and that, at every moment, an event is in itself its own narrative. (Lebrun 2004: 87) This is an interesting assertion of the idea that there is no divine script, and yet Caesar’s life is nevertheless a ‘narrative’ in which the crossing of Rubicon is a definitive event. It may not belong to the realm of divine necessity, but Caesar’s life is nevertheless imaged here as a book and therefore as completed writing in the same moment that it is advanced as the product of contingent decision, inflecting the contingency of the existential moment with the necessity that belongs to the domain of the already. Žižek distances himself from what he sees as a kind of structuralist primacy of the synchronic in this description of Caesar’s decision, and restores it instead to what he sees as the ‘properly dialectical paradox which defines true historicity’ (2011: 212): there is no substantial god who writes in advance the script of History and watches over its realization, the situation is open, truth emerges only through the very process of its deployment, etc., etc. – but what Hegel nonetheless maintains is the much deeper presupposition that, at the end, when the dusk falls over the events of the day, the Owl of Minerva will take flight, i.e., that there always is a story to be told at the end, the story which (‘retroactively’ and ‘contingently’ as much as one wants) reconstitutes the sense of the preceding process. (Žižek 2011: 213; italics in original) What Žižek upholds here is not the authority of actual retrospect, but the ‘deeper presupposition’ that this story will be told, and that it will always be told, after the event. The future tense is all important, and it ‘marks the passage from contingency to necessity’ (2011: 213): there is a story to be told if there is a story to be told. That is to say, if there is a story to be told (if, due to contingency, a story emerges at the end), then this story will appear as necessary. Yes, the story is necessary, but its necessity is itself contingent. (Žižek 2011: 213; italics in original)

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As we saw for the Kantian as if, here the properly Hegelian dialectic also hinges on the hypotheticality of the if, which in this case is the envisaged retrospect of a narrative to come, or a story to be told.

IV. Conclusion Here then are the three problems that the topic of contingency brings to the theory of narrative: the question of the not-yet-known substituting for the as-yet-undetermined, the relation of necessity to the figure and image of writing, and the uncertainty between the epistemological and the ontological status of contingency. In each case, the statement of the philosophical problem bumped immediately into the topic of narrative, partly because the very processing of a narrative seems to entail the transformation of contingency into necessity that inheres in the passage from the not yet to the always already. My concluding argument, however, seeks to show that the as if of narrative simulation is not an easy relation of similarity between human temporal becoming and narrative time. I would like to argue that the subtraction of presence or liveness in narrative representation, far from being a catastrophic difference, gives narrative a special place as a mode of hypotheticality and speculation based in its ability to combine the different temporal positions of immersion in events and retrospect, or what Uri Margolin calls the dual optics of ‘on the spot’ and ‘hindsight’ (1999: 161), in a single moment. I argued above that in the work of Derrida and Stiegler there is a proposition that the sequence in time of an event and its recording as writing is inverted, so that the externalisation of writing is understood as originary. These arguments, in the context of deconstruction, are formulated in complicated relations between an event and its condition of possibility. I would like to set out a number of less arcane ways in which this inversion is at work in the theory of narrative, beginning from the basic assumption of narrative simulation, that mimesis is based in a kind of similarity. The classical account of mimesis, as we have inherited it from Aristotle, is based in the view that artistic imitation roots itself in events or actions that are anterior to their representation, or that the represented actions are primary and their representation is secondary. In contemporary theory there is a counter-suggestion that events in narrative representation might actually modify and inflect in advance the actions that are classical postulated as prior and free-standing. One example of this argument is the account that Paul Ricoeur (1985) offers of the mimetic circle, in which our most basic understanding of human action is always already modified by the refiguration of narrative representations, so that they are thought of as narrative from the start. Ricoeur’s account seems to suggest, like Lebrun’s, that we do not need a divine script written in advance for the idea of contingency to be dulled, but that the originary alteration of human action by narrative will suffice. Morson might suggest that the experience of what we do not yet know is similar to the experience of what has not yet happened. Ricoeur’s version of the mimetic relation often emphasises the dissimilarity, perhaps even the fundamental incommensurability, between living and telling. The arguments are similar, in the sense that they both focus on the different temporal properties between events that are present before the eye and those that are over, but for Ricoeur the dissimilarity that allows the circle of mimesis to turn actually installs the completion of narrative representation in the moment of action itself, negating its

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self-standingness. There is, Ricoeur argues, always a mismatch between the time of narrative and the time of lived experience, and it is the dissimilarity that mobilises the dialectic between them. Narrative theory does not need to turn to this most basic of arguments about mimesis to find the effects of this dissimilarity. One of the telling features of Morson’s example of the video recording is that it deals with the most faithful kind of repetition of liveness available to us, since the recording of a sporting event is structurally identical to its live event, and differs only in the contextual matter of its referring to actions that are over. This cannot be said of the novel, which flaunts its ability to roam in time. If the novel can combine the dual optics of on the spot and retrospect (Margolin 1999: 161), it is because it has always specialised in double structures which inhere in its retrospection. Morson points out that the experience of watching Oedipus in ancient Greece was always an engagement with a double temporality: that we know the story in advance, but we also identify with Oedipus in imagining what it is like not to know. In this way, we stand astride the divine perspective of the gods, who know the future, and the human perspective which cannot. We can see this double structure at work in any written narrative because, once again, we do not need the divine script for this fatalism to pertain. The very tense structure of narrative, the founding difference between the time of an utterance and the time to which it refers, will suffice to activate this doubling, since the dynamic of human contingency and fate is, as we have seen, nothing more than the dynamic between prospect and retrospect. Nor do we require, in a written narrative, any specific tense structure, such as the default past tense of narrative verbs, to produce this doubling, since the category of writing itself is the mark of fate. However, within this dynamic between the open and the fixed future, narrative can play with almost infinite variations and possibilities, merely suggesting the hindsight that is not yet known, or actually installing knowledge of what is to come by revealing the future. I take it as a given that narrative theory and criticism have taken the disparity between chronological and narrative order, the distribution of knowledge in point of view, and the anachronies of what Genette ([1972] 1980) called analepsis and prolepsis as key resources for the analysis of this dynamic. What is perhaps less established is the kind of narrative theory that can convincingly relate the idea of completed action, in which narrative specialises, and the category of temporal becoming, in which contingency reigns. If it is true, as I said at the start, that these new philosophers of contingency have a more uneasy relationship with narrative theory than the language philosophers of old, I would point to the double-time structures of narrative as one of the places where the relation of contingency and necessity is given its most speculative formulations, especially where these structures install future moments in the present, or establish causation by retroaction. The idea that we might work backwards from effect to cause is well established in the theory of narrative partly for the role it plays in key arguments such as Todorov’s ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’ (2000), which distinguishes between the thriller and the detective fiction on the grounds that the latter is a double structure, proceeding forward through one story (the time of the investigation) which passes from cause to effect, at the same moment as it works backwards through another (the time of the crime, or the backstory that explains it), regressing from effect to cause. It is part of the logic of detective fiction that surprise disclosures and unexpected happenings spring an unexplained past, and in doing so,

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establish possibilities that we did not know were there. There is every reason to think that the regression from effect to cause borrows from what is basically a narrative insight when it makes this case about surprising, unforeseeable, or contingent events in general. Quentin Meillassoux, for example, describes exactly this kind of regression when he distinguishes between potentialities and virtualities. For Meillassoux, potentialities are known sets of possibilities, such as the six possibilities known in advance for a dice throw, whereas virtualities are events that exist outside any knowable set of outcomes or effects. Meillassoux’s principal interest lies in the advent of something logically unforeseeable, since no amount of knowledge, or any pre-existing possibility, could have signalled it in advance: If we maintain that becoming is not only capable of bringing forth cases on the basis of a pre-given universe of cases, we must then understand that it follows that such cases irrupt, properly speaking, from nothing, since no structure contains them as eternal possibilities before their emergence: we thus make irruption ex nihilo the very concept of a temporality delivered to its pure immanence. (Meillassoux 2011: 232; italics in original) This irruption ex nihilo, for Meillassoux, is more than just an instance of the unexpected. It sheds light on the nature of time in general, and strikes at the heart of causation: In every radical novelty, time makes manifest that it does not actualize a germ of the past but that it brings forth a virtuality which did not pre-exist in any way, in a totality inaccessible to time, its own advent. (Meillassoux 2011: 232) The importance of the distinction between aleatory and ontological uncertainty, therefore, is not just that it recognises a special kind of event, the kind contained by no structure in advance, but that this kind of singularity, this irruption from nothing, breaks with thinking about time as the realisation of potentialities: time is not the putting-in-movement of possibles, as the throw is the putting-inmovement of the faces of the die: time creates the possible in the very moment it comes to pass, it brings forth the possible as it does the real, it inserts itself in the throw of the die, to bring forth a seventh case, in principle unforeseeable, which breaks with the fixity of potentialities. (Meillassoux 2011: 233) I argued earlier that the figure of writing, the very metaphor that the new philosophers of contingency are seeking to depose, carried within it a connotation of necessity in its completed form and, as Agamben showed us, an image of contingency, of creation ex nihilo, in the form of the blank page. I also argued that the key thinkers of writing often inverted the relation of the before and after in the theory of grammatisation, regarding writing as primary or originary in relation to speech, memory or thought. In these two respects, the irruption from nothing and the regression from effect to cause link the theorists of writing to the group of philosophers often referred to as ‘speculative materialists’ (as Meillassoux described his own project) or ‘speculative realists’ (after the title of a conference at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2007) on the basis that they share key positions in the philosophy of time. Neither of these

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names has all that firm a footing in the landscape of contemporary thought, and they tend not to include some of the new thinkers of contingency (Malabou and Badiou, or Žižek and Agamben) who have been the focus of this discussion. I prefer to think of Meillassoux as one of a group of philosophers who have developed the concept of contingency as a way of challenging the prominence of language, or moving beyond the gram of grammatology, in philosophical enquiry. If the most irritable expressions of this opposition to the linguistic turn belong to Badiou, Meillassoux’s After Finitude (2009) is probably the most rigorous confrontation between the new interest in contingency and the old frameworks that foreground language and writing. In that work, the idea of contingency is used to challenge a whole era of philosophy, which he calls the ‘philosopheme of correlation’, which has been dominated by the Kantian idea that thought cannot get outside itself to apprehend the world. Thought can only think about reality from within the relation between the ‘in-itself’ of the world of objects and the ‘for us’ of human consciousness, or can only have access to the ‘correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’ (2009: 5). Like other philosophers associated with speculative materialism, Meillassoux is concerned, above all else, to extract metaphysics from this correlationist circle and reconnect with the ‘great outdoors’ of a mindindependent reality, a move that only becomes possible when language is displaced as the frame for all philosophical questions. Meillassoux begins After Finitude from the claim that, in the twentieth century, ‘the two principal “media” of the correlation were consciousness and language’ (2009: 6), ‘transparent cages’ which the traditions of phenomenology and analytical philosophy have been, respectively, trying to make visible since Kant. It is probably safe to assume that literary theory flourished in the twentieth century partly because of the solidity of its post-Kantian credentials, or its compatibility with the linguistic turn in analytical philosophy, and apparent that literary structuralism functioned as a kind of introduction to correlationism for generations of students and thinkers, for whom the structures of language were taken as the very texture of social and material reality. One of the paths that Meillassoux finds as a possible route out of the correlationist circle, and so one of the challenges to the status of language as a medium of the correlation, is the problem of the ancestral statement: a kind of statement established in the physical sciences that refers to, or makes claims about, a physical reality anterior to the emergence of life on earth. These statements, which take the form ‘Event Y occurred X number of years before the emergence of humans’, are interesting to Meillassoux because they make sense only if they contain two layers of meaning, one realist layer which advances its proposition in the luminosity of truth, and another which must acknowledge the retrojection involved in such a statement, by which he means that a human consciousness projects backwards from a present after the emergence of humans to a world anterior to consciousness itself. The statement only makes sense, according to Meillassoux, because of this duality of its realistic and its correlational meaning, which are, from a philosophical point of view, entirely at odds with each other. On one hand, it seems that the attempt to speak of ancestrality is driven by a wish to reclaim the outside world, and to reject language as an ineluctable frame. On the other hand, the duality of the ancestral statement restores all the thematics of narrative temporality to the question of matter: the duality of presence and retrospection and the dynamic of contingency and necessity come back to the foreground. It is exactly in these

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terms that Meillassoux understands the problems of the contingent emergence of life on earth, and therefore the philosophical scope of the ancestral statement. Life, he claims, supposes ‘the existence of a set of affective and perceptive contents’ and when we think about the emergence of life, we must choose between the view that ‘matter already contained such subjectivity in some manner’ and the view that it irrupted ex nihilo (2011: 235). Novelty itself, as we have seen, does not actualise a germ of the past but ‘brings forth a virtuality which did not pre-exist in any way’ (2011: 235). Ex nihilo irruption is the very image of the event without a cause, or the contingency of the unforeseeable, and yet we explain it retroactively by adding to the set of pre-existing potentialities, and even perceiving a necessity where there is none. There may be a rejection of sorts in Meillassoux’s argument of language as a medium of the correlation, but it is difficult not to see it also as the affirmation of narrative dynamics as I have been describing them – as an interplay of incommensurable temporal positions. Meillassoux concludes his essay ‘Potentiality and Virtuality’ with the claim that we have glimpsed a philosophy emancipated from the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and that we must restart in a spirit that maintains ‘the double exigency inherent to the classical form of rationalism: the ontology of that which is given to experience, and the critique of representation’ (2011: 236). My conviction is that written narrative is engaged in both sides of this double exigency, and in the elaboration of ‘the very framework of an immanent temporality’ (2011: 236) that Meillassoux seeks to install in the place of the two media of the correlation – consciousness and language. For this reason, I would argue that the theory of narrative is no less consonant with philosophies of contingency than they were with the guardians of grammatology or with the linguistic turn of the twentieth century more generally, and indeed that narrative might have special resources for an exploration of the dynamic that Meillassoux describes as the necessity of contingency.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio (1999), Potentialities, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Badiou, Alain (2006), Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham, London: Continuum. Cohn, Dorrit (1999), The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Currie, Gregory (1990), The Nature of Fiction, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1974), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Iser, Wolfgang (1978), The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kant, Immanuel (2003), Critique of Pure Reason, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Genette, Gérard [1972] (1980), Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane Lewin, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kermode, Frank (2000), The Sense of an Ending, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Lebrun, Gérard (2004), L’envers de la dialectique: Hegel à la lumière de Nietzsche, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Malabou, Catherine (2009), Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, New York: Columbia University Press. Margolin, Uri (1999), ‘Of what is past, is passing, or to come: Temporality, aspectuality, modality and the nature of literary narrative’, in David Herman (ed.), Narratologies, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 142–66.

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Meillassoux, Quentin (2009), After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, London and New York: Continuum. — (2011), ‘Potentiality and virtuality’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, London: re.press. Morson, Gary Saul (1994), Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1985), Time and Narrative, vol. 2, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — (1992), Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Searle, John (1969), Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Stiegler, Bernard (1998), Time and Technics 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. — (2010), ‘Memory’, in Mark B. N. Hansen and W. J. T. Mitchell (eds), Critical Terms for Media Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 64–87. Todorov, Tzvetan (2000), ‘The typology of detective fiction’, in David Lodge with Nigel Wood (eds), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 2nd edn, London and New York: Longman, pp. 137–44. Vaihinger, Hans (1924), The Philosophy of ‘As If’, The International Library of Philosophy, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Walton, Kendall (1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (1993), Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. — (2011), ‘Is it still possible to be a Hegelian today?’, in Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Melbourne: re.press, pp. 202–23. — (2012), Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London and New York: Verso.

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25 Local Nonfictionality within Generic Fiction: Huntington’s Disease in McEwan’s SATURDAY and Genova’s INSIDE THE O’BRIENS James Phelan

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his chapter brings together two strands of my current efforts to extend the explanatory power of the rhetorical poetics I have been developing over the last thirty-plus years: (1) developing a rhetorical account of the myriad relationships between fictionality and nonfictionality; and (2) exploring the two-way traffic between rhetorical theory and medical narratives. My method will be to consider a series of questions raised by the different treatments of the same illness, Huntington’s disease (HD), in two twenty-first-century novels: Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and Lisa Genova’s Inside the O’Briens (2015). In Saturday, McEwan recounts a day in the life of London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne – 15 February 2003 – a day historically significant because of a massive protest in London against the coming Iraq War and a day personally significant because of Perowne’s multiple encounters with a street criminal, Baxter, suffering from HD. In Inside the O’Briens, Genova recounts the discovery by Joe O’Brien, a middleaged Boston police officer, that he has HD and then explores the complex effects of that discovery on Joe, his wife, and their four children, each of whom has a fifty-fifty chance of carrying the genes for HD. In each case, the author makes a significant – and contestable – choice in the construction of the narrative, with each choice directly connected to the author’s handling of HD. McEwan chooses to use a reading of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ as the means to swing Baxter’s mood and have him abandon his plan to rape Perowne’s daughter Daisy. Genova chooses to end her novel with a variation of the ‘Lady-or-the-Tiger?’ motif, as she stops the narrative at the moment when Joe’s daughter Katie is about to learn whether she carries the genes for HD. I argue that both narrative choices, though not without their problems, are ultimately defensible, but I arrive at these conclusions through my answers to some more theoretical issues. First, how does the representation of an actual disease within a generic fiction influence our understanding of its status as a fictional or nonfictional component of the narrative? Brian Richardson has argued that ‘when a work is designated as fictional, the status of all its elements becomes different from similar elements in works of nonfiction’ (Herman et al. 2012: 106). I contend that both McEwan’s and Genova’s practice shows that Richardson’s claim is unwarranted, and I tease out some of the consequences of revising it. The first consequence is that we can become attuned to the importance of cross-border traffic: instances of nonfictionality within generic fiction and vice versa.

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The second consequence is that we can become attuned to the variety of roles that nonfictional elements can play within generic fiction. I develop a distinction between the status (fictional or nonfictional) and functionality (its particular purpose within the larger whole) of a narrative element, and I introduce the concept of salience for narrative elements. Salience is a relative concept: presumably, all elements have some salience, but some elements are more crucial for a narrative’s purposes than others. More specifically, I contend that Huntington’s disease has nonfictional status in both Saturday and Inside the O’Briens as well as notable functions in each. At the same time, HD has a far greater salience in Genova’s novel than in McEwan’s. Attending to these issues of status, functionality, and salience provides a productive engagement with the contestable choices of narrative construction that Genova and McEwan each make. In the final section of the chapter, I follow one of the practices that characterise the narrative medicine movement: I take up a question of practical application. Which novel about Huntington’s disease would be a better choice for a syllabus in a narrative medicine course in a medical school? Perhaps disappointingly, I answer that ‘it depends’, but I hope that the reasons underlying that answer will not be similarly disappointing. Furthermore, I take the discussion one step further and explain why, if I had to choose only one, I would opt for Saturday.

Fictionality, Nonfictionality, and Cross-Border Traffic I approach fictionality and nonfictionality from a rhetorical perspective, that is, one concerned with how authors use the resources of communication to persuade or otherwise influence audiences. This approach leads to the following claims:1 1. Fictionality is intentionally communicated invention in discourse. That communication can be explicitly signalled or just implied. I parse this definition this way: ‘intentionally’ reflects the rhetorical orientation toward a speaker’s purpose. ‘Explicitly signalled’ and ‘implied’ distinguish fictionality from lying, which is defective nonfictionality, since it purports not to be an act of invention when it actually is – a liar intends to deceive their audience; someone using fictionality does not. Allowing both explicit and implicit means of communicating fictionality reflects the great range of author–audience relations. Sometimes authors need to explicitly mark fictionality but sometimes they rely on audiences to recognise their shifts from nonfictionality to fictionality. In this respect, fictionality is similar to irony, which often has its most powerful effects when it relies on an unspoken understanding between author and audience: ‘I know that you know that I’m not being literal.’ ‘Invention’ indicates fictionality’s essential characteristic, the one that most distinguishes it from nonfictionality (see point 4 below). ‘In discourse’ indicates the broad domain in which fictionality occurs. 2. Generic fictions such as the novel, the short story, and the fiction film or play constitute a subcategory of fictionality. All generic fictions are instances of fictionality, but not all instances of fictionality are generic fictions. 3. Fictionality is pervasive throughout nonfictional discourse. Think of all the times we invent scenarios about what will happen if we do x or y. Think of all the times we say ‘what if?’ or ‘I wish that’ or engage in elaborate hyperbole. Fictionality is also a key tool in multiple disciplines – via thought experiments, models, hypotheses, and so on.

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4. Nonfictionality is intentionally communicated discourse that directly addresses actual states of affairs, whether through describing, reporting, interpreting, evaluating, questioning, or another mode of engaging with them. 5. Nonfictionality is pervasive throughout generic fictions, pace Richardson. Nonfictionality is clearly evident in such genres as the historical novel whose efficacy depends in part on authors’ being able to refer directly to historical people and events – as McEwan does, for example, when he makes the protest against the Iraq War the backdrop for the action of his novel. Nonfictionality can also be present – and prominent – in other global fictions. Here is how Genova begins Inside the O’Briens: Huntington’s disease (HD) is an inherited neurodegenerative disease characterized by a progressive loss of voluntary motor control and an increase in involuntary movements. Initial physical symptoms may include a loss of balance, reduced dexterity, falling, chorea, slurred speech, and difficulty swallowing. The disease is diagnosed through neurological exam, based on these disturbances in movement and can be confirmed through genetic testing, as a single genetic mutation causes this disease. Although the presentation of physical symptoms is necessary for diagnosis, there exists an insidious ‘prodrome of HD’ that may begin up to fifteen years before motor problems appear. Prodromal symptoms of HD are both psychiatric and cognitive and may include depression, apathy, paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, impulsivity, outbursts of anger, reduced speed and flexibility of cognitive processing, and memory impairment. HD is typically diagnosed between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five, proceeding inexorably to death in ten to twenty years. There is no treatment that affects the progression and no cure. It has been called the cruellest disease known to man. (Genova 2015: 1; italics in original) If that is not evidence of nonfictionality in generic fiction, I do not know what is. To come at the question another way, on what grounds could one argue that this account of HD is fictional? Someone might want to quarrel with aspects of the description (by noting, for example, that genetic testing is not always definitive), but that very impulse points to the nonfictional status of Genova’s discourse. Claims 2, 3, and 5 indicate why it is important to correct Richardson on this issue: they call attention to the ease and potential significance of cross-border traffic, that is, of instances of local fictionality within generic nonfiction and of local nonfictionality within generic fiction. 6. Fictionality is not an escape from the actual world but an indirect way of engaging with it. This claim applies both to local fictionality within global nonfictions (thought experiments, passages of invented scenarios in memoir, etc.) and to generic fictions themselves. Thus, generic fictions and generic nonfictions have the common goal of intervening in some way in the actual world, even as they ultimately deploy different means to do so (direct vs indirect engagement) – and even as they frequently rely on cross-border traffic. Both McEwan and Genova turn to the form of the novel, its licensing of large-scale invention, and its openness to local nonfictionality in the service of their specific purposes of influencing their readers’ understanding of aspects of the actual world, and, indeed, of influencing readers’ actions in that world.

