Unnatural Narratives - Unnatural Narratology 9783110229042, 9783110229035

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Unnatural Narratives - Unnatural Narratology linguae & litterae

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linguae & litterae Publications of the School of Language & Literature Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Edited by

Peter Auer · Gesa von Essen · Werner Frick Editorial Board Michel Espagne (Paris) · Marino Freschi (Rom) Erika Greber (Erlangen) · Ekkehard König (Berlin) Per Linell (Linköping) · Angelika Linke (Zürich) Christine Maillard (Strasbourg) · Pieter Muysken (Nijmegen) Wolfgang Raible (Freiburg) Editorial Assistant Aniela Knoblich

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De Gruyter

Unnatural Narratives Unnatural Narratology Edited by Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze

De Gruyter

ISBN 978-3-11-022903-5 e-ISBN 978-3-11-022904-2 ISSN 1869-7054 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Unnatural narratives - unnatural narratology / edited by Jan Alber, Rüdiger Heinze. p. cm. - (Linguae & litterae ; 9) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-11-022903-5 (alk. paper) 1. Literature - History and criticism - Theory, etc. 2. Narration (Rhetoric) 3. Literary form. I. Alber, Jan, 1973- II. Heinze, Rüdiger, 1972PN441.U56 2011 8091.923-dc23 2011027829

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. 쑔 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston Druck: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

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Contents

Jan Alber (Freiburg) and Rüdiger Heinze (Braunschweig) Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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I. Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives Brian Richardson (Maryland) What Is Unnatural Narrative Theory? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Jan Alber (Freiburg) The Diachronic Development of Unnaturalness: A New View on Genre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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II. Unnatural Narrators and Minds Henrik Skov Nielsen (Aarhus) Unnatural Narratology, Impersonal Voices, Real Authors, and Non-Communicative Narration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Stefan Iversen (Aarhus) “In flaming flames”: Crises of Experientiality in Non-Fictional Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Caroline Pirlet (Freiburg) Toward a Hybrid Approach to the Unnatural: ‘Reading for the Consciousness’ and the Psychodynamics of Experientiality in Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 III. Unnatural Time and Causality Marina Grishakova (Tartu) Narrative Causality Denaturalized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Martin Hermann (Freiburg) Hollywood Goes Computer Game: Narrative Remediation in the Time-Loop Quests Groundhog Day and 12:01 . . . . . . . . . 145

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Contents

Per Krogh Hansen (Kolding) Backmasked Messages: On the Fabula Construction in Episodically Reversed Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 IV. Unnatural Worlds and Events Jeff Thoss (Graz) Unnatural Narrative and Metalepsis: Grant Morrison’s Animal Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Johannes Fehrle (Vancouver) Unnatural Worlds and Unnatural Narration in Comics? A Critical Examination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 Andrea Moll (Freiburg) Natural or Unnatural? Linguistic Deep Level Structures in AbE: A Case Study of New South Wales Aboriginal English . . . . . . . . . 246 Bio Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

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Introduction

Jan Alber (Freiburg) and Rüdiger Heinze (Braunschweig)

Introduction Pictoribus atque poetis quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas. (Horace)

In recent years, the study of ‘unnatural’ narratives and the development of an ‘unnatural’ narratology has become an exciting new research program in narrative theory.1 In particular the last two decades have witnessed the production of numerous analyses of the unnatural in all its different manifestations.2 1

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Unnatural narratology is not unnatural in itself but rather a narratology of the unnatural. We thus ask readers to consider all such instances as so specified. See Richardson, Brian, “‘Time is Out of Joint’: Narrative Models and the Temporality of Drama”, Poetics Today, 8, 1987, Nr. 2, 299–310; “Pinter’s Landscape and the Boundaries of Narrative”, Essays in Literature, 18, 1991, Nr. 1, 37–45; “Beyond Poststructuralism: Theory of Character, the Personae of Modern Drama, and the Antinomies of Critical Theory”, Modern Drama, 40, 1997, 86–99; “Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression: Theorizing the Collapse of Time, Voice, and Frame”, Narrative, 8, 2000, Nr. 1, 23–42; “Denarration in Fiction: Erasing the Story in Beckett and Others”, Narrative, 9, 2001, Nr. 2, 168–75; “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 47–63; Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006; Alber, Jan, “The ‘Moreness’ or ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’ Narratology: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Lessness’ Reconsidered”, in: Style, 36, 2002, Nr. 1, 54–75; “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Study, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96; “Unnatural Narratives”, in: The Literary Encyclopedia, 2009, http://www.litencyc.com; “Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama”, Habilitation, University of Freiburg, in progress; Mäkelä, Maria, “Possible Minds: Constructing – and Reading – Another Consciousness as Fiction”, in: Pekka Tammi and Hannu Tommola (eds.), FREE Language INDIRECT Translation DISCOURSE Narratology: Linguistic, Translatological, and Literary-Theoretical Encounters, Tampere 2006, 231–60; Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, Narrative, 12, 2004, Nr. 2, 133–50; “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narratives”, in: Jan Alber / Monika Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, Columbus 2010, 275–302; Tammi, Pekka, “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’)”, in Partial Answers, 4, 2006, Nr. 2, 19–40; “Against ‘Against’ Narrative”, in: Lars-Åke Skalin (ed.), Narrativity, Fictionality, and Literariness: The Narrative Turn and the Study of Literary Fiction, Örebro 2008, 37–55; Iversen, Stefan, “Den uhyggelige fortælling i Johannes V. Jensens tidlige forfatterskab” [“The Uncanny Narrative in the Early Works of Johannes V. Jensen”], PhD thesis, Aarhus University 2008; Heinze, Rü-

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The aim of this collection of essays, Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, is twofold. First, it presents and discusses some of the new analytical tools that have so far been developed on the basis of unnatural novels, short stories, and plays. Second, it extends these findings through analyses of nonfictional testimonies, comics, graphic novels, films, and so-called ‘natural’ (i.e., oral) narratives. Generally speaking, the term unnatural has rather negative connotations. It is, for example, used to denounce certain types of behavior (as well as sexual orientations or practices) which the speaker considers to be deviant or perverse. We would therefore like to accentuate right from the start that the term unnatural has a decidedly positive connotation for us within the framework of this project. More specifically, unnatural narratologists consider the unnatural to be a fascinating object of study and argue that one can learn something by dealing with it. The aim of an unnatural theoretical approach is to approximate and conceptualize Otherness, rather than to stigmatize or reify it; such an approach is interested in various kinds of narrative strangeness and in particular in texts that deviate from the mimetic norms of most narratological models. How then can one define the term unnatural? We would like to propose three definitions, namely a wide one (1) and two narrow ones, (2) and (3). (1) At the most basic level, unnatural narratologists are interested in narratives that have a defamiliarizing effect because they are experimental, extreme, transgressive, unconventional, non-conformist, or out of the ordinary. From this perspective, the unnatural closely correlates with Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement (ostranenie), i.e., the argument that art ‘makes strange’: The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. […] Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways.3

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diger, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, Narrative, 16, 2008, Nr. 3, 279–97; Alber, Jan / Iversen, Stefan / Nielsen, Henrik Skov / Richardson, Brian, “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models”, Narrative, 18, 2010, Nr. 2, 113–36. The Narrative conferences in Austin, TX (2008), Birmingham, Great Britain (2009), Cleveland, OH (2010), and St. Louis, MO (2011) (organized by the International Society for the Study of Narrative) all featured panels on unnatural narratology. Also, Jan Alber organized an ISSN panel on “Postmodern and Unnatural Narratives” for the 2009 MLA in Philadelphia, PN. Shklovsky, Viktor, “Art as Technique [1917]”, in: Lee T. Lemon / Marion J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism, Lincoln, 1965, 12–13; italics in the original.

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Like, for example, the notion of “queer” for David Halperin, the unnatural […] acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence […] [and] demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative.4

In this volume, Johannes Fehrle opts for a broad and transmedial definition of the term unnatural which closely correlates with the unconventional and involves Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement.5 Also, in her essay, Caroline Pirlet defines unnatural narratives as odd or strange texts which “require the reader to consciously revert to level IV of Fludernik’s model, i.e., the readerly process of narrativization.”6 However, many unnatural narratologists have a narrower (or more specific) notion of the unnatural. (2) For example, Brian Richardson and Henrik Skov Nielsen argue that unnatural narratives are anti-mimetic texts that move beyond the conventions of natural narratives, i.e., “the mimesis of actual speech situations.”7 In this context, the term ‘natural narrative’ denotes spontaneous conversational storytelling in the sense of William Labov,8 and 4

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Halperin, David M., Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, Oxford and New York 1995, 62. In his contribution, Per Krogh Hansen looks at narratives that break generic conventions through temporal disruptions. He defines the term unnatural as follows: “when the representation of the events is disrupted, reordered or fragmented – we experience the narrative as unnatural – at least until the broken convention is repeated a sufficient number of times to form a new convention.” For a similar notion of the unnatural, see the contributions by Stefan Iversen and Marina Grishakova. Monika Fludernik argues that whenever readers are confronted with unreadable texts, they look for ways of recuperating them as narratives. In the process of narrativization, something is made a narrative by the sheer act of imposing narrativity on it. The process of narrativization (at Fludernik’s level IV) is based on the following types of cognitive frames: pretextual schemata that involve our real-world knowledge and parameters used to parse events as intentional acts (level I); frames of narrative mediation such as “telling” (narratives focusing on a teller figure), “experiencing” (narratives that are focalized through the consciousness of a protagonist), “viewing” (the witnessing of events), and “reflecting” (the projection of a reflecting consciousness in the process of rumination) (level II); and criteria pertaining to genre as well as to narrative as a general mode of discourse (level III). See Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London and New York 1996, 43–46. Richardson, Unnatural Voices, 2006, 5. At the same time, Richardson and Nielsen remain alert to the potential unnaturalness of conventional, realistic and mimetic ways of telling. See Labov, William / Waletzky, Joshua, “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience”, in: June Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, Seattle

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an example of an unnatural narrative in this sense is John Hawkes’s novel Sweet William (1993): the text differs from natural narratives in so far as the narrator is a sophisticated horse rather than a human being.9 Furthermore, Brian Richardson argues that unnatural narratives violate the “‘mimetic contract’ that had governed conventional fiction for centuries” as well as the “established boundaries of realism.”10 His use of the term ‘realism’ is not restricted to the nineteenth-century movement of Realism but rather refers to a (mimetic) narrative […] which appears to provide an accurate, objective, and confident description or authentic impression of reality. This semiotic effect, which rests on the assumption that language is an undistorted mirror of, or transparent window on, the ‘real,’ is based on a set of literary conventions for producing a lifelike illusion.11

Virginia Woolf ’s novel Orlando (1928) is an example of an unnatural narrative in this sense because “the eponymous hero ages at a different rate than the people that surround him (her),”12 which would of course never happen in a realist text. In his contribution to this volume, Brian Richardson offers the following definition: […] an unnatural narrative is one that conspicuously violates conventions of standard narrative forms, in particular the conventions of nonfictional narratives, oral or written, and fictional modes like realism that model themselves on nonfictional narratives. Unnatural narratives furthermore follow fluid, changing conventions and create new narratological patterns in each work. In a phrase, unnatural narratives produce a defamiliarization of the basic elements of narrative.

(3) Finally, Jan Alber restricts the use of the term unnatural to “physically impossible scenarios and events, that is impossible by the known laws governing the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones, that is, impossible

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1967, 12–44, and Labov, William, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, Philadelphia 1972. In his contribution to this volume, Henrik Skov Nielsen defines unnatural narratives as narratives that “transgress the rules of everyday storytelling practices.” At the same time, ‘natural’ (i.e., oral) narratives can also contain unnatural elements. See Andrea Moll’s essay in this collection. Brian Richardson argues that “if a narrative is, as commonly averred, someone relating a set of events to someone else, then this entire way of looking at narrative has to be reconsidered in the light of the numerous ways innovative authors problematize each term of this formula, especially the first one.” Richardson, Unnatural Voices, 5. Ibid., 1, 138. Palmer, Alan, “Realist Novel”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London 2005, 491. Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse”, 50.

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by accepted principles of logic.”13 The retrogressive temporality in Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow (1991) is physically impossible because intradiegetic time (time within the story) moves backward, and this defies our knowledge about the flow of time in the real world. Furthermore, the co-existence of mutually exclusive situations in Robert Coover’s short story “The Babysitter” (1969) is logically impossible because the represented storyworld violates the principle of non-contradiction. Alber places a major focus on postmodernist literature but he also shows that physically or logically impossible scenarios or events play a crucial role in earlier types of literature. The basic insight of scholars working within the framework of unnatural narratology is that narratives do not only mimetically reproduce the world as we know it. Many narratives confront us with strange narrative worlds which rely on principles that have very little to do with the actual world around us. Indeed, in the words of Thomas Pavel, “fictional discourse allows for any imaginable kind of confabulation.”14 Similarly, Mark Currie argues that “the impossible object, and even the impossible world, is of course the very possibility of fiction.”15 Unnatural narratologists also point out that narrative theory has had a mimetic bias ever since the times of Aristotle and the unities of time, place, and action.16 And this real-world orientation has lead to the marginalization of the unnatural. It should not surprise, then, that unnatural narratology is directed against what one might call ‘mimetic reductionism,’ i.e., the argument that all aspects of narrative can be explained on the basis of the real world. Brian Richardson puts this as follows: 13

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Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 80. See also the contributions by Caroline Pirlet, Martin Hermann, Jeff Thoss, Johannes Fehrle, and Andrea Moll in this volume. Some of the denaturalized types of causality discussed by Marina Grishakova are also either physically or logically impossible. Pavel, Thomas, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, MA 1986, 2. Currie, Mark, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, Edinburgh 2007, 85. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and transl. Stephen Halliwell, Cambridge, MA 1999, V, XVII, XVIII. See also Orr, Leonard, Problems and Poetics of the Nonaristotelian Novel, Lewisburg 1991. Interestingly, Aristotle’s teacher Plato bans art from his ideal state because according to him, art only imitates the empirical world and not the perfect World of Ideas. And since the empirical world is only the shadow of the World of Ideas, art is just the shadow of this shadow: it is “an imitation of a phantasm.” Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes: The Republic II, Books VI–X, ed. and transl. Paul Shorey, Cambridge, MA, 1970, 431 (598B). Obviously, Plato was only familiar with mimetic art that imitates the empirical world. We would like to suggest that if Plato had been familiar with more abstract types of art (such as unnatural narratives) he might perhaps have argued that art can take the citizens of his ideal state to the World of Ideas.

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Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze Since the time of Aristotle, narrative theory has had a pronounced mimetic bias. Fictional works are largely treated as if they were lifelike reproductions of human beings and human actions and could be analyzed according to real world notions of consistency, probability, individual and group psychology, and correspondence with accepted beliefs about the world. […] An insistently mimetic narrative theory, however, is largely useless when faced with the rich tradition of works by nonor antimimetic authors.17

What does unnatural narratology do? Unnatural narrative theory can be characterized as a subdomain of postclassical narratology.18 At issue are categories for narrative analyses that build on the work of structuralist narratologists but supplement that work with concepts and ideas that were unavailable to structuralists such as Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, A.J. Greimas, Franz Karl Stanzel, and Tzvetan Todorov. Unnatural narratologists develop new analytical tools that help describe the fact that many narratives deviate from real-world frames in a wide variety of different ways. More specifically, they show that unnatural narratives may radically deconstruct the anthropomorphic narrator,19 the traditional human character, and the minds associated with them,20 or they may move beyond real-world notions of time and space,21 thus taking us to the most remote territories of conceptual possibil-

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Richardson, Brian, “Theses on Unnatural Narratology”, 2009, http://www.nor disk.au.dk/forskningscentre/nrl/unnatural/brtheses (last accessed July 15, 2009). David Herman defines postclassical narratology as follows: “Postclassical narratology (which should not be conflated with poststructuralist theories of narrative) contains classical narratology as one of its ‘moments’ but is marked by a profusion of new methodologies and research hypotheses: the result is a host of new perspectives on the forms and functions of narrative itself. Further, in its postclassical phase, research on narrative does not just expose the limits but also exploits the possibilities of the older, structuralist models. In much the same way, postclassical physics does not simply discard classical Newtonian models, but rather rethinks their conceptual underpinnings and reassesses their scope of applicability.” Herman, David, “Introduction”, in: David Herman (ed.), Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, Columbus 1999, 2–3. See also Alber, Jan / Fludernik, Monika (eds.) Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, Columbus 2010. For an overview on the narrator figure see Phelan, James / Booth, Wayne C., “Narrator”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, 2005, 388–92. An overview on characters in narrative is provided by Margolin, Uri, “Character”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, 52–57. See the following two overviews on narrative time and space: Fludernik, Monika, “Time in Narrative”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.),

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ities.22 It is worth noting that the unnatural may occur at the level of the fabula or story (the what? of narrative) or the level of the sjuzhet or narrative discourse (the how? of narrative), or it may concern both the level of the telling and the level of the told. For instance, in unnatural narratives, the narrator may be an animal (Hawkes’s novel Sweet William), a corpse (Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones [2002]), an impossibly eloquent (and also burning) child (John Hawkes’s novel Virginie: Her Two Lives [1982]) an ‘omniscient’ first-person narrator (Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children [1981], various narrators in Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight [1962]),23 or otherwise impossible.24 Furthermore, characters can do numerous things that would be impossible in the real world. For example, they may display mutually incompatible features (Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud Nine [1979]); they can torture their author because they consider him to be a bad writer (Flann O’Brien’s novel At SwimTwo-Birds [1939]; they may turn into other entities (Franz Kafka’s short story “The Metamorphosis” [1915] and Sarah Kane’s play Cleansed [1998]); or their minds can get ‘infected’ by the words “blue” and kettle” with the result that these words inexplicably destroy the narrative as a whole (Caryl Churchill’s play Blue Kettle [1997]).25 Also, fictional narratives can radically deconstruct our real-world notions of time and space. According to Ursula K. Heise, “representation […] exists in a temporality of its own which is not dependent on the time laws of the ‘real’ world.”26 Indeed, as Brian Richardson has shown,27 fictional temporalities may be circular (Gabriel Josipovici’s short story “Mobius the Stripper” [1974])28; contradictory (Caryl Churchill’s play

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Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, 608–12; Buchholz, Sabine / Jahn, Manfred, “Space in Narrative”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / MarieLaure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, 551–55. See Alber / Iversen / Nielsen /Richardson, “Unnatural Narratives”, and, for a discussion of French fiction, Sherzer, Dina, Representation in Contemporary French Fiction, Lincoln/London 1987. See also Nielsen, “The Impersonal Voice” and Heinze, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology” as well as Henrik Skov Nielsen’s essay in this volume. Numerous other examples can be found in Richardson, Unnatural Voices. See also the discussions of unnatural minds by Stefan Iversen and Caroline Pirlet in this collection. Heise, Ursula K., Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism, Cambridge 1997, 205. See Richardson, “Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression”, 25–28, and Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse”, 48–52. See also the denaturalized cause-and-effect patterns that Marina Grishakova discusses in her article in this collection. See also Martin Hermann’s analysis of time-loop films in this volume.

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Traps [1978])29; antinomic or retrogressive (Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow)30; differential (when characters age at a different rate than other inhabitants of the storyworld, as in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando); conflated (when apparently different temporal zones begin to merge, as in Guy Davenport’s short story “The Haile Selassie Funeral Train” [1975])31; or multiple (when plotlines that begin and end at the same moment take different periods of time to unfold, as in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream [1594–96]). Most narrative theorists presuppose that it is always possible to retrieve or deduce a consistent story (fabula) from the narrative discourse (sjuzhet). However, with regard to numerous unnatural narratives, “this simply is not the case.”32 Settings and locations can of course also be ontologically unstable and may suddenly get transformed (Harold Pinter’s play The Basement [1967] and Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Lunar Park [2005]), or they can be otherwise impossible (like the unimaginable universe in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “El Aleph” [1949] or the architecturally impossible house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel The House of Leaves [2000]).33 Even though all unnatural narrative theorists have an interest in texts that are odd, strange, or unusual, unnatural narratology is not a homogenous school of thought. Unnatural narrative theory has an international orientation, and it is a multifarious, hybrid,34 and heteroglossic35 movement that

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For logically impossible temporalities see also Ryan, Marie-Laure, “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative”, in: Poetics Today, 27, 2006, Nr. 4, 633–74, and Dannenberg, Hilary P., Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction, Lincoln 2008. See also Chatman, Seymour, “Backwards”, in: Narrative, 17, 2009, Nr. 1, 31–55, and Per Krogh Hansen’s essay in this collection. David Herman refers to such temporalities in terms of polychronic narration. He argues that polychronic “situations and events root themselves in more than one place in time.” Herman, David, “Limits of Order: Toward a Theory of Polychronic Narration”, in: Narrative, 6, 1988, Nr. 1, 75. Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse”, 52. For unnatural worlds and events see the contributions by Jeff Thoss, Johannes Fehrle, and Andrea Moll in this volume. The notion of hybridity plays a crucial role in postcolonial criticism and was first used by Homi K. Bhabha, who argues that an “interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.” Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture, London 1994, 5. Bhabha sees all cultural identities as being “doubled […] or unstable”; he celebrates “hybridity and ‘cultural polyvalency,’ that is, the situation whereby individuals and groups belong simultaneously to more than one

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allows for various different perspectives on and definitions of the unnatural. In fact, one can argue that an unnatural narratology has to allow for various different perspectives on and definitions of the unnatural, not least because any understanding of the unnatural must consider its cultural context in order to avoid hemispheric blindness. As Andrea Moll illustrates in her essay, narrative scenarios that might seem unnatural to, say, most Western readers will seem perfectly natural and ordinary to Australian aborigines from New South Wales. In what follows, we would like to exemplarily outline one particular debate that takes place within unnatural narratology and relates to the role of cognitive parameters in discussions of the unnatural.36 Brian Richardson and Henrik Skov Nielsen are wary of the use of cognitive parameters in the analysis of unnatural narratives, especially insofar as such an approach tends to explain unnatural narratives in terms of ordinary cognition or familiar experiences. They argue that we simply have to accept the fact that the unnatural transcends real-world situations. Richardson and Nielsen point out that unnatural narratives foreground a resistance to realworld descriptions, and they highlight the inventive power of fictional techniques. From this perspective, unnatural narratologists describe deviations but respect the polysemy of literary creations, and a crucial aspect of this polysemy is the unnatural construction of recalcitrant texts. To put this slightly differently, they argue that we need to resist impulses to deny the unnatural its protean essence and unexpected effects. Hence, they prefer to explain the unnatural through narratological concepts that emphasize non-representational readings.37 Also, they accept the fundamental strangeness of unnatural scenarios and the feelings of disorientation that they might evoke. By contrast, Jan Alber argues that if we want to make sense of the unnatural, there is no way around our cognitive architecture, i.e., the frames and

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culture.” Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Manchester 2005, 196–99. ‘Heteroglossia’ denotes the existence of a “multiplicity of […] voices.” Bakhtin, Mikhail M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, transl. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin 1981, 263. See also the beginning of Caroline Pirlet’s essay in this volume. For an overview on cognitive narratology, see Herman, David, “Cognitive Narratology”, in: Peter Hühn / John Pier / Wolf Schmid / Jörg Schönert (eds.), Handbook of Narratology. Berlin/New York 2009, 30–43. While Richardson attempts to uphold the possibility of a multiplicity of interpretations, Nielsen is particularly interested in investigating the consequences of the differences between different types of narrative.

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scripts that are stored in our minds.38 Alber is particularly interested in explaining the unnatural on the basis of the process of naturalization.39 The term ‘naturalization’ was coined by Jonathan Culler in 1975: according to Culler, readers attempt to recuperate inexplicable elements of a text by taking recourse to familiar interpretive patterns.40 Monika Fludernik has extended this notion; she argues that in the process of “narrativization,” which is “a reading strategy that naturalizes texts by recourse to narrative schemata,”41 readers use parameters that are based on real-world experience and their exposure to literature to grasp textual oddities. On the basis of the concept of narrativization, Alber has developed five reading strategies which are designed to help readers come to terms with the unnatural, for example by reading events as internal states, by foregrounding the thematic, or by seeing unnatural scenarios as parts of allegorical structures.42 Furthermore, impossible scenarios urge us to create new frames43 by combining or extending parameters. Readers may, for example, generate new frames by blending pre-existing ones or they can engage in processes of ‘frame enrichment’ until the parameters include the strange phenomenon with which they are confronted.44 To paraphrase David Herman, in such cases, the reader’s task becomes a Sisyphean one: he or she has to conduct seemingly impossible mapping operations to orient him- or herself within storyworlds that refuse to be organized with the help of pre-existing cognitive parameters.45 What is at issue in this debate within unnatural narratology is the larger question of whether all narratives (no matter how bizarre) are ultimately “the 38

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41 42 43

44 45

“Frames basically deal with situations such as seeing a room or making a promise while scripts cover standard action sequences such as playing a game of football, going to a birthday party, or eating in a restaurant.” Jahn, Manfred, “Cognitive Narratology”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London 2005, 69. In his contribution to this volume, Henrik Skov Nielsen draws an important distinction between naturalization and conventionalization. He argues that “the strange, the formal, the fictional must be recuperated or naturalized, brought within our ken, if we do not want to remain gaping before monumental inscriptions.” Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, Ithaca 1975, 134. For attempts to naturalize the unnatural, see the contributions by Caroline Pirlet and Jeff Thoss in this volume. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 34. Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 82–3. On this point, see also Fludernik, Monika, “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters”, in: David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford 2003, 256. Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 82–3. Herman, David, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln 2002, 289.

Introduction

11

result of somebody’s subjective experience,”46 and can be defined in terms of Monika Fludernik’s notion of experientiality, i.e., “the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience.’”47 In other words, the question at stake is whether all narratives (including unnatural ones) somehow reflect human problems and/or concerns, or whether we can explain unnatural narratives on the basis of other (non-human, non-representational, textual, artificial, or synthetic48) considerations.49 One might argue that, taken to an extreme, the cognitive outlook potentially simplifies and trivializes the unnatural, or perhaps even imposes a normalizing strategy on the deviant: from this perspective, it might be better to simply let the unnatural speak for itself. On the other hand, in extreme manifestations, the non-representational approach sees unnatural narratives as monumental inscriptions that are so transcendent that theoreticians have to remain gaping before them and cannot even begin to make sense of them. The articles collected here all try to avoid the potential pitfalls of these two extreme positions, and attempt to do justice to the unnatural. More specifically, our contributors seek to get the balance right between the uniqueness of the unnatural and our attempts to make sense of it. This collection looks at a wide variety of different unnatural narratives. It places a major focus on the unnatural in postmodernist50 novels, short stories, and plays (Richardson, Nielsen, Pirlet, Grishakova) but our contributors also deal with Modernist texts (Richardson, Alber, and Grishakova),

46

47

48

49

50

Ludwig, Sämi, “Grotesque Landscapes: African American Fiction, Voodoo Animism, and Cognitive Models”, in: Maria Diedrich / Carl Pedersen / Justine Tally (eds.), Mapping African America: History, Narrative Formation, and the Production of Knowledge, Hamburg 1999, 195. Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London and New York 1996, 12. For discussions of the limits of experientiality, see also the contributions by Caroline Pirlet and Stefan Iversen in this collection. For the mind-boggling problem of a definition of narrative that covers both natural and unnatural manifestation see Henrik Skov Nielsen’s article. According to Jim Phelan, “responses to the synthetic component [of narrative] involve an audience’s interest in and attention to the characters and to the larger narrative as artificial constructs.” Phelan, James, Living To Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration, Ithaca, NY 2005, 20. On this question, see also Alber, “The ‘Moreness’ or ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’ Narratology.” According to Brian McHale, “the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological.” That is, postmodernist fiction self-reflexively problematizes the existence of the projected fictional world. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, New York/London 1987, 10.

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non-fictional testimonies (Iversen),51 comics and graphic novels (Thoss and Fehrle), films (Hermann and Hansen), and oral narratives (Moll). Alber looks at earlier manifestations of unnaturalness and investigates the development of the unnatural in English literary history. Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology is based on thoroughly revised papers that were given at a conference called “Unnatürliches Erzählen, Unnatural Narratives,” which was organized by Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze and took place at the new Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) in Freiburg (Germany) between November 11 and November 13, 2008.52 The contributions deal with different aspects of unnatural narrative theory and fall into the following four categories: (1) synchronic and diachronic perspectives; (2) unnatural narrators and minds; (3) unnatural time; and (4) unnatural worlds and events.53 (1) The first part of the collection concerns synchronic and diachronic perspectives on the unnatural. It follows Lawrence Krader’s basic argument that one may “analyze a social phenomenon by tracing its passage from one point in time to another, or how it came, at the later point, to be; alternatively, we may focus on its relations in a particular society at a given time.”54 Part 1 of this volume thus outlines the research program of unnatural narratology from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, and addresses manifestations of the unnatural in postmodernist fiction as well as the historical development of unnaturalness.

51

52

53

54

As Iversen shows in his contribution to this volume, horrific and/or sublime events, which can occur in the natural world, may call for unnatural techniques across the fiction/non-fiction divide. The FRIAS is the international research college of the University of Freiburg. It was established after Freiburg’s success in the Federal Excellence Initiative in October 2007. We would like to thank Werner Frick, the Director of the School of Language and Literature and Speaker of the Directorate, Gesa von Essen, the Scientific Coordinator, as well as Dorothee Birke, Michael Butter, and Tilmann Köppe, the School’s three Junior Fellows, for having been given the opportunity to organize this FRIAS conference. Prior to the conference, Alber and Heinze had co-won a competition for a Junior Research Group, initiated by the School of Language and Literature at FRIAS. Many of the contributors to this collection have an anglophone bias. Although this does influence the selection of examples, we see this project as an invitation and opening for discussion and thus hope that specialists from other fields will join to broaden the spectrum and scope of this project. Krader, Lawrence, “Beyond Structuralism: The Dialectics of the Diachronic and Synchronic Methods in the Human Sciences”, in: Ino Rossi (ed.), The Unconscious in Culture: The Structuralism of Lévi-Strauss in Perspective, New York 1974, 336.

Introduction

13

Brian Richardson opens this volume by discussing three foundational concepts of narrative theory that are transgressed by unnatural narratives: (a) voice, or the identity of the narrator; (b) story, that is, a logically consistent event sequence that is retrievable from the discourse; and (c) epistemic consistency, or the idea that a character cannot know the contents of the mind of another character. Richardson then moves to a discussion of the mimetic bias of narratology and suggests that the field open itself to the unnatural. Finally, he discriminates between mimetic, non-mimetic, and anti-mimetic texts, and, on the basis of an analysis of the history of English literature, Richardson points out that only the third type qualifies as being unnatural. In his paper, Jan Alber takes a closer look at earlier manifestations of unnaturalness, and investigates the development of physically or logically impossible scenarios and events through literary history from a cognitive perspective. He focuses on unnatural segments that have already been naturalized or conventionalized and thus no longer strike us as odd or strange. As a thesis he proposes that the development of new literary genres often goes hand in hand with the naturalization of the unnatural. In other words, new genres are frequently created as physical or logical impossibilities are converted into new perceptual frames. Examples of such new frames are the speaking animal in beast fables, the many supernatural elements in medieval fairy tales (and, later on, in Gothic novels and other fantasy literature), the speaking objects that narrate the circulation novels of the eighteenth century (anticipated by the speaking cross in the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood”), the telepathic narrator in much realist fiction, the impossible renderings of character interiority in Modernist fiction, and the numerous projected impossibilities (e.g., time travel) in science fiction. (2) The second part of this volume deals with unnatural narrators and minds. Henrik Skov Nielsen begins his contribution by comparing his and Rüdiger Heinze’s views on ‘omniscient’ first-person narrators, i.e., homodiegetic narrators that know more than they could if they were human beings.55 Nielsen argues that the two approaches converge in so far as they both argue that readers arrive at inadequate interpretations if they simply deem such narrators unreliable, insane, or wrong whenever they transcend the limits of natural storytellers: in such cases something else happens which has to do with the unnatural. In a second step, Nielsen then addresses the question of whether it is possible to come up with a definition of narrative that covers fictional, non-fictional, natural, and unnatural texts. In the final 55

See Nielsen, “The Impersonal Voice”, and Heinze, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology.”

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part of his essay, he makes an important distinction between naturalization on the one hand, and what he calls ‘conventionalization’ on the other, and he develops a new taxonomy that combines the conventional, the unconventional, the natural, and the unnatural. In his essay, Stefan Iversen addresses the question of how testimonies by Holocaust survivors challenge Monika Fludernik’s notion of experientiality. His findings urge Iversen to modify and extend the notion of experientiality as follows: he argues that traumatic events such as the Holocaust may lead to representations in which the mediating consciousness is unable to properly grasp the recounted event. In a sense, such narratives have too much life but too few signs. Iversen refers to these instances in terms of “unmediated experientiality.” On the other hand, there are also narratives which have too few or perhaps even contradictory human anchoring-points (like Samuel Beckett’s prose texts). Such narratives, which have too many signs but too little life, are referred to in terms of “demediated experientiality.” In her contribution, Caroline Pirlet develops a hybrid approach to the unnatural. More specifically, she fuses Fludernik’s ‘natural’ narratological approach with Peter Brooks’s ideas of desire for closure, the dynamics of the psyche, and repetition as binding.56 This fusion aspires to concretize the dynamics of consciousness and the process of narrativization. In a second step, she applies her theoretical models to Beckett’s television play Quad (1982) and Caryl Churchill’s play Heart’s Desire (1997) (in both plays repetitions play an important role). Pirlet’s interpretations closely correlate with Alber’s reading strategies 1, 2, and 3 (“reading events as internal states”; “foregrounding the thematic”; “reading allegorically”) but they also highlight the idea of repetition as a means to master psychological trauma. Pirlet closes her essay by suggesting that “a truly anthropocentric, reader-oriented cognitive approach like ‘natural’ narratology must sooner or later acknowledge readers’ affective responses to literature.” (3) Part 3 of Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology addresses unnatural time lines, i.e., experiments with our knowledge about time in the real world. Marina Grishakova looks at complex types of causality that denaturalize our stereotyped thought patterns about the connection between event sequences. She discriminates between the following five unnatural forms of narrative causality: (a) fuzzy causality concerns highly improbable links between causes and effects; (b) the term zero-degree causality describes a 56

See Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Cambridge 1992, and Brooks, Peter, “Narrative Desire”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 130–37.

Introduction

15

situation in which a condition that is inherently rich with causal potentialities and sufficient to entail causal connection fails to produce it; (c) retrograde causality correlates with the reversal of cause and effect; (d) causal closure closes off causality and precludes the further propagation of effects and their causes; and (e) causal loops confront us with causes that engender effects, and those effects reproduce the initial causes. Grishakova ends her contribution by arguing that these unnatural forms of narrative causality restructure the natural time order based on the relations of antecedence-subsequence and create a new, meaningful order of experience. In his essay, Martin Hermann analyses time-loop films in which time skips back like a broken record and certain characters are forced to relive parts of their past. Furthermore, Hermann develops a complex argument with far-reaching implications. Not only does he show how Hollywood films of the 1980s adapted the aesthetics and logic of adventure computer games and combined these with the “traditional literary strategy of the quest;” he also details how time-loop films are “simultaneously a conventional and exceptional type of narrative” as a result of the “double strategy of narrative remediation.” As a consequence, Hermann provides strong evidence that “unconventional, unnatural narratives need to be rooted in established traditions of storytelling in order to be appreciated by a wider audience.” Per Krogh Hansen deals with cases of reversed time in which the narrative discourse represents a (more or less) chronological sequence of events in such a way that we gradually move backward in time, while the individual sections move forward through time. More specifically, he shows how the episodically reversed films Memento and Irréversible “invite the spectator into a game of interpretive opening and rejection.” As Hansen argues, this reversal engages the reader in a game of post hoc ergo propter hoc that not only entertains cognitively, but ultimately emphasizes humanity’s fundamental ability to ascribe progression and causal patterns to history and surroundings and thus to make meaning in what seems meaningless, order in what is chaos. (4) The fourth part of our collection analyzes the projection of unnatural storyworlds and events. For example, Jeff Thoss looks at metaleptic jumps, i.e., jumps between different narrative levels, in Grant Morrison’s superhero comic Animal Man (1988–90). More specifically, he analyses (a) transgressions between the primary world of the story and other (embedded or imaginary) worlds within the text; (b) feigned transgressions between the primary world of the text and the (extra-textual) world of the reader; and (c) transgressions between story and discourse. Thoss approaches the unnatural from a cognitive perspective: he shows that even though metalepsis is clearly

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an unnatural phenomenon, narratives (such as Animal Man) also provide ways of naturalizing or explaining metaleptic jumps. In his contribution, Johannes Fehrle applies Alber’s concept of unnaturalness to the storyworlds in comics and graphic novels (such as Frank Miller’s Sin City [1993], Richard McGuire’s “Here” [2006], Robert Crumb’s “Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics” [2005], Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns [2008], and Brian Talbot’s The Tale of One Bad Rat [2008]). Fehrle shows that comics have not suffered from as strict a ‘dictatorship’ of the mimetic as other forms of narrative fiction, and argues that there is no preeminence of the natural (or realist) in comics comparable to that in highbrow fiction. Fehrle opts for a broader, transmedial concept of the unnatural that closely correlates with Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization and covers cases of “extreme narration, astonishing storyworlds, and breaks with classical narrative models in comics.” Finally, Andrea Moll’s essay focuses on unnatural events in oral forms of Aboriginal storytelling. She demonstrates the importance and diverse functions of storytelling in orally based cultures, and she also provides an intercultural perspective on unnaturalness by looking at linguistic deep level structures in Aboriginal English. Moll makes a compelling point for “taking cultural differences into account when assessing the ‘naturalness’ or ‘unnaturalness’ of narratives” because “what may seem an unnatural narrative element or strategy to us may be fully ‘naturalized,’ that is cognitively conventionalized and internalized by members of another culture living in a different social and cultural environment.” Taken together, the essays in this collection develop new narratological tools and modeling systems which are designed to capture the strangeness and extravagance of unnatural narratives. What Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology offers is a systematic investigation of anti-mimetic techniques and strategies that relate to different narrative parameters (narrators, characters, time, space, and events), different media, and different periods within various literary histories. For us, an unnatural narratology is a narratology that appreciates the multifariousness of narrative because, as Brian Richardson puts it, “in its more innovative forms,” the convention of narrative “is to alter convention, its essence is to elude a fixed essence, and its nature is to seek out the unnatural.”57

57

Richardson, Unnatural Voices, 140.

Introduction

17

Bibliography Alber, Jan, “The ‘Moreness’ or ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’ Narratology: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Lessness’ Reconsidered”, in: Style 36, 2002, Nr. 1, 54–75. Reprinted in: Short Story Criticism 74, 2004, 113–24. –, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Study, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96. Finnish translation forthcoming 2010. –, “Unnatural Narratives”, in: The Literary Encyclopedia, 2009, http://www.litencyc.com. –, “Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama”, Habilitation, University of Freiburg, in progress. Alber, Jan / Fludernik, Monika (eds.) Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, Columbus 2010. Alber, Jan / Iversen, Stefan / Nielsen, Henrik Skov / Richardson, Brian, “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models”, Narrative 18, 2010, Nr. 2, 113–36. Danish translation in progress. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and transl. Stephen Halliwell, Cambridge, MA 1999. Bakhtin, Mikhail M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, transl. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin 1981. Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Manchester 2005. Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture, London 1994. Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Cambridge 1992. –, “Narrative Desire”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 130–37. Buchholz, Sabine / Jahn, Manfred, “Space in Narrative”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, 551–55. Chatman, Seymour, “Backwards”, in: Narrative 17, 2009, Nr. 1, 31–55. Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, Ithaca 1975. Currie, Mark, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, Edinburgh 2007. Dannenberg, Hilary P., Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction, Lincoln 2008. Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London and New York 1996. –, “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters”, in: David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford 2003, 243–67. –, “Time in Narrative”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, 608–12. Fauconnier, Gilles / Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities, New York 2002. Halperin, David M., Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, Oxford and New York 1995, 62. Heinze, Rüdiger, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, Narrative, 16, 2008, Nr. 3, 279–97. Heise, Ursula K., Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism, Cambridge 1997, 205.