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7. There are degrees of indirectness within fictionality, which is another way of saying that different uses of fictionality seek to engage with the actual world in different ways. I shall argue that Genova’s indirection is less pronounced than McEwan’s and that this difference helps to explain some other differences between them. (Of course, McEwan’s indirectness is less pronounced than that of many other fictions, e.g., those we classify as science fiction.)

Status, Functionality, and Salience The seven claims of the previous section undergird the distinction between status and function. Any narrative element – a character, a place, an institution, an object, and so on – has fictional status, if its author communicates that it is invented, regardless of the global generic status of its text. Any element has nonfictional status if the author communicates that it refers to an extratextual entity. (Authors can also choose to blur the line between invention and reference and thus that between fictionality and nonfictionality, but neither McEwan nor O’Brien engages in such blurring.) To determine function, a rhetorical critic analyses how the author deploys the element in the unfolding narrative progression and how it contributes to (or detracts from) the author’s purposes. Thus, for example, consider Genova’s choice to set the action of her novel in the nonfictional location of Charlestown, Massachusetts. This choice serves two main functions: (1) it heightens the mimetic illusion, that is, the illusion that Genova is not constructing the whole narrative but rather giving her audience access to the autonomous actions of actual people in the real world; (2) it helps her characterise the O’Brien family as recognisable types: they are Irish Catholics from Boston. In general terms, both functions reduce the degree of indirection of Genova’s effort to intervene with the actual world; in specific terms, both functions serve her larger purpose of connecting her invention of the O’Brien family to the realities of HD. To determine the salience of a given function, a rhetorical critic analyses its prominence and significance relative to the functions of other elements of the narrative and to the overall purposes of the novel. Authors reveal their purposes through their management of the narrative progression,2 including their direction of the audience’s interests in the mimetic, thematic, and synthetic components of the narrative. By the mimetic component, I mean the authorial shaping of readerly interests in and responses to the narrative’s imitations of – or references to – the actual world, including such matters as events following the cause–effect logic of the extratextual world, characters functioning as possible people or being representations of actual people, time and space following the known laws of physics, and so on. By the thematic component, I mean the authorial shaping of readerly interests in and responses to the ideational, ideological, and ethical dimensions of the narrative, a shaping that can include giving individual characters a representative function. By the synthetic component, I mean the authorial shaping of readerly interests in and responses to a narrative’s constructedness. Furthermore, some narratives will make one of these components dominant, others will make two components dominant, and still others will make all three prominent. Consider, for example, the relative salience of time in Saturday and Inside the O’Briens. Time is always going to be a factor in the construction of narrative (works that are not dependent on temporality we call lyrics or essays or something other than narratives), but its salience as a mimetic, thematic, and/or synthetic component

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of a narrative can vary from one narrative to the next. For example, time is far more salient in any time-travel narrative than it is in, say, most episodes of any television situation comedy. McEwan and Genova deploy the standard Western system of time: sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, approximately four weeks in a month, twelve months in a year, and so on. In this respect, time has nonfictional status in both novels, and both authors use it for the standard functions of organising experiences into recognisable chunks (this happens between a and b, that between c and d, and so on). For Genova, time has medium but subordinate salience. On the one hand, the issues of how fast HD progresses and how long someone with HD can be expected to live are important aspects of her exposition of HD and its consequences. In addition, the youngest O’Brien child, twenty-two-year-old Katie, needs to decide by a certain date whether to move from Boston to Portland, Oregon with her boyfriend Felix, a decision that Genova ties to Katie’s wavering about whether to do the genetic test that will reveal whether or not she will develop HD. On the other hand, it is not time itself to which Genova directs her audience’s attention. Instead, she focuses on the ways HD influences the significance of time in one’s life. In that sense, Genova’s attention to time is a subsidiary part of her mimetic and thematic exploration of HD and its consequences for families that carry the gene. This point becomes clearer when we compare its salience to another nonfictional element of the narrative: the existence of genetic testing for HD. As I have already suggested, Genova gives this element far greater salience by constructing one track of the progression around the instabilities and complications of Katie O’Brien’s decisions about whether to undergo the genetic testing and whether to learn the results. For McEwan, time has a greater salience than for Genova but it is still less salient than many other mimetic and thematic issues. McEwan gives time salience in part through his synthetic choice to write a ‘day in the life’ novel. In addition, he frequently makes Perowne (and thus his audience) aware of time’s passing, both within this day and within the larger trajectory of his life. Indeed, McEwan positions this day in the life within a larger awareness of the life course of a family. He devotes one section of the novel to Perowne’s visit to his elderly mother, a former champion swimmer now suffering from dementia, and he adds considerable tension to the climactic scenes by revealing that Perowne’s daughter, whom Baxter commands to strip naked, is pregnant. Furthermore, with the nonfictional anti-war protest as background for the action, McEwan invites his audience to see Perowne’s day within the larger context of contemporary history, including the 9/11 attacks and their consequences. But McEwan does not directly tie the instabilities, complications, and resolution of the narrative to this exploration of time, choosing instead to tie them to the thematic issues I mentioned above: medical ethics, national and personal security in the post-9/11 world, the relations between the sciences and the humanities, and the potential power of literature.

A Fiction of Exposition: The Salience of HD in Inside the O’Briens I turn now to the relative salience of HD in each novel, starting with Genova’s project. For Genova, the nature of HD and its consequences for those who suffer from it as well as those who carry the genes for it are the most salient features of

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the narrative. She signals that prominence by opening the narrative with the nonfictional account of HD and then reinforces it with an opening chapter that depicts Joe O’Brien, at age thirty-six, exhibiting the prodromal symptoms of memory impairment and sudden rage. More generally, Genova divides the book into three parts, each organised around her exposition of HD and its consequences. She frames each part with a nonfictional report of some aspect of the disease, and then uses the fictionality of the characters and events to exemplify and give texture to the details of that frame. In Part One, after her framing report on HD, Genova recounts, via narration focalised through Joe, his movement from the prodromal stage of HD to its full onset and diagnosis. She frames Part Two with a summary of the genetic mutation associated with HD and a brief discussion of the availability of genetic testing, including the statistic that 90 per cent of people at risk have chosen not to learn whether they carry the mutation. Genova then switches to focalising the events through Katie, situating her within the O’Brien family and within her own life course, and showing how she agonises over whether to take the test. She ends Part Two with Katie’s decision to be tested but not necessarily to learn the results. Genova frames Part Three with a summary of the typical progress of the disease, a reminder that there are no effective treatments, and a characterisation of it as a family disease. Genova follows this frame by bringing the separate tracks of Part One and Part Two together, as she both picks Joe’s story back up and continues with Katie’s. She alternates focalising the events through each character’s perspective, as she recounts Joe’s deterioration and his efforts to cope, and Katie’s slow progress toward her decision to move to Portland with Felix and to find out the results of her genetic test. As I noted above, Genova ends the novel with her variation of the ‘Lady-or-the-Tiger?’ motif. I will return to Genova’s choice in her handling of the ending, but first I draw some larger conclusions from this analysis. It suggests that Genova’s novel belongs to a genre that I will call ‘the fiction of exposition’. In this genre, an author gives some nonfictional phenomena the greatest salience, and, in so doing, makes the indirections of fictionality far less pronounced than in most other genres of fiction, with the possible exception of allegory. That feature of the genre supports an additional claim: the greater the salience of one or more nonfictional elements in a generic fiction, the more directly the fiction connects with the actual world. Furthermore, in fictions of exposition, the thematic component is dominant and the mimetic is developed for its capacity to increase the audience’s affective and ethical responses to the characters and their situations. In other words, the author uses the audience’s engagement with the mimetic component to make the abstract concrete – as Genova does when she moves from the descriptions that frame the three parts of her novel to the exemplification of their main points in the lives of the O’Briens. This understanding of Inside the O’Briens as a fiction of exposition informs my assessment of Genova’s handling of the ending. Is it a gimmick, an effective conclusion of the exposition, or something else? I note, first, that Genova clearly resolves the instability of Katie’s immediate future: she has decided to move to Portland with Felix regardless of the outcome of the test. This resolution fits with Genova’s purpose of modelling positive responses to HD (and to the possibility that one has HD). Because Katie moves away from thinking that her decision should be contingent on the outcome of the test – if negative, she will go; if positive, she will not – she becomes

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someone who is not defined by her HD status. Similarly, Genova uses Katie to give Joe the advice he needs not to be wholly defined by his disease: Katie tells Joe that his children need him to be a model of how to live with HD. Nevertheless, Genova’s withholding Katie’s test results from her audience is a bold move because it breaks the mimetic illusion and foregrounds the synthetic component of the narrative and Genova’s role as constructor. ‘Why do I stop telling Katie’s story here? Because I can.’ Fair enough, but not sufficient because breaking the mimetic illusion in this way runs the risk of alienating her audience. In building and sustaining that illusion, Genova asks her audience to make an emotional investment in the O’Briens, especially in Joe and Katie – so much so that one can argue that Genova has an ethical responsibility to satisfy the readerly curiosity that she has evoked and stoked throughout Parts Two and Three. In other words, by not revealing the test results, Genova plays fast and loose with her audience’s affective engagement with her narrative and in so doing raises questions about the ethics of her telling. However, attending both to the ending itself and to the larger purposes of Genova’s narrative suggests that the ending is both ethically and aesthetically defensible. By refusing to satisfy the audience’s curiosity about Katie’s test results, Genova actually highlights the existential moment of revelation itself. She gives her audience a heightened sense of what it is like to be on the verge of knowing whether one is condemned to or liberated from the effects of HD. Conveying that heightened experience, while simultaneously breaking the mimetic illusion, is not only consistent with but an appropriate contribution to the larger purposes of her fiction of exposition. Genova is always about linking the experiences of the O’Briens to the actual world. In other words, evoking and nurturing her audience’s affective investment in Katie and her results has never been an end in itself. It has always been a means to help the novelist accomplish her expositional ends.

The Ethics of Representation: The Salience of HD in Saturday In Saturday, HD is far less salient, as a short list of the major contrasts with Inside the O’Briens indicates. Where Genova devotes much of her novel to showing the consciousness of Joe O’Brien as he copes with the onset and progression of the disease, McEwan uses the phrase ‘Huntington’s disease’ only a handful of times, locates it not in the protagonist but in an (important) minor character, and never offers an inside view of that character’s consciousness. Furthermore, McEwan focalises everything through Perowne, who as a neurosurgeon already knows all the things that Genova painstakingly explicates. Consequently, McEwan, in order to preserve the mimetic illusion of his novel, does minimal exposition of the disease. McEwan restricts his exposition to HD’s essential features: the genetic disposition, its overall progress, its main symptoms, especially its effect on sudden mood swings. Furthermore, as my brief discussion of McEwan’s treatment of time indicates, McEwan makes other issues more salient: medical ethics, issues of national and personal security in the post-9/11 world, the relations between the sciences and the humanities, and, indeed, the potential power of literature. Let me elaborate on this point by offering a brief sketch of the progression. As Catherine Belling (2012) has helpfully pointed out, for much of the progression, Saturday does not have a high degree of narrativity but proceeds through lyric revelations of Perowne’s consciousness as he reflects on the events of his day: waking

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early and watching a burning plane in the sky; making love with his wife Rosalind; interacting with his son Theo; having his first run-in with Baxter after their car accident; playing squash with his American colleague Jay Strauss; visiting his mother in the nursing home; beginning to prepare a festive dinner to celebrate the return home of Daisy and the publication of her first book of poetry; the second, more dangerous, run-in with Baxter and the second successful escape; the decision to operate on Baxter’s head injury; the final return home and reunion with Rosalind. Both the lyric unfolding of Perowne’s consciousness and the narrative backbone provided by the encounters with Baxter allow McEwan to explore the issues I have identified above. Indeed, his giving greater salience to those issues is what motivates him to choose HD rather than some other neurological disease as Baxter’s besetting condition. In other words, McEwan’s interest in HD is not something driving the novel the way Genova’s interest drives Inside the O’Briens but rather his other interests lead him to choose HD rather than, say, epilepsy as the illness he would diagnose in Baxter.3 Let me explain by offering a brief synopsis of how McEwan handles the relationship between Baxter and Perowne. As I mentioned above, they meet as a result of a minor car accident. Perowne, driving his late-model silver Mercedes S500, tries to avoid running into Baxter’s red BMW when it unexpectedly pulls out from the kerb, but ends up hitting its wing mirror and knocking it totally off the car. Baxter, accompanied by two henchmen, Nigel and Nark, decides that, rather than exchanging insurance information, the appropriate next step is to assert his dominance and give Perowne a beating. Perowne takes one good punch in his chest, but then, noticing Baxter’s unusual eye and head movements, launches into an on-the-spot diagnosis of HD in an effort to distract him. Though suspicious, Baxter wants to hear Perowne out but not in front of his companions so he sends them back to the BMW. Perowne rattles on with talk of new, promising drugs, but Baxter, in another mood swing, becomes angry, and he tries to call Nigel and Nark back so that they can give Perowne his beating. But they have lost confidence in him, and while Baxter devotes his attention to them, Perowne seizes the moment to get back in his car and escape the situation. Perowne, in effect, has humiliated Baxter in front of his companions and so Baxter wants revenge. He figures out where Perowne lives, waits outside the house with Nigel, and when Rosalind returns home, pulls a knife on her and forces his way into the house. Perowne has been preparing the festive dinner for his family. Baxter orders Daisy to strip, presumably as a prelude to raping her, but both he and Nigel are discomfited by her pregnancy. Seeing the proofs of Daisy’s poetry book, he commands her to read from it. Initially too scared to comply, Daisy takes her grandfather’s advice to ‘do one you used to say for me’, and recites Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. Her recitation produces the controversial turning point in the action. Baxter has a profound mood swing to elation, and, marvelling at Daisy’s poetic genius, tells her to get dressed. He then turns to Perowne, saying he wants more information about the drugs he mentioned in the morning. Baxter’s mood swing eventually leads to an opening for Perowne and Theo to overpower him and throw him down the stairs, giving him a substantial head injury. Baxter is taken by the authorities to Perowne’s hospital, and Jay Strauss calls asking him to operate. Perowne successfully treats the head injury but of course can do nothing for Baxter’s HD. McEwan’s handling of the turning point is problematic because it seems to deny the novel’s commitment to the mimetic illusion as the synthetic and thematic take

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over. Everything changes, it seems, not because of a mimetic logic of cause and effect but more because McEwan wants to make a case for the power of Arnold’s poem and by extension of literature in general. Amy Elias (2010: 5) puts the objection bluntly: McEwan ‘implies that a good poem read well can turn the hearts of men from violence to fraternity, a wishful thesis about terror in our time’. John Banville makes a similar objection with a more specific reference to Baxter: ‘Even allowing for the fact that Baxter is suffering from a debilitating neural disorder, this is a remarkable response from the kind of thug he is portrayed as being’ (2005: 16). Elaine Hadley assesses the turn this way: ‘Incredible and surely repulsive if proffered merely as a rape prevention technique, as deployed in this way Arnold’s poem dramatizes a powerful fantasy, a Victorian fantasy that still entices us’ (2005: 93). When the same essential objection comes from several perceptive critics, it should not be simply dismissed. At the same time, it is very surprising that a novelist as accomplished as McEwan would have constructed the turning point of his otherwise resolutely mimetic novel on a fantasy. What gives? I suggest that the problem arises from the relation between the function and salience of HD. For McEwan, the primary function of Baxter’s HD is to make the turning point mimetically plausible: those with HD are emotionally labile and thus a powerful poem, especially one that reminds Baxter of his childhood, could produce his mood swing. But because McEwan makes other issues more salient, and because the mimetic premises of the narration restrict his exposition of HD, it is not at all surprising that readers who do not know what Perowne (and McEwan) know about HD will react the way Elias, Banville, and Hadley do. Indeed, for these critics what is salient in the scene itself is not that Baxter is following a recognisable HD script but that McEwan seems to invest so much power in ‘Dover Beach’. In other words, if McEwan had found a way to give HD greater salience, its functionality in the turning point would likely be more prominent and the objections would either not arise or be much milder. But given all his other interests, including his commitment to the mimetic illusion, making HD more salient would be no easy task. In sum, then, I regard McEwan’s choice as ultimately consistent with the logic of his narrative construction, but, given the relatively minor salience of HD itself, as virtually impossible to execute with his usual élan.4 I turn now to the question of McEwan’s ethical obligation in his representation of HD. Nancy S. Wexler and Michael D. Rawlins offer the following assessment of McEwan’s representation: Baxter is the worst caricature of someone with Huntington’s disease. His calumny is blamed entirely on the length of the CAG repeat on his fourth chromosome, and his villainy is due only to his disease. McEwan sadly reinforces the stigma and stereotypes from which families with Huntington’s disease suffer, and which make them hide both their inheritance and their destiny. Statistics show that people with Huntington’s disease are no more prone to violence or crime than anyone else in the population. Their bizarre and uncontrollable movements may be frightening, but they are no more dangerous than anybody else. One of us (Nancy Wexler) is at risk for Huntington’s disease. Her mother taught high school biology; three of her uncles were professional jazz musicians; and her maternal grandfather sold lingerie. All five died from Huntington’s disease – but none were in any way violent. (Wexler and Rawlins 2005: 1069–70)

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This startling passage supports my claim about the nonfictional status of McEwan’s representation of HD. Wexler and Rawlins would not be so exercised if they did not attribute implicit referential claims to that representation. Furthermore, they would not turn to this remarkable-because-so-unnecessary testimony about the law-abiding, non-violent professions pursued by the members of Nancy Wexler’s family as a way to counter McEwan’s representation of Baxter. It is as if they regard McEwan’s representation of Baxter as an indictment of Wexler’s family that cannot be ignored. Be that as it may, the passage unfortunately rests on a misreading of McEwan’s representation. In McEwan’s account, Baxter is not a criminal because of HD but rather a criminal with HD. The constraints of the focalisation through Perowne make it impossible for McEwan to give any definitive backstory about why Baxter becomes a criminal. The most he can do is offer Perowne’s speculations – lack of success in school, one thing leading to another – and these of course reveal more about Perowne than they do about Baxter. Furthermore, McEwan’s representation of Baxter’s response to ‘Dover Beach’ is not simply, as Wexler and Rawlins contend, ‘an example of emotional and dangerous instability’ (2005: 1069), but also a recognition that Baxter’s condition gives him a responsiveness to literature that Perowne himself notably lacks. Nevertheless, Wexler and Rawlins’s assessment does point to the ethical stakes – and the risks of being misunderstood – when an author inserts nonfictional elements into fictional narratives, especially in a case of a disability such as HD. Genova, while very clear about the negative effects of HD, links her thorough exposition of it with a hopeful message about being able to rise above its effects. Wexler and Rawlins, I am confident, would emphatically endorse Genova’s representation. But is there an ethical imperative for McEwan’s representation to follow the same contours? If not, then what counts as an ethically responsible representation of it? The concepts of functionality and salience are helpful in answering these questions but they also need to be supplemented by some general points about the ethics of nonfictionality. I begin with a necessary condition. The ethics of nonfictionality require accuracy of representation: the depiction of the nonfictional entity within the text must correspond to its extratextual properties. Or to put it another way, the depiction must correspond to what is known about the entity. If Wexler and Rawlins could support their claim that McEwan makes a causal link between HD and criminal behaviour, then McEwan would be violating this necessary condition for ethical representation. Beyond that, however, I submit that an author has considerable leeway in the assigning of functionality and salience to the nonfictional entity and that ethical judgements should therefore be based on an understanding of those matters. In practical terms, this point means that McEwan has no ethical obligation to give a fuller exposition of HD or to give it greater salience. In this respect, then, McEwan’s representation is ethically sound. At the same time, the juxtaposition of McEwan’s choices about functionality and salience with those of Genova’s points to the risks an author runs by giving a more restricted functionality and salience to a nonfictional entity, and especially one that has a significant political dimension such as disability. Genova, in the words of Rita Charon (2007), wants to honour the stories of those suffering from HD, while McEwan has other functions in mind for his representation. Given the clear ethical value of Genova’s approach, and given McEwan’s subordination of HD to his other purposes, it is not surprising that readers who home in just on the representation of HD end up finding fault with it.

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Saturday or Inside the O’Briens? A Pedagogical Thought Experiment Imagine (note the shift to fictionality) the following scenario: you are teaching a course in narrative medicine to a group of medical students at different stages of their training and you have room on your syllabus for only one of these novels. Imagine, furthermore, that your choice will have roughly equal salience with the other medical narratives on your syllabus. Which do you choose and why? As I suggested in the introduction, I believe that the best answer to the first question is ‘it depends’. More specifically, it depends on how you construct the two-way traffic in the course between its larger purposes and the purposes of this particular unit. If the larger purposes of the course are to show how narrative can supplement the kinds of learning the students are experiencing in their scientific-textbook-and-clinical training, then Inside the O’Briens with its well-executed ‘fiction of exposition’ would get the initial edge. That edge would be magnified if the purpose of the unit is to work with an especially clear example of such a supplement. To put this point another way, if the purpose of the unit is to give the students both information about and empathy for patients with HD, Genova’s novel is the better choice. On the other hand, if the larger purposes of the course are to introduce students to the wide range of goals that narrative can aspire to and thus to its affordances and challenges, then Saturday, with its deeper commitment to the mimetic illusion and its multiple thematic purposes, would get the initial edge. That edge would be magnified if the purpose of the unit is to show how particular medical narratives can engage audiences in the nuances of human actions and interactions around issues of medicine as well as in the layering of affective and ethical responses to them. To put this point another way, if the purpose is to get students to engage with the complexities of narrative construction and audience response, including the complexities of feeling and judging characters and their actions, then McEwan’s novel is the better choice. Furthermore, I have sketched only two sets of pedagogical purposes here, and any experienced teacher knows that (a) these two sets are not mutually exclusive – a single course could have some units governed by one set and other units governed by the other set; and (b) this narrative medicine course could be successfully constructed for other purposes (e.g. the affordances of narrative in different media, the testing of the efficacy of different narrative theories for the project of narrative medicine, and more). So, again, ‘it depends’. But any teacher also knows that teaching any actual course requires seemingly countless decisions – or to put it another way, knows that the syllabus needs to be filled out with something more than ‘it depends’. Thus, I turn from the secondperson to the first-person form of the questions in the thought experiment: ‘which do I choose and why?’ I choose Saturday because I find the second set of purposes a better foundation for a narrative medicine course in a medical school for three reasons. (1) Medical students are less in need of the supplements provided by Genova’s fiction of exposition than they are of engaging with affectively and ethically challenging narratives such as Saturday. Genova’s fiction of exposition extends the same kind of training that the medical students receive in the rest of the curriculum, while McEwan offers something substantially and valuably different. Consequently, a course built on this second set of principles will itself have more salience in the overall medical school

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curriculum than one built on the first set of principles. (2) Engaging with the complexities of Saturday sharpens medical students’ interpretive skills and ethical judgements more than following the more straightforward exposition of Genova’s novel does. Developing these capacities will enable the students – both now and after they graduate – to offer better care. (3) Engaging with Saturday rates higher on the scale of ‘the quality of life lived while reading’ than Inside the O’Briens precisely because it generates such multiple and nuanced responses to its affective and ethical dimensions. Even if actual readers come to conclude, as I have, that McEwan’s handling of Saturday’s turning point is far from perfect, the process of finding sound reasons for that judgement is beneficial.

Conclusion This analysis, I believe, offers the following significant take-aways. There is considerable cross-border traffic between fictionality and nonfictionality, a phenomenon of special relevance to fictions representing nonfictional illnesses. Analysing and assessing the representations of such nonfictional entities is greatly aided by rhetorical theory’s take on the concepts of status, functionality, and salience, because those takes enable the analyst to avoid any ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach and be appropriately responsive to the nuances of individual cases. Rhetorical theory recognises the value of a diversity of purposes for fictions of medical illness, and the value of different degrees of indirection in a generic fiction’s efforts to intervene in the actual world. Genova’s well-executed fiction of exposition deserves to be applauded for the light it sheds on HD, just as McEwan’s use of HD in the service of other ends, though not without its problems, makes a positive contribution to his efforts to come to grips with the post-9/11 world. Furthermore, even as rhetorical theory values this diversity of purposes, it can also be used to choose one option rather than another. Finally, however, the biggest take-away is that rhetorical theory is still only at the beginning of its efforts to understand the fascinating relations among fictionality, nonfictionality, and medical narratives.

Notes 1. This approach has its roots in Walsh (2007). See also Nielsen et al. (2015a, 2015b), Phelan (2016), and Phelan and Nielsen (2017). Several of my seven claims overlap with the ‘Ten Theses’ Nielsen, Walsh, and I propose (2015b). See also Dawson (2015) who proposes ‘Ten Theses against Fictionality’, and Hatavara and Mildorf (2017) who propose ‘hybrid fictionality’. 2. For more extended discussion of narrative progression, see Phelan (1989, 2007, 2017). 3. In this respect, McEwan’s use of HD conforms to the model of disability-as-supplement that Mitchell and Snyder identify in their important book Narrative Prosthesis (2000). And I acknowledge that one could do a sharp disability studies critique of McEwan’s representation of Baxter. But I believe that attending to the relative salience of HD in Saturday offers a broader and ultimately more adequate account of McEwan’s representation of it. 4. From this perspective, McEwan’s problems with the turning point are an instance of what Ralph W. Rader (2011) has identified as an unintended negative consequence of a positive artistic construction. For further discussion of such phenomena, see Phelan (2017).

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Works Cited Banville, John (2005), ‘A day in the life’, New York Review of Books, 52: 9, 26 May, 12–17. Belling, Catherine (2012), ‘A happy doctor’s escape from narrative: Reflection in Saturday’, Medical Humanities, 38: 1, 2–6, (last accessed 16 August 2017). Charon, Rita (2007), Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness, New York: Oxford University Press. Dawson, Paul (2015), ‘Ten theses against fictionality’, Narrative, 23, 74–100. Elias, Amy (2010), ‘The tipping point of badness’, American Book Review, January–February, 5. Genova, Lisa (2015), Inside the O’Briens, New York: Gallery Books. Hadley, Elaine (2005), ‘On a darkling plain: Victorian liberalism and the fantasy of agency’, Victorian Studies, 48: 1, 92–102. Hatavara, Mari and Jarmila Mildorf (2017), ‘Hybrid fictionality and vicarious narrative experience’, Narrative, 25, 65–82. Herman, David, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol (2012), Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. McEwan, Ian (2005), Saturday, New York: Doubleday. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder (2000), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh (2015a), ‘Fictionality as rhetoric: A response to Paul Dawson’, Narrative, 23, 101–11. — (2015b), ‘Ten theses about fictionality’, Narrative, 23, 61–73. Phelan, James (1989), Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — (2007), Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. — (2016), ‘Local fictionality within global nonfiction: Roz Chast’s Why Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?’, Enthymema,16, (last accessed 15 November 2017). — (2017), Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. — and Henrik Skov Nielsen (2017), ‘Why there are no one-to-one correspondences among fictionality, narrative, and techniques: A response to Mari Hatavara and Jarmila Mildorf’, Narrative, 25, 83–91. Rader, Ralph W. (2011), ‘Fact, theory, and literary explanation’, in Fact, Fiction, and Form: Selected Chapters of Ralph W. Rader, ed. James Phelan and David H. Richter, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 31–57. Walsh, Richard (2007), A Rhetoric of Fictionality, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Wexler, Nancy S. and Michael D. Rawlins (2005), ‘Prejudice in the portrayal of Huntington’s disease’, The Lancet, 366: 9491, 1069–70.

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26 The Story of the Law Ruth Ronen

[A] tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself, as a whole of some magnitude; for a whole may be of no magnitude to speak of. Now a whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something itself, either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it. A well-constructed Plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes; beginning and end in it must be of the forms just described. (Aristotle [ca. 330 bce] 1997: para. 2b, ch. 7)

A

story, says Aristotle, must be complete, a whole of some magnitude. Its completeness has to do with what we can call coherence and closure. Events are clearly located one in relation to the other and they are structured so that the closing event signals a point where nothing else is required. A story has nothing before it and nothing after it – which is what grants the story closure. This closure is not itself part of what the story tells, as Aristotle does not qualify a certain type of event as having a closing quality. And yet closure is an effect of the story’s structure; the story, to be a story, must reach its limit and this limit must be shown, enacted, in order to achieve the completeness that a story demands. Surely, this Aristotelian notion of an organic completeness is debatable: stories tend to be open-ended regarding their beginnings and endings. Stories may also disturb the idea of ending by coming to a closure in an intriguing, unsettling manner (leaving the reader in want of knowing more). Stories may create indefinite thresholds for what comprises their point of commencement and what qualifies as their ending. Stories often conflate their interior domain with the exterior one (whenever actual facts are documented as part of the fictional story, for instance). Stories may be unclear about their limits, and yet, the way the limits of a story are set, the way they are demonstrated, affirmatively or negatively through the story’s unfolding, is constitutive of its story-ness. The important point in Aristotle for the present study is that closure and completeness are not attributed to specific events but to the overall effect of a story’s structure. Closure is not locatable in the story but is rather produced by it. In this essay, I wish to apply these basic Aristotelian insights regarding narrative closure to some of the puzzling issues that laws elicit. One of the most puzzling ones is what seems to be the indeterminate limit of the applicability of laws: laws tend to appear with indeterminate thresholds and boundaries. Does the law equally apply to a human action exercised in the public domain and when practised in privacy? Does

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the law apply in a situation of war? Does it apply to insane subjects? How does the execution of laws decide the indeterminacies that laws always involve (in the form of lacunas for instance)? Can a law be breached or does transgression already involve a domain beyond the law? In what follows I would like to suggest that laws are structurally deficient in producing closure and to examine the consequences and the remedies for this deficiency. Paradoxically, the indeterminate limit of laws appears to be connected to their intended totality, to the fact that a law introduces a general norm to be applied to a limitless spectrum of relevant practices and hence implies open-endedness and indefiniteness. However, as we will see below, the law structurally lacks closure, over and above the fact that the law formally suggests a totality and limitless applicability (see Ronen 2014). Even if this lack of closure is part of what defines the very ontology of laws, the way laws are in relation to practical reason (i.e. in relation to the Kantian question ‘How I should act?’ (Kant [1781] 1999: A805), we will look at this lack of closure in narrativeAristotelian terms in order to disclose the significance of this lack. Note that with ‘law’ I refer here to a wider spectrum than just moral laws or legislative laws. Every instance where a principle is applied to a domain in order to regulate its functioning, will qualify as ‘law’. It can be a juridical law, but also a moral one, a formal principle or a regulation. In what follows, I will examine cases with a pronounced indeterminacy regarding the law’s limit and where this indeterminacy has pronounced and far reaching consequences. We will see that such cases raise the question of what can produce a closure to the domain of the law, what kind of intervention? The general thesis regarding this question (forwarded in the last part of the paper) will be that the Aristotelian notion of narrative closure, a closure that will be shown to be missing from the story of laws, this Aristotelian intuition can also suggest what qualifies as ending/ closure to the law. Note that in referring to the domain of the law as a story, rather than suggesting story-ness as a figure of speech, ascribes the law with the Aristotelian fundamental idea of having an overall narrative structure, that its beginning leads through a middle to an ending. The law has limits set by its very structure.

Capitalism: A Story with No Closure To elucidate the problem of closure as I wish to address it in this essay, let us first look at Thomas Piketty’s monumental work on Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014). Piketty, by now a world-renowned French economist, aims in his study to assess the capitalist distribution of capital, throughout the 300 years of capital’s history, by applying one principle. The principle of capitalism, according to Piketty, is a formula: r > g, stating that the return on capital will always be greater than the rate of growth. This principle, which formulates a relation between two quantities, applies to a very wide range of phenomena taking place in world economies. But the importance of this formula does not only lie in the account it gives for the open-ended space of world economy1 under one capitalist principle. More interestingly, this principle provides an account for the fact that capitalism appears to present powerful forces of convergence and of divergence, the relation between which is unclear. What are forces of ‘convergence’ and of ‘divergence’? If the fundamental capitalist tenet is that, if left to itself, capitalism will determine the distribution of wealth, and market forces will push toward greater equality, converging powers of capitalism comply with this tenet: they

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lead from ‘the progress of technological rationality to the triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate, capable managers over fat cat stockholders, and skill over nepotism’ (Piketty 2014: 21). But capitalism also exhibits diverging forces, forces that counteract this idea of ever-improved distribution of capital. Capitalism gives way to divergences, that is, to what may seem to be aberrations, or disturbances in the capitalist system. Inequality that gets out of hand, failure in the correlation between merit and income, doubtful benefit granted to education, excessive accumulation of capital: do these imperfections of the capitalist economy indicate the malfunctioning of a system that can be remedied by unleashing market forces? While the capitalist agenda is inclined to regard divergences as the outcome of regulation or other state interventions that interfere with market forces, Piketty’s thesis is different. Piketty claims that the principle of capitalism is such that the more perfect the capital market (in the economist’s sense), the more likely these divergences are to occur (2014: 27). According to Piketty’s thesis, the principle of wealth distribution says that given (by the corpus of data he presents) that the rate of return on capital is always higher than the rate of growth in the economy, our more optimistic beliefs regarding capitalism (that production technologies increase the importance of human capital and skills, that greater diffusion of knowledge and skills meeting market demand increases equality, that the distribution of wealth reduces conflicts among classes and generations) are more likely to be illusions. Moreover, on the basis of this principle formulated by Piketty, the difference between converging and diverging forces disappears: both forces turn out to be the result of applying the very same principle of capitalism. On the basis of data accumulated from 1700 until the present, Piketty shows that the current situation, in which inequality increases to alarming degrees and capital is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, is in line with the very same logic of capitalism which gave owners of land steady income in the eighteenth century. That is, Western economies do not suffer from capitalism that went wild; it is not a system that went astray and is no longer adequately regulated by capitalist forces. Capitalism had, in fact, got out of hand as a way of realising itself. It is perfectly consistent with capitalism that, for instance, increase in the average level of education will not decrease income inequality. When, for instance, super-managers are paid enormous wages even when their performance as managers is poor or non-profitable, they in fact implement the law of capitalism per se. All these are modes of displaying the one law capitalism is subject to: r > g. This law of capitalism can equally lead to convergences and to divergences: it subsumes the principle and its aberration under the same law. As the return on capital is always greater than the rate of growth (as reflected in wages and in productivity), one will always earn from the rent on capital more than from any raise in productivity or in wages. The principle of capitalism says that under capitalism productivity is sustained but at the same time is also subverted, by leading to an evergrowing inequality of wealth distribution regardless of merit or skill. The consequences of Piketty’s thesis are varied but I will concentrate on one of them, which clearly emerges from his study: given that both convergences and divergences appear to be generated by the same capitalist law, the possibility of overcoming capitalist divergences – or even of creating an alternative to capitalism – becomes impossible to contemplate. Wars, for instance, can create the impression that the

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return on capital can be significantly reduced, but this is just a temporary illusion, claims Piketty (2014: 572). There is no alternative nor rectification for capitalist divergences. This lack of alternative can be shown through Piketty’s criticism of Marx’s views. Marx believed that capitalism is subject to the principle of infinite accumulation of capital that will lead inexorably to a falling rate of profit on capital and eventually to its downfall (2014: 228). Piketty, however, claims against Marx that the deep structure of capitalism guarantees that such a point will never be reached. Capitalism will never reduce the ‘macroeconomic importance of capital relative to labour’ (2014: 572). Contrary to Marx’s apocalypse, then, enormous amounts of capital can be accumulated without reducing its return to zero. From this perspective, communism – although regarded as an attempt to overturn capitalism by prohibiting ownership on capital – emerges as not external to capitalism, in the sense that it acknowledges the infinite return on capital. The principle of capitalism hence ‘devours’ more aspects of life than we could imagine, and it explains capitalism’s obscure limit. What could be considered as postcapitalist aberrations or liberations just become new displays of capitalist lawfulness. We are always within a capitalist economy, and the effects of capitalism cannot be remedied by alternative ideologies but only fought from within. Capitalism’s far-reaching detrimental effects, as inspected with high intensity in the twenty-first century, are to be explained, according to Piketty, by the same principle of capitalism that was in effect in 1700. Along the historical spectrum, the rural societies depicted in the novels of Balzac and Austen and the twenty-first-century super-managers who defy the meritocratic model both comply with the same principle. Capitalism can be shown to result from the same economic principle throughout this spectrum of manifestations, as both appear to hinder the free play of productivity but serve in fact as hinges in the machinery of productivity. Capitalism, in other words, subsumes everything: both its pronounced ideas and their negation. This devouring force of capitalism can further be illustrated in the way Piketty handles the possibility of capital saturation in capitalist economy. Can capital be accumulated in the hands of rentiers (those who earn from capital and not from labour) to the degree that there is nothing left to consume and the return on capital becomes similar to the growth rate? But, enquires Piketty, why should the owners of capital choose to accumulate that much capital? (2014: 564). That is, at the limit of applying the principle of capitalism one encounters non-sense rather than definite closure. The absence of closure can also be illustrated in cases where what appear to be transgressive acts are incorporated under the domain of the same principle. Strategies like taxation, for instance, and other modes of regulation, which at face value may appear to contradict a self-regulated economy, can turn out to fortify the interests of capital rather than put a check on its free operation. Piketty explains that since effective regulation requires cooperation among nations, it may lead to globalising markets (to facilitate such cooperation), markets that are likely to counteract the very effects of regulation. Hence, regulation which aims to counteract the capitalist principle and limit its operation can turn out to strengthen its pervasiveness. Capitalism is not a discretionary economic system that leaves potential alternatives open. What characterises capitalism is the fact that it occupies every aspect of life, it colonises all forms of life, a fact which makes it difficult to extricate oneself from it, or to propose a way of putting a limit to capitalism. We are always within capitalism.2

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The force of Piketty’s thesis, and also the source of its controversiality, lies in denying capitalism the ability to create closure, as exemplified in both convergences and divergences adhering to the same law. Hence, market divergences are not the abnormalities that capitalism rectifies, nor are market divergences the outcome of capitalism’s insufficiently regulated operation. Rather, market divergences reveal the true nature of capitalism and therefore fail to create a definite threshold for setting the limits of capitalism. Piketty’s suggestion consequently comes as a solution: market divergences are not the problem that should be solved but are the capitalist solution per se. Divergences fail to produce closure for capitalism, neither from within (as market failures) nor from without (as phenomena outside the immediate reach of the capitalist system), but because they are the enactments par excellence of the principle of capitalism. Piketty thus has shown that not only is the capitalist principle (its economic law) more pervasive than one may acknowledge, the colonising force of capitalism over practices of life fails to produce a limit, a point of closure beyond which capitalism no longer works. Hence, market occurrences that may seem transgressive, aberrational, or displaced will turn out to affirm the law of capitalism. The historical narrative that unfolds, what may appear as the conflicting, heterogeneous evolution of market economy, hence does not only emerge as a variegated affirmation of a single principle, but moreover, as subversive of all possible alternatives to this principle of capitalist distribution of wealth and of ways of going beyond its limit. There is no outside to the story of capitalism, no possible transgression of its principle. Counteracting the law from without is hence impossible: this is what I described above as the colonisation of all practices. The law cannot be breached from within nor from without. The difficulty the law reveals is that getting free from the domain of the law is not feasible due to the lack of closure the law exhibits. This absence of closure, which emerges from Piketty’s study of capitalism, implies what can now be related to Aristotle’s determination regarding a story’s closure. Piketty’s analysis of capitalism shows a failure to produce a closure, to set a limit on the operation of capitalism. Since everything is subsumed under the same capitalist principle (r > g), the narrative of capitalism can continue forever by subsuming every possibility of transgression under its wings. How can the system of capitalism yet devise modes that will neither be devoured by capitalist mechanisms and interests, nor bring the economy to a point of losing its sense? In view of the lack of closure, a transgressive act would need to display a restraining force, an effective way of castrating the law in an act of internal exclusion rather than as an act free-of-the-law. That is, an element is excluded from the system and is yet considered part of it, thus marking from within a limit on the system’s range of control. An effective transgression would have to be one that creates a sense of closure from within the law itself (rather than go beyond the sphere of the law). Transgression cannot infringe upon the domain of the law and go beyond its limit. It is rather an internal mode of setting the limit, of restraining the law and thereby introducing a sense of closure for the domain of the law. My proposal, following Piketty, is therefore to approach the story of the law as a story unfolding the quest for the act that will limit the law from within its domain, thus creating a sense of closure. This idea of an act that creates an internally excluded limit will be illustrated in the third part of this chapter through Freud’s ‘Moses and Monotheism’ (1939). But first, how are we to understand the relation between the law and the transgressive act? What is it about the law that weakens the transgressive effect of human action?

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The Law and Its Exception ‘It [philosophy] must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought’ (Wittgenstein 1998: Tractatus 4.114). For Wittgenstein, the task of philosophy is to set the limit of thought by way of an analysis of the bounds of language and of sense. Setting the limit on sense and on thought is a way of acknowledging that beyond logic and its propositions we face non-sense and non-thought. The bounds of language, detectable through the structure of a proposition, are insulated for Wittgenstein: one can never transgress the limit of sense, only acknowledge this limit. Wittgenstein can stand as a foil to our further exploration of the story of the law through the notion of suspending or crossing the domain of the law’s applicability. The law, as Giorgio Agamben (2005) reveals, shows its true face when its domain is crossed, when its force is suspended in a state of exception. The state of exception is a non-juridical state of affairs imposed by sovereign power in what are claimed to be emergency situations (like situations of war or of threat to government). In states of exception the juridical order is suspended (creating an indeterminate legal situation) in order to enable political order to exercise power unhindered by the law. The state of exception, as described by Agamben, is a modern invention, more than it is a practice of past totalitarian regimes. It is the creation of democratic societies from the French Revolution onward, to the extent that the state of exception has become the rule (2005: 9), the paradigmatic form of government in the twentieth century. In modern democracies the politically anomic state, the state without law, has gained prevalence, and it is claimed that political life relies on the state of exception to establish and maintain its power of governing. With Agamben’s study of the state of exception we will see how an indefinite threshold of lawfulness and of the limits on its execution leads to attempts to claim that the suspension of the law is part and parcel of law’s enforcement. Agamben’s analysis counters any conflation of the two and exposes the interested blurring of the threshold of lawfulness. It takes a political exposition of the state of exception to reconstitute the limit of the law and to reveal the effects of suspending it. Agamben portrays in his study the powerful tendency of the law ‘to annex anomie itself’ (2005: 39) (i.e. to incorporate the negation of the law into one space). The history of political and legislative thought reveals ways of subsuming the state of exception under the domain of the law by intensifying the indefiniteness, which every law appears naturally to sustain, by leaving open the correlation of the law to its application. Agamben confronts two alternative narratives of the law in its relation to states of exception: according to one narrative, a state of exception carries the originary source of lawfulness; the state of exception constitutes the law’s validation by conditioning its initial force of enactment. Following this narrative, states of exception are understood as prior conditions for setting the law’s threshold or limit (2005: 4), and as essential to the juridical order. According to this picture, the state without law is needed to constitute the law itself. The attempt to define the law by assuming a state of deactivated-law as its necessary prerequisite creates the impression that the state of exception constitutes the origin and source of validity of the legal system, which is, generally speaking, the position provoked by Karl Schmitt. According to Schmitt’s famous dictum, the sovereign is the one declaring a state of exception, an état de

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siège; that is, for Schmitt declaring a state of exception is the paradigmatic form of government in the sense that it indicates the origin of political power, the kernel of authority from which the force of the law can be executed. According to this first understanding of the state of exception, the originary state of the law is revealed where the law exercises its full powers (before this originary power is distributed to different agencies – the legislative, the executive – and restrained through practices of governing). Positioning the state of exception in an originary place camouflages the lack of closure for the juridical system: the relation between the norm, its subversion, and its application remains indefinite. The second narrative is the one that locates the state of exception around the notion of necessity. According to this narrative, the state of exception is external to the legislative powers of democracy and is hence bound to be imposed temporarily and as a result of absolute necessity (imposing it beyond these prerequisites is likely eventually to liquidate democracy). Necessity creates a lacuna within the domain of the law but does not annul the law. In this narrative, the state of exception does not lie outside the legal system, but signifies ‘an essential fracture between the position of the norm and its application . . . creating a zone in which application is suspended, but the law, as such, remains in force’ (2005: 9). This narrative (which allows the law to stay in force while acknowledging enclaves of anomie where the law does not apply) fails to define the notion of necessity. Once the state of exception has become prevalent, it is no longer possible to define the idea of necessity, to delineate the circumstances that make it necessary to impose emergency regulations. Both narratives3 incapacitate the full sense of exception, obscuring the fact that an état de siège takes place in a space ‘devoid of law’ (2005: 50). Agamben shows the many facets of the endeavour of the modern state to portray the state of necessity in such a way that it ‘tends to be included within the juridical order and to appear as a true and proper “state” of the law’ (2005: 26). Agamben’s genealogical investigation of this tendency aims to unravel the obscurantism it relies on, as well as the political secret ties between the law and its suspension. Agamben shows the state of exception for what it is juristically and politically: a sphere of action whose juridical significance eludes our grasp because it is extra-juridical. Why does the juridical order insist on maintaining a relation with anomie? Why does the law tend to present the space devoid of law as essential to the juridical context? Following Agamben, we can say that the juridical order lacks closure, either because of an unclarity regarding the relation between the law/norm and its application or because the law is inclined to present itself as an order whose limits are indefinite (the law tends to devour all forms of life as relevant to its authority). Without going into these moot questions, it can be said that the limit of the law is not given (either for juridical or for political reasons) but must be produced. By separating the force of the law from the modes of its realisation, exception – that is, the suspension of the norm – is presented as necessary in order to apply the norm: Force of law that is separate from the law, floating imperium, being-in-force without application, and, more generally, the idea of a sort of ‘degree zero’ of the law – all these are fictions through which law attempts to encompass its own absence and to appropriate the state of exception, or at least to assure itself a relation with it. (Agamben 2005: 51)