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Herman, David, “Limits of Order: Toward a Theory of Polychronic Narration”, in: Narrative 6, 1988, Nr. 1, 72–95. –, “Introduction”, in: David Herman (ed.), Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, Columbus 1999, 1–30. –, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln 2002. –, “Cognitive Narratology”, in: Peter Hühn / John Pier / Wolf Schmid / Jörg Schönert (eds.), Handbook of Narratology. Berlin/New York 2009, 30–43. Iversen, Stefan, “Den uhyggelige fortælling i Johannes V. Jensens tidlige forfatterskab” [“The Uncanny Narrative in the Early Works of Johannes V. Jensen”], PhD thesis, Aarhus University 2008. Jahn, Manfred, “Cognitive Narratology”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / MarieLaure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London 2005, 67–71. Krader, Lawrence, “Beyond Structuralism: The Dialectics of the Diachronic and Synchronic Methods in the Human Sciences”, in: Ino Rossi (ed.), The Unconscious in Culture: The Structuralism of Lévi-Strauss in Perspective, New York 1974. Labov, William, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, Philadelphia 1972. Labov, William / Waletzky, Joshua, “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience”, in: June Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, Seattle 1967, 12–44. Ludwig, Sämi, “Grotesque Landscapes: African American Fiction, Voodoo Animism, and Cognitive Models”, in: Maria Diedrich / Carl Pedersen / Justine Tally (eds.), Mapping African America: History, Narrative Formation, and the Production of Knowledge, Hamburg 1999, 189–202. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, New York/London 1987. Margolin, Uri, “Character”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, 52–57. Mäkelä, Maria, “Possible Minds: Constructing – and Reading – Another Consciousness as Fiction”, in: Pekka Tammi / Hannu Tommola (eds.), FREE Language INDIRECT Translation DISCOURSE Narratology: Linguistic, Translatological, and Literary-Theoretical Encounters, Tampere 2006, 231–60. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, Narrative, 12, 2004, Nr. 2, 133–50. –, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narratives”, in: Jan Alber / Monika Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, Columbus 2010, 275–302. Orr, Leonard, Problems and Poetics of the Nonaristotelian Novel, Lewisburg 1991. Pavel, Thomas, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, MA 1986. Phelan, James, Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration, Ithaca, NY 2005. Phelan, James / Booth, Wayne C. “Narrator”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, 2005, 388–92. Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes: The Republic II, Books VI–X, ed. and transl. Paul Shorey, Cambridge, MA, 1970. Richardson, Brian, “‘Time is Out of Joint’: Narrative Models and the Temporality of Drama”, Poetics Today 8, 1987, Nr. 2, 299–310. –, “Pinter’s Landscape and the Boundaries of Narrative”, Essays in Literature 18, 1991, Nr. 1, 37–45.

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–, “Beyond Poststructuralism: Theory of Character, the Personae of Modern Drama, and the Antinomies of Critical Theory”, Modern Drama 40, 1997, 86–99. –, “Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression: Theorizing the Collapse of Time, Voice, and Frame”, Narrative 8, 2000, Nr. 1, 23–42. –, “Denarration in Fiction: Erasing the Story in Beckett and Others,” Narrative 9, 2001, Nr. 2, 168–75. –, “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 47–63. –, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006. –, “Theses on Unnatural Narratology”, 2009, http://www.nordisk.au.dk/forskningscentre/nrl/unnatural/brtheses (last accessed February 10, 2010). Ryan, Marie-Laure, “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative”, in: Poetics Today, 27, 2006, Nr. 4, 633–74. –, “Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative”, in: Style 43, 2009, Nr. 2, 142–64. Sherzer, Dina, Representation in Contemporary French Fiction, Lincoln/London 1987. Shklovsky, Viktor, “Art as Technique [1917]”, in: Lee T. Lemon/Marion J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism, Lincoln 1965, 3–24. Tammi, Pekka, “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’)”, in Partial Answers, 4, 2006, Nr. 2, 19–40. –, “Against ‘Against’ Narrative”, in: Lars-Åke Skalin (ed.), Narrativity, Fictionality, and Literariness: The Narrative Turn and the Study of Literary Fiction, Örebro 2008, 37–55.

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I. Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives

What Is Unnatural Narrative Theory?

23

Brian Richardson (Maryland)

What Is Unnatural Narrative Theory?1

1. Introduction I begin this paper with an ostensive definition of unnatural narrative, and go on to examine three foundational concepts of narrative theory that are transgressed by unnatural fictions: voice, or the identity of the narrator; story, that is, a logically consistent fabula that is retrievable from the sujet; and epistemic consistency, or the idea that a character cannot know the contents of the mind of another character. Each of these foundational concepts is seriously challenged by a number of texts that have up to now resisted traditional narrative theory: second-person narration, antinomic temporality, and what Genette has called paralepsis. I go on to speculate on the reasons for the mimetic bias in narratology, its history, and its consequences. In the second part of the paper, I differentiate unnatural narrative from superficially similar types and genres, such as science fiction, the marvelous tale, allegory, and alternative history. I then take up the question of whether unnatural works can become naturalized, and if so, whether they can be made unnatural again. I discuss the degrees of unnaturalness in self-reflexive works, unnatural techniques in nonfiction and popular fiction, and conclude with some reflections on the values of unnatural narrative. To answer the question of this article’s title, we may begin with what analytical philosophers refer to as an ostensive definition: they are works like Borges’ most unreal stories, Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy (1957), Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969), and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), to start with paradigmatic examples. It is immediately apparent that these works all transgress mimetic expectations, the canons of realism, and the conventions of natural narrative. Such works can be found in most periods; they range from Aristophanes’ plays to Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534) to Shakespeare’s more extravagant creations such as The Winter’s Tale (1611) to Diderot’s Jacques le fatalist et son maitre (1796) to the latest postmodern and avant-garde texts. Un1

I wish to begin by thanking Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze for organizing the impressive and intellectually exciting conference at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies where this paper was first read. I thank the other attendees for their many helpful and perspicacious comments.

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natural narratives in fact constitute an entire alternative history of literature, one that has been ignored or marginalized by poetics that remain grounded in the concept of mimesis. Let us begin with a discussion of three basic, indeed foundational, components of narrative theory: narration, story, and ontological consistency, and examine how the mimetic bias in narrative theory has distorted the field and left so many gaps in the examples it purports to cover.

2. Narration Genette states that the novelist must choose between two narrative postures, either “to have the story told by one of its ‘characters,’ or to have it told by a narrator outside the story.”2 This statement is not entirely accurate; there are many ways in which this formulation may be contravened. Multipersoned narratives like William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) include both character monologues and, in the final section, third-person narration; classical narratology can comprehend either stance but has no category for such combined practices. Unnatural forms of we-narration also include both a homo- and a heterodiegetic perspective, as the narrator describes the mental processes of others. Perhaps most interesting for our purposes is second-person narration. Not surprisingly, nearly all earlier theorists claimed it was one of the two prominent forms. Revealingly, however, such theorists could not agree on which form it actually belonged to. I observe in my book, Unnatural Voices, that for Genette, this “rare and simple case” is readily situated as heterodiegetic narration.3 Brian McHale likewise believes that “you stands in for the third-person pronoun of the fictional character, functioning in a kind of displaced free indirect discourse.”4 However, Franz K. Stanzel takes the opposite position, affirming that in “the novel in the second person […] the ‘you’ is really a self-dramatization of the ‘I,’ and the form of the monologue prevails here, too.”5 Discussing Butor’s La Modification (1957), Mieke Bal states categorically that “the ‘you’ is simply an ‘I’ in disguise, a ‘first person’ narrator talking to himself; the novel is a ‘first person’ narrative with a formal twist to it that does not engage the en2

3

4 5

Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, transl. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca 1980, 244. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse Revisited, transl. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca 1988, 133. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, London 1987, 223. Stanzel, Franz Karl, A Theory of Narrative, transl. Charlotte Goedsche, Cambridge 1979, 225.

What Is Unnatural Narrative Theory?

25

tire narrative situation.”6 Matt DelConte likewise affirms that nearly “all second person narration is actually homodiegesis considering that a narrator must be on the same diegetic plane as his/her narratee-protagonist […] in order to communicate with that narratee-protagonist.”7 What are we to make of such decisive yet contradictory pronouncements? This confusion is inevitable because second-person narration is situated between but irreducible to the standard binary oppositions of either first and third person or hetero- and homodiegetic narration; instead, it oscillates irregularly from one side to the other and cannot be convincingly “naturalized” to either conventional practice. Monika Fludernik has accurately articulated the curious nature of this kind of narration: “second-person fiction destroys the easy assumption of the traditional dichotomous structures which the standard narratological models have proposed, especially the distinction between homo- and heterodiegetic narrative (Genette) or that of the identity or nonidentity of the realms of existence between narrator and characters (Stanzel).”8 Antimimetic fiction challenges or erodes the boundaries that are observed and in fact define mimetic fiction.

3. Fabula and Sujet One of the most important concepts in standard narrative theory is the interrelated notion of fabula (story) and sujet (discourse). And to be sure, in natural and non-fictional narratives a distinct fabula can always be inferred from a fixed sujet, and in most cases, the sujet is firmly fixed. In the words of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, the disposition of elements in the text […] is bound to be one-directional and irreversible, because language prescribes a linear figuration of signs and hence a linear presentation of information about things. We read letter after letter, word after word, sentence after sentence, chapter after chapter, and so on.9

But with many avant-garde and postmodern works, this is not always the case; sujets come unmoored and fabulas vanish or multiply unnaturally.10 In 6

7

8 9

10

Bal, Mieke, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 3rd Edition, Toronto 2009, 29. DelConte, Matt, “Why You Can’t Speak: Second Person Narration, Voice, and a New Model for Understanding Narrative”, in: Style, 37, 2003, Nr. 2, 210. Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London/New York 1996, 226. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, New York 1983, 45. See Richardson, Brian, “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Non-Mimetic Fiction”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics:

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an Ouroborean text like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) or Vladimir Nabokov’s story “The Circle” (1936), the last word of the text is also its first word; both the story and its telling seem to be infinite. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La jalousie (1957) and Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” (1969) can be said to have an indeterminate, contradictory fabula and a fixed sujet. Experimental works like B. S. Johnson’s “novel-in-a-box,” The Unfortunates (1969), whose pages are collected in individual groups which the reader must arrange, have an indeterminate sujet and a fixed fabula, as do many hypertext fictions. Denarrated texts like those of Beckett’s in which the narrator admits that all the events he has just narrated never took place and therefore have no retrievable fabula; all that we have is the sujet. Some works where the reader chooses from different possible narrative paths have multiple fabulas and a variable sujet, such as Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters (1992) or Michael Joyce’s hyperfiction, afternoon: a story (1987). Still other possibilities exist. It is this kind of experimental, unnatural construction of fabula and sujet that narrative theory needs to comprehend.

4. Ontological Consistency Many classic examples of first-person narration contain unnatural or impossible claims of knowledge. As Peter Rabinowitz has pointed out: Anton Lavrent’evich, the narrator of Dostoyevsky’s Possessed, offers a limited perspective on events at the beginning of the novel. But while he remains the nominal narrator throughout the text, his persona and limitations fade away for long passages in the middle, where we receive a great deal of information to which he could have no possible access.11

Numerous other examples of such epistemic transgressions could be readily adduced. Most narratologists simply ignore these discrepancies, considering them as a kind of embarrassing mistake. But they are in fact widespread and frequently call attention to themselves in the narrative. Henry Fielding reveals the minds of many of the characters in Joseph Andrews (1742), but at other points his narrator steps back from omniscience and claims he does not know certain facts, as Wilhelm Füger has shown:

11

Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 47–63, and Richardson, Brian, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006. Rabinowitz, Peter, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, Ithaca 1987, 126–27.

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He skillfully alternates between on the one hand pretending to proceed strictly in the manner of a conscientious biographer, whose credibility depends on a careful sifting and weighing of evidence, and on the other hand mockingly unmasking this pretension as a purely fictional device.12

In Nikolaij V. Gogol’s story “The Overcoat” (1842), the narrator provides many details of the private thoughts of the protagonist. At one point, he describes a smile on the face of Akaky Akakievich, and after rhetorically asking why the man was smiling, goes on to aver that there is no way to creep into a man’s soul and find out what he thinks – an activity, that is, that the narrator has been performing all along. Anna Kavan’s first-person narrator includes elaborate descriptions of scenes he did not witness in Chapters Five and Six of her hallucinatory novel, Ice (1967), with no explanation of how this could have occurred. In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980), Saleem Sinai describes another such violation when he states that Nazeem Aziz eavesdropped on her daughters’ dreams. “Yes, there’s no other explanation, stranger things have been known to happen in this country of ours” he asserts, though soon he will offer alternative, naturalistic explanations: “the invasion of dreams” might also be a mother’s deduction, or female intuition.13 This account does prepare the reader for still greater epistemological violations, as when Saleem becomes able to hear the thoughts of other children born, like him, on the day of India’s independence. Genette is one of the few theorists to acknowledge the existence of such unnatural narrative acts, and discusses a number of such examples, which he terms “paralepses,” in Proust’s Recherche.14 These include the last thoughts of Bergotte on his deathbed, which, as has often been noted, cannot have been reported to Marcel since no one – for very good reason – could have knowledge of them. That is one paralepsis to end all paralepses; it is irreducible by any hypothesis to the narrator’s information, and one we must indeed attribute to the ‘omniscient’ novelist – and one that would be enough to prove Proust capable of transgressing the limits of his own narrative ‘system.’15

We have, Genette explains, a “paradoxical – and to some people shameful – situation of a ‘first-person’ narrating that is nevertheless occasionally omniscient.”16 This kind of epistemic violation is however by no means uncom12

13 14 15 16

Füger, Wilhelm, “Limits of the Narrator’s Knowledge in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews: A Contribution to the Theory of Negated Knowledge in Fiction”, in: Style, 38, 2006, Nr. 3, 282. Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, New York 2006, 58. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 207–11. Ibid., 208. Ibid., 252.

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mon and, as noted earlier in this paper, is frequently present in we-narration where a character-narrator discloses the thoughts of other minds. Articles by Dan Shen and by Henrik Skov Nielsen have further explored this oscillating narrative perspective. Shen writes that paralepses “draw attention not only to the limitations of the violated modes of focalization, but also to the fact that the barriers between modes of focalization are very much conventional.”17 Nielsen takes his analysis further, arguing for two separate theoretical entities in the case of such paraleptic texts: the narrating-I and what he calls the “impersonal voice of the narrative.” The latter can say what a narrating-I cannot say, produce details that no person could remember, render the thoughts of other characters, speak when the character remains silent, etc. It speaks, however, in the first person, both when the possibilities of the person referred to by the first person are abandoned and when it says what this person cannot say.18

As Nielsen and others such as Rüdiger Heinze and Maria Mäkelä point out,19 such epistemological violations are quite common and often go unremarked in ostensibly realistic narratives. The “scandalous” case of paralepsis is in fact the same conflation of homo- and heterodiegetic forms that appears in the “you” and “we” narration that Genette declines to theorize. To do so one must address exactly those kinds of epistemological ruptures and ontological conflations typical of postmodernism and present in a wide range of other works.

5. Theoretical Implications This discussion of the ways in which unnatural components of narrative have been denied, ignored, and marginalized by narrative theory leads to some further observations. The first is how unnecessary this denial is. There is no need for theorists to protect some imaginary notion of the purity of 17

18

19

Shen, Dan, “Breaking Conventional Barriers: Transgressions of Modes of Focalization”, in: Willie van Peer / Seymour Chatman (eds.), New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, Albany 2001, 172. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, in: Narrative, 12, 2004, 139–40. Heinze, Rüdiger, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, in: Narrative, 16, 2008, Nr. 3, 279–97; Mäkelä, Maria, “Possible Minds: Constructing – and Reading – Another Consciousness as Fiction,” in: Pekka Tammi / Hannu Tommola (eds.), FREE Language INDIRECT Translation DISCOURSE Narratology: Linguistic, Translatological and Literary-Theoretical Encounters, Tampere 2006, 231–60.

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narratology and thereby artificially limit the works it allows itself to comprehend. In this context it is interesting to note that the subjects of characterization and, to a lesser degree, narrative space, do not suffer the same theoretical neglect from narratologists. The existence of nonhuman and impossible characters is often acknowledged, as are other worlds that differ radically from our own in possible-worlds theory. Genette is even prepared to discuss the unnatural practice of metalepsis, or the transgression of narrative levels.20 It must be admitted that, for the most part, insufficient theoretical examination has been done of these odd, fascinating narrative components; nevertheless, their presence in theoretical discourse shows that narratology can readily incorporate such elements if it desires to. There is no reason why rhetorical, structuralist, or cognitivist narrative theory must necessarily exclude unnatural events and texts.21 Why not construct a rhetoric of the unnatural to complement existing formulations? There could easily be a structuralist theory of anti-mimetic texts – in fact, such work was begun by David Hayman and Jean Ricardou.22 There should be a cognitive study of the means, methods, and functions of such anti-narratives. What purposes do they serve and why do they produce such fascination? The reason for most modern theoreticians’ concerted avoidance of such texts is not obvious. There may, however, be a simple answer: the desire of most narratologists to have a single, all-embracing theory that seamlessly covers all narratives, fictional and non-fictional, popular and recondite, natural and artificial. But such an approach cannot in principle begin to do justice to the distinctive qualities of fiction, whose defining feature is its difference from the actual world. In fiction, one can have unicorns and comic scenes in Hades, a character can die multiple times, logically impossible places and events can exist, and the voice of one narrator can collapse into that of another. Why would anyone think that a single theory of narrative could account for two such different uses without some very elaborate theoretical 20 21

22

On metalepsis, see also the contribution by Jeff Thoss in this volume. It is encouraging to see that such work has been started, as evidenced by the rhetorical studies by Peter Rabinowitz and James Phelan cited in this paper. Jan Alber and H. Porter Abbott have likewise done excellent work in bringing together unnatural texts and cognitive theory. This promises to be a very rewarding enterprise. See Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96; Abbott, H. Porter, “Immersions in the Cognitive Sublime: The Textual Experience of the Extratextual Unknown in García Márquez and Beckett”, in: Narrative, 17, 2009, 131–42. See also the contributions by Jan Alber, Caroline Pirlet, and Jeff Thoss in this collection. See Hayman, David, Re-Forming the Narrative: Toward a Mechanics of Modernist Fiction, Ithaca 1987, and Ricardou, Jean, Pour une theorie du nouveau roman, Paris 1971.

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maneuvering around this inalterable opposition? Why use an explanatory model like that used in linguistics or biology when neither science has to account for artificial languages, mythical plants, impossible constructs, or parodic forms? Fiction is different, often wildly different, and this needs to be taken account of in any narrative theory that aims at comprehensiveness. Since its inception, narrative theory has had a pronounced bias toward mimetic works. Aristotle’s Poetics is primarily concerned with the mimetic nature of tragedies and epics. He does not like the epic poet to “speak in his own voice” – no facile metafiction for the Stagyrite. Nevertheless, there are many points where the artifactuality of literature and its difference from the events of life is admitted, particularly where Aristotle insists on the difference between a single, unified action and the many often unconnected events in a person’s life, or again where he famously differentiates between poetry and history. Given these positions, we ‘unnaturals’ feel it a terrible loss that his treatise on comedy remains lost. What would he have said about the outrageous characters and events of Aristophanes and other authors of Old Comedy, or the metadramatic parodies like those in the lost play whose title alone has come down to us: Hercules the Stage Manager? Had Aristotle’s other poetics been known, the entire history of critical theory might have been very different. Since the time of Aristotle, a number of theorists have nevertheless approached issues from what might be termed an unnatural perspective. We may begin by mentioning Viktor Shklovsky, who famously claimed that Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) was the most typical work of world literature. Bakhtin’s work on the Rabelaisian text and on some of the odder kinds of chronotope (such as the medieval dream vision chronotope) is extremely relevant to contemporary research into the unnatural. Käte Hamburger is the first of a long line of impressive theorists who identify and draw attention to what Dorrit Cohn has called “the distinction of fiction,”23 that is, discourse features that typically exist only in a work of fiction, such as the knowledge of the contents of other minds. These theorists include, in addition to Cohn, Anne Banfield and Sylvie Patron. Possible-worlds theory as adapted for narrative studies, especially in the work of Lubomir Doleˇzel, is extremely pertinent. Other theorists whose work features recent experimental fiction and who should also be mentioned in this context include Jean Ricardou, David Hayman, Leonard Orr, and Dina Sherzer.24 23 24

Cohn, Dorrit, The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore 1999. Orr, Leonard, Problems and Poetics of the Nonaristotelian Novel, Lewisburg 1991; Sherzer, Dina, Representation in Contemporary French Fiction, Lincoln / London 1987.

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6. Limits and Extent of the Unnatural What text is not unnatural? By this question I mean to ask what ostensibly similar genres are in fact not unnatural at all? In the discussion that follows, I will begin with the caveat that my own sense of the unnatural is more restricted than that of many of my colleagues and collaborators. In particular, I distinguish between mimetic, non-mimetic, and anti-mimetic poetics. To use some paradigmatic examples, Anna Karenina (1877–78) is mimetic, that is it seeks to reproduce in fiction typical characters and events from the actual world. A fairy tale is non-mimetic; it makes no sense to criticize a specimen of the genre by saying, “Wait, there are no fairies! And if there were, they wouldn’t behave that way.” By contrast, the anti-mimetic points out its own constructedness, the artificiality of many of its techniques, and its inherent fictionality. Classical science fiction, I argue, is not typically unnatural, especially insofar as it attempts to construct entirely realistic narratives of events that could occur in the future; the mimetic impulse remains constant. Postmodern science fiction, however, such as practiced by Italo Calvino or Stanislaw Lem, does create the kinds of anti-realist or logically impossible settings and events required by the genuinely unnatural; it might be noted that more and more science fiction seems to be moving in this “unnatural” direction. Novels that construct an alternative history, such as if the Confederacy had won the U. S. Civil War, also typically conform to a realistic framework – indeed, that is arguably their chief source of interest. Supernatural fiction, in which a magic potion, an angel, or a divinity affects the course of events, also typically aspires to a mimetic poetics, though one that exceeds the parameters of classical realism: its authors dramatize a world in which supernatural entities can genuinely alter events; they produce a mimetic representation according to their beliefs. Again, anti-mimetic authors can tamper with any of these forms. When Rushdie has Gandhi die on the wrong day in Midnight’s Children, the fact is acknowledged in the text, and the narrator refuses to change the mistaken date to the correct one; his alternative history is an unnatural, postmodern one. When he retells the stories of Mohammed and Satan in The Satanic Verses, he similarly employs anti-mimetic strategies of representation. I suspect that many oneiric works can similarly be thought of as primarily verisimilar: they attempt to reproduce the logic and sequence of a human dream. Allegory is a genre that is neither primarily mimetic nor anti-mimetic. Instead, it embodies structures of ideas in narrative form. “Everyman” and Animal Farm are straightforward allegories and have little of the unnatural about

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them. Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss is not a playful transformation of the elements of characterization; neither is the portrayal of his belief in Leibniz’ doctrine that ours is best of all possible worlds primarily intended to be realistic. It is true, however, that we laugh at him precisely insofar as his behavior resembles one who is obsessed by a fixed idea; it is the intersection of the development of the drama of ideas with an exaggerated mimetic component that produces audience satisfaction (and when an allegory is not relieved by any verisimilar effect it rapidly becomes boring). Postmodern allegories, however, play with or parody the straightforward dramatization of a set of ideas found in classical allegory, and thereby become more unnatural. Farce is likewise neither unnatural nor particularly realistic; it discloses rather the absurdity of particular behaviors when carried to unlikely extremes. Here too the great authors of farces like Molière make the preposterous behavior resemble the compulsions of people we know, thus providing an additional quasi-mimetic component to what is otherwise a non-mimetic series of events. Works of fantasy similarly fail to qualify as “unnatural” narratives in my view because of their conventionality. They usually follow familiar patterns that readers quickly recognize and require. An online guide to writing fantasy novels begins: “When writing a fantasy novel, the writer needs to remember there is a structure to follow. We refer to the flow of the storyline as the plot arc. In a fantasy novel, as in all novels, following the arc is imperative to creating a novel readers will devour.” Similar formulaic advice is given for the creation of fantasy worlds, characters, gods, and dialogue.25 It is easy to imagine how different a guide to writing a postmodern novel would be. One would begin by eschewing or exaggerating narrative conventions, and continue to violate conventions in as unconventional way as possible. The difference between these two is precisely the unnatural component of postmodernism. In the same vein, most fairy tales are fairly conventional without being either mimetic or anti-mimetic, though we can readily adduce examples of postmodern transformations of fairy tales into something quite unnatural, as in Angela Carter’s rewritings of traditional fairy stories.

7. Assimilating the Unnatural It is perhaps precisely because of the unnerving aspects of unnatural works that so many critics try to somehow wrest them into a more familiar framework and forcibly conventionalize them. We may look into what has been 25

Source: http://www.inspiredauthor.com/Fiction_Writing/Fantasy/Write_Nove l/ index.htm.

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called “the Pinter problem” for some insight into this situation.26 For decades, critics faced with the problem of interpreting Pinter’s unusual plays have employed a number of strategies to “naturalize” them and make them seem to fit within existing modes and genres. Thus, some critics have tried to “explain” Pinter by saying that all of his works are merely the dramatization of a dream, or they are simply an allegory, or an accurate portrayal of a fantasy, or a series of realistic though disjointed slices of life, or a vision of purgatory, or whatever. In each case, the interpretive strategy fails; by insisting too much on a single facet of the work, the criticism become reductive and simplistic and thereby loses the richness of the work as a whole. What almost no one suggests is that these dramas are deliberate, sustained violations of the conventions of theatrical representation, and this is what fascinates both spectators and critics. The plays are fundamentally and profoundly unnatural. This does not mean that they are not also allegorical, dreamlike, fantastic, or psychomachias: it is to say that we should not engage in a needless reductionism and limit our readings to one or two of these conventional aspects. We must instead respect the polysemy of literary creations, and a crucial aspect of this polysemy can be the unnatural construction of recalcitrant texts. We need to recognize the anti-mimetic as such, and resist impulses to deny its protean essence and unexpected effects. A capacious narratology attuned to the varieties of the unnatural can be invaluable in identifying and articulating these differences. This point can be clarified by a glance at Tristan Tzara’s play, “The Gas Jet.” This work is entirely unnatural and is irreducible to any conceptual framework. It simply contains several lines of nonsense dialogue spoken by pseudo-characters called, for no particular reason, “Eye,” “Ear,” “Mouth,” “Eyebrow,” etc. There is no allegory, no realism, no dreamlike qualities, and unlike the theater of the absurd, no sustained play with the conventions of human conversation. It is, significantly, rather boring and is understandably rarely staged. This suggests to me that unnatural elements function best in a literary context when framed by, combined with, or in a dialectical relation with other, “natural” (that is, conventional) elements of narrative: the purely unnatural is perhaps not especially interesting. The conclusion I draw is that, when we analyze a play by Pinter, we should recognize the hints of allegory, the thematic associations, the suggestion of fantasy or dream-like events, the parody of ordinary human interactions – but not reduce the unnatural elements to any one of these other aspects.

26

Quigley, Austin, The Pinter Problem, Princeton 1975, 3–31.

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8. The Unnatural in Literary History I began this paper by stating that unnatural narratives are those that violate mimetic expectations, the canons of realism, and the conventions of natural narrative. To these we may add two other possible criteria: they contravene the practice of non-fictional narratives, usually in a flagrant manner, and they defy the conventions and expectations of existing, established genres. It is time now to try to clarify this issue somewhat, since it is evident that some texts may violate one of these categories but not the others. All non-mimetic works are not, ipso facto, unnatural narratives, as we have seen in the cases of fantasy and supernatural stories. An ordinary animal fable has nothing to do with the canons of realism which it predates or ignores, but is instead an exemplary instance of a natural narrative. Animal fables are quite widespread throughout different cultures, and may even be universal. Stories of talking or thinking animals are common in many cultures down to Millie’s Book, Barbara Bush’s volume about her experiences in the White House told from the perspective of her dog. Animal stories can become unnatural, however: ironically, this can be achieved by the interjection of realism, including an invented psychological realism, as we find in the representations of a horse’s consciousness in Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer” (1886) or John Hawkes’ Sweet William (1993). Equally unnatural is the presentation of a snail’s perspective in Woolf ’s “Kew Gardens” (1919). It is not the non-mimetic but the anti-mimetic that constitutes the unnatural. This is because anti-mimetic narrative violates the conventions of mimesis by pointing out the unrealistic nature of those conventions. Having indicated what the unnatural is not, we may now try to offer a definition: an unnatural narrative is one that conspicuously violates conventions of standard narrative forms, in particular the conventions of nonfictional narratives, oral or written, and fictional modes like realism that model themselves on nonfictional narratives. Unnatural narratives furthermore follow fluid, changing conventions and create new narratological patterns in each work. In a phrase, unnatural narratives produce a defamiliarization of the basic elements of narrative. We can get a clearer sense of the dynamics of unnatural narratives by considering their curious situation in relation to literary history. These works are, above all else, unconventional: that is, they ignore, repudiate, transform, or violate existing literary conventions. Yet we also know how easily a strikingly new technique can be rapidly copied and become fashionable, and quickly become clichéd. Mariana Torgovnik has suggested that this is what has happened to the “open ending” in which key issues of a work’s plot remain unresolved: “a form of conclusion that would once

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have been shocking and new has become thoroughly expected and conventional.”27 The same is true of interior monologue – first startling, then familiar. As such it might seem, to slightly vary the old paradox of literary history, that there can be no real tradition of the unnatural – every work would have to be quite different, each a variation and repudiation of the works that went before it – including those by the same formerly transgressive author. One example that can help us find our way through this maze is the theater of the absurd. Originally shocking, scandalous, and often incomprehensible, absurdist dramas for many years have been familiar, bracing, even celebrated. Most however continue to retain their unnatural quality precisely because the situations they enact both approximate and distort conventional human dialogue and interactions. One of the secrets to staying unnatural, I suspect, is substantial and continued innovation. In this subgenre, you can never use the same trick twice. If so, the play will seem to be merely a watered down version of an earlier piece, or even an old absurdist’s unintended self-parody. The other device for producing work that remains striking is scale, especially the violation of the basis of a range of experiences we have on a daily basis, such as the experience of the unidirectionality of time or the basic framework of human communication. Although even in these cases, the degree of unnaturalness varies by genre; while narrated “antinomic temporality”28 is extremely unnatural, there is nothing unusual at all about running a film backwards. However, to have such a reverse sequence enacted on stage, as the San Francisco Mime Troupe once did, is most delightfully unnatural. So is, to a lesser extent, the stage enactment of a slow motion sequence. In every case, it is important, in the phrase of Jan Alber’s contribution to this volume, to discriminate between “(1) unnatural scenarios and events that have already been naturalized, […] and (2) unnatural scenarios and events that have not yet been naturalized and still strike us as odd or strange.” I prefer to limit the term “unnatural” to those scenarios that remain strange. Among the strategies that have become sufficiently common so that they cease to be unnatural is the case of the dead narrator, who tells his or her story from beyond the grave. Again, the tactic can be “re-unnaturalized,” or made unnatural again, by fresh innovations. This happens in Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo (1955), as the narrator only gradually learns that he is dead. It is also true that some techniques of postmodernism have undergone a similar transformation: first shocking, then impressive, and finally a bit 27 28

Torgovnik, Marianna, Closure in the Novel, Princeton 1981, 205. See Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse.”

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clichéd. They must continue to be innovative if they are to retain their bite. We may conclude by affirming that unnatural narratives are works that flaunt their own fictionality, and typically depart from convention in a significant and often self-conscious manner that remains unexpected.

9. The Range of the Unnatural Having just identified what I think are the boundaries of the paradigmatically unnatural, I also want to suggest that this quality can be found in varying degrees in works that are and are not primarily unnatural. Just as there are degrees of narrativity in a work, so are there degrees of unnaturalness. To get a sense of this spectrum, we may look at the phenomenon of reflexivity in drama. The statement that “all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” (As You Like It, 2.7.139–40) expresses a perfectly normal sentiment that takes on an added piquancy when uttered by a character on a stage; I would say that it is minimally unnatural. When the irony is intensified the unnaturalness of the statement increases, as in 1 Henry VI when Talbot, learning that his son has just been killed, rails against fate, shouting: “Accursed fatal hand/ That hath contriv’d this woeful tragedy!” (1. 4. 80–81). When the mimetic justification is diminished, the unnaturalness of an observation is also increased, as in Fabian’s comment in Twelfth Night on the scene he just witnesses: “If this were play’d upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction” (3.4.127–28). Still more unnatural are the points where the mimetic illusion is broken, as when Robin Goodfellow, still in character, addresses the audience at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (5.1.423–38). Most flagrantly unnatural is where the representational illusion is travestied. About thirty minutes into Roger Vitrac’s play, Les mystères de l’amour (1927), a shot is heard offstage and a man comes to the front of the stage to say that the author has just committed suicide and that all the spectators should leave the theater. After a short break, the play resumes; the “theater manager” was simply an actor playing a role, as was the “author” who soon appears, covered in blood, smiling broadly. At the extreme end of this spectrum would be Peter Handke’s Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience, 1966). Here, the concept of representation is ambiguous or irrelevant: the actors do not impersonate characters and their actions do not depict events; the players merely speak their lines. As the actors themselves state to the audience: “Das ist kein Drama. Hier wird keine Handlung wiederholt, die schon geschehen ist […] Das ist kein Lokalaugenschein, bei dem eine Tat wiederholt wird, die einmal wirklich geschehen ist. Hier spielt die Zeit keine Rolle. Wir spielen keine Hand-

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lung.”29 (“This is no drama. No action that has occurred elsewhere is reenacted here […] This is no make-believe which re-enacts an action that really happened once upon a time. Time plays no role here. We are not acting out a plot”).30 In rare cases, nonfictional literature can be unnatural, as demonstrated by a number of unusual sources: Speak, Memory, the playful autobiography of Vladimir Nabokov; Edmund Morris’ Dutch, a biography of Ronald Reagan in which Morris pretends to transcribe Reagan’s thinking, and the Holocaust narratives described by Stefan Iversen elsewhere in this volume. We should also note that the unnatural is present in many forms of folk and popular literature, such as children’s cartoons, Bob Hope/Bing Crosby “road” movies, and in the more extravagant kinds of Russian skaz. We see it also in the nineteenth-century American ballad of Dan Tucker, which includes the lines: He combed his hair with a wagon wheel And died of a toothache in his heel.

Finally, we should differentiate these from the pseudo-unnatural narrative, that is, the narrative that seems to be unnatural only to those ignorant of the conventions it adheres to, as found in typical medieval mystery plays or the more conventional Chinese operas. It has been claimed that in some sense or at some level every work of literature engages in realism, and we all know what it means to say that the work of Kafka is entirely realistic. I wish to suggest that the unnatural is also a quality that can be found in almost every work of fiction. In experimental texts like those of Kafka or postmodernism, it is flagrant and obvious. But even in the most conventional, decorous, or timid realistic texts, there are numerous slippages into the unnatural, as scholars like James Phelan,31 Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Maria Mäkelä have superbly documented. The unnatural should be thought of as a variable quality, like a light control that can modify the degree of illumination, or the volume knob on a radio. Narrative fiction is a polysemous entity which functions on at least three planes simultaneously: the referential or realistic, the thematic or ideological, and the acknowledgment of the artificiality and constructedness of fictional narratives.

29 30 31

Handke, Peter, Die Theaterstücke, Frankfurt 1975, 23. Handke, Peter, Kaspar and Other Plays, transl. Michael Roloff, New York 1975, 15. Phelan, James, Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration, Chicago 2005, 1–30.

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10. Conclusion: Unnatural Values A primary value of anti-mimetic strategies of narration is to draw attention to the way narratives are constructed and point to the desires that such constructions serve. They work against easy identification with characters and plot trajectories; they discourage conventional responses to stock devices, and promote a critical stand that is at variance with illusionism or sentimentality. Antimimetic elements continually remind us of the dual nature of narrative fiction, all of which is, in varying degrees, both mimetic and artificial at the same time. Realism tries to hide its artifice as it strives for the verisimilar; postmodernism downplays its realism and flaunts its own, original forms of fabrication. Unnatural texts readily provoke a Rabelaisian mockery of the highly serious, the sacrosanct, the dogmatic, and of every species of sacred cow, as Robert Coover’s satiric representation of Richard Nixon in The Public Burning (1977) or Rushdie’s scathing portrait of Ayatollah Khomeni in The Satanic Verses (1988) reveals. They are a wonderful source of literary playfulness, and have been ever since Aristophanes’ The Frogs dramatized the contest in Hades that was to determine whether Aeschylus or Euripides was the greater writer (to see which one was “weightier,” each author had a line of his verse placed on one side of a scale; Aeschylus always won). Unnatural narrative practices readily align themselves with parody, above all the parody of conventional narrative formulas. A study of unnatural narrative can foreground experimental techniques developed by oppositional writers, whether feminist, minority, or postcolonial, to carve out different representational practices from those of the dominant culture. And perhaps most compellingly, unnatural techniques are often used to depict horrific actions that seem to defy the normal methods of ordinary narratives: the few subjects of antinomic temporality include unfortunate deaths, collective disasters, and the Holocaust; they are used to represent effectively some very unnatural human practices. Antimimetic representation is widely acknowledged and regularly discussed in other media. Textbooks in art history note Leonardo’s construction of two vanishing points in “The Last Supper,” something impossible in nature, that provides an unnatural depiction of a supernatural event. Art critics regularly note Cezanne’s many deliberate violations of perspective and his defiance of the law of gravity in his still lifes. A narrative theory that is attentive to such constructions will be better connected to some of the same artistic techniques that helped inspire many literary experiments. Unnatural techniques are pervasive in postmodern and many avant-garde texts. If we are to comprehend the most fascinating, creative, and challenging literature

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of our time, we need to employ the framework provided by unnatural narrative theory.

11. Bibliography Abbott, H. Porter, “Immersions in the Cognitive Sublime: The Textual Experience of the Extratextual Unknown in García Márquez and Beckett”, in: Narrative, 17, 2009, 131–42. Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96. Bal, Mieke, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 3rd Edition, Toronto 2009. Cohn, Dorrit, The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore 1999. DelConte, Matt, “Why You Can’t Speak: Second Person Narration, Voice, and a New Model for Understanding Narrative”, in: Style 37, 2003, Nr. 2, 204–19. Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London/New York 1996. Füger, Wilhelm, “Limits of the Narrator’s Knowledge in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews: A Contribution to the Theory of Negated Knowledge in Fiction”, in: Style, 38, 2006, Nr. 3, 278–89. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, transl. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca 1980. –, Narrative Discourse Revisited, transl. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca 1988. Handke, Peter, Kaspar and Other Plays, transl. Michael Roloff, New York 1975. –, Die Theaterstücke, Frankfurt 1975. Hayman, David, Re-Forming the Narrative: Toward a Mechanics of Modernist Fiction, Ithaca 1987. Heinze, Rüdiger, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, in: Narrative, 16, 2008, Nr. 3, 279–97. Mäkelä, Maria, “Possible Minds: Constructing – and Reading – Another Consciousness as Fiction,” in: Pekka Tammi / Hannu Tommola (eds.), FREE Language INDIRECT Translation DISCOURSE Narratology: Linguistic, Translatological and Literary-Theoretical Encounters, Tampere 2006, 231–60. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, London 1987. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, in: Narrative, 12, 2004, 133–50. Orr, Leonard, Problems and Poetics of the Nonaristotelian Novel, Lewisburg 1991. Phelan, James, Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration, Chicago 2005. Quigley, Austin, The Pinter Problem, Princeton 1975. Rabinowitz, Peter, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, Ithaca 1987. Ricardou, Jean, Pour une theorie du nouveau roman, Paris 1971. Richardson, Brian, “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Non-Mimetic Fiction”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 47–63. –, “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses”, in: James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (eds.), A Companion to Narrative Theory, New York 2005, 167–80.

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–, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, New York 1983. Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, New York 2006. Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th Edition, edited by David Bevington, New York 2004. Shen, Dan, “Breaking Conventional Barriers: Transgressions of Modes of Focalization”, in: Willie van Peer / Seymour Chatman (eds.), New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, Albany 2001, 159–72. Sherzer, Dina, Representation in Contemporary French Fiction, Lincoln/London 1987. Stanzel, Franz Karl, A Theory of Narrative, transl. Charlotte Goedsche, Cambridge 1979. Torgovnik, Marianna, Closure in the Novel, Princeton 1981.

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Jan Alber (Freiburg)

The Diachronic Development of Unnaturalness: A New View on Genre1

1. Introduction Many narrative texts teem with unnatural, i.e., physically or logically impossible, scenarios and events that take us to the most remote territories of what can be imagined.2 Postmodernist narratives in particular are full of elements that contradict the known laws governing the physical world or accepted principles of logic (such as the principle of non-contradiction). In postmodernist texts, the narrator can be a corpse, a sperm, an animal, an impossibly eloquent child, or an ‘omniscient’ first-person speaker3; characters may exist in various (mutually exclusive) versions; also, they can metamorphosize into somebody else, or torture their authors because they consider their creators to be authoritarian4; time can move backwards; the present can be caused by the future; mutually exclusive events can happen at the same time5; and settings may get inexplicably transformed or they can be otherwise impossible.6 In this paper, I take a closer look at earlier manifestations of unnaturalness. I investigate the development of physically or logically impossible scenarios and events through English literary history, from the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood” up until the first half of the twentieth cen1

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I would like to thank Johannes Fehrle, Monika Fludernik, Rüdiger Heinze, and David Herman for their extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Study, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96. See also Alber, Jan, “Unnatural Narratives”, in: The Literary Encyclopedia, 2009, http://www.litencyc.com. Examples can be found in Alice Sebold’s The Loveley Bones (2002), John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), John Hawkes’s Sweet William (1993), John Hawkes’s Virginie: Her Two Lives (1982), and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). See Martin Crimp’s play Attempts on her Life (1997), Sarah Kane’s play Cleansed (1998), and Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). Examples are Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), and Caryl Churchill’s play Traps (1978). See the unimaginable universe in “El Aleph” (1949) by Borges as well as the houses in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park (2005), and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967).