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It takes the act of the philosopher to produce a limit to the law’s domain by welding the logical status of the law with its praxis, by insisting that the state of exception cannot be a mode of practising the law. In order to grasp Agamben’s move as a way of establishing a closure for the domain of the law, it should be stressed that there are practical consequences to the indefinite threshold of the juridical order. The most evident consequence is the uncertain zone in which human action is placed when confronted with a threshold of undecidability: If the state of exception’s characteristic property is a suspension of the juridical order, how can such a suspension still be contained within it? How can an anomie be inscribed within the juridical order? And if the state of exception is instead only a de facto situation, and is as such unrelated or contrary to law, how is it possible for the order to contain a lacuna precisely where the decisive situation is concerned? And what is the meaning of this lacuna? In truth, that state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other. (Agamben 2005: 23) In this long quotation we can see that Agamben objects to any attempt to think of the state of exception in juridical terms (either as establishing the law’s originary force and validity or as suspending it from within the law’s authority, thus creating a zone of indistinction). What qualifies the modern state of exception is its prevalence, that it knows no exception. When the anomic state becomes the rule, it imposes a state of indeterminateness with regard to the law. In the absence of a clear difference between lawfulness and lawlessness, there remains no way of demarcating the limit to the state of exception. It can last forever. The state of exception, claims Agamben, is the ultimate form of domination, a domination in anomie – that is, without law. Agamben aims to restore the difference between the state of exception and the state of the law because the state of exception is a state of counterfeiting lawfulness without there being a law that applies, and this indeterminate juridical status makes it a catastrophic mode for regulating life. In a state of exception whose status of anomie is obscured, human action and practices lose their meaning and escape definition. ‘What is a human praxis that is wholly delivered over to a juridical void?’ (2005: 49). Human action loses its grasp on the norm, loses the meaningfulness that could be ascribed to it by the consistency of a public sphere. Hence, in a state of exception, the killing of another person remains in a public limbo: is it a punishable act? Should the killer be brought to trial or was the killer saving the political order?4 So, in a state of exception, distinguishing compliance with the law from transgression of the law becomes impossible. In a space devoid of law which becomes the rule, the one who acts ‘neither executes nor transgress the law, but inexecutes it’ (2005: 50). One’s actions cannot be assessed, they are absolutely undecidable, and their definition as executive or transgressive ‘lie[s] beyond the sphere of the law’ (2005: 50) in an absolute non-place. The effect of the state of exception placed within or in relation to the

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domain of the law is that the limit or closure of this domain dissolves, and the human agent is denied any meaning to his or her actions. Hence Agamben qualifies the state of exception as a state that leads to the slow disappearance of the possibility for political action. When the law as a distinct domain (to which limits have been set) is suspended, human acts cannot be law-preserving nor transgressive because the law has assumed an indeterminate threshold of entry. When the status of the law is indeterminate, human action is stagnated, emptied out of all significance. What makes a political action possible then, when the law itself appears as allpervasive and boundless? How can one act politically, when the divide between the state of the law and the state without law (the state of exception) is incorporated into one space that does not admit difference (in which communism is regarded as one of the forms of capitalism)? What we can infer from both the economic analysis of capitalism and from the political-juridical analysis of the state of exception is that the impossibility of transgression is symptomatic of the lack of closure. When nothing limits the totality of the law, it becomes impossible to act in application of the law. I will now turn to examine a specific case – quasi-historical, quasi-literary – which will enable me to delineate in preliminary terms how an act can produce a sense of closure. I will show, through Freud’s analysis of the history of Moses, how an act can constrain the colonising force of the law and what it takes to produce a transgressive act under the pervasiveness of the law.

The Act that Institutes Narrative Closure Let us look at the example of Freud’s late text ‘Moses and Monotheism’ (1939), which pinpoints the complex relation between the generality of the law and the possibility of political action. Freud, always interested in the relation of religious beliefs and practices to psychic structures, addresses here the vicissitudes of monotheism, and the question of how a subject becomes the subject of a religion. The origins of monotheism can be traced to Egypt, as the story of Moses recounts, and it was only later that the monotheistic faith was adopted by the nomadic people of the Israelites. We know that monotheism was not in fact accepted by the ‘chosen people’ until a late stage, and in order to explain these vicissitudes of monotheism Freud has to argue on two fronts: he first has to establish the relation between Egyptian and Hebrew monotheistic beliefs in order to explain wherefrom monotheism came down to the horde or aggregate of people who left Egypt. And second, he has to prove the difference between the religion adopted from Egypt and exported outside its borders by Moses and the people he collected, and the monotheism that was later presented as a singular law of faith in the one god who has chosen one people for whom a set of commands was inscribed and effectively applied in a chosen land. In other words, setting the limit, the definite threshold for the commencement of the Hebraic monotheistic law is essential for establishing the foundations of a belief (which would establish both a political and an ethical order) whose history the biblical story aims to recount.

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Freud’s move is that of first stressing the hiatus between the mere monotheistic faith and its actual application within a given social order. Monotheism first appeared as abstract and distant from any religious practice and its application demanded the strictest of impositions. Its first proponent (Akhenaten, the ruler of Egypt who adopted a version of monotheism) had to impose his religion on his people and did so in the harshest of manners. This king ‘set about forcing a new religion on his Egyptian subjects – a religion which ran contrary to their thousands of years old traditions and to all the familiar habits of their lives’ (Freud [1939] 1964: 30). Freud does not only stress the total alienation between monotheism and its potential practitioners, he also indicates that in order to apply this new religion to his people Akhenaten did everything in his power to impose it as exclusive ([1939] 1964: 22). Under this king’s reign everything related to the commonly practised religions was absolutely rejected: ‘he expunged’ the detested gods, claims Freud, from every inscription – even where it occurred in the name of his father . . . Throughout the kingdom temples were closed, divine service forbidden, temple property confiscated. Indeed the king’s zeal went so far that he had the ancient monuments examined in order to have the word ‘god’ obliterated in them where it occurred in the plural. ([1939] 1964: 23) This fanatical vindictiveness raised negative feelings among the people, feelings which were to be openly expressed only after Akhenaten’s death. Freud stresses that the strict monotheism that reigned in Egypt during the kingship of Akhenaten was gaining ever-greater clarity, consistency, harshness, and intolerance as it was imposed on the ‘insatiable appetite of the Egyptians for embodying their gods in clay, stone and metal’ ([1939] 1964: 30). In other words, Akhenaten introduced a religious law that aimed to eradicate all others but, as such, his version of fanatical monotheism (rejecting all other gods) only stressed that common belief contrasted greatly with the monotheistic faith. The first phase in the vicissitudes of monotheism is defined by this split between the faith imposed forcefully by Akhenaten and the common practice which, at the time of its flourishing, Lacan stresses after Freud, ‘weaves human experience together . . . The numinous proliferates and intervenes on all sides in human experience’ ([1939] 1964: 172). But how can a religious law, so alienated from common practice, be transformed into the law founding a new people? How can it establish a social order? To explain this transformation Freud needs agents to manifest and enact the new religious law: Moses the Egyptian and Moses the Midianite since ‘it [the numinous] is so abundant that something in the end must be manifested through man; its power cannot be overcome’ ([1939] 1964: 172). The first to act under the monotheistic law is indeed Moses the Egyptian. ‘It is he who chooses a small group of men and leads them through the test that will make them worthy to found a community based on this principle . . . a bunch of men to carry the project through’ (Lacan 1992: 173). This is Moses the rationalist, the legislator who bases his leadership on the unification of the world as this came down to him from his master. His attempt to grant his faith to a random group of people (an attempt made years after the dethronement of Akhenaten) fails, however. The multiplicity of pagan

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deities is too entrenched and it takes the desert years and a radical founding act to change this state of affairs. In order for monotheism to give way to the singular belief in one god, to vanquish its opponents (the numerous figurative and material gods), and to become the law of a people, a faith held by subjects, closure had to be produced. In order for Egyptian monotheism to be clearly marked from its later offspring, a limit had to be demonstrated as a moment of transition between the monotheism as it originated in Egypt and its ruler and the monotheism of the Hebraic law that would take its transcribed form in the Decalogue. For this purpose of making a case for the moment of transition between two norms, two sets of beliefs, Freud relies on the succession of the Egyptian Moses with Moses the Midianite.5 While the first Moses’ responsibility in this story was to keep up the monotheistic faith of Akhenaten, the second Moses is responsible for constituting by the power of this faith a community of believers. The second Moses is hence the vehicle of monotheism sustained throughout the long years in the desert and the arrival at Canaan. It is only then that the conditions have ripened for the aggregate of people with eclectic beliefs to become one community, a monotheistic people in its own right. Freud’s reconstruction of the story of monotheism reveals that the threat to the monotheistic belief did not lie merely with the reality of multiple deities; rather, monotheism failed to appear as a practice to be committed to. It failed to produce a community. Since monotheism is a faith that cannot rely on imaginary elements (material and figurative symbols) to institute identity and identification, it has to rely on the speech of an abstract god. Freud and Lacan after him claim that the spoken and written word that instituted a pact between a god and its people could not have taken place if something, an act, had not already established the law of the community of Hebraic believers. Freud suggests that the replacement of the Egyptian Moses by the Midianite by an act of aggression is what created the cut, the necessary transition between the monotheism of old, the one that battled to no avail the many gods of material figuration, and the new monotheism of the Israelites. Freud attributes this power to transform monotheism into the practical law for a people, to the transgressive act of parricide. At this moment when the brakes imposed by authority do not work well and the father/god is murdered, at this moment in which Freud locates the source of morality, a social order is created. For Freud, the act of murdering the father of religion, in this case the murder of the Egyptian Moses, just as the murder of the primordial father in Totem and Taboo, is a necessary turning point in the movement to monotheism as a way of life because it is an act that turns the individual restraint under the law into a communal affair: from now on the community of law-followers will accept the law as a common restraint on instincts and desires.6 The significance of the death of the father for psychoanalysis is a matter I will not discuss in detail here. The crucial point is that the act, the ultimate transgressive act, can constitute a social order because it marks the limit of authority at the moment of its total collapse: a moment where authority has been destroyed. From this moment onward the law, whose limit is already structurally present by force, can become an imperative which a community of believers will act upon. The transgressive act, whether an actual one or just a phantasy (the story of Moses has all the properties of a myth7), is the ultimate act destined to place man

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as a practitioner of the law in relation to the law whose demand, by definition, is always absolute. The act produces a change of order: in place of the obscurantism imposed by the diverse faces of belief (Freud shows that Moses, the father of religion, is portrayed in conflicting terms and god himself appears both as a rational distant agency and as a vengeful dark deity who demands sacrifice) the world is unified under one law. Once the law has been established under a new order, the community of believers can take on itself the spoken word, the monotheistic command as inscribed in the Ten Commandments. Transgression, hence, rather than counteracting the decree of the monotheistic law, conditions lawfulness. The transgressive act produces a limit, a point of entry for human beings, into the domain of the law marking the beginning of a new religion. After the act, the ultimate political act, monotheism, the rule of restraint and strict formalism, will replace past religious practices; the community of brothers will replace the tyrannical rule of the primordial father.8 The murder in this sense is the ultimate political act because it produces a closure for the domain of the law, creating a difference between the monotheistic resources in Egyptian culture and the singular practice of monotheism as adopted by the Israelites. It is only at this point that monotheism could become a constitutive moment for the Israelites. Freud, in other words, points at the symbolic act of parricide as an act of scission necessary in order to set a limit for the domain of the Hebraic monotheistic law, thus turning it into a religious practice: So that something like the order of the law may be transmitted, it has to pass along the path traced by the primordial drama . . . that is to say, the murder of the father and its consequences . . . As a result of which . . . an inaugural pact is established that is essential for a time to the institution of that law. (Freud [1939] 1964: 176) The act taking place in the primordial drama (the murder of the father of the horde or the murder of the Egyptian Moses) is transgressive not because it transcends the norm; rather, the transgressive act produces the limit on the norm from within, in an act of internal exclusion. It is with this act that the written decree is established as one that should not be transgressed nor suspended: ‘thou shalt not kill’ is already the law one obeys because it functions as the constant reminder of the limit of the law. The establishment of the pact is demonstrated in the Ten Commandments, the most authentic moral decree, since the commandments already demonstrate that in the history of the Hebraic people, we have reached the point where a communal entity can bear the message of one God. In conclusion: the law fundamentally, even by definition, defies its own closure. The law appears to hold whatever lies beyond its domain as devoid of sense or as something that should be assimilated into the law’s domain. It takes an act to produce a limit for the law and it takes the act par excellence to produce closure. The act that can produce closure is one which creates an internal exclusion, that marks something as lying beyond the law’s bounds, thereby establishing for the law a point of origin or limit. This act of transgression which produces a limit is the narrative act in Aristotelian terms, the act in which a point of closure transpires.

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Notes 1. An alternative explanation would be the assimilation of twenty-first-century phenomena under the heading of post-capitalism, in an attempt to express their noticeable connection with, yet diversion from, classical capitalism. Piketty’s solution is different from the division into phases, as will be explained below. 2. An interesting literary exemplification of to this account by Piketty would be Michel Houellebecq’s Les particules élémentaires (The Elementary Particles, 2001), in which the movement, which acted in the name of liberty, freedom from consumption, and sexual permissiveness, is sharply portrayed as manipulated by capitalist interests. Capitalism, says Houellebecq, has always aimed to isolate the subject and cut him or her off from family and love bounds that have traditionally filtered the devouring forces of capitalism, so that the subject falls prey more easily to capitalist manipulations. The industry of sex, including the industry developed for the ideologically permissive, freedom-seeking generation of the 1960s, shows Houellebecq, is one indication of this fact. Freedom from consumption and from political dictates turns out to exhibit total compliance with capitalist interests. 3. Another narrative (which can be seen as a version of one of the two narratives portrayed above) would be Benjamin for whom exception is catastrophic. Benjamin, as read by Agamben, regards the state of exception as ‘a zone of absolute indeterminacy between anomie and law, in which the sphere of creatures and the juridical order are caught up in a single catastrophe’ (2005: 57). For Benjamin, the state of exception is to be excluded from the juridical order, and when present, it introduces radical undecidability (between lawmaking and law-preservation, between anomie and jurisdiction, between necessity and its elimination) (2005: 54ff.). 4. This example quoted by Agamben is taken from Cicero (De oratore) and it concerns Opimius’s assassination of Caius Gracchus’s followers. 5. Freud wishes to prove the existence and function of the Egyptian Moses prior to the events of the people: ‘that between the fall of Moses and the establishment of the new religion at Kadesh two generations, or perhaps even a century, elapsed’ ([1939] 1964: 39). 6. ‘The religion which began with the prohibition against making an image of God develops more and more in the course of centuries into a religion of instinctual renunciations’ (Freud [1939] 1964: 118). 7. Freud himself stresses time and again the conjectural, doubtful character of the history he portrays (e.g. [1939] 1964: 31, 102), and yet, this doubt does not reduce from the certainty which the return of the repressed produces in the subject: ‘men have always known that they once possessed a primal father and killed him’ ([1939] 1964: 101). 8. Lacan stresses that the community under the rule of Moses the Midianite represents a transitory stage of darkness, magic, and vengeance. The events that befall the Israelites in the desert and in the new land show that the aggressivity of the act is no longer part of the old pagan belief, but is now associated with the new god, the hidden god of monotheistic belief.

Works Cited Agamben Giorgio (2005), State of Exception, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle [ca. 330 bce] (1997), Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud Sigmund [1939] (1964), ‘Moses and monotheism’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. XXIII, London: The Hogarth Press, pp. 1–137.

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Houellebecq, Michel (2001), The Elementary Particles, trans. Frank Wynne, New York: Vintage. Kant, Immanuel [1781] (1999), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1992), The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII, New York: W. W. Norton. Piketty, Thomas (2014), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Ronen Ruth (2014), Art Before the Law, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1998), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden, New York: Dover Publications.

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27 The Centre for Narrative Gravity: Narrative and the Philosophy of Selfhood after Dennett Richard Walsh

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here is a broadly based intellectual tradition that gives narrative a key role in our understanding of selfhood. The claim has thoroughgoing radical versions and very circumspect modest versions; in the course of this discussion I will suggest that even the most modest give narrative too much credit, while even the most radical underestimate its importance. That is, I think there is good reason to give narrative a crucial role in the constitution of selfhood, but this does not mean the self is in any sense narrative in form. The reasons for this view have to do with arguments about the way narrative is understood as well as with the conception of selfhood; since the scope of both concepts is large, however, my discussion will confine itself to the overlap between them. My starting point is Daniel Dennett’s well-known proposition, from Consciousness Explained, that your self is ‘nothing more than, and nothing less than, your center of narrative gravity’ (1993: 429). Narrative, as well as selfhood, can benefit from something like Dennett’s broad interdisciplinary commitment to a dialogue between philosophy, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. Indeed it is tempting to interpret his ‘centre of narrative gravity’ along these lines, as an interdisciplinary research centre, The Centre for Narrative Gravity, or CNG; its strapline would be ‘we take narrative seriously’. In former times it would have been a budget-holding centre, with administrative support and office space located in or around the pineal gland. Nowadays it is more likely to be virtual, eking out a meagre programme of workshops whilst hustling for scraps of funding, its only persistent manifestations an ill-maintained website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter hashtag. While this is not, ultimately, the interpretation of Dennett’s metaphor that I wish to defend, it does suggestively foreground certain features a centre may have – virtuality, contingency, and the dialogic or systemic qualities that arise through interdisciplinary collaboration. The question of how best to interpret Dennett’s metaphor is an important one, however, since it has had a certain amount of traction – and drawn a certain amount of criticism – in subsequent debate about narrative and selfhood. The appropriate place to begin an interpretation is with Dennett’s own apparent understanding of the phrase, as manifested in the account of selfhood it facilitates. For Dennett’s purposes, the important features of an object’s centre of gravity are that it is a single point (1993: 418), and that it is an abstraction, a ‘theorist’s fiction’ (1992: 103), yet one

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with real properties (e.g. a spatiotemporal location relative to the object) that prove useful in understanding the object’s actual behaviour (1992: 103). Appropriated to a metaphor for selfhood, the idea of a centre of gravity allows Dennett to say that selves are neither material nor non-existent; it allows him to say they are a kind of unitary model an agent may have of itself, or another (1993: 427); and it allows him to explain both the temporal continuity and discontinuity of the properties of selves. So, to give the image some concrete specificity, the centre of gravity of a metal ring, for example, is in the centre of the ring – where there is no ring. Its position relative to the ring persists no matter how the ring’s position or orientation changes, but it abruptly changes if the distribution of mass in the ring changes, for instance if a piece of bubble gum gets stuck on one side (the ring in this example is mine; the bubble gum is Dennett’s (1992: 104)). These are not all the possible connotations of the centre of gravity metaphor. One implication that Dennett underplays (though it is perhaps implicit) is that this unitary point is defined by the net effect of the vectors of gravitational force acting upon the entire distributed mass of the object. It is the point through which the resultant gravitational force upon the object passes, whatever its orientation, because the combined moments of gravitational force, or gravitational torque, acting upon every point in the object are equal around this point. For certain purposes (e.g. balance), the object can be treated as if the entirety of its mass were located at its centre of gravity; yet the action of gravity upon every part of the object actually produces different degrees of torque, in different directions, relative to this virtual centre. The connotation of the metaphor considered in this respect, then, is that the unity of the centre, the self, is an emergent quality of a systemic multiplicity of conflicting causes. The relevance of this consideration depends upon the way narrative is figured into the metaphor. Unfortunately, Dennett’s account of the role of narrative in selfhood is confusing in two important respects. The first confusion surrounds the question of what it is that constitutes the unity of a narrative self. Is it the unity of a single, overarching, and ongoing autobiographical narrative? Is it constituted, again and again, repetitively or variously, by the unity of each individual narrative act? Is there some principle of cohesiveness in between? Dennett speaks both of ‘a’ story, and of ‘incessant bouts of storytelling’ (1993: 428), which allow different inferences. He spends a considerable amount of time on problematic issues such as multiple personality disorder (1993: 419ff.) and the gappiness of consciousness (1993: 423); the former demonstrates the contingency of the unitary self as an artefact, but the latter seems to support an assumption that the temporal continuity of selfhood always depends upon the singularity of such an artefact. Despite his acknowledgement of the evident multiplicity of occasions of storytelling, however understood, these considerations seem to commit Dennett to the idea that the unity of selfhood is a formal property only realised in some notion of a single autobiographical narrative. The second confusion is that he equivocates on whether the self is to be understood as if it were the source of narrative, or the object of narrative. He says, ‘streams of narrative issue forth as if from a single source’, but also, ‘we build up a defining story about ourselves, organised around a sort of basic blip of self-representation’ (1993: 418, 428–9). Or, presenting the equivocation more succinctly, he says that our stories are a prompt to ‘posit a unified agent whose words they are, about whom they are’