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tury.7 In comparison to earlier narratives, postmodernist texts acquire their specificity through the concentration and radicalization of unnaturalness. However, it is worth noting that the unnatural scenarios and events of postmodernism are not brand-new phenomena. Rather, they have been anticipated in various different ways. Many older narratives project scenarios or events that are impossible in the real world, and I argue that this is, at least partly, what makes these texts interesting. Furthermore, I discriminate between (1) unnatural scenarios and events that have already been naturalized or conventionalized, i.e., turned “into a basic cognitive category,”8 and (2) unnatural scenarios and events that have not yet been naturalized or conventionalized and still strike us as odd or strange.9 In this paper, I focus on the former, i.e., on unnatural segments of narratives that have already been naturalized or conventionalized during the course of the development of English literary history and thus no longer strike us as defamiliarizing in the sense of Viktor Shklovsky (1917).10 As a thesis that needs further testing, I would like to propose that the development of new literary genres often goes hand in hand with the naturali-

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The texts that I discuss are examples and do of course not cover literary history as a whole. Fludernik, Monika, “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters”, in: David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford 2003, 256. The term ‘naturalization’ was invented by Jonathan Culler. According to Culler, readers attempt to recuperate inexplicable elements of a text by taking recourse to familiar interpretive patterns. See Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, Ithaca 1975, 134. I am using the term in the sense of Fludernik (“Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters”, 256) and I am talking about an intra-literary process whereby physical or logical impossibilities become a bonafide concern in the domain of literature. Furthermore, I argue that this process influences the cognitive architecture of readers. To put this slightly differently, for me, the process of naturalization concerns the interaction between unnatural scenarios in the text and the reader. Shklovsky, Viktor, “Art as Technique [1917]”, in: Lee T. Lemon / Marion J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism, Lincoln, 1965, 3–24. Unnatural segments that are still defamiliarizing can be found in postmodernist narratives (examples include the ‘omniscient’ first-person narrator, mutually exclusive versions of characters or the story, and inexplicably transforming settings). See Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, Narrative, 12, 2004, Nr. 2, 133–50; Heinze, Rüdiger, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, Narrative, 16, 2008, Nr. 3, 279–97; Richardson, Brian, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006; and Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”.

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zation or conventionalization of the unnatural.11 In other words, new genres are frequently created as physical or logical impossibilities are converted into a new perceptual frame (such as ‘the speaking animal’ in beast fables, supernatural elements in fairy tales, the ‘omniscient’ narrator in realist fiction, or time travel in science fiction).12 One way of explaining these various literary outbursts of the unnatural would perhaps be to see them as a human impulse to avoid having the possible calcify into the necessary.13

2. The Speaking Cross in the Old English Poem “The Dream of the Rood” The earliest example of unnaturalness I have yet come across in the realm of English literature can be found in the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood” when the Holy Cross begins “to utter words”14 and renders its experiences in relation to the crucifixion of Christ. In this context, Mark Turner argues that […] cognitively modern human beings have a remarkable, species-defining ability to pluck forbidden mental fruit – that is, to activate two conflicting mental structures […] [such as cross and person, J. A.] and to blend them creatively into a new mental structure […] [such as speaking cross, J. A.].15

Clearly, contemporary readers, imbued with a religious world view, might well have thought a speaking cross plausible and natural. But of course speaking crosses were as impossible in the real world at that time as they are today. More specifically, they are possible in our imagination, in the world of

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The term “genre” means kind or type: “a genre is a kind of literature.” Mikics, David, A New Handbook of Literary Terms, New Haven and London 2007, 132. According to John Frow, “genre is, amongst other things, a matter of discrimination and taxonomy: of organising things into recognizable classes.” Frow, John, Genre, London/New York 2005, 51. In what follows, I will refer to literary subgenres such as beast fables, fairy tales, object narratives, fantasy narratives, paranormal texts, Modernist novels, and science fiction. Exceptions to this model of generic innovation exist. As examples I would like to mention autobiographies, detective fiction, and pornography. These new genres cannot be traced back to a process in which something impossible became naturalized. I would like to thank David Herman for suggesting this idea to me. Gordon, R. K., “The Dream of the Rood”, in: R. K. Gordon (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry, London 1970, 235. Turner, Mark, “Double-Scope Stories”, in: David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford 2003, 117.

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fiction, but not in the actual world, and this fact obviously turns the speaking cross into an interesting phenomenon.16 In the poem, the cross, which speaks and feels like a human being, details its emotions as it realizes that it will be used as the instrument of crucifixion: “I trembled when the Hero [Jesus Christ, J.A.] clasped me; yet I durst not bow to the earth, fall to the level of the ground, but I must needs stand firm.”17 The physical impossibility of the speaking cross can easily be explained as an internal state, namely as a part of the sinner’s dream in which it occurs.18 However, it is worth noting that this it-narrative avant la lettre19 also serves to communicate a particular vision of Christ, the sinful speaker of the poem, and the reader. As Mark Turner has shown,20 “The Dream of the Rood” does not only present us with a speaking cross. During the course of the poem, the Holy Cross additionally blends with Christ, with the speaker of the poem, and with a thane. More specifically, at the beginning of the cross’s story, the speaking cross participates in Christ’s sufferings: both are pierced with nails, mocked and tortured, and finally buried:

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H. Porter Abbott mentions “the mass suicide in California of cult members dedicated to the idea that they would be rescued from this life by a spaceship hidden behind comet Hale-Bopp.” Abbott argues that this idea “required repressing awareness of a host of contradictions between the story and the facts of the empirical world.” Abbott, H. Porter, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Cambridge 2008, 45. The same is true of the speaking cross: the fact that certain people believe that something is the case does not mean that this is so. Gordon, “The Dream of the Rood”, 236, my italics, J. A. This is an example of my reading strategy I (“reading events as internal states”), in which we try to make sense of unnatural scenarios by explaining them as dreams, fantasies, or hallucinations. See Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 82–5. The poem begins as follows: “Lo! I will declare the best of dreams which I dreamt in the middle of the night, when human creatures lay at rest.” Later on, the sinner tells us that the cross began “to utter words”: “Yet I, lying there a long space, beheld in sorrow the Saviour’s cross, till I heard it speak.” Gordon, “The Dream of the Rood”, 235. Terms such as “it-narratives” and “object tales” denote a subgenre of the eighteenth-century novel, “a type of prose fiction in which inanimate objects (coins, waistcoats, pins, corkscrews, coaches) or animals (dogs, fleas, cats, ponies) serve as the central characters.” Blackwell, Mark, “Introduction: The It-Narrative and Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory”, in: Mark Blackwell (ed.), The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, Lewisburg 2007, 10. As I will show in Section 3, the speaking object was naturalized and turned into a cognitive category during the eighteenth century. Turner, “Double-Scope Stories”, 130–1.

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Yet for a long space we stood there in our place streaming with blood after the voice of warriors had risen up. Cold grew the corpse, fair house of the Soul. Then they began to cut us all down to the earth; that was a dead trial. They buried us in a deep pit.21

By blending Christ with the cross, the poem highlights the universal quality of the plight Christ had to endure.22 Furthermore, according to Mark Turner, […] the Christ-like suffering of the Cross confers upon it both immortality and the ability to heal sinners: the Cross informs the sinner that those who wear the Cross need not be afraid, that the kingdom of heaven can be sought through the Cross.23

Later on, the cross blends with the sinner who relates the dream, and we learn that the cross feels sinful – like the speaker of the poem. More specifically, the cross feels guilty because of its involvement in Christ’s death: “Long ago I became the severest of torments, most hateful to men, before I opened to mankind the true path of life.”24 However, the inanimate cross was redeemed, and, thus, the human sinner can be redeemed as well: Lo! The Prince of glory, the Lord of heaven honoured me then beyond the trees of the forest, even as Almighty God also honoured his mother Mary herself above the whole race of women. Now I bid thee, my loved man, to declare this vision unto men; reveal in words that it is the glorious tree on which Almighty God suffered for the many sins of mankind and the old deeds of Adam.25

In the final section of its tale, the cross blends itself with a loyal thane: He [the Lord, J. A.] will ask before the multitude where the man is who for God’s sake would taste bitter death, as He aforetime did on the cross; but then they will be afraid, and think little of what they begin to say to Christ. No one need be terrified there who erstwhile bears in his breast the best of signs, but each soul which desires to dwell with the Lord must through the cross seek the kingdom which is far from earth.26

The point of this part of the cross’s story is presumably to urge the sinner and the reader to fuse pagan loyalty with Christian ideas to become proper Christian thanes.27 In the way in which old objects ‘speak’ to us about their 21 22

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Gordon, “The Dream of the Rood”, 236; my italics, J. A. The following quotation underlines this point: “All creation wept, lamented the King’s death; Christ was on the cross.” Ibid. Turner, “Double-Scope Stories”, 131. Gordon, “The Dream of the Rood”, 237. Ibid. Ibid. On this point see also Richardson, Peter R., “Making Thanes: Literature, Rhetoric, and State-Formation in Anglo-Saxon England”, in: Philological Quarterly, 78, 1999, 215–32.

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past, the Holy Cross speaks to us about its history, and it does so in order to convert us into Christian believers. It strikes me as extremely interesting that “The Dream of the Rood,” presumably one of the oldest works of English literature, already contains an unnatural scenario, namely a speaking cross (even though this scenario is of course part of a dream). From my perspective, the development of English literature through the centuries that follow can be fruitfully described in terms of the constant interaction or dialectic between the natural28 and the unnatural – the realist29 and the impossible.30 Existing narratological frameworks suffer from a mimetic bias and focus far too extensively on the idea that narratives are modeled on the actual world and consequently ignore the many unnatural or impossible elements of the worlds created via stories. As I will show in what follows, many narratives that have developed during the course of English literary history can be characterized in terms of the reci28

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My use of the term ‘natural’ closely correlates with our knowledge of natural laws and other cognitive parameters derived from our real-world experience. See also Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London and New York 1996, 10–11, and Fludernik, “Natural Narratology.” I do obviously not have a simplistic or essentialist notion of the natural world or reality. Natural cognitive scripts and frames (concerning time, space, and human agents) are cultural forms of simulation or representation, i.e., second-order constructs in the sense of Paul Watzlawick, How Real is Real? Confusion, Disinformation, Communication, London 1976, 140–2. Furthermore, I conceive of our real-world parameters as hypotheses that have not yet been falsified in the sense of Karl Popper, Logik der Forschung [1934], ed. Herbert Keuth, Tübingen 2005. In other words, one day it might be possible to encounter a flying carpet or a speaking cross in the real world. However, as long as I have not seen a flying carpet or a speaking cross, I accept the idea that carpets do not fly as well as the idea that crosses do not speak as valid hypotheses that have not yet been falsified. My use of the term “realism” is not restricted to the nineteenth-century movement of Realism but rather refers to a narrative “which appears to provide an accurate, objective, and confident description or authentic impression of reality. This semiotic effect, which rests on the assumption that language is an undistorted mirror of, or transparent window on, the ‘real,’ is based on a set of literary conventions for producing a lifelike illusion.” Palmer, Alan, “Realist Novel”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London 2005, 491. Natural (i.e., real-world) cognitive parameters play an important role in realist fiction. As Rüdiger Heinze pointed out to me, we also get unnatural scenarios in ancient Greek and Sumerian texts. This observation might perhaps suggest that fictional literature as such involves the interplay between the natural and the unnatural. For the unnatural in ancient Greek texts see also Scodel, Ruth, Credible Impossibilities: Conventions and Strategies of Verisimilitude in Homer and Greek Tragedy, Stuttgart/Leipzig 1999.

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procity between the natural (or realist) and the unnatural (or impossible). Indeed, as already indicated, I suggest that the integration or naturalization of unnatural scenarios is a hitherto neglected driving force behind the creation and institutionalization of new genres.

3. The Disparate Time Zones in the Medieval Fairy Tale De Nugis Curialium Medieval fairy tales closely correlate with supernatural forces, i.e., physically impossible forces that transcend the scientifically visible universe.31 Fairy tales have developed “out of the wider genre of the folk tale” and frequently feature “magical transformations, giants and dwarves, young women suffering cruel captivity or placed under spells, and heroic rituals of initiation.”32 That is to say, readers must have gradually begun to accept supernatural entities as possibilities in the world of fiction. This process of naturalization presumably began before the Middle Ages because supernatural forces also play a crucial role in the Old English epic Beowulf33 and already in the Arabian Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folk tales compiled in Arabic between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries A.D., as well as in the ancient Iraqi The Epic of Gilgamesh. Walter Map’s twelfth-century text De Nugis Curialium (Courtiers’ Trifles) is an example of a medieval fairy tale that contains an unnatural scenario. More specifically, Map’s narrative contains an impossible temporality34 which can be explained as pertaining to the realm of the supernatural. At the same time, this medieval narrative clearly verifies Ursula K. Heise’s observation that narrative time does not at all depend on the time laws of the real world.35 31

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On the important role of the supernatural in fairy tales, see also Neemann, Harold, “Fairy Tale”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London/New York 2005, 157–8. Mikics, Handbook, 116. The term ‘fairy tale’ (conte de fée) was first used by Madame d’Aulnoy, a seventeenth-century writer of fairly tales. Numerous structural resemblances exist between Beowulf, the hero of the epic Beowulf, and modern superheroes such as Superman, Batman, or Spiderman. For instance, both Beowulf and modern superheroes are imbued with supernatural power. While Superman is able to fly and also to alter the course of history, Beowulf can remain under water for an impossible long period of time. For more on modern superheroes see Johannes Fehrle’s contribution to this volume. For further medieval experiments with time see Thompson, Stith, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Vol. 6, Bloomington 1958, 798. Heise, Ursula K., Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism, Cambridge 1997, 205.

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In Courtiers’ Trifles, a pygmy king approaches the Briton King Herla and they agree to attend each other’s weddings.36 When King Herla leaves the pygmy’s otherworld after the latter’s wedding, Herla discovers that he has actually spent “two hundred years” there, while in his own experience the lapse of time seems to have encompassed only “three days.”37 King Herla also realizes that he has lost his kingdom because the Saxons took possession of it. Courtiers’ Trifles presents us with an instance of time travel without a time machine, and the interesting thing is that Herla ages at a different rate than other inhabitants of the storyworld, namely those who did not enter the world of the pygmy.38 Upon Herla’s departure from this otherworld, the pygmy presents him with a bloodhound and tells Herla that “on no account must any of his train dismount until that dog leapt from the arms of his bearer.”39 However, on their return to the human world, some of Herla’s men forget the pygmy’s orders, dismount, and immediately turn into dust. Finally, we are told that “the dog has not yet alighted” and that “King Herla still holds on his mad course with his band in eternal wanderings.”40 That is to say that Herla and his gang, who no longer fulfill any function in the human (or real) world, are doomed to wander around England forever. What is the purpose or ‘point’ of this impossible temporality that has to do with the supernatural figure of the pygmy? I would like to suggest that Map’s fairy tale uses the pygmy’s time zone to critique leaders who are too restless, and hence do not pay attention to the demands of the actual world. The narrator also connects King Herla to King Henry II, who ruled over England between 1154 and 1189: “Recently, it is said, in the first year of the coronation of our King Henry,” Herla and his men “ceased to visit our land in force as before […] as if they had transmitted their wanderings to us.”41 The narrator argues that Henry II shares the restlessness of Herla and is thus incapable of comprehending the problems of the real world. “We rush on at

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Map, Walter, De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and transl. M. R. James, Oxford 1983, 27. Ibid., 31. Brian Richardson would call this unnatural scenario a “differential temporality” because a “character ages at a different rate than the people that surround him.” Richardson, Brian, “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 50. Map, De Nugis Curialium, 29. Ibid., 31. Ibid., see also 371.

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a furious pace; the present we treat with negligence and folly, the future we entrust to chance, […] we are more than any man lost and depressed.”42 As Roseanna Cross has shown, the implication of Map’s unnatural temporality is that all kings potentially face the danger of entering a different time zone, and thus of becoming oblivious to present concerns.43 The fact that some of Herla’s men fall to dust, while others are doomed to eternal wanderings, clearly suggests that they have become irrelevant to the human world. Courtiers’ Trifles uses disparate temporal zones to discriminate between restless leaders who fail to address the problems of the real world, and determined leaders who actually try to solve these problems.44

4. Object Narratives in the Eighteenth Century We also find unnatural scenarios in texts that were popular in the eighteenth century. More specifically, many eighteenth-century authors produced satirical narratives that confront us with non-human narrators. Some of these so-called “it-narratives” are told by animals (such as fleas, cats, a horse, a louse, mice, a fly, and a jackdaw), while others are narrated by inanimate objects (such as coins, a bank note, slippers, shoes, an umbrella, a coat, a pin-cushion, a hackney coach, a watch, a sofa, a corkscrew, and even an atom).45 It is perhaps worth noting that the beast fables by the ancient Greek writer Aesop already contain animals that talk and typically “dramatize human faults.”46 That is to say that ‘the speaking animal’ must have been naturalized and turned into a cognitive category at a relatively early point in

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Ibid., 373. Cross, Roseanna, “‘Heterochronia’ in Thomas of Erceldoune, Guingamor, ‘The Tale of King Herla,’ and The Story of Meriadoc, King of Cambria”, in: Neophilologus, 92, 2008, 170. Supernatural forces can also be found in numerous Renaissance plays. As examples, I would like to mention the ghosts in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1585) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1602), the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), as well as the use of magic in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) and The Winter’s Tale (1611). See Flint, Christopher, “Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction”, in: PMLA, 113, 1998, Nr. 2, 212–26; Bellamy, Liz, “It-Narrators and Circulation: Defining a Subgenre”, in: Mark Blackwell (ed.), The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, Lewisburg 2007, 117–46; Blackwell, “Introduction.” Mikics, Handbook, 37.

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time.47 Hence, in what follows, I will not refer to speaking animals but instead focus on stories that are told by inanimate objects. Although object narrators are impossible in the real world, they are of course possible in the world of fiction. Gérard Genette points out that in fiction, nothing prevents us from entrusting the role of the narrative agent “to an animal […] or indeed to an ‘inanimate’ object.”48 Similarly, Marie-Laure Ryan reminds us of the fact that “the narrator is a theoretical fiction, and that the human-like, pseudonatural narrator is only one of its many possible avatars.”49 I would like to propose that ‘the speaking object’ was gradually being naturalized during the eighteenth century: readers began to accept the speaking object as a possibility in the world of fiction.50 Christopher Flint argues that “the appearance of speaking objects in eighteenth-century fiction is linked to authorial concerns about the circulation of books in the public sphere.”51 Indeed, these object narratives typically construct a link between their non-human narrators on the one hand

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The most famous English example is Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” (from his fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales), which confronts us with Chauntecleer, a speaking cock, Pertelote, a speaking hen, and a speaking fox. This highly ambivalent tale might be read as a warning against the dangers of flattery. Mark Turner additionally points out that “talking animals, an obvious blend, are routine in children’s literature.” Turner, Mark, “The Cognitive Study of Art, Language, and Literature”, Poetics Today, 23, 2002, Nr. 1, 13. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method [1972], transl. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca 1980, 244, n. 74. Ryan, Marie-Laure, “The Narratorial Function: Breaking Down a Theoretical Primitive”, Narrative, 9, 2001, Nr. 2, 152. Mark Blackwell describes the critical reception of it-narratives as follows: “Despite the evident popularity of it-fictions in the second half of the eighteenth century and their continuing importance in the nineteenth century, the form has languished in critical purgatory. Chrysal has dropped from even the most eccentric list of the period’s canonical works, as have its literary counterparts. Indeed, most twentieth-century considerations of novels like Chrysal have been confined to editorial introductions and sweeping and encyclopedic critical surveys more commonly written before 1950. In The Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1660–1789) (1948), the third volume of A Literary History of England, George Sherburn connected it-narratives with other satirical novels ‘hark[ing] back to the picaresque pattern,’ though ‘instead of a human adventurer,’ he noted, ‘they […] frequently substitute some unhuman piece of ‘currency.’ Some years earlier, Ernest Baker had traced a similar genealogy in The Novel of Sentiment and the Gothic Romance (1934), volume 5 of The History of the English Novel, but dismissed works like Chrysal by proclaiming their literary interest ‘insignificant.’” Blackwell, “Introduction”, 11. Flint, “Speaking Objects”, 212.

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and authorship on the other. For instance, the title page of The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes (1754) reads as follows: So common now are Authors grown, That ev’ry Scribler in the Town, Thinks he can give Delight. If writers then are got so vain, To think they pleasure when they pain, No wonder Slippers write. Anon.

Similarly, in Thomas Bridges’s The Adventures of a Bank-note (1770), the banknote speaks as the tale’s author and compares its right to speak with the right of Dr. Samuel Johnson: “The author thinks he has as great a title to coin words as the great Doctor anybody [Samuel Johnson, J. A.]; and whether he takes his degree or not, he declares he will do it whenever he pleases.”52 Another important feature of eighteenth-century object narratives is that the narrators pass from hand to hand, and we are presented with views of “an atomized and fragmented society.”53 For instance, in Helenus Scott’s The Adventures of a Rupee (1782), the rupee encounters various social levels, from a poor sailor to a princess in the royal family.54 It is worth noting that apart from economic ties, i.e., the exchange of money, these diverse individuals do not have anything in common. In Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (1760–65), the narrator is even exchanged through transactions that involve bribery, corruption, and prostitution. Also, at one point, the narrator of The Adventures of a Bank-note happily exclaims: “Who would not be a banknote to have such a quick succession of adventures and acquaintance?”55 However, the corrupt state of society in this novel renders the bank-note’s question ironic: it means the opposite of what it purports to say. How can we interpret these speaking objects that pass from one individualized owner to the next? According to Liz Bellamy, the ‘circulation novels’ or ‘it-narratives’ of the eighteenth century “provide a satirical vision of the atomized and mercenary nature of society within a commercial state.”56 That is to say, they critique the fact that the economic system and commercial values have come to define all relationships in eighteenth-century England. Indeed, the narrator of The Adventures of a Guinea argues that “when the mighty spirit of a large mass of gold takes possession of the human heart, it 52 53 54 55

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Bridges, Thomas, The Adventures of a Bank-note, Volume II, London 1770, 42. Bellamy, “It-Narrators”, 124. Scott, Helenus, The Adventures of a Rupee, London 1782, 92–3 and 223–40. Johnstone, Charles, Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea, Volume II, London 1770, 25. Bellamy, “It-Narrators”, 132.

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influences all its actions, and overpowers, or banishes, the weaker impulse of those immaterial, unessential notions called virtues.”57 Furthermore, these narratives comment on the objectification of human agents through commerce and trade. Among other things, they highlight the fact that the commercialized circulation of books in the public sphere may turn authors into commodities so that inanimate objects (such as the slippers in The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes) sometimes become better storytellers than their human counterparts. In the words of Christopher Flint, “the narratives are, among other things, parables of textual and authorial objectification; the storyteller is not only transformed into an inanimate form but also compelled by a system of ownership to describe the experience of others, usually at the expense of internal or personal reflection.”58 Eighteenth-century circulation novels use speaking objects to make us aware of the fact that the principles of commerce and trade may gradually displace or perhaps even eliminate human qualities.

5. The Fantastic and the Paranormal Supernatural forces do not only play a crucial role in medieval fairy tales but also in later fantastic literature. As already said in Section 2, supernatural creatures (such as ghosts, vampires, werewolves, witches, or wizards) and events (such as miracles, spells, curses, and divination) are also physically impossible59 and hence unnatural. I would like to argue that medieval fairy tales had already naturalized the supernatural and turned it into a basic perceptual frame, and fantastic texts continued to use the supernatural as a cognitive category. When we read a fantastic text today, the impossible forces of the supernatural do not strike us as odd or strange; we can easily accept them as a part of the projected storyworld. Francis Berthelot argues that “the fantastic emerges from the twilight area of Christianity: the mystery of death and the afterlife, the ambiguity between good and evil. It is associated with the dark figures of the Devil and his creatures: witches, vampires, ghosts, the living dead.”60 In contrast to Tzvetan Todorov, who points out that the fantastic obliges the reader “to hesitate be57 58 59

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Johnstone, Chrysal, Vol. I, 7. Flint, “Speaking Objects”, 221. Ronen, Ruth, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, Cambridge 1994, 55; Doleˇzel, Lubomír, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore/London 1998, 116. Berthelot, Francis, “The Fantastic”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / MarieLaure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London/New York 2005, 159.

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tween a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described,”61 Nancy H. Traill argues, more convincingly, that in what she calls “the fantasy mode,” supernatural entities dominate the narrative as a whole, while the realist (or ‘natural’) mode only occurs at the beginning and the ending.62 Traill’s fantasy mode is thus virtually identical with what Todorov calls “the marvelous,” where we simply have to accept the supernatural as a given of the projected storyworld.63 Examples of fantastic texts (in the sense of Traill) include Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), which depicts supernatural events that occur in a hideous castle, and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), which is about Ambrosio, a depraved monk, who has a fatal alliance with Matilda, a demon. Another category of the supernatural can be found in the eighteenth-century satire, for instance in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726; amended 1735), where Gulliver journeys to Lilliput (part I); Brobdingnag (part II); Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubrig, Luggnagg, and Japan (part III); as well as to the land of the Houyhnhnms (part IV); and encounters various supernatural creatures. A present-day example is the Harry Potter series by Joanne K. Rowling, which is set at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a school of magic for young witches and wizards. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), for example, Hermione Granger receives a time turner, a magical necklace, from Professor McGonagall which allows her to travel back in time to attend more classes than is humanly possible. At the end of the novel, Harry Potter and Hermione use this magical device to alter the course of history by saving Buckbeak, a hippogriff, and Sirius Black, Harry’s godfather: in the first version of the novel’s story, the former was beheaded even though he was innocent, while the latter was wrongly imprisoned. Nancy H. Traill has also identified an interesting link between the supernatural in fantastic texts and the unnatural scenarios of postmodernism in what she calls “the paranormal.”64 More specifically, Traill shows that in 61

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Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, transl. Richard Howard, Cleveland and London 1973, 33. For Todorov, the prototypical fantastic text is Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). Traill, Nancy H., Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in Literature, Toronto 1996, 12–16. Todorov, The Fantastic, 41–2. Alberto Manguel argues that “fantastic literature deals with what can be best described as the impossible seeping into the possible.” Manguel, Alberto (ed.), Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, London 1983, xvii. Traill, Nancy H., “Fictional Worlds of the Fantastic”, in: Style, 25, 1991, Nr. 2, 17.

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nineteenth-century narratives such as Charles Dickens’s “The Signal-Man” (1866), the supernatural is absorbed by realism, as a result becoming as physically possible as the natural. In this particular text, telepathy becomes an option in the narrative without there being a supernatural explanation for it: The opposition [‘supernatural’ vs. ‘natural,’ J. A.] loses its force because we find that the word ‘supernatural’ is merely a label for strange phenomena latent within the natural domain. Clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition, for instance, are taken to be as physically possible as any commonplace human ability.65

The supernatural realm has disappeared in so far as it has become a realist option in the primary storyworld of the literary text: “supernatural phenomena are […] brought within the paradigm of the natural.”66 65 66

Ibid. Traill, Possible Worlds, 17–18. Supposedly ‘pure’ realist narratives often contain unnatural elements as well. For example, the so-called ‘omniscient’ narrator of realist novels such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) is also physically impossible in so far as this third-person narrator knows what the characters think or feel: he does not speculate. In this context, Marie-Laure Ryan speaks of “the supernatural ability of reading into foreign minds.” Ryan, Marie-Laure, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington 1991, 67. Similarly, Monika Fludernik argues that “the ‘omniscient’ narrator function in fiction is […] already a nonnatural extension of the real-life schema of historical narration.” Fludernik, Monika, “New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization, and New Writing”, in: New Literary History, 32, 2001, 624. Following Nicholas Royle, Jonathan Culler suggests replacing the idea of omniscience with that of telepathy or telepathic transmission. Culler, Jonathan, “Omniscience”, in: Narrative, 12, 2004, Nr. 1, 29–32. Royle uses the term ‘telepathy’ for instances in which narrators can read the minds of others: “‘Telepathy’ opens possibilities of a humbler, more precise, less religiously freighted conceptuality than does omniscience for thinking about the uncanniness of what is going on in narrative fiction.” Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny, Manchester 2003, 261. David Herman, on the other hand, disputes the argument “that only fictional narratives can give us direct, ‘inside’ views of characters’ minds, and that fictional minds are therefore sui generis, or different in some fundamental other way from everyday minds.” Herman, David, “Introduction,” in: David Herman (ed.), The Emergence of Mind, Lincoln forthcoming. Herman points out that even in non-literary contexts, other minds are accessible to us through people’s demeanor, physical comportment, utterances, and so forth. However, I would like to argue that while the telepathic narrator in realist fiction is always right about the interiority of others, real-world agents have to rely on their hypotheses and speculations about the thoughts and feelings of other people. Herman is correct in arguing that we are often right about the interiority of others, but we are frequently also wrong. In contrast to Herman, I would therefore like to highlight the distinctiveness of fiction: the realm of fiction is the only realm in

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Lubomír Doleˇzel summarizes the difference between the fantastic and the paranormal as follows: “now that the gods are dead, humans themselves are responsible for the chaotic world they have created and operate.”67 Dolezˇ el refers to Traill’s paranormal mode, i.e., worlds which generate physically possible and physically impossible elements at the same time, as “hybrid worlds.”68 As an example, he mentions Franz Kafka’s well-known short story “Die Verwandlung” (“The Metamorphosis” [1915]), in which we learn that “one morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin.”69 Indeed, in this text, a physically impossible event has happened without any supernatural explanation. The major protagonist was not turned into a vermin by a witch or wizard; he simply is a vermin and has to cope with it. And such paranormal (or hybrid) scenarios are virtually identical with the unnatural scenarios of postmodernism such as the magical realism of D. M. Thomas’s novel The White Hotel (1981), in which the central protagonist’s pain “is not the trace of a past trauma, but rather the anticipatory illumination of a future one.”70 In this narrative, the present is (impossibly) caused by the future rather than the past. More specifically, the Jewish Lisa Erdman suffers from “severe pains in her left breast and pelvic region, as well as a chronic respiratory condition.”71 Lisa is being treated by a fictitious version of Freud who interprets the pain as a symptom of a traumatic event located in the past. However, the novel’s unnatural story disrupts conventional cause-and-effect patterns as the body of the major protagonist can literally feel the future, namely Lisa/Anna’s brutal murder at Babi Yar in 1941. Before the Nazis fire their machine guns, Lisa/Anna and Kolya, her step son, jump into a ravine. Kolya dies and Lisa/Anna lies dying in the ravine. Before Lisa/Anna is subjected to a horrifying bayonet rape, we are informed about the actual cause of the pains she suffered earlier in the novel: An SS man bent over an old woman lying on her side, having seen a glint of something bright. His hand brushed her breast when he reached for the crucifix to pull it free, and he must have sensed a flicker of life. Letting go the crucifix he

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which proper mind reading that goes beyond speculation is possible. As I will show in Section 5, the representation of consciousness plays an even more important role in Modernist fiction. Doleˇzel, Heterocosmica, 198. Ibid., 187–9. Kafka, Franz, “The Metamorphosis [1915]”, in: The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, transl. J. Neugroschel, New York 1993, 119. Herman, David, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln 2002, 252. Thomas, D. M., The White Hotel, London 1981, 83.

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Jan Alber stood up. He drew his leg back and sent his jackboot crashing into her left breast. She moved position from the force of the blow, but uttered no sound. Still not satisfied, he swung his boot and sent it cracking into her pelvis. Again the only sound was the clean snap of the bone. Satisfied at last, he jerked the crucifix free.72

These are the events that caused her pains in the left breast and the pelvic region, and Lisa/Anna’s body has (impossibly) ‘foreseen’ these future events. The supernatural and the paranormal are two slightly different manifestations of the unnatural. While unnatural events or creatures in fantastic texts can be explained (or have been naturalized) as pertaining to the realm of the supernatural, paranormal texts defy such an explanation. Like the unnatural elements of postmodernism, paranormal events and scenarios (such as Gregor Samsa’s transformation) still strike us as odd or strange, and we have to resort to other explanations such as the five reading strategies that I have developed.73 Perhaps one can read Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” as an allegory on the human condition that illustrates that we all occasionally feel like, or treat one another as, vermin.

6. The Transparent Minds of Modernist Fiction Modernist novels typically provide access to the thoughts and feelings of reflector-characters (like Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Clarissa Dalloway).74 In the real world, we cannot correctly read other people’s minds, we can only form hypotheses about the thoughts and feelings of our fellow human beings. But in the world of fiction we can read the minds of the characters. In The Distinction of Fiction, Dorrit Cohn describes this fact in terms of the “unnatural power” of third-person narrators “to see into their characters’ inner lives.”75 The (physically impossible) insights into the minds of characters have gradually become naturalized or conventionalized in Modernist fiction.76 Today, narrative techniques such as psychonarration, free indirect

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Ibid., 218–19, my italics, J. A. Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 82–3. Brian McHale argues that “the dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological.” McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, New York/London 1987, 9. That is, Modernist fiction (such as the stream-of-consciousness novel) primarily addresses questions of knowledge. Cohn, Dorrit, The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore 1999, 106, my italics, J. A. As I have shown in Section 4, the representation of consciousness first began to figure in realist novels.

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discourse, or direct thought77 no longer strike us as odd or strange; rather, we accept them as a part of the projected worlds in Modernist novels. Let me present an example. The following passage from Virginia Woolf ’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925) renders the thoughts and feelings of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked World War I veteran: Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death. There was his hand; there the dead. White things were assembling behind the railings opposite. But he dared not look. Evans was behind the railings! “What are you saying?” said Rezia suddenly, sitting down by him. Interrupted again! She was always interrupting.78

When Septimus Warren Smith experienced the death of Evans, his commanding officer during the war, he must have lost his feelings, and consequently retreated into a private world of paralysis. Furthermore, Septimus shows signs of schizophrenia. To begin with, he suffers from hallucinations: the birds sing to him “in Greek” and the dead “Evans” approaches him from “behind the railings.” Second, he is no longer able to clearly discriminate between himself and his surroundings. For example, he feels an ecstatic connection with nature, which is why he argues that “men must not cut down trees.” Third, he thinks that he has a mission (“change the world”), and throughout the novel tries to convince everyone of the necessity of universal love. Fourth, he seems to talk to himself until Rezia, his wife, whom he experiences as a nuisance, finally interrupts him. Such passages allow the reader to experience thoughts, feelings, psychological problems, and mental illnesses he or she does not normally have 77

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The term ‘psychonarration’ denotes a narrator’s report of a character’s conscious or unconscious mental states. The term ‘free indirect discourse,’ on the other hand, refers to a third-person rendering of thoughts that stays close to the character’s own oral syntax and diction except that tenses are shifted to the current narrative tense and pronouns are adjusted. Finally, stretches of direct thought convey what a character thinks without any narratorial mediation. Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway [1925], Oxford 2000, 21. The quoted passage uses narrative techniques such as psychonarration (“a sparrow perched […], how there is no death”), free indirect discourse (“she was always interrupting”), and direct thought (“men must not cut down trees”; “there is a God”; “change the world”; “no one kills from hatred”; “make it known”) to render the character’s interiority.

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access to. This particular passage is not unnatural because we are confronted with a schizophrenic character (schizophrenics exist in the real world); rather, it is unnatural because the third-person narrator is somehow able to know and tell us exactly what Septimus thinks and feels. In the character of Septimus Warren Smith, Woolf ’s novel presents us with a convincing portrait of schizophrenic breakdown. Furthermore, the text illustrates how the demands of patriarchy may drive a man crazy, and ultimately into suicide. We are invited to sympathize with Septimus and perhaps even to understand his reasons for killing himself. As Käte Hamburger first suggested, literature is interesting because it can portray consciousness, particularly the consciousness of ‘somebody else’ from the inside.79 Indeed, narrative fiction is the only mode of discourse that allows us to get such inside views. In the words of Monika Fludernik, “fiction at one point discovers that it can not only present another’s mind by conjecture and a little bit of invention (by a stretching of the imagination, so to speak), but can present consciousness extensively as if reading people’s minds.”80 My point is that, as in the other examples I have discussed in this contribution, readers had to stretch their cognitive frames beyond real-world possibilities in order to make sense of the projected world: “It is precisely such an extension of our readerly privilege to experience a fictional persona’s consciousness im-mediately that helps literature to extend the range of realworld-experience towards and beyond the limits of human cognition.”81

7. The Impossible Temporalities in Science Fiction Science-fiction narratives also contain numerous unnatural scenarios and events that have already been naturalized. Among them are extraterrestrials, aliens, Martians, cyborgs, robots that have intentionality (such as C3PO), impossible spaces, the idea of time travel, and other warped temporalities. We expect to encounter such unnatural creatures and situations when we open a science-fiction novel. According to Peter Stockwell, the term “science fiction” was popularized in the 1940s, and […] has come to refer to a form of genre fiction characterised by the narration of imaginative and speculative alternative worlds. Though typically set in the future or in space, sf (usually abbreviated in lower case) also encompasses narratives 79

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Hamburger, Käte, The Logic of Literature [1973], transl. Marilynn J. Rose, Bloomington 1993. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 48. Fludernik, “New Wine”, 626.

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of counterfactual history, virtuality, and an extreme defamiliarisation of contemporary society.82

Christine Brooke-Rose argues that “science fiction has its roots in the marvellous.”83 From my perspective, these roots involve the unnatural. Both genres play around with the physically or logically impossible. In the case of the former, the unnatural can be explained in terms of the supernatural, while in the case of the latter, the impossible can be explained through potential technological progress or simply the setting in the future. Interestingly, most (if not all) of the unnatural temporalities that Brian Richardson has discovered are common in the area of science fiction, where they have already been naturalized or conventionalized.84 Richardson discriminates between the following impossible temporalities: (1) in circular ones, time continues indefinitely (as in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake [1939]); (2) in contradictory time lines, incompatible or irreconcilable versions of the story are set forth (an example is Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” [1969]); (3) in antinomic temporalities, time moves backward (as in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow [1991]); (4) in differential ones, characters age at a different rate than other inhabitants of the storyworld (an example is Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando [1928]); and (5) in conflated time lines, apparently different temporal zones fail to remain distinct (as in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada [1976]).85 Let me present examples from science-fiction narratives: to begin with, a circular temporality can be found in J. G. Ballard’s short story “Escapement” (1952). This science-fiction narrative presents us with a temporal loop in which time skips back like a broken record and the central protagonist is then forced to relive parts of his past. Furthermore, as Marie-Laure Ryan has shown, Ursula Le Guin’s science-fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

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Stockwell, Peter, “Science Fiction”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / MarieLaure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London 2005, 518–19. Brooke-Rose, Christine, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially the Fantastic, Cambridge 1981, 72. See Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse”, 48–52. I would like to thank Johannes Fehrle and Rüdiger Heinze for mentioning numerous science-fiction narratives to me. Richardson also mentions “dual or multiple” temporalities, “in which different plotlines, though beginning and ending at the same moment, nevertheless take different numbers of days to unfold.” Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse”, 50–1. From my perspective, differential and dual temporalities are rather similar. Both involve disparate time zones; it is only that in dual or multiple ones, the different time line does not affect the ageing of the characters.

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contains a contradictory temporality.86 In this narrative George Orr experiences “effective dreams” that change the circumstances of his life. When Dr. Haber, a psychoanalyst, begins to control Orr’s dreams through hypnosis, he discovers that he can actually create new worlds by scripting these dreams: the result of this process is a multiverse narrative that consists of coexisting but logically incompatible worlds.87 Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction novel Counter-Clock World (1967) contains a retrogressive temporality. In this novel, time begins to move backward in the year 1986 when the projected world reaches the so-called “Hobart Phase.” From this point onward, the dead revive in their own graves (“old-birth”), live their lives in reverse, return to the womb, and split into an egg and a sperm while their parents are having sex.88 Differential time lines proliferate in science-fiction narratives, too. For example, in Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Time for the Stars (1956), Pat Bartlett, a member of a starship crew who are supposed to discover new planets to colonize, ages more slowly than his twin brother Tom, who remained on earth. Similarly, in Joe Haldeman’s science-fiction novel The Forever War (1974), William Mandella, fights an interstellar war against the Taurans, an alien species, and he ages more slowly than those who stayed on planet Earth.89 Finally, in science-fiction narratives, characters permanently travel into the past or the future so that the present and the past (or the present and the future) become merged in conflated temporalities. In Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” (1953), set in 2055, time machines enable American citizens to travel back sixty million years to shoot dinosaurs. Unfortunately, during his time safari, Eckels, the central protagonist, kills “a butterfly,” thus tragically altering the course of history.90 86

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Ryan, Marie-Laure, “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative”, in: Poetics Today, 27, 2006, Nr. 4, 663. This temporality is logically impossible because it violates the principle of noncontradiction. Dick, Philip K., Counter-Clock World [1968], London 1990, 14. See also Ryan, Marie-Laure, “Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative”, in: Style, 43, 2009, Nr. 2, 145–50. Haldeman, Joe, The Forever War, New York 1974, 132; 213. See also the science-fiction film Planet of the Apes (1968), where three astronauts travel for 2006 years (they end up on an unknown planet in the year 3978 A.D.) but age only eighteen months during this journey. Bradbury, Ray, “A Sound of Thunder [1953]”, in: The Golden Apples of the Sun, Frogmore 1977, 98. Also, Edward Bush, the central protagonist of Brian Aldiss’s science-fiction novel Cryptozoic (1967), travels to the past again and again. In Robert Heinlein’s short story “All You Zombies” (1959), an intersexual man travels back in time to impregnate his younger female self (before she underwent a sex

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Many unnatural temporalities that we find defamiliarizing in postmodernist fiction have already been naturalized in the field of science fiction. For instance, when we read a science-fiction novel, we expect time travel to be a possibility. Brian McHale has already investigated the interaction between postmodernism and science fiction. He argues that there has been “a tendency for postmodernist writing to absorb motifs and topoi from science fiction writing, mining science fiction for its raw materials.”91 McHale also shows that the newer cyberpunk science fiction “tends to ‘literalize’ or ‘actualize’ what occurs in postmodernist fiction as metaphor.”92 From my perspective, McHale’s findings suggest that both types of narrative involve the unnatural, albeit in slightly different ways. While science-fiction narratives use impossible temporalities as possibilities in the future, postmodernist narratives create a defamiliarizing effect by using them within a realist context. Perhaps one can explain the unnatural temporalities of postmodernism that Brian Richardson has discovered as blendings of two encyclopedias in the sense of Lubomír Doleˇzel. Doleˇzel defines encyclopedias as “shared communal knowledge” and argues that “the actual-world encyclopedia is just one among numerous encyclopedias of possible worlds. Knowledge about a possible world constructed by a fictional text constitutes a fictional encyclopedia.”93 I propose that what strikes us as being odd or strange about the unnatural temporalities of postmodernism, is the occurring of impossible time lines in realist contexts. Hence, one might argue that postmodernist narratives blend our actual-world encyclopedia with our science-fiction encyclopedia by using the latter’s temporalities against the background of otherwise perfectly realist narratives.