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(1993: 418). This formulation, which reflects his concern, most of the time, with autobiographical stories, is sanguine about the equivalence of the source and object of narrative representation. The emphasis upon autobiographical narratives, on whatever scale, will need further consideration; but even if that restriction of scope is granted, there are always principled, non-trivial differences between the narrating I and the narrated I. The self that narrates the self has a reflexive relation to that narrated self, and so inherently generates a conceptual detachment from it which is clearly no part of the narrated self itself. This is already the case in the apparent immediacy of spontaneous present-tense self-narration, and only becomes more obvious with greater degrees of autobiographical retrospect. These two kinds of ambiguity in Dennett’s version of narrative selfhood provide a handle upon the ways it relates to some subsequent perspectives that more or less directly align themselves with or against it. To take the unity question first, Dennett’s view has largely been assimilated to what Galen Strawson has defined, and critiqued, as the ‘narrativity thesis’, which can take a descriptive psychological form or a normative ethical form. Strawson identifies a broad consensus behind the idea that we typically understand our lives as autobiographical narratives, and that this understanding is what constitutes selfhood as a psychological phenomenon. In addition to, or as a variant of, this universal psychological thesis, there is a normative thesis that regards understanding oneself narratively as an ethical imperative, in that doing so is necessary in order to fully realise one’s self, to achieve ‘full personhood’ (Strawson 2004: 428). Strawson identifies Oliver Sacks (1985), Jerome Bruner (1987), Charles Taylor (1989), Marya Schechtman (1996), Paul Ricoeur (1992), Alastair MacIntyre (1981), and Dennett himself as among the proponents of variations upon the narrativity thesis. Strawson rejects both the psychological and the ethical narrativity theses, though the main force of his argument concerns the latter. He accuses narrativists of, at best, illicit generalisation from their own introspection, and advances his own case as a counter-argument; he denies that autobiographical narrative continuity contributes in any important way to his selfhood, and offers a range of reasons why such a non-narrative sense of self might be preferable to the cultivation of a narrative self. The debate is largely framed at the level of large-scale autobiographical narrative, and the bone of contention has less to do with narrative as such than with the formal unity it offers; its provision for the continuity of the self’s qualities over time, which narrativists take to be either necessary or desirable. In fact, the terms in which Strawson articulates his alternative view are themselves freighted with narrative connotations. He diagnoses the narrativist view as merely symptomatic of a ‘diachronic’ disposition – a propensity to experience selfhood primarily in terms of its long-term continuities – not an insight into the essential nature of selfhood (2004: 430). He presents his own case as representative of an alternative disposition, which places no such premium upon the long-term continuity of selfhood, and which he calls ‘episodic’; and he argues further that even a diachronic type may sometimes lack a narrative sense of self, by virtue of having lived an ‘intensely picaresque’ life (2004: 442). These terms, despite being deployed on the anti-narrativist side of the argument, remain strikingly narrative in their import. In this respect they underline the point that what Strawson denies is the narrativist equation between selfhood and the unity of the singular autobiographical narrative, not the idea that narrative may be more incidentally involved in self-understanding. Indeed, he has

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more recently conceded (in deference to Nietzsche) that it may be important for selfunderstanding to grasp the sequence of one’s experiences, without finding it necessary to modify his anti-narrativist stance (2015: 301). However, Strawson’s argument does also present a challenge to more finely grained versions of the narrativist view, which grant narrative a role in selfhood on an intimate scale. As Daniel Hutto has argued, Strawson presents a dilemma for all forms of ‘strong narrativism’, defined as the claim not just that narrative is a fundamental means of self-shaping, but that self-experience is intrinsically narrative in form, on any scale (2016: 31–6). The dilemma is that the strong narrativist claim, to the extent that it is pitched at the level of autobiographical unity, is implausible (too selective, reductive, even coercive; this is the main thrust of Strawson’s ethical argument); but to the extent that it is cast at the level of everyday experience, it is trivial; in this sense, the experience of making a cup of coffee is a narrative (Strawson 2004: 439). As Hutto’s analysis shows, the force of Strawson’s triviality charge is that the form of narrative cannot encompass the whole of self-experience unless experience is defined as itself already implicitly narrative, in which case the notion of narrative adds nothing to it. Marya Schechtman, who has maintained a narrativist position over several publications since 1996, is one philosopher whose position has come to rest upon this question of implicit narrative. Her central concern is with the importance of selfhood to the individual’s psychological ‘survival’ over time, and she distinguishes between a ‘person narrative’, which provides for a detached recognition of the continuity between one’s own past, present, and future, and a ‘self narrative’, which provides for empathic identification with that continuing self. Only the latter, she insists, secures personal psychological survival in the full sense (Schechtman 2007). The necessity for it is not self-evident, however, even if it is appealing to our narrative desire for coherence; nor (from Strawson’s perspective) is it even self-evidently desirable in that strong sense. But in any case, this criterion of the self’s survival imposes a burden of sustained self-narration that is implausible unless, as Schechtman acknowledges, it is ‘largely implicit and automatic’ (2007: 162). The fragility of such a notion of implicit narrative becomes clear when Schechtman subsequently relinquishes the term ‘narrative’, considering it more accurate to characterise the ongoing continuity of our implicit self-understanding as that of a ‘diachronically structured unit’ (2014: 108). This formulation intimates the possibility that such unity may not, after all, be narrative in kind. I shall need to return to the question of implicit narrative, but first I want to dwell a little upon responses to the other ambiguity in Dennett’s account, his equivocation between the narrating and narrated self. Narrativist positions, Dennett included, tend to emphasise the idea of the self as narrated – as the object of narrative representation. One exception is David Velleman, whose chapter ‘The Self as Narrator’ takes up Dennett’s discussion and argues that the self should be thought of as ‘the author of a veridical autobiography, who really is identical with the protagonist of his story’ (2006: 207). In doing so, he takes up Dennett’s own appeal to the opening of Moby-Dick (Melville [1851] 2008), ‘Call me Ishmael’, which Velleman understands as a metaphorical point about the fictive relation between the author Melville (as brain) and the narrator Ishmael (as self). Velleman’s argument, however, seizes upon the idea that the relation between the narrating Ishmael and the narrated

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Ishmael is not fictional. Actually this is a misreading of Dennett, since his point is explicitly about fictional character as a narrative construct, and he goes on to talk about characters in third-person fiction such as Sherlock Holmes and Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom (Dennett 1992: 105). Dennett’s discussion becomes literary at this point because he is glossing the idea of the self as a kind of useful fiction, but the pitfalls of the analogy lend support to a criticism of narrativist positions by Peter Lamarque (2007), who notes that equating narrative with literary narrative, and by extension, literature with life, is fundamentally misleading about both. The Melville example is an unfortunate one both for Dennett’s narrative point and for Velleman’s point about narrator–protagonist identity. In the first place, against Dennett, ‘Call me Ishmael’ is not a narrative statement, but an imperative; nor is it the case in principle that the fictive representation of an act of narration is itself an act of narration. But equally, against Velleman, first-person narration, like any other narrative form, is the production of meaning, not just a manifestation of identity. Indeed, given the literary context and the strong symbolic resonance of the name, one connotation of the imperative that opens Moby-Dick is ‘My name is not Ishmael.’ In any case, contrary to Velleman’s assertion, the narrator is never identical to the protagonist; the narrating self always exceeds the self that it constitutes as narrated, by virtue of the very act of narration if nothing else. In first-person fiction, of course, both the narrated and the narrating ‘I’ are represented, and the form commonly draws attention to the discrepancies between the two. More fundamentally, the self conceived as the narrator of one’s own life, rather than the protagonist represented in that narration, is not only conceptually distinct from that protagonist, but is itself not represented. Such a consideration does identify a curious gap between the more typical narrativist emphasis upon the object of representation and the first-person nature of self-experience, and for this reason Velleman’s interest in the narrator is suggestive, even as he himself takes it in the wrong direction. He identifies the autobiographical narrator with the protagonist, but dissents from Dennett’s equation between the unity of the self and the unity of the narrative, noting that ‘we tell many small, disconnected stories about ourselves’ (Velleman 2006: 222). Accordingly, he ends by attributing the unity of the self to the unity of the narrator as the agent of these narrative acts (2006: 223); but since this agency is no more explicitly unitary than agency of other kinds, the specific relevance of narrative acts seems to disappear entirely, and the account ceases to be explanatory. Lurking behind these problems with representation and the implicit there lies a further problem with Dennett’s notion of narrative, which is the crux of an important counter-argument from Richard Menary. It is that Dennett considers narrative to be a linguistic phenomenon, made of ‘words, words, words’ (Dennett 1993: 417). As was evident from the Melville example, this sometimes leads to an overly inclusive notion of narrative; but in a different sense it is unduly restrictive, failing to recognise that narrative representations may be articulated in other, non-linguistic media – including mental representations as well as material media. Menary, whose concern is to situate selfhood in relation to embodiment, endorses Dennett’s linguistic view of narrative (Menary 2008: 65), but argues that (given the illegitimacy of the idea of implicit narrative) it sets tight limits upon narrative’s role in embodied experience. This limitation leads him to distinguish between two senses of self, ‘one

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as an embodied experiencer of and actor in the world and the other as a narrator of those experiences and actions’ (2008: 66). Prior to any role for narrative in selfhood, Menary argues, there must be ‘a minimal sense of self as a subject of experience and this minimal self is an embodied subject’ (2008: 75). Such a view makes common cause with phenomenological arguments against narrative selfhood, which similarly insist upon the need for a concept of the ‘primitive self’ at the elemental level of firstperson experientiality (Zahavi 2007: 189). Menary’s view is not without its own problems, however. Being a subject cannot of itself amount to being a self; that would be too permissive, and he approves of Shaun Gallagher’s formulation of a minimal self as ‘a consciousness of oneself as an immediate subject of experience, unextended in time’ (Gallagher 2000: 15; qtd in Menary 2008: 75). Even this, he grants, is too minimal. A self without extension in time is no self at all; we are not goldfish, swimming around our bowls in a perpetual present. According to Menary, however, the embodied self provides for such temporal extension, the sequence of bodily experiences ‘lending themselves to narration’ (2008: 76 n.8) as ‘pre-narrative fodder’ (2008: 70, 73) or even having ‘pre-narrative structure’ (2008: 64). But what is the category of the ‘pre-narrative’ here? If it means ‘before narrative’, it begs the question of how the sequence is grasped together as a whole; if it means ‘proto-narrative’, it seems that Menary is smuggling back in the notion of implicit narrative he has already disallowed. The ‘proto-narrative’ sense might be better addressed from a narrativist perspective, by appealing to a concept of narrative as semiotic rather than exclusively linguistic, thereby allowing a much more elementary role for narrative in cognition. Narrative cognition, thus conceived, is a fundamental mode of sense-making that is not dependent upon language, and is perhaps more primitive than language. Against Menary, this is not mere embodied experientiality but, indeed, narrative; but since the objects of narrative cognition are many and various, it does not in itself provide for the coherence or continuity of selfhood. We are bounced back to the other interpretation of Menary’s ‘pre-narrative’, as meaning before narrative, which indeed seems closer to the spirit of his argument for the integrity of embodiment, but demands a non-narrative concept of the coherence of self without providing a principle for such coherence. Let me return to Dennett’s metaphor. Why does he say ‘centre of narrative gravity’, rather than ‘narrative centre of gravity’? The latter would seem to better capture what he means. It is the centre, the self, to which he attributes narrative qualities, after all. Still, to paraphrase D. H. Lawrence, we should trust the tale, not the teller (Lawrence [1923] 1990: 8); and this seems a particularly appropriate context in which to do so, given Dennett’s thesis that the tale is, indeed, the teller. As written, the phrase ‘centre of narrative gravity’ makes ‘narrative’ qualify ‘gravity’, not ‘centre’. Narrative gravity would seem to be a kind of force, rather than a kind of representation. This reading opens up new possibilities: for one thing, it gives narrative a constitutive role in selfhood without implying that the self is an object of narrative representation. The narrative act, on this view, may be significant for selfhood regardless of whether or not the narrative represents the self. Dennett, like other narrativists across the whole spectrum of positions, is wholly preoccupied with autobiographical narratives, ignoring the possibility that what matters for selfhood is not that my narratives are about me, but that they are mine.

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My narratives are not ‘mine’ in the sense of being authored by my self, of course (that would explain nothing); they are my narratives in the basic sense that they are necessarily articulated from my subject position; but their articulation endows that subject position with qualities. Every narrative act inherently makes commitments that implicate the narrating subject, which therefore acquires a range of perspectival attributes by virtue of that act. These attributes – spatiotemporal, conceptual, emotional, ethical – are contextually cumulative, and all contribute to the constitution of a narrating self whether the narrative is about the self or not. The effect I am describing is analogous to what Louis Althusser (1971) called interpellation, or hailing, with respect to the reader, but here applied to the narrator. It is the sense in which the bare fact of occupying either subject position entails ownership of the values that position implies, which may range from bare attentional priorities to ideological alignments. On this view, then, narrative gravity is a metaphor relating to selfhood in the sense that selfhood is a net effect of the multiplicity of our narrative acts, public and private; a resultant of their semiotic force. Selfhood thus conceived is implicit in narrative, but it is not implicit narrative; nor is it ‘pre-narrative’ in any sense. The idea of implicit narrative is not an intelligible concept: while a great deal of the logic of narrative is always implicit, that logic is invoked by its semiotic form, which is necessarily explicit. Narrative need not be articulated in language, but even if we are talking about narrative cognition, where the medium may be iconic mental representation, this is already – precisely – representation. Narrative can only be constituted as narrative by abstraction from embodiment to a semiotic domain; and the order and coherence provided by narrative form is consequent upon that process. If there is a sense of sequential coherence to first-person experientiality, then, that coherence cannot be understood as a pre-narrative quality of embodied experience itself – unless some equivocation between empirical and semiotic senses of ‘experience’ is involved. The latter sense of experientiality, as a semiotic product, may indeed provide for an elemental consciousness of continuing selfhood, but in that case, it is a post-narrative phenomenon. To say that selfhood is an effect of narrative is not to make a case for narrative selfhood. If the self is an implicit effect of a multiplicity of acts of narrative sensemaking, diverse in their occasions and objects of representation, then it follows that selfhood is not itself narrative in form. I am therefore siding with Strawson against narrativism, though in a particular way. In one sense, my anti-narrativism is more radical than Strawson’s, since his claim is just that selfhood is not necessarily narrative in form, and some people experience it otherwise. Distinguishing between diachronic and episodic types, he offers himself as an example of the latter, for whom the self is not narrative (and for whom this is a good thing). In the spirit of Strawson’s case-based reasoning, I can press the argument further by also offering myself as an example. Unlike Strawson, I do have a strong sense of the coherence of my own selfhood over time, and I would find it relatively easy to identify long-term autobiographical continuities in my interests, attitudes, feelings, and goals. Accordingly, I have to stand up and say, ‘My name is Richard Walsh, and I am a diachronic.’ Nor am I, according to Strawson, the kind of diachronic who might nonetheless lack narrative selfhood, since I do not think my life could be described as even remotely ‘picaresque’. On the face of it, then, I think I am as good a candidate for narrative

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selfhood as anyone; yet I find the idea that my self is narrative in form, on any scale, entirely unconvincing. However, I do think that my self is a resultant of my acts of narrative cognition – all of them, on all scales; and in that respect, I continue to grant narrative an importance for selfhood that is not only greater than Strawson allows, but more fundamental than even the most emphatic narrativist claims. But why conceive of selfhood as a specific effect of acts of narrative cognition, rather than every cognitive act? My emphasis upon acts of narration has some affinities with Velleman’s account of the self as narrator, and might be subject to a similar kind of objection: if the emphasis falls too much upon the act, rather than the specific form of narrative, perhaps this is really a much more general appeal to cognitive agency as a unifying principle. Or again, the virtual formation of self as an effect of narrative cognition looks similar to a proposal from Tim Bayne, also implicitly drawing upon Dennett’s metaphor, that the unity of the self should be conceived as a virtual centre of phenomenal gravity (Bayne 2010: 289). If the unity of self over time is not the unity of an autobiographical narrative, why invoke narrative at all? Or to put the same question differently, why is the role of narrative here non-trivial? The concept of narrative involved in the idea of narrative cognition is a parsimonious one. It does not invoke the rich structures of meaning in elaborate cultural forms of narrative discourse, nor even the ordinary devices of everyday conversational narratives, but just the bare, minimal logic of grasping together, as a conceptual unit, a temporal sequential whole. While narrative cognition does not constitute our only way of conceiving temporality, it does provide for a very fundamental and specific attentional grasp upon it. Crucially, the temporal wholes of narrative cognition have two faces – that of the object of narration and that of the narrative act itself. This is the root of the dual temporality of narrative, the time of the narrated and the time of the narration, which is so extensively exploited in its more highly crafted cultural forms. Sophisticated narratives often foreground the dissociation between the temporality of narration and that of the narrated events, for example by thematising retrospection, or by exploiting the possibilities of non-chronological narration. But the distinction between these two temporalities is already latent in narrative cognition, where it is their reciprocity that matters. In giving intelligible form to the temporality of its attentional object, narrative cognition also implicitly gives form to the temporality of narration. The latency of this effect is of a piece with the other aspects of the process I have characterised by analogy with interpellation, the implicit attribution of qualities to the narrating subject position. It establishes an implicit temporal continuity for the subject which aggregates cumulatively across multiple discrete acts of narrative cognition, a continuity which is itself, therefore, a systemic rather than narrative phenomenon. The temporal continuity of selfhood, then, is provided for by the temporal logic of narrative cognition, even while the resultant continuing self is not narrative in form, but an emergent effect of the systemic relations among a subject’s acts of narrative cognition. This notion of selfhood as necessarily an emergent phenomenon arising out of underlying systemic complexity has some presence already in discussions of the self. Owen Flanagan, for example, notes that ‘you are a complex system. Much of what makes you tick is neither “selfy” nor transparent from the subjective point of view’ (1998: 210); while Schechtman concludes her survey of approaches to narrative selfhood by saying that ‘the complexity of selves is to be found in the multiple perspectives on our lives that we negotiate in living them’ (2011: 415). However, she then goes on,

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it is ‘a complexity best understood in narrative terms’, and the force of that ‘best’ is at the heart of the debate. Even if, as anti-narrativists insist (and as I have argued), the self is not innately narrative, of course we can and do often think about our selves in narrative terms; but there is room for disagreement about the extent to which this is best. Narrative is a powerful way of making sense, sometimes too powerful, too coercive. Sophisticated narratives can be highly self-aware about their own imposition of form, and perhaps in this way they can mitigate narrative’s most pernicious effects, yet at the same time they consolidate the hegemony of narrative thinking. Still, inasmuch as narrative is our primary way of making sense of temporal phenomena, it is hard to avoid. Peter Goldie, who rejects the notion of a narrative self, argues for a modest version of a narrative ‘sense of self’. This, Goldie says, is not our only way of thinking about the self (and other selves), and provides for relatively superficial and loose forms of coherence (quite compatible with Strawson’s view); but he also says that such a narrative sense of self is ‘an important part of what it is to be human’ (2012: 149). And perhaps it is, warts and all. The self per se, however, is not narrative, nor can it be explained by an inscrutable notion of implicit narrative. It is an implicit effect of narrative cognition, and the unity and continuity of selfhood is a contingent, sometimes fragile, systemic product of the multiplicity of our narrative engagements with temporality. You might say it is an emergent phenomenon, a back-formation, a virtual image, or a spandrel of our acts of narrative cognition. Or you might say it is the resultant of their moments of narrative force; a centre of narrative gravity.1

Note 1. This work was enabled by a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Durham.

Works Cited Althusser, Louis (1971), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Chapters, trans. Ben Brewster, London: New Left Books. Bayne, Tim (2010), The Unity of Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bruner, Jerome (1987), ‘Life as narrative’, Social Research, 54: 1, 11–32. Dennett, Daniel C. (1992), ‘The self as the center of narrative gravity’, in Frank S. Kessel, Pamela M. Cole, and Dale L. Johnson (eds), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 103–15. — (1993), Consciousness Explained, London: Penguin. Flanagan, Owen C. (1998), Consciousness Reconsidered, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gallagher, Shaun (2000), ‘Philosophical conceptions of the self: Implications for cognitive science’, Trends in the Cognitive Sciences, 4: 1, 14–21. Goldie, Peter (2012), The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutto, Daniel D. (2016), ‘Narrative self-shaping: A modest proposal’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 15, 21–41. Lamarque, Peter (2007), ‘On the distance between literary narratives and real-life narratives’, in Daniel D. Hutto (ed.), Narrative Understanding and Persons, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 117–32.

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Lawrence, D. H. [1923] (1990), Studies in Classic American Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin. MacIntyre, Alastair (1981), After Virtue, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Melville, Herman [1851] (2008), Moby-Dick, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Menary, Richard (2008), ‘Embodied narratives’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15: 6, 63–84. Ricoeur, Paul (1992), Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Sacks, Oliver (1985), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, London: Duckworth. Schechtman, Marya (1996), The Constitution of Selves, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. — (2007), ‘Stories, lives, and basic survival: A refinement and defense of the narrative view’, in Daniel D. Hutto (ed.), Narrative Understanding and Persons, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 155–78. — (2011), ‘The narrative self’, in Shaun Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Self, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 394–416. — (2014), Staying Alive, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strawson, Galen (2004), ‘Against narrativity’, Ratio, 17: 4, 428–52. — (2015), ‘The unstoried life’, in Zachary Leader (ed.), On Life-Writing, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 284–302. Taylor, Charles (1989), Sources of the Self, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Velleman, J. David (2006), ‘The self as narrator’, in Self to Self: Selected Chapters, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 203–23. Zahavi, Dan (2007), ‘Self and other: The limits of narrative understanding’, in Daniel D. Hutto (ed.), Narrative Understanding and Persons, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 179–202.

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28 The Body as Medium: A Phenomenological Approach to the Production of Affect in Narrative Amy Shuman and Katharine Young

Affect

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he cleft between reason and passion has persisted in Western philosophy for more than 2,000 years, despite the declaration of philosophers, ancient and modern, that it is a false dichotomy. As Antonio Damasio demonstrates, the course of reason is always shaped by passion just as, according to Plato and Aristotle, the course of passion is always shaped by reason (Damasio 1994: 173; Plato [370 bce] 1956: 246a–254e, 286; Aristotle [340 bce] 1963: 1105b20). Working in this tradition, narratologists have often treated the linguistic text of a storytelling as if it were a logical organisation of syntagms and paradigms and its affect as if it were hovering between the lines of the text, quivering in the bodies of the interlocutors, or floating in the atmosphere between them. Words, it supposes, could refer to emotions but they could not have or be emotions. We would like to demonstrate that affect is neither in the text, in the body, nor in the air, but is generated interactively by the act of telling the story. For their part, affect theorists have themselves sustained the impression that affect is a sort of atmosphere suffusing eras, spaces, and occasions. Fredric Jameson points out that traditional theories of emotion propose the body as a ‘monadlike container, within which things felt are then expressed by projection outward’ (1991: 15). With the ‘death of the subject’ in postmodernism, emotion lost its container (Terada 2001). What used to be understood as feelings inside bodies surfaced to become ‘intensities’ around them, in the term Jameson took from Jean-François Lyotard, ‘free-floating and impersonal and . . . dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria’ (1991: 15–16). Asubjective affect theorists disregard the body as a site of registration for affect, as if it inhered in materialities and atmospheres. We think it would be more illuminating to consider that affects do not inhere in materialities (or in the atmospheres among objects) but arise between materialities and sensibilities. This is the contention of subjective affect theorists, who argue that however they are constituted, affects traverse bodies. As Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg write, affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, partbody, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1)

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The authors continue, Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, visceral forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability. (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1) Bodies are animated by affects whether we are aware of it or not on account of ‘affect’s always immanent capacity for extending further still: both into and out of the interstices of the inorganic and non-living, the intracellular divulgences of sinew, tissue, and gut economies, and the vaporous evanescences of the incorporeal (events, atmospheres, feeling-tones)’ (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 2). As Sara Ahmed puts it, ‘we may walk into a room and “feel the atmosphere”, but what we may feel depends on the angle of our arrival. Or we might say that the atmosphere is already angled; it is always felt from a specific point’ (2010: 37). Our project is not to examine how stories make people feel but how stories angle affects on the occasion of their telling.