8. Conclusion My investigation of the history of English literature highlights that fictional texts have always projected scenarios or events that are impossible in the real world. And from my perspective, this is, at least partly, what makes fiction interesting and special. Unnatural scenarios and events significantly widen the cognitive horizon of human awareness; they challenge our limited perspec-

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change) with the result that he paradoxically becomes both his father and his mother. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 65. See also McHale, Brian, Constructing Postmodernism, London 1992, 229. McHale, Brian, “Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk”, in: Critique 33, 1992, Nr. 3, 150. Doleˇzel, Heterocosmica, 177.

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tive on the world and invite us to address questions that we do not normally address. The unnatural extends the limits of what readers can take to be the case so that the real becomes a zone of potentiality refusing reduction to any simplistic account of the way things are. The unnatural also sheds new light on the distinctiveness of fiction. I suggest that the possibility of representing the impossible is the most crucial difference between the world of fiction and other modes of discourse. It is only in fictional worlds that we can experience and ponder unnatural manifestations such as physically or logically impossible narrators, characters, temporalities, settings, and events, and that we can gain access to the thoughts and feelings of ‘others.’ Pekka Tammi has recently argued that “we should now ask whether it is not the capacity of literary fiction […] to deal specifically with the impossibilities, the paradoxes and problems, of our human efforts to order experience.”94 Even though Tammi talks about psychological impossibilities and problems (rather than physical or logical impossibilities), I think that our understandings of fiction converge in so far as we both argue that fictional worlds are not only concerned with order, coherence, stability, and causality but also with impossibilities of various different types. Unnatural scenarios or events are also frequently depicted in the fictional worlds of paintings. René Magritte’s painting Le blanc-seing (1965), for example, presents us with a physically impossible scenario: in the painting, a tree that is located behind a lady on a horse blocks our view on this lady, while the space between two other trees makes her horse transparent. Ulf Linde comments on this painting as follows: “if we wish to call the world the painting refers to a possible world we must […] make an important limitation: the painting – and only the painting – makes that world possible.”95

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Tammi, Pekka, “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’)”, in: Partial Answers, 4, 2006, Nr. 2, 29. Linde, Ulf, “Image and Dimension”, in: Sture Allén (ed.), Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences, Berlin and New York 1989, 312. Further examples of impossible paintings are M. C. Escher’s Ascending and Descending (1960), in which two lines of monks ascend and descend stairs in an infinite loop on a monastery that would be impossible to build, and Waterfall (1961), in which the water flows uphill and downhill at the same time. An earlier example is William Hogarth’s engraving False Perspective (1754), in which “a tree which is nearer the foreground than several others is nevertheless behind a sign which they are in front of.” Walton, Kendall L., Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA 1990, 64. The British psychologists Lionel S. and Roger Penrose discuss numerous impossible objects. The Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd was actually the first to design impossible objects (such as the so-called “Penrose triangle”) but

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As I have shown, during the course of English literary history, many unnatural scenarios or events have been conventionalized or naturalized, i.e., turned into a basic cognitive frame. Despite the obvious role of ‘natural’ or real-world cognitive parameters in all narratives,96 I suggest that the development of new genres closely correlates with the naturalization or conventionalization of unnatural segments. One only has to think of the crucial role of speaking animals in beast fables, the many supernatural elements in medieval fairy tales (and, later on, in Gothic novels and other fantasy literature), the speaking objects that narrate the circulation novels of the eighteenth century (anticipated by the speaking cross in the Old English “The Dream of the Rood”), the telepathic narrator in much realist fiction, the impossible renderings of character interiority (through free indirect discourse, psychonarration, or direct thought) in Modernist fiction, and the numerous projected impossibilities in science fiction. All of these narratives are characterized by the interaction or reciprocity between the natural on the one hand and the unnatural on the other. I would also like to highlight that both the natural and the unnatural involve simulation or models of representation. Hence, these categories can be found on a continuum and are not diametrically opposed to one another. I am here following the pragmatist argument that all forms of representation (no matter how bizarre) “are ultimately the result of somebody’s subjective experience.”97 Nevertheless, I accentuate the important role of the unnatu-

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Penrose and Penrose were obviously not familiar with his work. Penrose and Penrose describe the features of the Penrose triangle as follows: “Here is a perspective drawing, each part of which is accepted as representing a three-dimensional rectangular structure. The lines in the drawing are, however, connected in such a manner as to produce an impossibility.” Penrose, Lionel S. / Penrose, Roger, “Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Visual Illusion”, in: British Journal of Psychology, 49, 1958, 31; see also 31–3. See Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology and “Natural Narratology”; Herman, Story Logic and “Introduction.” Ludwig, Sämi, “Grotesque Landscapes: African American Fiction, Voodoo Animism, and Cognitive Models”, in: Maria Diedrich / Carl Pedersen / Justine Tally (eds.), Mapping African America: History, Narrative Formation, and the Production of Knowledge, Hamburg 1999, 195. One might perhaps see unnatural scenarios and events as phenomena in the sense of Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce argues that phenomenology is “the description of the phaneron; and by the phaneron [he] mean[s] the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not.” Peirce, Charles Sanders, “The Principles of Phenomenology”, in: Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler, New York 1955, 74.

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ral, i.e., the possibility of simulating the impossible, in fictional worlds.98 Sämi Ludwig argues that representations of the impossible are “digital rather than analogic”; they offer “processed information (‘meaning’) rather than mimesis of the outside (‘imitation’).” Furthermore, […] there is no direct or proportional ‘likeness’ involved: Depending on whether they are more important or less important to human beings, elements and experiences of outside space and time are allotted larger or smaller presence on such a customized map. This kind of representation, then, must be seen as the careful recording of useful information, which is based on one’s needs and one’s experience with the environment; it reflects the purposeful negotiation of space and time by living people.99

As my analysis has shown, it is important to note that throughout literary history, fictional narratives have always urged us to work on our cognitive architecture and to develop new frames or scripts before we could formulate hypotheses about the potential messages of these narratives. If fictional texts did not create new parameters, it would be difficult (if not impossible) to account for literary change, and both the writing and the reading of narratives would correlate with the eternal reproduction of the same basic stock of cognitive frames. According to Stanislaw Lem, “the evolution of literary genres” is based on the “violation of storytelling conventions which have already become static.”100 From my perspective, the unnatural is the major driving force behind this evolution.

98

Interestingly, the unnatural even plays a role in natural (i.e., oral) narratives in the sense of William Labov. See Labov, William, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, Philadelphia 1972. For example, tall tales are full of physically impossible scenarios and events which are presumably supposed to make these oral narratives more entertaining and anecdotally tellable: tall tales are spontaneously occurring stories of personal experience “in which the circumstances of the narrated event are stretched by degrees to the point that they challenge or exceed the limits of credibility.” Bauman, Richard, “Tall Tale”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London 2005, 582. Also, Katie Wales has recently published an article in which she investigates oral narratives in private séances that involve communication between a spiritual medium and the dead as well as between the spiritual medium and a sitter. See Wales, Katie, “Unnatural Conversations in Unnatural Conversations: Speech Reporting in the Discourse of Spiritual Mediumship”, in: Language and Literature, 18, 2009, Nr. 4, 347–56. 99 Ludwig, “Grotesque Landscapes”, 190; italics in the original. 100 Lem, Stanislaw, Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Franz Rottensteiner, London 1985, 123.

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9. Bibliography Abbott, H. Porter, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Cambridge 2008. Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Study, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96. –, “Unnatural Narratives”, in: The Literary Encyclopedia, 2009, http://www.liten cyc.com. Bauman, Richard, “Tall Tale”, in: David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London 2005, 582. Bellamy, Liz, “It-Narrators and Circulation: Defining a Subgenre”, in: Mark Blackwell (ed.), The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, Lewisburg 2007, 117–46. Berthelot, Francis, “The Fantastic”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / MarieLaure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London and New York 2005, 159–60. Blackwell, Mark, “Introduction: The It-Narrative and Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory”, in: Mark Blackwell (ed.), The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, Lewisburg 2007, 9–14. Bradbury, Ray, “A Sound of Thunder [1953]”, in: The Golden Apples of the Sun, Frogmore 1977, 88–99. Bridges, Thomas, The Adventures of a Bank-note, Volume I and II, London 1770. Brooke-Rose, Christine, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially the Fantastic, Cambridge 1981. Cohn, Dorrit, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton 1978. –, The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore 1999. Cross, Roseanna, “‘Heterochronia’ in Thomas of Erceldoune, Guingamor, ‘The Tale of King Herla,’ and The Story of Meriadoc, King of Cambria”, in: Neophilologus, 92, 2008, 163–75. Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, Ithaca 1975. –, “Omniscience”, Narrative, 12, 2004, Nr. 1, 22–34. Dick, Philip K., Counter-Clock World [1968], London 1990. Doleˇzel, Lubomír, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore and London 1998. Flint, Christopher, “Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction”, in: PMLA, 113, 1998, Nr. 2, 212–26. Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London/New York 1996. –, “New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization, and New Writing”, in: New Literary History, 32, 2001, 619–38. –, “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters”, in: David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford 2003, 243–67. Frow, John, Genre, London/New York 2005. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method [1972], transl. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca 1980. Gordon, R. K., “The Dream of the Rood”, in: R. K. Gordon (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry, London 1970, 235–38. Haldeman, Joe, The Forever War, New York 1974.

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Hamburger, Käte, The Logic of Literature [1973], transl. Marilynn J. Rose, Bloomington 1993. Heinze, Rüdiger, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, Narrative, 16, 2008, Nr. 3, 279–97. Heise, Ursula K., Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism, Cambridge 1997. Herman, David, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln 2002. –, “Introduction”, in: David Herman (ed.), The Emergence of Mind, Lincoln forthcoming. The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes: Written by Themselves. London 1754. Johnstone, Charles Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea. 4 Vols. London, 1760–65. Kafka, Franz, “The Metamorphosis [1915]”, in: The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, transl. J. Neugroschel, New York 1993, 119–92. Labov, William, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, Philadelphia 1972. Lem, Stanislaw, Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Franz Rottensteiner, London 1985. Linde, Ulf, “Image and Dimension”, in Sture Allén (ed.), Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences, Berlin and New York 1989, 312–28. Ludwig, Sämi, “Grotesque Landscapes: African American Fiction, Voodoo Animism, and Cognitive Models”, in: Maria Diedrich / Carl Pedersen / Justine Tally (eds.), Mapping African America: History, Narrative Formation, and the Production of Knowledge, Hamburg 1999, 189–202. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, New York and London 1987. –, Constructing Postmodernism, London 1992. –, “Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk”, in: Critique, 33, 1992, Nr. 3, 149–75. Manguel, Alberto (ed.), Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, London 1983. Map, Walter, De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and transl. M. R. James, Oxford 1983. Mikics, David, A New Handbook of Literary Terms, New Haven/London 2007. Neemann, Harold, “Fairy Tale”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London/New York 2005, 157–58. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, Narrative, 12, 2004, Nr. 2, 133–50. Palmer, Alan, “Realist Novel”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London 2005, 491–92. Peirce, Charles Sanders, “The Principles of Phenomenology”, in: Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler, New York 1955, 74–97. Penrose, Lionel S. / Penrose, Roger, “Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Visual Illusion”, in: British Journal of Psychology, 49, 1958, 31–3. Popper, Karl, Logik der Forschung [1934], ed. Herbert Keuth, Tübingen 2005. Richardson, Brian, “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 47–63. –, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006.

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Richardson, Peter R., “Making Thanes: Literature, Rhetoric, and State-Formation in Anglo-Saxon England”, in: Philological Quarterly, 78, 1999, 215–32. Ronen, Ruth, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, Cambridge 1994. Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny, Manchester 2003. Ryan, Marie-Laure, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington 1991. –, “The Narratorial Function: Breaking Down a Theoretical Primitive”, in: Narrative, 9, 2001, Nr. 2, 146–52. –, “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative”, in: Poetics Today, 27, 2006, Nr. 4, 633–74. –, “Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative”, in: Style, 43, 2009, Nr. 2, 142–64. Scodel, Ruth, Credible Impossibilities: Conventions and Strategies of Verisimilitude in Homer and Greek Tragedy, Stuttgart/Leipzig 1999. Scott, Helenus, The Adventures of a Rupee, London 1782. Shklovsky, Viktor, “Art as Technique [1917]”, in: Lee T. Lemon / Marion J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism, Lincoln 1965, 3–24. Stockwell, Peter, “Science Fiction”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London 2005, 518–20. Tammi, Pekka, “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’)”, in: Partial Answers, 4, 2006, Nr. 2, 19–40. Thomas, D. M., The White Hotel, London 1981. Thompson, Stith, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Vol. 6, Bloomington 1958. Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, transl. Richard Howard, Cleveland and London 1973. Traill, Nancy H., “Fictional Worlds of the Fantastic”, in: Style, 25, 1991, Nr. 2, 196–210. –, Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in Literature, Toronto 1996. Turner, Mark, “The Cognitive Study of Art, Language, and Literature”, in: Poetics Today, 23, 2002, Nr. 1, 9–20. –, “Double-Scope Stories”, in: David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford 2003, 117–42. Wales, Katie, “Unnatural Conversations in Unnatural Conversations: Speech Reporting in the Discourse of Spiritual Mediumship”, in: Language and Literature, 18, 2009, Nr. 4, 347–56. Walton, Kendall L., Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA 1990. Watzlawick, Paul, How Real is Real? Confusion, Disinformation, Communication, London 1976. Wells, H. G., “The Time Machine [1895]”, in: Frank McConnell (ed.), The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, New York 1977, 11–104. Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway [1925], Oxford 2000.

II. Unnatural Narrators and Minds

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Henrik Skov Nielsen (Aarhus)

Unnatural Narratology, Impersonal Voices, Real Authors, and Non-Communicative Narration

1. Introduction Narrative theory may well be the greatest export success emanating from the study of literature ever. Originating in structuralism and applied in the early years mainly to literary works of art, narratological terms and insights have now spread to fields as diverse as economics, history, psychology and many others. A reason for and a consequence of this success is that major trends in today’s narrative theory focus on the idea that narratives are modeled on the actual world – meaning that, for example, fictional minds are not fundamentally different from real minds, that there is a genetic link between everyday storytelling practices and, say, experimental novels, and so forth. It could be argued, however, that the emphasis on real-world knowledge and the assumption that all stories are situated within a communicative context comparable to real-life narrative situations may lead to a neglect of the specific possibilities of some literary and fictional narratives – and other kinds of unnatural narratives. One of the many reasons why this matters, is that it deeply influences our understanding of what role narratives should play in the study of literature and not least what role literature should play in the study of narratives – and also in the study of language and culture for that matter. And this, in turn, affects considerations about curricula across different studies; considerations about what kind of knowledge we wish to pursue at what occasions, and the whole complex of questions about whether literature at the universities should be a means or an end or both. After the ISSN Conference in Washington, D. C., in 2007, a small group of narrative theorists incidentally gathered in the lobby. The group included Brian Richardson, Jan Alber, Maria Mäkelä, and myself. We realized that the conference in Washington seemed to have yielded a rather strong resistance to otherwise predominant naturalizing paradigms. Consequently, we invited everyone interested to join a group on what we tentatively called “unnatural narratology.” We even bought the (given the name of the group unsurprising) web address . We have since been surprised by the overwhelming interest that numerous excellent scholars have taken in the project and even more overwhelmed by the many seem-

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ingly unsolvable problems that arose from trying to determine what we mean when we talk about unnatural narratology and when we tried to delimit what we talk about. What are unnatural narratives? And what exactly do you do if you are interested in doing unnatural narratology? The conference conducted in Freiburg by Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze is one step in the process of trying to find answers to these questions. In this article, I take up an especially challenging invitation to introduce some ideas I put forward in an article1 and then connect and compare these ideas to ideas about the role of the real author in fictional narratives. In the following, I will very briefly recount the main arguments for an impersonal voice, and then turn to Rüdiger Heinze’s brilliant article on a very similar topic.2 Subsequently, I will try to negotiate between my views and his and to consider the role of the author. Finally, I will deal with the question of whether it is possible to provide a definition of “narrative” that includes fictional and non-fictional as well as natural and unnatural narratives at the same time. In that latter context, I will say a few words about the differences between naturalization and conventionalization in order to try to describe the specificity of unnatural narratives.

2. Impersonal Voices At several occasions I have recently suggested that the voice we hear in fiction is actually often the voice of the author and not the voice of a narrator.3 I realize that saying that this voice in fiction – even in first-person fiction – is both impersonal and the voice of the author sounds like taking self-contradiction to new limits. However, in fact, I do not think it is a contradiction at all. And I will try to explain why in this paper. First let me notice that there is some common ground between the two statements, namely that we should be careful to not always attribute the words of fictional narratives to narrators. While there is always a global communication between the author and the reader in force, this needs not take the form of someone telling somebody about something that happened like a narrator would be expected to do to 1

2

3

Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, in: Narrative, 12, 2004, Nr. 2, 133–50. Heinze, Rüdiger, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, in: Narrative, 16, 2008, Nr. 3, 279–97. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narratives” in: Jan Alber / Monika Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, Columbus forthcoming 2010; Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “What’s in a Name? Double Exposures in Lunar Park”, in: Naomi Mandel (ed.), Bret Easton Ellis, forthcoming.

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a narratee, but rather the form of fictional invention and world creation. Strange as it may seem, the suggestion that the person referred to by the pronoun “I” need not really be the narrator in first-person narrative fiction is an attempt to solve a specific problem that has haunted narrative theory since Käte Hamburger. Hamburger takes her point of departure in an at once fundamental and radical distinction between epic and non-epic statements, claiming that in epic fiction, there is no statement subject. According to Hamburger, the sentences of the epic are not sentences that can be true or false in respect to reality but are sentences about something that only exists by virtue of the sentences: That is, the narrative poet is not a statement-subject. He does not narrate about persons and things, but rather he narrates these persons and things […].4 Das heißt, der erzählende Dichter ist kein Aussagesubjekt, er erzählt nicht von Personen und Dingen, sondern er erzählt Personen und Dinge […].5

In first-person fiction, however, Hamburger maintains that the situation is very different because such fiction is more like autobiography than like epic fiction. For Hamburger, epic narrative operates according to rules that differ from those of reality statements, first-person narratives do not: A constitutive feature inherent in the concept of the feigned reality statement is the fact that here the form of reality statement occurs. That is, we have a subjectobject correlation, whose decisive characteristic is that the statement-subject, the first-person narrator, can speak about other persons only as objects. He can never free them from his own experience-field.6 In dem Begriffe fingierte Wirklichkeitsaussage ist als konstituierendes Moment enthalten, daß hier die Form der Wirklichkeitsaussage vorliegt, d. h. eine SubjektObjekt-Korrelation, für die entscheidend ist, daß das Aussagesubjekt, der Icherzähler, von anderen Personen nur als von Objekten sprechen kann. Er kann diese niemals aus seinem eigenen Erlebnisfeld entlassen.7

In Hamburger’s view, if there is a statement subject, then it will narrate something that (in the world of fiction) exists prior to its narration. If there is no statement subject, then the sentences of fiction will produce the world they describe. Consequently, as Hamburger herself recognizes, there is an insurmountable difference between the ontology of the narrated world in the two cases, and, for her, only the narrated world of the first case belongs to the domain of true fiction. In this way, Hamburger concludes that fictional firstperson narrative does not belong to the domain of true fiction. Hamburger’s 4 5 6 7

Hamburger, Käte, The Logic of Literature, Bloomington 1973, 136. Hamburger, Käte, Die Logik der Dichtung, Stuttgart 1957, 74. Hamburger, Logic, 315. Hamburger, Logik, 224.