Gesture Acts of narration animate two realities, the realm of events the story is about, currently called the storyworld, and the occasion on which the story is told, the storytelling occasion, in this instance the realm of conversation (Ryan and Thon 2014: 1; Young 1987: viii). This animation is both verbal and gestural. Co-speech gestures are affiliated with words in the course of talk. David McNeill distinguishes four types of co-speech gesture. Iconic gestures represent the concrete characters, acts, objects, and spaces words mention; metaphoric gestures represent abstract ideas or emotions iconically as if they were characters, acts, objects, and spaces. Beats are a subtype of metaphorics, which represent speaking or narrating iconically as if it were a concrete substance, typically a stream. Deictics point to characters, acts, objects, and spaces in actual or virtual worlds (McNeill 1992: 12–18). Gestures are movements lifted away from their practical engagements with objects in the world to present themselves as objects of interactive attention, to delineate the objects to which they allude, and at the same time to allude to the gesturer’s speech or thought. It is not that the perceiver deciphers the thought or the object from the gesture. With the gesture, he or she inhabits the world of meanings in which gesturer and object inhere. Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes: In the action of the hand which is raised towards an object is contained a reference to the object, not as an object represented, but as that highly specific thing towards which we project ourselves, near which we are, in anticipation, and which we haunt. Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body. (Merleau-Ponty [1962] 1995: 138–9) And Young writes: In iconic and metaphoric gestures . . . I perceive both object and action in the gesture itself, both what the thing is and what the gesturer has in mind about it. The object is colonized by the action; the action issues in its object. (Young 2011: 63)

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These gestures reveal not only consciousness as corporeity, the movement of the body in the world, but also objects as intentional. In the symbolic gesture, unlike the anticipatory hand, the object as well as the gesturer exhibits intentional qualities. The solidity of neither cranium nor thing conceals from the perceiver the intentionality of the gesturer. In the iconic or metaphoric gesture, the solidity of the object has dematerialised at the same time as the other’s intentionality has materialised. There, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘the intentional object is offered to the spectator at the same time as the gesture itself’ (Merleau-Ponty [1962] 1995: 186; see also Young 2011: 63). As Young writes, ‘Gestures exhibit the intersubjectivity/intercorporeity that precedes and makes possible acts of communication. They do not open up communication between subjects; they rely on it’ (2011: 64). Intersubjectivity, which Merleau-Ponty later calls intercorporeity, is not a magical awareness of other minds but the mutual investment of interacting bodies in the world of meanings they jointly inhabit (MerleauPonty 1968: 141). Bodies generate affects in interaction with their own and other bodies, part-bodies, objects, sounds, movements, gazes, and spaces in acts of narration.

Co-narration Stories are co-operated, in Charles Goodwin’s term (2014), not by tellers and hearers but by tellers and hearers in movement on occasions in spaces. No body is the unique originating agent of either narration or affection. As Young observes, ‘Stories are mutually constructed by participants in the storytelling occasion’ (1987: 162). All storytellings distribute the production of narrative across at least two bodies, one body typically figured as teller and the other as hearer. In this figuration, agency is distributed unevenly across bodies: the teller is held primarily responsible for producing the story. The production of affect is also distributed across bodies but the other way around. In the typical figuration, the hearer is held primarily responsible for registering whatever affects the story generates. The story we have selected to study here reverses these typifications. The hearer produces most of the narrative; the teller registers most of the affect. In this co-operation, the teller is disabled and the hearer is abled. In his groundbreaking chapter on how a man with aphasia is able to tell a complex story ‘by linking his limited talk and embodied action to the talk and action of others’ (2004: 151), Charles Goodwin broadens our understanding of communicative competence in narrative exchange and argues for an interactive, embodied understanding of the production of narrative. In particular, Goodwin considers how a narrator with a limited vocabulary (three words) uses gesture to participate ‘as a forceful, consequential storyteller’ (2004: 165). In this chapter, we build on Goodwin’s understanding of ‘how language is organized as a social phenomenon and how it functions as a central resource for building the consequential actions that make up the lifeworld of a particular social group’ (2004: 166). Like Goodwin, we analyse a narrative told by an individual who relies on co-production to create meaning. Unlike the narrator Goodwin studied, who relies on previous competence before suffering a stroke that reduced his language capacity, the narrator we study has not lost prior competence. Although both narrators speak with non-disabled interlocutors who are more than willing to fill in gaps, we do not regard the interlocutors as supplements who make up for a deficiency. Co-narration is not a remedy for deficit but instead demonstrates how narrative production depends

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on intersubjective interaction (Shuman 2015). Both of the co-narrators in our study, one with and one without language-related disabilities, not only fill in gaps but also miss cues and dialogically negotiate the direction of the story. Their production of a blend of semiotic resources, including words, gestures, expressions, repetitions, and prompts (especially in the form of questions) provides rich ground for examining narrative as an affective exchange dependent on cultural expectations that are not givens but that require further negotiation. Following Goodwin, we argue that utterances are co-operated by participants over the course of interactions; in other words, rather than view the semiotic resources as pre-existing in the form of segments that might later be integrated in a co-produced narrative, we view the co-production as an example of the interplay of affective and referential meaning, sustaining both an exchange of emotional engagement and an account of an event. We do not regard the affective dimension of narrative as a supplement that affords understanding in the absence of language. To the contrary, we argue that narrative research has sometimes artificially separated the affective from the referential. Exchanges between people with and without disabilities can confirm stereotypical and stigmatised assumptions, producing what Ato Quayson describes as ‘aesthetic nervousness’ in abled bodies (2007: 15). As he writes, Every/body is subject to chance and contingent events. The recognition of this radical contingency produces features of a primal scene of extreme anxiety whose roots lie in the barely acknowledged vertiginous fears of loss of control of the body itself . . . the sudden recognition of contingency is not solely a philosophical one – in fact hardly ever is it the moment of the social encounter itself – but is also and perhaps primarily an emotional and affective one. (Quayson 2007: 17) Our focus is similar to that of Goodwin and Marjorie Goodwin, who observe ‘how affect and the display of emotion are organized as interactive phenomena’ (2010: 49). In the following discussion, we explore how co-narrators negotiate shifts in the affective registers of the conversational realm of the narrative exchange and the storyworld of the events described. For the most part, co-narration has been explored as a dimension of conversational narrative; researchers have argued that collaborative storytelling is part of group membership (Norrick 1997: 202), and, in some cases, foundational to the creation of particular social formations, such as families (Ochs et al. 1989). In the field of disability studies, Val Williams discusses co-narration as a typical form of interaction between people with and without intellectual disabilities, though the co-production is rarely recognised as a legitimate form of making meaning. Instead, the co-production of meaning stigmatises people with intellectual disabilities as incompetent, unable to generate meaning by themselves. In a close examination of exchanges between caregivers and people with intellectual disabilities, Williams discusses the interactional conditions in which the person with intellectual disabilities is recognised as a legitimate interlocutor (2011: 1). She observes how ‘allocated turns’ both restrict and provide opportunities for this recognition (2011: 42). In Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor’s foundational work on conarration, based on ethnographic observations of conversations at the dinner table,

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narrative became ‘a problem-solving discourse activity . . . family members articulate solutions to problems posed by narrated events and at times work together to articulate the narrative problem itself’ (1989: 238). Unlike narratives told by an ‘authoritative teller’ (1989: 242) who presents a particular, and often sustained, position, co-narrated stories can be described as what the authors call ‘detective stories’ in which positions shift and are renegotiated. ‘[C]ognitive approaches tend to focus on individual tellings and retellings of stories without attending to the fact that stories are often if not typically collaboratively produced, i.e. co-narrated, by those participating in the social interaction’ (Ochs et al. 1989: 241; italics in original). As Lars-Christer Hydén and Eleonor Antelius point out, co-narration is typical of many speaking situations among people both with and without communication difficulties (2011: 589). They point out that ‘persons with communicative disabilities are often involved in storytelling that does not necessarily conform to the conventional expectations of what constitutes a narrative’ (2011: 588). In their research with individuals who have had brain injuries, they observe, ‘Storytellers who experience troubles in telling stories are often quite inventive in organizing the interaction in order to appear as the primary storytellers’ (2011: 589). Our research is a continuation of Young’s (1984) discussion of joint storytelling and co-narration. She catalogues a variety of turn-taking strategies employed by co-narrators, including parenthetical remarks and asides, interruptions (simultaneous starts, mid-sentence starts, completing others’ utterances), questions, interpositions, evaluations, prefaces, and codas (1987: 164–75). Young distinguishes between joint storytelling and collaborative narration and writes: Joint storytelling can just as well be the result of competition as collaboration. To count as collaborative narration, both storytellers’ utterances must not only be essential to the story in the technical sense that they carry forward the sequentially organized story line, but also they must be intendedly mutually constructed. (Young 1987: 182) Young also considers some of the epistemological consequences of co-narration, especially when a narrator holds out information in suspense, contributing to productions of shared affect, such as surprise (1987: 216). As we demonstrate below, what is consequential in a story, in contrast to what is merely sequential, can be produced by shared affect. Neal Norrick’s research describes how tellers enlist participants as co-narrators: In full-fledged collaborative co-narration, all co-tellers have had access (at least vicariously) to some common previous event, so that there is no need to establish common experience and no competitive ‘story topping’, though participants may still vie for the right to tell. (Norrick 2007: 137) Our co-narrators do not tell their story together for another hearer. Instead, the conarrator is also the hearer, who has to figure out what the story is even as she is engaged in telling it. The teller does enlist her to help tell the story but it is to her as well as with her, collapsing the roles of teller and hearer into one person.

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Methods The narrative was collected spontaneously, with general permission obtained to record the communicative event. Shuman recorded the event, a conversation between Margo Izzo and Lino, Shuman’s son. Galey Modan, a friend and colleague of Shuman’s, was also present. Shuman has recorded dozens of Lino’s narratives, both audio and video recordings, as he enjoys opportunities to narrate and likes to be recorded so that he can listen/watch later. He especially enjoys narrating events in his own life, and he often asks for help from others who were present at the event. Often, he will ask a parent or careworker to help him to tell a particular person about a particular event. He is aware that some people do not understand his speech as well as others. Margo and Lino are part of a shared social world and see each other fairly often. Margo, a professor with expertise on people with intellectual disabilities transitioning into adulthood, has had many conversations with Lino, a thirty-year-old man with intellectual disabilities, including difficulty speaking. Margo is not only a neurotypical speaker but also is aware, in ways that Lino is not, that they perceive the world differently, and for both reasons, she does the work of carrying the narrative progression forward, primarily by asking questions. However, Lino is not just the follower in the conversation; the story is clearly his, and he has a specific agenda for what to tell. The narrative discussed here was important to him, and he told it to several people, including Galey, who is present for the telling and who interjects a couple of times. The occasion discussed here was a first hearing for Margo.

The Narrative Time: Place: Event: Participants:

Videographer:

19 May 2017. 5 p.m.; total length of time: 2.5 minutes Columbus, Ohio, kitchen, no additional set-up Margo has come to dinner at Lino’s house Margo, family friend and also director of the programme Lino attended at OSU, Galey Modan, friend who lives at the house, Amy Shuman, mother of Lino, Lino – Colin Shuman Schaffer Amy Shuman, using iPad, standing in one place, 6 feet from conversation, no difficulties of perception; she interjects a comment at one point but otherwise does not participate

Scene Lino and Margo are facing each other, their bodies partially turned out toward Amy, who is filming them. Throughout their co-narration, Lino holds a pair of socks tucked against his chest with his right hand; Margo holds a goblet with a drink in one hand or the other, or both. As the film clip opens, Lino leans against a sideboard, his left hand in his pocket; Margo stands in front of the stove, her drink in her right hand. Lino typically smiles continuously across his utterances, inflecting the whole utterance turn affectively; Margo typically nods on phrases of hers, punctuating its linguistic structure pragmatically. By contrast, Lino’s verbal intonations are relatively flat, giving them an unemotional quality; Margo intensifies her intonations to infuse her utterances with affect at specific moments.

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Transcript1 Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: [[ Lino: Margo: [[ Lino: Margo: Lino:

Margo:

Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo:

Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo:

Lino: Margo: Nooo. Lino: [[ Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino:

Andrew went to the game. ((Margo takes hold of glass with both hands.)) And Olivia. ((Lino takes left hand out of pocket.)) Andrew went to the game and= Uhuh and Olivia ((Galey walks by)) And Olivia went to the game. And was this- What kind of game was it. Basketball. A basketball game= ((Raises voice intensity slightly on basketball.)) It too far away Were you playing or [ ] Playing. were you watching. [ ] Playing. You were playing. Oh good They needed an extra playerextra player. ((Pronounces extra carefully.)) You need an extra prayeroh playerThey needed an extra player. (Deictic: waves hand toward Lino as the very player they needed.) Yes. And who played. Me. Ah ha so you gotyou got picked up by another team. With Joe. Joe got picked up too. I’m Joe’s team. Oh you’re on Joe’s team. All right. So what happened. Nat fell. ((Flat intonation.)) Uh ((Opens mouth wide, takes audible inbreath.)) ((Elongates vowel, voice pitch lowering. Nods deeply; draws chin in.)) Ye(hehehe)ah. ((Laughter breaks through speech.)) [ ] Was it during practice? ((Pitch up at the end.)) Game. ((Pitches voice high, raises volume, elongates vowel, varies tune.)) During a game? ((Intensifies vocalisation, raising pitch at end to indicate incredulity.)) Yes= ((Repeats game intonation with less intensity, raising pitch at end.))

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Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino:

Did he get hurt?= Yeah. Did he break his arm? Head.

Margo: Lino:

He hit his head. Yeah he fell down.

Margo:

Was he unconscious? Or did he get right up. I said to MattHe layed out= ((Shakes her head.)) No I said to Coach Matt. What did you say to Coach Matt. ((Nods.)) ‘Pick up Nat u- off the court’. (Deictic-iconic: brushes left hand forward and along, at once pointing to Nat deictically and iconically laying him out on the ground.) ((Chuckles; Margo joins in.)) [ ] Ye(hehe)ah. Pick up Nat off the court ye(he)ah. (Deictic-iconic: echoes Lino’s gesture of laying Nat out with added scoop hand, iconic for picking up.) ((Nodding and shaking her head.)) You can’t leave him on the court. (Deictic-iconic gesture, Internal perspective: brushes right hand forward and downward, repeating gesture of laying Nat out and pointing to him.) Unhum. No. He got (unintelligible) So could- could Nat get up himself? No. ((Pitches vocalisation high and loud, grinning and chuckling.)) Oh wow. Did you have to help pick him up? Coach did. The coach did, wow. ((Nods.)) And could Nat walk? Everybody helped. Everybody helped. Right, wow, and so what did Nat say. Somebody- somebody’s pushingsomebody’s pushing him down. Somebody pushed him down?= [ ] Pushed. Yeah. ((Repeats lower-intensity game intonation.)) Uh oh did he get a foul. (. . .)

Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino:

Lino: [[ Margo:

Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino: Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: Margo: Lino: Margo: [[ Galey: Lino: Margo: Lino:

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((Repeats lower-intensity game intonation again.)) (Deictic-iconic gesture, Internal perspective: taps twice on his own temple, representing Nat’s head iconically as his own head.) ((Shakes her head.)) (Deictic-iconic gesture, Internal perspective: brushes left hand forward and downward, iconically laying out the fallen body before him and pointing to it.) ((Looks at Amy.))

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the body as medium Margo: [[ Lino:

Margo: Amy: Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo:

Lino: Margo:

Lino: Margo:

Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino:

407

Show me, how did it happen [ ] (He call) Lauren (Deictic-metaphoric, Internal perspective: lifts left hand, thumb up, either pointing to Lauren or marking time as if it were space behind him.) Lauren Hysell. Uh, yeah. Lauren Hysell. Yeah, she’s= Lauren helped Nat. Oh she helped Nat. On free throw. (Iconic, Internal perspective: raises left hand and tosses basketball up and over.) Oooh so he got fouled and so Lauren threw in the free throw (1. Beat-metaphoric, Internal perspective: on so, taps down the side of her right hand, to mark point in speech as stream; 2. Beatmetaphoric, Internal perspective: taps right hand back a notch to mark preceding event in time as space behind current space; 3. Beat-metaphoric, Internal perspective: taps hand down on Lauren, cutting into speech as stream; 4. Iconic, Internal perspective: raises right and repeats Lino’s toss. Nods on each gesture.) cause Nat was _____ still hurt. (1. Iconic-metaphoric: waves right hand at her own temple, representing mental disturbance metaphorically as physical disturbance and representing Nat’s head iconically as her own head; 2. continues wave over her own pause, shaking her head throughout; 3. nods over still hurt, moves right hand to hold glass along with left.) Yeah. Did Nat- Was Nat able to go back in the game?= (Releases left hand from glass. Deictic, Internal perspective: gestures to ‘Nat’ as if he were to her left with left hand; 2. Deictic-iconic, Internal perspective: brushes left hand forward toward virtual space of game.) No. No? He was out the rest of the game? (Metaphoric, Internal perspective: runs left hand over smooth surface of space as metaphoric of time.) Yeah. What quarter did it happen. (Adaptor: scratches the right side of her chin with fingers of her left hand.) First. The first quarter. Yeah. Wow. I bet he was sad because he couldn’t play. Three four on three four. Right how many of the shots did Lauren make. (Iconic, Internal perspective: abbreviated left-handed ball toss.) She missed two.

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408 Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino: Margo: Lino: Galey: Margo: Margo: Lino: Margo:

Lino: Margo: Lino? Margo: Lino: [[ Margo:

amy shuman and katharine young She missed the two OK well (Nods; nods while shrugging shoulders.) That’s all right= Alec Andrew’s neighbour scored. Okay, so Alec scored.= Yeah. Alright what was the score of the game. I’m not sure. OK, so did you win the game or lose the game. Fun. You won the game. ((Intensifies voicing.)) (We had fun.) It was fun. It was fun. All right, okay= (. . .)= (Metaphoric?: Raises his left hand in arc toward Margo, as if encompassing her catching on.) It doesn’t matter if you win or lose ((Shakes her head.)) it’s always fun, right?= (Beat-metaphoric: throw-away gesture with her left hand.) I saw you. You saw me, where? (Deictic: points to self with left hand.) The café. You saw my picture at the Solar Café. Ye(hehehe)ah. ((Laughs.)) [ ] (Hehe) I know

Finding a Story William Labov holds that a story must have at least two narrative clauses separated by temporal juncture (1972: 360). Narrative clauses report actions and the clauses are necessarily sequenced such that changing the order of the clauses changes the implied order of the actions. E. M. Forster offers an example of this sort of sequencing: ‘The king died and then the queen died’ (1927). But mere sequencing – one thing after another – is inconsequential and inconsequential sequences can go on forever: and then, and then, and then. To make a story out of a sequence, the narrator must build in a way to make it stop. Typically, narrators do this by creating a causal connection between the two clauses so that the second follows on from the first, rather than just coming after it. Once the second clause fulfils the expectation the first clause creates, the story can come to an end. Forster’s solution: ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief.’ The two narrative clauses, ‘the king died’ and ‘the queen died’, are now consequentially related: the queen died because the king died, not just incidentally sometime afterwards. That is a story. The full requirement for a thing being a story is that it have at least two necessarily sequenced clauses of which the second is consequential on the first. Margo’s undertaking is to figure out what is consequential in Lino’s narrative. Lino begins his story with a series of clauses, none of which is necessarily sequenced: people went to a game; it was basketball; Lino played. The events could have been presented in a different order: Lino played in a game; people went; it was basketball;

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or, there was a basketball game; Lino played; people went. These clauses constitute what Labov calls an orientation section that sets the scene for whatever consequential event follows. To precipitate the disclosure of this event, Margo says, ‘So what happened’ and Lino answers, ‘Nat fell.’ Taking this as causal, Margo searches for its consequence by asking Lino a series of questions: was it during a practice or a game? Did he break his arm or knock himself out? Lino answers her questions but does not develop the narrative in the directions she proposes. So Margo explores the possibility that the fall is the consequence but the cause was narrated afterwards: somebody pushed him. Her reconstruction of the story later in the conversation seeks this sort of typified narrative consequentiality: somebody pushed Nat; he fell. ‘Oooh so he got fouled and so Lauren threw in the free throw cause Nat was still hurt.’ Though necessarily sequenced, these clauses do not arrive at a consequence. If the consequence had been that the team lost the game, then these clauses could have counted as causal: because somebody pushed Nat, he was fouled; because he got injured, somebody else took his free throws; because she missed the free throws, the team lost the game. But Lino passes over the outcome of the game as a possible consequence; he declines even to say what the outcome was. In our view, ‘Nat fell’ is indeed a cause and Lino does in fact propose a consequence. Margo’s problem – and it is a problem any narratologist might have – is that causes and consequences are usually physical acts. In this instance, though the cause is a physical act, the consequence is not. It is a speech act, specifically a command: ‘Pick up Nat u- off the court.’ Lino is recounting the moment he affected the sequence of events he is narrating. The narrative is set up so he can say what he said, not what he did. This is the event that is most affectively intensified in the narration: Nat fell; Lino told the coach to pick him up. Lino and Margo respond to each other exuberantly and delightedly, and Lino expresses this delight even when the subject is negative, such as Nat hurting himself or Lauren missing the free throws. This intensification is not something Lino brings about. Indeed, Margo initiates it. Like the narrative, affect is co-operated between them.

Co-narration and Affect To construct their story together, Lino offers phrases Margo reiterates: ‘Andrew went to the game’ / ‘Andrew went to the game’; ‘Basketball’ / ‘A basketball game’; ‘Playing’ / ‘You were playing’; ‘I’m Joe’s team’ / ‘Oh you’re on Joe’s team’ and the like. In their co-operation of narrative, Margo reiterates Lino’s iterations to make sure she has got them right before going on. If Lino corrects her reiteration, Margo re-reiterates it: ‘Uhuh and Olivia’ / ‘And Olivia went to the game.’ Co-narration with a person with intellectual disabilities, especially a speech disability like Lino’s, is bound to include miscues and misunderstandings. Like Goodwin, we do not regard co-narration as a compensation for varying competencies but instead propose that such interactions provide insights about intersubjectivity. The narrative contains many mishearings and miscues, both of which might invite a model of narrative analysis designed to identify the narrator as coder and the listener or reader as decoder, a model intensified by an interaction between people with and without speech disabilities. Instead, and consistent with Goodwin’s analysis, we propose that these moments in the interaction are opportunities to renegotiate the meaning of the story and control of its direction.

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Throughout the exchange, Margo attempts to fill in the gaps in her understanding of the narrative as provided by Lino. She quickly recovers from mishearings, for example when she hears ‘prayers’ instead of ‘players’, and in some cases, she uses her general comprehension about basketball games, for example when she understands that when Lino says ‘you need an extra player’, or that he was ‘picked up by another team’. Twice, things Lino says are not sufficiently audible, and she ignores them. First, at the beginning of the narrative, he says, ‘It too far away’, referring to the distance he travelled to the game, a fact unrelated to the discussion, though possibly relevant to a different narrative. Second, in response to Margo’s comment referring to Nat, ‘I bet he was sad because he couldn’t play’, Lino says, ‘three-four on three-four’, referring to the number of the player who pushed Nat, a fact somewhat relevant to the narrative about the foul and the free throw. Margo does not understand and does not follow up and instead asks whether Lauren scored any free throw baskets. The character three-four does appear in other versions of the story. Lino is accustomed to such moments of narrative renegotiation, both to points not getting any follow-up and to misunderstanding, as he is frequently not understood. When it is important to him, he will spell out a word. Repetition serves more than one role in interactions among people with speech disabilities as it can both intensify an important point (Lino telling the coach to pick up Nat) and correct a misunderstanding (player rather than prayer).

Mimesis Reiterations have two effects. Narratively, they retard the flow of narrative by folding it back on itself. The doubling is redundant: a single narrative move is made twice. The repetition-as-correction model figures the initiator’s utterance as flawed. But affectively, doubling is cumulative. The repeating body entrains itself to the initiating body. Repetition is a form of ‘mimetic communication’, which Anna Gibbs defines as ‘the corporeally based forms of imitation, both voluntary and involuntary’ (2010: 186). Margo and Lino enter into interactional synchrony: At their most primitive, these involve the visceral level of affect contagion, the ‘synchrony of facial expressions, vocalizations, postures and movements with those of another person’, producing a tendency for those involved ‘to converge emotionally’ (Hatfield, Cacioppo & Rapson 1994, 5). (Gibbs 2010: 186) In mimesis, the difference between the imitation and the imitated is as important as the similarity. Translating one sensory mode into another – words to gestures, for instance – or translating a mode from one body to another – Lino to Margo, as here – creates what Gibbs calls ‘isomorphism without identity’ (2010: 195). The paired utterances pair bodies: affects move across both. In imitating Lino, Margo is not only moving as Lino moves but also being moved by her own movement. Silvan Tomkins writes: affects are not private obscure internal intestinal responses but facial responses that communicate and motivate at once both publicly outward to the other and backward and inward to the one who smiles or cries or frowns or sneers or otherwise expresses his affects. (Tomkins and Izard 1966: vii; qtd in Gibbs 2010: 191)

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Affects work their way into the body as ‘an envelope of possibilities rather than the finite totality or essence represented by the idea of the individual organism’, as Gibbs puts it (2010: 187). By imitating Lino, Margo opens her body to the affects she imitates: This phenomenon, also referred to as ‘entrainment’ of one person with another, as when someone’s gestures and movements are synchronized with their speech, or when an attentive listener’s or an audience’s almost invisible movements are synchronized with the speech rhythms of the person to whom they are listening, so bodies come to ‘move in organizations of change which reflect the microstructure of what is being said, like a car following a curving road’, as [William] Condon writes (1984). (Gibbs 2010: 197) Once Margo has tuned her phrase to Lino’s, she can solicit the next narrative move: ‘What kind of game was it’; ‘Were you playing or were you watching’; ‘And who played’; ‘So what happened.’ Though in the orientation section Margo frames all four of these solicitations as grammatical questions, they act as proposed next contributions to the continuation of the narrative. This is suggested by the way she pronounces them as intonational statements with a pitch drop at the end. The last of these solicitations is the only one that does not contain a prompt for its own answer: ‘So what happened.’ Lino’s answer shifts the narrative from scene setting to narrative action: ‘Nat fell.’ In response to this shift, Margo’s next four grammatical questions are intonational questions but unlike her previous down-intonation grammatical questions, these do not have to do with eliciting new information but with the intensification of affect: ‘Was it during practice?’; ‘During a game?’; ‘Did he get hurt?’; ‘Did he break his arm?’ The up intonation at the end of the utterances expresses incredulity rather than inquiry. These utterances follow and intensify Margo’s initial response to Lino’s answer: ‘Uh’, spoken on an inbreath with her mouth opened wide, and ‘Nooo’, in which she elongates the ‘o’ and lowers its pitch over the course of its elongation. As with the breath and mouth gestures accompanying ‘Uh’, she accompanies the prosodic rhythm and tune of ‘Nooo’ by nodding her head deeply, followed by tucking her chin in. In contrast to the flat prosody of Lino’s ‘Nat fell’, Margo’s speech contours and body movements introduce an affective intensity into the story. Lino picks up this intensity in his own response, ‘Ye(hehehe)ah’, in the course of which laughing breaks through speaking as the punctuation of the elongated vowel by aspirated out breaths. Jack Katz argues that the perturbations of speech by laughing and crying bring about evidence of a spontaneous inner self rupturing through a composed outer order. Both ‘bring to the surface and mark things that are routinely effaced in ordinary, nonemotional conduct’ (Katz 1999: 212–13). He adds: ‘Crying and laughter commonly emerge in social life through making respiration visible, marking that routinely invisible bodily process of intertwining with the world that is itself at the ongoing source of all that is visible in social life’ (1999: 340). They are for that reason felt as authentic expressions of affect in contrast to the cultivated linguistic forms they perturb. Lino echoes each of Margo’s affectively inflected questions with affectively similar responses in different words. He gives each of these – ‘Game’, ‘Yes’, and ‘Yeah’ – the high-pitched, strangulated voice, loud volume, elongated vowel, and tune contour he has given ‘Ye(hehehe)ah.’ These question–answer utterance pairs are affectively connected though linguistically discrete. The mapping of mimeses over this

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act of co-narration makes it apparent that affects are not generated inside one body and ex-pressed out of it, as emotions are thought to be. Affects are interactive formations, not internal experiences. Affect animates the virtual reality of the storyworld as it does the actual reality of the storytelling occasion. As John Du Bois and Elise Kärkkäinen write, ‘Indexical cues for affect may include multimodal features such as intonation, prosody, voice quality, facial expression, body posture, and other signs’ (2012: 435). To clarify where Nat was hit, as Lino says ‘Head’, he taps his head in a deictic-iconic gesture that at once points to his own head as an iconic representation of Nat’s and represents the hit iconically. At that moment, the storyworld opens up around him and encloses a part of his body as part of the body of a character. The narrator briefly lends his body to the storyworld whose bodies, acts, and spaces now affect it. When he goes on to say, ‘Yeah he fell down’, Lino affiliates the word down with a deicticiconic gesture of brushing his hand forward and downward, laying Nat’s body out before him on the ground. With this gesture, Lino is again enclosed in the storyworld as a character but the character is himself observing Nat’s fall. When he tells Margo what he said to Coach Matt, ‘Pick up Nat u- off the court’, he repeats this layingout gesture. As Margo reiterates Lino’s instruction to the coach, ‘Pick up Nat off the court ye(he)ah’, she, too, repeats the layout gesture, synchronising her body with Lino’s as character as well as narrator. She repeats the gesture a fourth time as she says, ‘You can’t leave him on the court.’ Margo’s repetition of Lino’s gesture, referencing Nat on the floor, is an instance of affect attunement (Stern 1985: 132; Fuchs and Koch 2014: 7), affording shared emotional attention to the narrative event. She has entered the storyworld mimetically in the character of Lino witnessing Nat’s fall. The two of them now jointly inhabit a mutually constituted storyworld that materialises briefly around them and within which they both point. Mimesis is both verbal and corporeal. It shapes the interactive contours along which affect flows across bodies, act, and spaces. Lino’s repertoire of affect displays is restricted. He is mostly positive, even in response to negative events. For example, although he is passionate about sports and cares deeply about who wins, whether as a spectator or participant, when asked about the outcome of a game in which his team lost, he typically says either ‘I have a good attitude’, ‘Next time they/we will win’, or ‘It was fun.’ All of these are phrases he has been taught as part of ‘being a good sport’. As Tomkins’s work suggests (Tomkins and Izard 1966), these surface expressions do not simply arise from Lino’s good nature; they impress themselves upon his nature as they are formed, both over the course of his development and at the moment of their use. Though he rarely uses them, he has displays for negative affect. For instance, he expresses sadness by cupping his forehead in his hand, and then lowering and shaking his head, sometimes accompanied by saying, ‘It’s sad’, a gesture he uses when he is talking about the deaths of his grandfathers. Because they press both inward and outward, affect displays afford their maker a stronger connection with both self and other. Thomas Fuchs and Sabine Koch regard emotions as resulting from the circular interaction between affective qualities and affordances in the environment and the subject’s bodily resonance, be it in the form of sensations, postures, expressive movements or movement tendencies . . . one is moved by movement (perception; impression; affection) . . . and moved

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to move (action; expression; e-motion). Through its resonance, the body functions as a medium of emotional perception: it colors or charges self-experience and the environment with affective valences while it remains itself in the background of one’s own awareness. This model is then applied to emotional social understanding or interaffectivity which is regarded as an intertwinement of two cycles of embodied affectivity. (Fuchs and Koch 2014: 1) Margo and Lino exemplify this intertwinement.

Moving Bodies Narrators do not tell stories to get information across to hearers, not even information they regard as consequential. They tell stories to indulge themselves and involve their hearers in the affects the telling animates in the storyworld as well as on the storytelling occasion. In the story he tells here, Lino is narrating affect, both how the events affected him as they happened and how the telling affects the occasion on which he narrates the events. The affect he narrates is peculiar to his perception of the basketball game. As other perceivers know, Nat often fakes injuries. So when number 34 pushed him and he fell down, the coaches waited to see if he would get up again. Lino, unaware of the grounds for their hesitation, told them to pick him up. For Lino, this is a hero story: he saved Nat. What motivated him were his anxiety about Nat’s injury, his suspicion that the coaches had not noticed it, and his urge to help Nat. The moment of hesitation between Nat’s fall and Lino’s speech act is the locus of affect in the storyworld. That same moment is also the locus of affect on the storytelling occasion. Though the affect has transmuted across bodies and modalities, it retains the intensities that inflect its mimesis. Labov contends that to find events reportable as stories, tellers must evaluate them as breaks with the ordinary. ‘Evaluative devices say to us: this was terrifying, dangerous, weird, wild, crazy; or amusing, hilarious, wonderful; more generally, that it was strange, uncommon, or unusual – that is, worth reporting. It was not ordinary, plain, humdrum, everyday, or run-of the-mill’ (1972: 370). Evaluation is inherently affective, though Labov does not write about it in that way. Affect is what makes events reportable by any narrator. In Labov’s (2010) analysis, the affects must show up in the storyworld. He discounts the possibility that the affects that make events reportable might show up in the telling rather than the events. We argue that kindling affect on the storytelling occasion can warrant taking the floor to narrate events as much as the affect the event kindled.

Phenomenology and Affect Theory Affect theory awakens phenomenology to the implications of intercorporeity. It is the consequence of taking seriously the phenomenological claim that I am not sealed up inside my body, already completed and closed off, but enmeshed with other bodies in interactions that both bring us to ourselves and change us. I am not a human being but, as Nick Lee puts it, a human becoming, ‘an emergent property of distributed interactions between heterogeneous elements’, including ‘persons, discourses, technologies, objects, bodies, etc’ (Lee 2008: 57, 59):

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Cast forward by its open-ended in-between-ness, affect is integral to a body’s perpetual becoming (always becoming otherwise, however subtly, than what it already is), pulled beyond its seeming surface-boundedness by way of its relations to, indeed its composition through, the forces of encounter. (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 3) We are witness to these forces in the encounter between Lino and Margo. Each is affected by the other in the course of becoming. Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century philosopher who originated affect theory, distinguishes between affect and affection. In his introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi describes the distinction thus: • • • •

AFFECT/AFFECTATION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. • L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body. (Adapted from Massumi 1987: xvi) It is this becoming-human who affects and is affected as an intensity by intensities it encounters. We are all ‘emergent properties of processes of construction’ (Lee 2008: 59). We do not just put ourselves into stories, we make ourselves out of them.

Appendix: Transcription Conventions Line end = / Capital letter . ? () (Hehe) (( )) [[ [ ] , ... English spelling All capitals All small font

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Pause (from Tedlock 1978) Absence of obligatory end-pause One-turn pause Start of utterance Down intonation at end of utterance Up intonation at end of utterance Correction phenomena Doubtful hearings Laughter Editorial comments Simultaneous speech Extent of simultaneity (adapted by Malcah Yeager from Schenkein 1978) Up-down-middle intonation (devised by Malcah Yeager, personal communication 1980) Elisions English speaking Loud speech Whispering

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Gesture transcription conventions Underlined word External perspective Internal perspective Deictic Iconic Metaphoric Beat

Co-occurs with gesture Gesturer outside the storyworld Gesturer a character inside the storyworld Pointing gesture Representational gesture that imitates its object Represents source domain of metaphor iconically Represents speech metaphorically as a substance

Note 1. See the Appendix for transcription conventions.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara (2010), ‘Happy objects’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 29–51. Aristotle [340 bce] (1963), Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Condon, William (1984), ‘Communication and empathy’, in Joseph Lichtenberg, Melvin Bornstein, and Donald Silver (eds), Empathy, Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, pp. 35–58. Damasio, Antonio (1994), Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, New York: G. P. Putnam. Du Bois, John W. and Elise Kärkkäinen (2012), ‘Taking a stance on emotion: Affect, sequence, and intersubjectivity in dialogic interaction’, Text & Talk, 32: 4, 433–51. Forster, E. M. (1927), Aspects of the Novel, London: Edward Arnold. Fuchs, Thomas and Sabine C. Koch (2014), ‘Embodied affectivity: On moving and being moved’, Frontiers in Psychology, 5: 508, 1–12. Gibbs, Anna (2010), ‘After affect: Sympathy, synchrony, and mimetic communication’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 186–205. Goodwin, Charles (2004), ‘A competent speaker who can’t speak: The social life of aphasia’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14: 2, 151–70. — (2014), ‘The intelligibility of gesture within a framework of co-operative action’, in Mandana Seyfeddinipur and Marianne Gullberg (eds), From Gesture in Conversation to Visible Action as Utterance: Essays in Honor of Adam Kendon, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 199–216. — and Marjorie Harness Goodwin (2010), ‘Concurrent operations on talk: Notes on the interactive organization of assessments’, Papers in Pragmatics, 1: 1, 1–54. Hatfield, Elaine, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson (1994), Emotional Contagion: Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hydén, Lars-Christer and Eleonor Antelius (2011), ‘Communicative disability and stories: Towards an embodied conception of narratives’, Health, 15: 6, 588–603. Jameson, Fredric (1991), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Katz, Jack (1999), How Emotions Work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Labov, William (1972), ‘The transformation of experience in narrative syntax’, in Language in the Inner City, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 354–96.

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— (2010), ‘Where should I begin?’, in Deborah Schiffrin, Anna de Fina, and Anastasia Nylund (eds), Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 7–22. Lee, Nick (2008), ‘Awake, asleep, adult, child: An a-humanist account of persons’, Body and Society, 14: 4, 57–74. McNeill, David (1992), Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Massumi, Brian (1987), ‘Translator’s foreword: Pleasures of philosophy’, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. ix–xv. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice [1962] (1995), The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London and New York: Routledge. — (1968), The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Norrick, Neal R. (1997), ‘Twice-told tales: Collaborative narration of familiar stories’, Language in Society, 26: 2, 199–220. — (2007), ‘Conversational storytelling’, in David Herman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 127–41. Ochs, Elinor, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor (1989), ‘Detective stories at dinnertime: Problemsolving through co-narration’, Cultural Dynamics, 2: 2, 238–57. Plato [370 bce] (1956), Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, New York: Simon & Schuster. Quayson, Ato (2007), Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, New York: Columbia. Ryan, Marie-Laure and Jan-Noël Thon (2004), ‘Storyworlds across Media: Introduction’, in MarieLaure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon (eds), Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 1–21. Schenkein, James (ed.) (1978), Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, New York: Academic Press. Seigworth, Gregory J. and Melissa Gregg (2010), ‘An inventory of shimmers’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–25. Shuman, Amy (2015), ‘Disability, narrative normativity, and the stigmatized vernacular of communicative (in)competence’, in Trevor Blank and Andrea Kitta (eds), Diagnosing Folklore: Perspectives on Disability, Health, and Trauma, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 23–40. Stern, Daniel N. (1985), The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, New York: Basic Books. Tedlock, Dennis (1972), ‘Introduction’, in Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians, trans. Dennis Tedlock, Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, pp. xv–xxxii. Terada, Rei (2001), Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tomkins, Silvan and Carroll Izard (1966), Affect, Cognition, and Personality: Empirical Studies, London: Tavistock Press. Williams, Val (2011), Disability and Discourse: Analysing Inclusive Conversation with People with Intellectual Disabilities, New York: Wiley. Young, Katharine (1984), ‘Ontological puzzles about narrative’, Poetics, 13: 3, 239–59. — (1987), Taleworlds and Storyrealms: The Phenomenology of Narrative, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. — (2011), ‘Gestures, intercorporeity, and the fate of phenomenology in folklore’, Journal of American Folklore, 124: 492, 55–87.

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Index

Aarseth, Espen, 204, 209 Abbott, H. Porter, 202, 336 Achituv, Romy and Camille Utterback, 206 actor-network theory, 85, 90 Adams, Ann Marie, 89 Adams, Sam, 169 aetiology, 150–2 affect, 83, 93, 175, 306, 307, 309–12, 314, 367–8, 372–3, 399–400, 401–3, 409–15; see also emotion Agamben, Giorgio, 352–3, 358–9, 380–3 Ahmed, Sara, 84, 134, 400 AIDS/HIV crisis, 150 Alber, Jan, 291, 292–3, 295, 297–8, 302 Allen, Woody, 234 Altes, Liesbeth Korthals, 32 Althusser, Louis, 395 analepsis, 319, 320, 321, 357 Anderson, Miranda, 59–60 Ankerson, Ingrid and Megan Sapnar, 209 anomie, 179, 380–2 anthropomorphosis, 30, 248, 276–7, 279, 282–3, 400 antimimetic, 33, 40, 292–3, 297, 299–302, 305–15, 333–5, 337, 342, 368; see also mimesis; unnatural narrative(s) Aristotle, 30, 44, 146, 333, 352, 356, 375–6, 379, 399 Arnold, Matthew, 362, 369–71 assemblage, 83–8, 90–4 Atkinson, Kate, 337 Auerbach, Nina, 145 Austen, Jane, 120, 124, 324 autobiography, 77, 105, 218, 245, 390–6

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avatar(s), 178, 181–2, 206, 298–9 Ayckbourn, Alan, 335 Azzarello, Brian and Eduardo Risso, 57–8, 59, 61–2, 63–4 Babb, Genie, 118 backstory, 181, 260–1, 357, 371 Badiou, Alain, 203–4, 349, 359 Baker, Jo, 121 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 90, 118, 121, 203 Bal, Mieke, 149, 202, 203, 321 Balázs, Béla, 284, 285 Ball, Alan, 257 Bammer, Angelika and Ruthellen Boetcher Joeres, 129 Banville, John, 370 Baraka, Amiri, 339 Barnden, John, 35 Barrett, Lisa Feldman, 100, 101 Barthes, Roland, 148, 150, 193, 202, 278, 281 Bassett, Caroline, 137 Batson, C. Daniel, 44 Bayne, Tim, 396 Bechdel, Alison, 120 Beckett, Samuel, 64, 334, 342 Belling, Catherine, 368 Benoît, Ted, 222 Bergen, Hilary, 137–8 Berkenkotter, Carol and Doris Ravotas, 23–4 Berlant, Lauren, 84, 85, 103, 134, 175–6 Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner, 134 Bernaerts, Lars, 31

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418

index

Bernstein, Carol A., 20 Bester, Alfred, 318 Biebuyck, Benjamin and Gunther Martens, 76 Bildungsroman, 122, 180 Black Lives Matter, 99 Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, 311 body, the, 45, 56, 117–19, 122, 124–7, 129, 182, 242, 266, 279, 342, 399–401, 411, 413; see also embodiment Bogost, Ian, 174 Bordwell, David, 273–6, 277–9, 284, 336 Borges, Jorge Luis, 334 Bradbury, Malcolm, 335–6 Bradbury, Ray, 318 Bradshaw, Peter, 166 Branigan, Edward, 275, 281–4 Bratton, Benjamin H., 163 Brecht, Bertolt, 339–40 Brennan, Tim, 340 Brooks, Peter, 335 Brophy, Brigid, 339 Brown, Hablot Knight, 258 Buchholz, Laura, 123 Bukatman, Scott, 241 Burgoyne, Robert, 275–6, 279 Butler, Octavia, 323 Caine, Michael, 310 capitalism, 102, 174, 376–9, 383 Cappucio, Massimiliano and Tom Froese, 72 Caracciolo, Marco, 74–5, 117, 122, 125 Carroll, Lewis, 239 Carroll, Noel, 341 Carter, Elizabeth, 128 Castillo, Ana, 335 ‘catfishing’, 132 Césaire, Aimé, 341 Chalmers, David, 56, 57, 63 character(s), 18, 24–6, 32, 33–4, 72, 86, 89–94, 121–2, 127, 189, 194, 207–9, 259–63, 265, 269–71, 291, 296–7, 323, 333, 340, 372, 393 and the body, 39–40, 58, 118–19, 126, 412 in digital media, 132, 204, 294 and gender, 146, 222

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in graphic narrative, 100, 102–5, 107, 110, 216–18, 221–4, 241–3 identification with, 46, 324–5 as narrators, 36, 281 as ‘people’, 48, 123–4, 365 in storyworld, 58–64, 202, 231–2, 236, 257, 337, 367 systems of, 121–2, 125–6 in video games, 178–9, 181–2, 300–1 see also focalisation; narrator(s) Charon, Rita, 371 Chase, David, 261–2 Chast, Roz, 127 Chatman, Seymour, 146, 202 Chiang, Ted, 321 Chopin, Kate, 119, 124–5 chronotope, 118, 121, 125 Chu, Seo-Young, 70–1, 77, 317 Chun, Wendy, 159–60, 166–7, 169 Church, Jennifer, 75 Churchill, Caryl, 337, 340 Chute, Hillary, 118–19, 127 Clair, René, 340 Clark, Andy, 56, 57, 60, 63 closure, 94, 134, 138, 151–2, 248, 297, 300, 332–3, 338, 340–3 in graphic narrative, 110 in law, 375–6, 378–9, 381, 383–6 in television, 272 see also endings computing events, 204–5 consciousness, 17–18, 20–2, 43, 70, 75, 85, 92, 196, 242, 246, 285, 308, 326, 359–60 corporeal, 118, 122, 129, 401 representation of, 32–4, 36–8, 89, 119, 122, 128, 326, 368–9, 390 self-, 276, 319, 324, 394–5 stream of, 234 contingency, 89, 242, 273, 275–6, 349–60, 367, 389–90, 397, 402 continuity, 32–3, 40, 176, 178, 221, 227–8, 231–6, 260, 390–2, 394, 396–7 Coover, Robert, 336, 337 Copjec, Joan, 147 copyright, 216–19, 244 Cortázar, Julio, 32, 36–9

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index cosmopolitanism, 86–8, 94 counterfactuality, 363 Crary, Jonathan, 177 Creed, Barbara, 146 Crick, Francis, 22 Crowley, Matt, 332 Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, 318, 340 Currie, Mark, 319–21 Dadlez, E. M., 44 D’Alessandro, Anthony, 166 Damasio, Antonio, 56, 399 Dannenberg, Hilary, 337 Dargis, Manohla, 166 Darwin, Charles, 100 Dawson, Paul, 89–90 De Kosnick, Abigail, 219 Deacon, Terrence, 22 deictics, 91, 400, 406–8, 412 Delany, Samuel, 67, 317–18 Deleuze, Giles, 84, 279, 283–5, 414 Delgado, Richard, 103 Dennett, Daniel, 389–94, 396 Deren, Maya, 307, 309–10 Derrida, Jacques, 207, 352, 356 Descartes, René, 31, 39, 56, 118, 399 diachrony, 391–2, 395 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 20–1, 23 Dickens, Charles, 258–9 disability, 121, 242, 318, 371, 402, 409 discourse, 24, 90, 102, 193, 232, 264, 318, 363–4 narrative, 89, 122, 124, 202, 208, 256–7, 273, 275, 278–85, 291, 310–11, 319, 321, 329, 396 disnarration, 124, 162 Donner, Richard, 233 Druillet, Philippe, 60–2, 63–4 Du Bois, John and Elise Kärkkäinen, 412 Dumas, Alexandre, 58–9 Easterlin, Nancy, 40 Ebert, Roger, 146, 150 Eco, Umberto, 187, 194 Edelman, Lee, 135, 147, 149 Eisenberg, Nancy, 45

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419

Ekman, Paul, 99 Elfenbein, Hilary A. and Nalini Ambady, 101 Elias, Amy, 370 Eliot, George (Marian Evans), 31, 333 embodiment, 35, 43–5, 56–9, 60–4, 68, 70–3, 77, 84, 183, 206–8, 239–40, 244, 253, 274, 393–5, 401, 413 as narratological category, 117–18, 124–8, 278–9 see also body emotion, 38, 43–52, 56, 67, 71, 77, 84, 99–102, 105, 107, 110, 125, 136, 138–40, 176, 182, 230, 243, 306–7, 309, 310–11, 368, 399–402, 412–13; see also affect; facial emotion recognition empathy, 110, 392 narrative, 43–7, 50–2, 99, 128, 372 poststructural, 102 statistical, 102 structural, 100, 102–3 see also emotion enactive cognition, 68–9, 72, 75 endings, 332–43, 367 alternative, 152, 297, 300–1, 335–6, 342 Aristotelian, 257, 375 see also closure Enevold, Jessica, 176 environmental humanities, 30 epistemology, 26, 191–2, 197, 282, 328, 349, 354, 356, 403 Estes, Adam Clark, 164 ethics, 85, 89, 266, 366, 368–71 ethnography, 175–6, 402 fabula see story facial emotion recognition, 99–100, 105, 110 fan culture, 218–19 Farwell, Marilyn, 153 Faulkner, William, 320 Felski, Rita, 85, 305, 306, 310, 312, 314 Ferguson, Frances, 122–3 fictionality, 363–4 Filliou, Robert, 210 Fisher, Philip, 49 Flaubert, Gustave, 60

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420

index

flow, 188–9, 194, 197 Fludernik, Monika, 30, 117, 121, 291–3, 308 focalisation, 57–8, 89–94, 118, 122–3, 125, 128, 319, 321–5, 328–9, 371 folk psychology, 32–3 Forster, E. M., 86, 88, 92, 152, 408 Forster, Mark, 339 Foucault, Michel, 19, 147 4E cognition, 56, 57, 65, 74 Fourton, Gérald, 218 Fowles, John, 335 Franco, James, 133 free indirect discourse, 89, 92, 119, 122–3, 307 in film, 307 Freedman, Carl, 328–9 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 152, 379, 383–6 Frost, Robert, 258 Fuchs, Thomas and Sabine Koch, 412–13 Gaboury, Jacob, 139 Gair, Susan, 102 Gaitskill, Mary, 176 Gallagher, Shaun and Robb Lindgren, 73 Galloway, Alexander R., 166, 181–3 Gansa, Alex, 259, 262 Gardner, Jared, 105 Garréta, Anne, 121 Gates, Henry Louis, 92 Gaudreault, André, 274, 275–9, 280, 283–4 Genette, Gérard, 118–19, 122, 124, 128, 203, 275, 278–9, 319, 323, 357 Genova, Lisa, 362–9, 371–3 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra, 179 Gibbs, Anna, 410–11 Gibson, William, 322–3, 327–8 Gilligan, Vince, 268–9 Godard, Jean-Luc, 334 Goldie, Peter, 397 Goodwin, Charles, 401–2, 409 Goodwin, Charles and Marjorie Goodwin, 402 graphic narrative, 56, 57–8, 59–61, 65, 99–114, 118–20, 127, 208, 215–25, 239–54, 299 Grosz, Elizabeth, 118

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Gunning, Tom, 146, 150, 274–5, 278–9, 283–4 gutter (in comics), 110 Hadley, Elaine, 370 Haggerty, George, 119, 129, 149–50 Hale, Dorothy, 89–90 Hamburger, Käte, 308 Hammond, Meghan, 102 haptics, 239–44, 248, 253 Harari, Yual, 22 Harper, Nika, 181 Harrigan, Pat and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 228 Harrison, Mary-Catherine, 102 Hayles, N. Katherine, 210, 297 Hayot, Eric, 129 Hayward, Jennifer, 227, 229 Heinlein, Robert, 317 Henry, O., 335 Hergé, 215–17, 222–3 Herman, David, 33, 39, 117–18, 125, 202–3 Herman, Luc, 31 heteroglossia see Bakhtin, Mikhail heterosexuality, 133–8, 140–2, 147, 149, 153 Hitchcock, Alfred, 223 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 189 Holquist, Michael, 117 Hong, Caroline, 104 Hopkins, Pauline, 119, 125–7 Hühn, Peter, 24, 310–11 Hühn, Peter and Roy Sommer, 308–9, 311 Hutcheon, Linda, 340 Hutto, Daniel, 34, 392 Hydén, Lars-Christer and Eleonor Antelius, 403 hypertext, 206, 208, 291, 293–5, 297–8, 302 individualism, 103, 169 and character, 105 Inglis, Gavin, 294–5 interpellation, 122, 148–9, 395–6 Intersectionality, 43, 83–6, 117, 118–19, 120–1 Iser, Wolfgang, 206–7, 351 Islamophobia, 99

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index Ivanchikova, Alla, 133–4 Iversen, Stefan, 33–4 Izard, Carroll, 100 Jackson, Shelley, 295–8 Jacobs, Edgar Pierre (aka E.P. or Edward P. Jacobs), 215–25 Jagose, Annamarie, 134 Jakobson, Roman, 311, 314 James, Erin, 40 James, Henry, 332–3 Jameson, Frederic, 399 Jensen, Thomas Wiben and Elena Cuffari, 74 Jonze, Spike, 133 Jordan, Neil, 120 Joyce, Michael, 208 Juul, Jesper, 178, 184, 204 Kafka, Franz, 33–4 Kant, Emanuel, 351, 356, 359, 376 Katz, Jack, 411 Katz, Steve, 210 Kazemi, Darius, 180 Keen, Suzanne, 102–3 Kelleter, Frank, 229, 235 Kerbaj, Mazen, 240, 244–54 Kim, Sue J., 5, 118 King, Stephen, 121 Koch, Christof, 22 Koenig, Sarah, 188–97 Kozloff, Sarah, 275–6 Kreiswirth, Martin, 24 Labov, William, 190, 408–9, 413 Lacan, Jacques, 56, 60–4, 147, 153, 384–5 Lambie, Ryan, 169 Lanser, Susan S., 83 Lanser’s rule, 123 Latour, Bruno, 85, 89–91, 219 Lawrence, D. H., 332, 394 Leblanc, Raymond, 216 Lebrun, Gérard. 355 Lejeune, Philippe, 245 Lem, Stanislaw, 328 Lester, Richard, 233 Linklater, Richard, 233

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421

Litvak, Joseph, 145 Lowenstein, Adam, 146 ludology, 181, 184 vs. narratology, 174 Luhrmann, Tanya, 21 Lynch, David, 232–3 Lyotard, Jean-François, 399 McAllister, Brian, 309 McCary, Leo, 162 MacDonald, Scott, 307 McEwan, Ian, 362–6, 368–73 McGlothlin, Erin, 104 McGuire, Richard, 243 McHale, Brian, 9, 33, 68, 77–8, 309, 335, 337 Maciak, Phillip, 161 McNeill, David, 400 madness, 18–26, 301 Mäkelä, Maria, 34 Malsky, Bea, 178–9 Mangen, Anne and Adriaan van der Weel, 43 Mann, Michael, 159, 163, 166 Mann, Michael and Stephen Galloway, 166 Manovich, Lev, 137 Margolin, Uri, 122, 356 Márquez, Gabriel García, 337 Marx, Karl, 378 masculinity, 123, 139–40, 176–7 Massumi, Brian, 414 Matsumodo, David, 100 Menary, Richard, 393–4 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 400–1 metafiction, 72 metalepsis, 291, 294, 298–302 metaphysics, 359 metonymy, 37–8, 125 microexpressions, 99 Milch, David, 265, 266 Miller, D. A., 134, 332 Miller, J. Hillis, 333 mimesis, 30, 71, 76, 276, 280, 315, 329, 351, 356–7, 365–70, 372, 410–13; see also antimimetic mindblindness, 18–20 Mitchell, W. J. T., 311–12

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422 Mittell, Jason, 190 Montaigne, Michel de, 120 Moraru, Christian, 86 Moretti, Franco, 122 Mori, Masahiro, 70 morphing, 123, 256 Morrison, Paul, 153 Morson, Gary Saul, 203–4, 349–51, 354, 356–7 Morton, Timothy, 40 von Mossner, Alexa Weik, 40 Mulvey, Laura, 61, 146, 149 Muñoz, José Esteban, 142 Nabokov, Vladimir, 334, 342 Nakamura, Lisa, 183 Narayan, Shyamala, 340 narratability, 160 narration, 123, 161–2, 180, 191, 203, 323, 342, 370, 396 co-, 401–3, 409–10, 412 comics, 241 and digital media, 179 epistolary, 207 figural, 122 film, 273–85 networked, 85–94 poetry as, 307 self-, 391–4 structures of, 67 time of, 209, 319, 321, 396 unnatural, 291 narrative(s), 33, 43–4 conventions, 68 digital, 204–10, 165, 194–5, 298 events in, 24, 37, 118–19, 152, 162, 168, 179, 194, 202–8, 224, 231, 236, 241–2, 259, 268, 279–80, 291–2, 298, 313, 319, 328, 333, 335–43, 352–60, 365, 367–8, 375, 396, 402, 408–9, 413 experimental, 31, 36 failure of, 25 form, 67–8 locative, 206 Medical, 362–73

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index nonfictional, 17, 362–73 and the nonhuman, 30–1 and psychology, 23–4, 30, 32, 34, 37–9 and queerness, 138 refusal of, 153 and sexuality, 132–42 see also graphic narrative; serial(ity); unnatural narrative(s) narrative becoming, 258–9, 261–72 narrative personal distress (NPD), 44–7, 49–52 narrative theory, 33, 40, 56 cognitive, 31–2, 33–4, 40, 43, 56, 59, 65, 67–8, 72, 74–5, 78, 84, 117, 202, 275–7, 284, 291–2, 323, 352, 396 rhetorical, 362–73 see also narratology; unnatural narrative(s) narrativity, 23, 46, 51, 64, 68, 77, 117, 119, 202, 204, 273–4, 285, 317, 391 lack of, 23–4, 368 in lyric poetry, 308 in video games, 208, 302 narratography, 159, 161, 163, 165, 273 narratology, 119 and embodiment, 117 feminist, 118 gestural vs. verbal, 120 intersectional, 83 queer, 142 see also narrative theory narrator(s) gender of, 123 omniscient, 89–90, 123, 279, 292, 298, 300–1, 319, 324–7 queer, 123–4 Natu, Vaidehi and Alice J. O’Toole, 101 Nelles, William, 321 Nelson, Jason, 206 neurotypicals, 20 new media, 133, 137, 142 Ngai, Sianne, 44 Nielsen, Henrik Skov, 292–3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20 Noë, Alva, 57, 63 Nolan, Christopher, 305–1, 362

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index

423

nonhuman, the, 31, 148, 164 Norrick, Neal, 403

Puar, Jasbir, 84 Punday, Daniel, 118, 120, 127–8

object-oriented philosophy, 30 Ochs, Elinor, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor, 402–3 Olsen, Lance and Tim Guthrie, 294 omniscience see narrator(s): omniscient ontology, 26, 36, 39, 151, 264, 276, 296–8, 300, 317, 336, 340, 349, 354, 356, 358, 360, 376 oral storytelling, 188, 194 Orientalism, 107 Orr, Christopher, 166 O’Toole, Alice J., Kenneth Deffenbacher, Dominique Valentin, and Hervé Abdi, 100

Quayson, Ato, 402 queer(ness) 123, 127, 129, 132–42, 145–53 Queneau, Raymond, 334, 335, 337

Palmer, Alan, 32–3, 36–7, 39, 59 Parks, Tim, 51 Pawlikowski, Pavel, 233 pedagogy, 48–51, 372–3 Phelan, James, 33, 220, 257–8, 309–10, 335, 341 Phelan, James and Peter Rabinowitz, 2 Phelan, Peggy, 119, 122, 129 phenomenology, 68, 72, 84–6, 88, 90, 206, 359, 394, 413–14 physicalism, 31, 35–6, 38–9 physics, 22, 175, 365 naive, 35, 38 Piketty, Thomas, 376–9 Plato, 31, 399 plot, 25, 30, 64, 121, 125, 134, 178–9, 223–5, 233, 240, 243, 258–9, 301 as syuzhet, 128, 193, 202–3, 319, 328–9 Poe, Edgar Allan, 61 Popescu, Irina, 49an, 61 posthumanism, 30, 31, 160 Pressman, Jessica, 210 Priestley, J. B., 335 Prince, Gerald, 118–19, 162 prolepsis, 319–20, 321, 357 Proust, Marcel, 324 psychoanalytic theory, 23, 59–62, 64, 150, 282–3, 385

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Rabinowitz, Peter, 342 race, 99–113, 121, 126 and facial recognition technology, 101 and gender, 93 whiteness, 121 Rak, Julie, 179, 184 Real, the, 147–8, 151, 153; see also Lacan reproduction, 133–9 and futurism, 138, 147 Richardson, Brian, 291–3, 297, 299, 362, 364 Richter, David, 341 Ricoeur, Paul, 76, 356–7 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 337 Roberts, Adam, 68, 76 Robins, Eli and Samuel Guze, 20 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 324, 328 Roof, Judith, 134, 138, 153 Rowling, J. K., 228–9 Rushdie, Salman, 340–2 Russell, James, 100 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 122, 123, 124, 202–3, 205, 279, 295, 297 Said, Edward, 257 Sanderson, Candie, 105 Santiago, Wilfred, 104 Savarese, Ralph, 20 Savarese, Ralph and Lisa Zunshine, 19 Scarry, Elaine, 86–7, 89, 91–3, 94, 128 Schechtman, Marya, 392, 396–7 Schmitt, Karl, 380–1 Scholes, Robert and Robert Kellogg, 326 Schulman, Nev and Max Joseph, 132 Scott, Ridley, 234 Scott, Tony, 145, 146 Sedgwick, Eve K., 84, 88 Seigworth, Gregory and Melissa Gregg, 399–400

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424

index

self, the, 26, 44, 84, 88, 92–3, 175, 209, 325, 336, 338, 339, 340, 389–97, 411–12 Sente, Yves and André Juillard, 222 serial(ity), 188, 190, 210, 217, 220, 224–5, 227–37, 241–72 Shakespeare, William, 17–19, 25, 332, 334 Shaviro, Steven, 160 Shephard, Sam, 340 Shklovshy, Viktor, 25, 329 Short, Emily and Liz Daly, 207 Shuman, Amy, 103 Sitney, P. Adams, 307 situated conceptualisation, 62 Slingerland, Edward, 32 Smith, Zadie, 85–94 social media, 132, 175, 179–81, 187, 193 space(s), 25, 35, 58, 87, 118–19, 121–5, 128, 162, 164–5, 188, 241–3, 253, 283, 309, 319, 365, 400–1, 411–12 in comics, 110 cyber-, 70, 323, 327–8 ‘devoid of law’, 381–3 figurative, 245, 261, 306, 325 public vs. private, 124 queer, 141–2 story-, 208–9, 294–5 virtual, 69–73, 77, 175, 177–9, 184, 187, 195, 208, 245 Spinoza, Baruch, 310, 414 Stanzel, Franz, 122 state of exception, 380–3 Sterne, Laurence, 162, 329, 341 Stewart, Garrett, 160–1, 163, 273 Stiegler, Bernard, 352, 356 Stoppard, Tom, 334 story, 24, 31, 34, 64, 122–5, 128, 152, 208–9, 220, 228, 230, 235, 240, 269–71, 275, 279, 280, 295, 297, 309, 315, 323, 326, 336, 339–40, 355–6, 375–86, 390, 400, 401, 408–12 as fabula, 128, 193, 202–3, 318–19, 321, 329, 334, 343 in film, 146, 150 of heterosexuality, 135–7, 141 in videogames, 175–80, 184 storyline, 217, 233, 256, 262, 342

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storytelling, 30, 34, 39, 67–8, 77, 120, 138, 141, 161, 179, 181, 202 collaborative, 183, 204 in comics, 225 oral, 188, 194 serialised, 190 storyworld, 39, 43, 47, 51, 174, 187, 197, 231, 236, 257, 264–6, 277, 279, 295, 298, 321, 323, 327–8, 339, 341, 400, 402–3, 408, 412–13 Strachey, Christopher, 139–40 Strawson, Galen, 391–2 supranarratable, the, 159, 162–3, 164–5, 169 suspense, 46, 207, 263, 280, 295, 350, 403 Suvin, Darko, 78, 318 Swanwick, Michael, 325 Swift, Graham, 25–6 syuzhet see plot Tarkovsky, Andrei, 315 temporality, 152 and narrative, 118–19, 124–5, 356 of reading, 202 see also time Theory of Mind, 31–2, 34, 323–4 Thomas, Dylan, 305–7, 309–11, 313, 314 Thornham, Helen, 176 time, 24, 110, 123, 148, 151–2, 176–8, 184, 188, 202–10, 240–1, 244, 246, 253–4, 280, 283, 308, 311, 337, 341, 352, 355–8, 365–6, 366, 394, 396 -line(s), 146, 169, 189–90, 193, 195 and seriality, 228–30, 232–3, 261, 268 -travel, 319–21, 325, 366 see also temporality Todorov, Tzvetan, 203, 342, 357 Tomkins, Silvan, 412 Toscana, David, 338 Tran, GB, 99–114 transmediality, 56, 59, 228, 231, 275, 299, 302 trauma, 48–50, 62, 70, 102–4, 147 Turing, Alan, 76–7, 78 Turner, Mark, 35 Twombly, Cy, 139 Tykwer, Tom, 335 Type I narratives, 24

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index Uexküll, Jakob von, 68 unconscious, the, 17, 61, 84, 147, 283, 285 unity, 38, 236, 262, 266, 281, 285, 393–7 Universality, 71, 275 of facial expressions, 100–1 unnarratability, 159, 165 unnarration, 162, 165 unnatural narrative(s), 33, 40, 291–302, 333, 342; see also antimimetic Vaihinger, Hans, 351 Valente, Catherynne M., 68–77 Van Hamme, Jean, 222 Vanmelkebeke, Jacques, 216, 218 Velleman, J. David, 392–3, 396 Vervaeck, Bart, 31 Vietnam War, 103–4 Vint, Sherryl, 76 Vonnegut, Kurt, 320–1 Walsh, Richard, 68, 325 Ware, Chris, 240–4 Warhol, Robyn, 44, 84, 94, 118, 159, 162–3, 165, 175–6, 175, 177, 183, 336 Warhol, Robyn and Susan S. Lanser, 83 Washko, Angela, 184 Wells, H. G., 218, 318–19 Wexler, Nancy S. and Michael D. Rawlins, 370–1 Whalen, Tim, 336

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425

White, Hayden, 202 Wiegert, Robin, 266 Wilde, Oscar, 145, 332, 334 Williams, Donna, 20 Williams, Raymond, 188 Williams, Val, 402 Wilson, Doug, 183, 184–5 Wilson, E. O., 22 Wimsatt, W. K., 314 Winterson, Jeanette, 120–1 Wittenberg, David, 320 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 283, 350, 353, 380 Woloch, Alex, 121–2 Wordsworth, William, 311 world building see worldmaking worldmaking, 83–94, 327–8 Wreden, Davey, 299 Yang, Gene Luen, 104 Yang, Robert, 182 Young, Katharine, 400–1, 403 Young, Kay, 31 Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, 206, 208–9 Yu, Derek, 180 Žižek, Slavoj, 62, 147, 149–50 153, 354–5, 359 Zoller Seitz, Matt, 166 Zunshine, Lisa, 24, 32–3, 36, 39, 70

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