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conclusion seems very counterintuitive to me and it frequently reappears in subsequent discussions of the status of the narrator. Historically, fictional first-person narrative has always been an obvious problem for any no-narrator theory, since it seems unquestionable that the first-person narrative is narrated by a personalized first-person narrator. It has seemed impossible to make room for fictional first-person narrative in a theory that does not have room for the narrator. This is the problem that I try to solve. Suffice it here to refer to just one example from my article where I provide many examples from different periods. The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which is one of the very first first-person fictional narratives as such, contains a curious passage. In books 5 and 6, one finds the very elaborate story of Cupid and Psyche related by an old woman. Immediately afterwards, we read the following: “This the trifling and drunken old woman declared to the captive maiden, but I, poor ass, not standing far off, was not a little sorry in that I lacked pen and book to write so worthy a tale.”8 The context leaves no doubt that the ass is sorry because the story, long and complex as it is, cannot possibly be remembered without the ability of writing to support memory. Furthermore, any possibility that the old woman might retell the story at some later point is eliminated by the fact that she is hanged immediately after having told the story (295). The passage makes it clear that when we “hear” the story about Cupid and Psyche there is no temporal distance and afterwards, the ass cannot possibly remember it. Thus the story, as the old woman told it, is forever forgotten and lost, and yet it is there in front of our eyes, where it continues to exist in this hic et nunc, where it is told. The question, now, is how should we interpret passages and narratives like this? According to my proposal, it is not a question of the first-person narrator lying or being untrustworthy since he renders what he cannot remember, nor is it a question of the ass making up the details missing in memory. The story comes to the reader as an authoritative one. What we read is the impersonal voice of the narrative narrating what the ass will not be able to remember (and that he will not be able to remember it). The reader is requested to believe both that the old woman told the story exactly as we read it for thirty pages and that the ass cannot remember it. This is unnatural in the specific sense that both things could never be true at the same time in any naturally occurring storytelling context. When sentences in a fictional narrative that would clearly mark the narrator as unreliable or even insane in a nonfictional narrative come to the 8

Apuleius, The Golden Ass, Cambridge, MA 1973, 285.

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reader as authoritative, it is because the sentences should not unambiguously be ascribed to (a later version of) the character but rather to the impersonal voice of the narrative. This conclusion has a further consequence of vital importance: as opposed to the sentences of autobiography but akin to those of third-person narrative, the sentences of first-person narrative fiction do not form statements about reality. Instead they produce a fictional world that does not exist independently of these sentences. Expressed this way, the narrative situation in first-person narrative fiction closely approximates the narration in third-person narrative. In fact, if we briefly return to Hamburger, we find that the concept of an impersonal voice of the narrative simply eliminates Hamburger’s distinction between narratives with and those without a statement subject. Third-person narrative and first-person narrative are thus both characterized by not having a narrator who speaks about something that exists independently of the narrative fiction, but rather an impersonal voice that creates the world to which it refers. In that sense I think of the proposal as simple and economical. The first-person narrator, like all the other elements of fiction, is created because the impersonal voice of the narrative refers to it. This goes for trees, houses, space ships, and all persons including the person referred to by the pronoun “I.” In his rich and well-argued article “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction” (2008), Rüdiger Heinze mentions a whole range of very interesting examples of first-person narratives displaying knowledge that their first-person narrators could not possibly possess. Some of the examples are to some degree similar to the Apuleius-example. Heinze’s examples are all very good, and I have immediately put them into my bibliography of unnatural first-person narratives. Heinze proceeds to establish a typology of different types. And he refers to the examples as different kinds of paralepsis in first person narratives where something is disclosed that the first person narrator could not know. In this context, I wish to make two remarks. The first is this: the term ‘paralepsis’ means “saying too much” in the sense of disclosing knowledge you could not possess. In one sense that is a very apt term for the phenomena we are discussing and I do not want to challenge it. I just wish to mention that it is only a question of paralepsis if we still think of the first person as narrator. In so far as an impersonal voice is narrating, it is not saying more or less than it knows – it is inventing and creating a world including the first person and his knowledge and lack of knowledge. In that sense “paralepsis” serves in its own way to naturalize the understanding – and as I understand it, Heinze deliberately wishes to stress that readers naturalize for a good reason.

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The second thing that interests me here is an important objection Heinze raises. He formulates it as follows: Nielsen himself introduces one main dilemma: “[O]n the one hand, in first-person narrative fiction it is very common to find a number of features that would be highly unlikely in a nonfictional narrative and sometimes features that clearly show us that the sentences cannot possibly be narrated by a personal first-person narrator. On the other hand, it is just as significant that the protagonist in firstperson narrative is often recognizable by his idiolects, idiosyncrasies, prejudices, etc., as these directly appear in the rendering of the narrative” (136). If we take this comment seriously, then Nielsen’s hypothesis does not work for texts such as Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama, as he claims it does, because “impossible” comments here clearly carry the distinct mark of the voice of the I-narrator and thus belong to the character function: “I walk into the frame, not noticing the black limousine parked across the street” (168). To limit these often humorous or ironic comments as belonging merely to an impersonal voice misrepresents the style of Ellis’ I-narrator.9

The last sentence is true indeed. And I would find it ill-advised to say that such comments belong “merely” to an impersonal voice. Again it may be illuminating to compare this scenario to the situation in third-person narration. In first-person narrative fiction, the protagonist has a voice with idiolects and personal characteristics, and this voice may interfere in the presentation of the narrative just as the characters’ voices may interfere in the presentation of the narrative in heterodiegetic narration, i.e. the third-person mode. This could be in the form of a dual voice of free indirect speech in one of its shapes. This only affirms that the impersonal voice presents and creates all characters along with the characteristics of their respective styles, and this goes for the protagonist in fictional first-person narratives as well. It is very true that the style here belongs to Victor. He and his style are both created by the very utterance of the words by a voice which is not limited to his knowledge. If the two voices were always present only one at the time, the objection would be correct, but in fact they are intertwined throughout a narrative. Only sometimes is it possible to determine with certainty that some words or thoughts could not possibly be the first person’s. This second voice is impersonal in the precise sense that is does not belong to any of the characters although it creates the characters and refers to one of them as “I” and lets this person talk in a way that is characteristic of his or her style. What is probably most important, though, is a point on which we agree. We simply arrive at inadequate interpretations if we deem first-person narrators unre9

Heinze, “Violations”, 288.

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liable, insane (e.g., schizophrenic), or wrong whenever they transcend the limits of natural (real-world) storytellers. Heinze provides very strong support for that claim.

3. Report and Invention, Narration and Communication Another narratologist who has dealt resolutely with some of the very problems mentioned above is James Phelan, whose approach is rhetorical. His well-known and often re-iterated definition of narrative is: “narrative itself can be fruitfully understood as a rhetorical act: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened.”10 Phelan himself is aware that this conception runs into troubles in some narratives, e.g. narratives as the ones mentioned, in which something is narrated that the character-narrator need not, will not, or cannot tell. In these cases Phelan makes a division: Communication in character narration occurs along at least two tracks – the narrator-narratee track, and the narrator-authorial audience track. Along the narrator-narratee track, the narrator acts as a reporter, interpreter and evaluator of the narrated for the narratee, and those actions are constrained by the narrative situation (a character narrator, for example, cannot enter the consciousness of another character); let us call these actions ‘narrator functions.’ Along the narratorauthorial audience track, the narrator unwittingly reports information of all kinds to the authorial audience (the narrator does not know that an authorial audience exists); let us call this reporting ‘disclosure functions.’11

Phelan’s explanations have great advantages: they explain why examples such as Apuleius’ and many others should not be considered mistakes on behalf of the author, and why the passages appear as authoritative rather than unreliable. But a potential problem remains. The potential problem is the word “report.” When something is narrated that is beyond the limits imposed by the narrative situation, it is still referred to as report by the narrator – only now unwittingly and to an audience (the authorial audience mentioned in the quote) he/she does not know exists. One could object that this approach underestimates the consequences of the fact that fictional narratives are not reports, but inventions. The general problem is that if all narration is report and communication – I use the two words as synonyms as Phelan seems to do – then there must be a reporter. And this brings me directly to the question of the author. The need for a re10

11

Phelan, James, Living To Tell About It: A Rhetoric And Ethics Of Character Narration, New York 2005, 18. Ibid., 12.

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porter is the main reason why the author tends to be excluded from narratological interest. In fictional narratives the author is obviously not a reporter and not telling that something happened; the author is inventing. Thus, in order to be able to view fictional narratives as reports, narratologists have taken interest in the narrator instead. But as soon as it becomes obvious that the narrator is not reporting (if for instance he/she does not know what is told), the need for the author returns. Phelan meets the demands of this need for a reporter in his examples by saying that the implied author interferes and has the narrator narrate to audiences and for purposes the narrator is unaware of. The general logic – a logic not specific to Phelan, but common to all narratological conceptions that equate communication and narration – is that from the observation that the author is not reporting one concludes that the narrator is; and from the observation that the narrator is not reporting, one concludes that the author is. As is obvious from my way of putting this, I think this logic comes close to circularity. And I will suggest that there is a simpler way of approaching the problem. The suggestion is simply that not all narration is report and communication as seems to be the implication of Phelan’s definition. Fictional narratives are inventive instead of reporting. In my opinion Phelan’s formula is even more accurate – and necessary as well as sufficient – as a definition of communication than as a definition of narrative. Invention and non-report are techniques of fictionality. But fictionality is not necessarily a global quality of a narrative. It may also be local. Not all works of non-fiction refrain from techniques of fictionality, and not all works of fiction employ such techniques. Let us take a look at the following simple example: “The two men on the couches next to me are both sound asleep. […] I fade in and out. The TV is narcotic. In and out. In. Out. In. Out.”12 The words form, quite literally, “unspeakable sentences,” to use Ann Banfield’s expression. As opposed to Banfield I try to stress that non-communication does not only appear in narrative fiction and, conversely, that not all narrative fiction is non-communicative. Whether the example is fictional or not matters little (and actually the discussion is still ongoing about the status of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces) because regardless of the global status of the narrative as fiction or not, this is not communication. In so far as “out” describes a state of mind, of not being conscious, it clearly could not at the same time be reported. In the quote there is no one to tell to and no one conscious to do the telling. 12

Frey, James, A Million Little Pieces, New York 2003, 286.

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However minimal, I have never encountered a definition of communication that did not include a sender and a receiver. But neither of the two parties necessary for communication to take place need to be present for a narrative to exist. If nothing happened or no one told it, or told it to no one etc. – then there could still be narration, but the narration would not entail the report from anyone that something happened. When things are told that a narrator could not know, the inventive aspect of fiction is foregrounded.

4. Defining Narratives To recapitulate: What Phelan defines is in my view not a sum of all narrative, but a sub-part – the sub-part of reporting narration. In the last part of the paper, I wish to broaden the perspective and talk more generally about the pros and cons of trying to find a definition that includes all narratives and excludes all non-narratives. Taking my point of departure in David Herman’s recent and very refined prototype definition (2009), I move on to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a broader and more inclusive definition of narrative. For Herman the four basic elements of prototypical narratives are: i) situatedness (a specific context or occasion for telling) ii) event sequencing iii) worldmaking/world disruption (the events introduce disruption into a storyworld) iv) what it’s like (to experience these events and disruptions)13

Notably what is defined is a prototypical narrative. And Herman proceeds to introduce the extremely useful notions of “centrality gradience” and “membership gradience”: […] prototypical instances of a given category will be good (= easily recognized and named) examples of it, whereas more peripheral instances will display less goodness-of-fit. Thus a category like “bird” can be characterized as subject to what Lakoff calls centrality gradience: although robins are more prototypical members or central instances of the category than emus are (since robins can fly, for example), emus still belong to the category of bird, albeit farther away from what might be called the center of the category space. Meanwhile, when one category shades over into another, membership gradience can be said to obtain. Think of the categories “tall person” and “person of average height”: where exactly do you draw the line? Narrative can be described as a kind of text (a text-type category) to which both centrality gradience and membership gradience apply.14

13 14

Herman, David, Basic Elements of Narrative, Malden, MA 2009, 9. Ibid., 12.

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The term “natural” has been most prominently applied to narrative theory by Monika Fludernik. She describes the term as follows: Natural narrative is a term that has come to define “naturally occurring” storytelling […] What will be called natural narrative in this book includes, mainly, spontaneous conversational storytelling […].15

While Herman does not subscribe to the term “natural,” he still focuses on the idea that there is a genetic link between everyday storytelling practices and the features we take to be prototypical of all stories. In that specific sense, I think that what Herman provides is a definition of what Fludernik would call natural narratives. I also think there can be narratives without one or more of these four basic elements. For reasons of space I shall focus here on only one of the elements – that of situatedness. In conversational narratives, situatedness in the form of the context and occasion for telling is extremely important. It is part of what makes a natural narrative a natural narrative, and it is often decisive for our interpretation of the narrative. But to many literary theorists a large number of literary narratives would importantly be un-situated in the sense that not only is there no identifiable – there is even no imaginable – point in time and space in which the narrative act is situated. Even in first-person narratives the lack of situatedness is often quite apparent. One example would be the following short passage from Glamorama: “See you, baby.” I hand her a French tulip I just happen to be holding and start pulling away from the curb. “Oh Victor,” she calls out, handing Scooter the French tulip. “I got the job! I got the contract.” “Great, baby. I gotta run. What job you crazy chick?” “Guess?” “Matsuda? Gap?” I grin, limousines honking behind me. “Baby, listen, see you tomorrow night.” “No. Guess?” “Baby, I already did. You’re mind-tripping me.”16

There is clearly a character that starts out by saying “See you, baby.” These words are situated in a communicative situation and uttered by the character to a female acquaintance. But at no point is there a narrator situated anywhere before, during or after the events, who says: “I hand her a French tulip.” No communicative situation seems imaginable in which a narrator will narrate these words to a narratee. These next words of the text are not words 15 16

Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London/New York 1996, 13. Ellis, Bret Easton, Glamorama, New York 1999, 19.

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that Victor says, thinks or mumbles to himself or anyone else at any point. The words are unsituated: there is no context and occasion for telling them. The impossibility of adequately describing Glamorama in natural terms is found also on the most general plot level of the narrative. Glamorama is in some respects a classical doppelgänger-narrative. The protagonist and first-person narrator Victor Ward apparently has a double, and this double is gradually taking over his identity. In the end, one Victor – and everything seems to indicate that he is the one we have followed throughout most of the book – dies in Italy while the other Victor, his double, enjoys life in New York. The really odd and unnatural thing about Glamorama, however, is that not only does the double overtake the identity of the first-person narrator on the thematic level and in the narrated universe; he even becomes the enunciator of the pronoun “I.”17 The double becomes the narrating narrator and thus takes over part of the narration. This phenomenon certainly seems to correspond to no manner of natural real-world discourse. And the understanding of just the basic events and the storyline in Glamorama hinges crucially on understanding this pronominal takeover. But literary narratives told in the first-person present tense are clearly not the only potentially un-situated literary narratives. ‘Omniscient’ third-person narration is also more often than not without a specific place or situatedness for a narrator within (or perhaps rather outside) the narrative. And many narratives told in the second person will go well beyond any imaginable communicative situation between a ‘you’ and an ‘I.’ I shall not here demonstrate the lack of situatedness in a wide array of literary narratives, but I think it is fairly uncontroversial to say that if conversational, naturally occurring storytelling is prototypical of narrative, then many literary narratives will diverge from this prototypicality. They will then be more or less “untypical.” Herman does elegantly make room for the a-typical and divergent in the description of the prototypical with its basis in the natural, and this, then, is where centrality gradience and membership gradience become relevant. One could argue that just as emus are birds even though an ability to fly is not really realized in these species, many literary texts are narratives even though they are not really situated – and even though one or more of the other three basic elements may not be fully realized. In that case unnatural narratology is a bit like ornithology with a special interest in emus. To my mind, however, it is not unproblematic to assume 17

See also Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “Telling Doubles and Literal Minded Reading in Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama”, in: Naomi Mandel / Alain-Philippe Durand (eds.), Novels of The Contemporary Extreme, London/New York, 2006, 20–30.

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that many novels and short stories and other literary narratives are to the category of narratives what emus are to the category of birds. To put it bluntly, while staying in the ornithological realm, it amounts to assuming that Andersen’s fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling” is itself an ugly duckling instead of a beautiful swan when compared to other narratives. So while there is room for both the natural and the unnatural in Herman’s model the choice of the prototypical has a consequence. In its attempt to cut across the fiction/nonfiction divide and to work across media, it may run the risk of marginalizing important and central narratives. But is it even possible to imagine a positive definition of narratives that includes all narratives, natural and unnatural, and which at the same time excludes non-narratives? Can we clearly discriminate between non-narrative texts on the one hand, and unnatural narratives on the other? Notwithstanding all its inadequacies I wish to offer for discussion a definition that may well contend for a prize in the category of very short definitions of narrative. I do so not least with the aim of helping to facilitate another interpretation of the limitations and advantages of Herman’s proposal. My suggestion is: Narrative = disruption experienced Compared to Herman, what has happened and why? “Disruption” equals Herman’s “event sequencing” and “world disruption” at the same time for reasons of economy and simplicity, since it seems to me that we cannot have disruption without event sequencing and we cannot have either of them outside a world – imagined or real, following the laws of nature and logic or not. So the world and the event sequencing both seem to me sufficiently implied in “disruption.” Furthermore, “experienced” equals Herman’s “what it’s like.” I can think of narratives in which almost no disruption takes place, but very often these narratives at the same time represent the emphatic absence of a potential disruption. And I can think of, for example, historiographic narratives which do not directly represent the mind or thought of any experiencing character, but they will probably often cue readers to imagine what it is like to live in times or under circumstances like the depicted. Almost all narratives whether in the form of film, literature, conversational storytelling or something else, will score high on one and mostly both of these parameters. One could ask whether it is not the case that there must be a framing, representation or mediation of some kind and if a more complete definition would have to be something like “Narrative = the representation of disruption experienced.” Narrative may well need representation in its defi-

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nition, but for the moment I will bracket the question of whether this representation needs to be some kind of formal framing or could just amount to the mental representation of the (perhaps by nature narrative) experience of disruption in the mind of the experiencer. Compared to Herman’s definition, the suggested one suffers from the obvious disadvantage that it is very general and unspecific. It may indeed be true, as Jim Phelan suggested to me that “unnatural narratives mean that after a certain minimal set of identifiers it may not be possible to arrive at a definition that applies to all and only narratives.” It is therefore much less suited to describe features that in fact are central to a whole range of natural narratives in which situatedness et al. are central characteristics. This very objection, however, points the way to a different interpretation of the four basic elements of Herman’s definition: From a certain viewpoint these four elements may be conceived of not as features that are proto-typical of all narratives but instead as specific limitations certain conditions impose. In this view unnatural narratives do not negate or mock natural conditions. It is just as much the other way round: Certain conditions impose the necessity of situatedness. And likewise in some situations world-making is a central element. World-making seems to me to belong to fictional genres. In my opinion the slash between “world-making” and “world disruption” seems simultaneously to create and hide the distinction between fictional and nonfictional works that the definition attempts to bridge. Only fictional works are worldmaking in any literal sense, whereas world-disruption has a neutral stance towards the fiction/non-fiction distinction. Some narratives cue their audience to think of them as world-making, that is, as fictional. The situated and the un-situated are equally exceptional as are the fictional and the non-fictional. A definition, then, that includes narratives that are unnatural in the sense that they transgress the rules of everyday storytelling practices will not be the opposite of a natural definition. Expansion, not negation of the territory of narratives will be the result. In this view, the basic elements are – to different degrees – optional or context-specific limitations. It is not the case that they negate the broad definition of “disruption experienced;” instead they specify particular limitations and conditions of specific contexts. As briefly touched upon above, this is even true to some degree for “disruption” and “experienced.” When Monika Fludernik famously redefined narrativity as “mediated experientiality” her model had the great advantage of being able to include texts and plays like the ones of Beckett under the umbrella of narratives, since they could be constructed as rich in experientiality while totally or almost plotless. That meant that highly sophisticated cultural achievements

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were moved from the domain of non-narratives to that of quintessential narratives. The price paid by relying solely on experientiality, however, was significant, since historiography and several other text-types where now given zero narrativity. Fludernik, though, also writes: “However, since all narrative includes nonexperiential sequences, I will allow a place in the model for such forms of narrative, categorizing historical writing as narrative with restricted narrativity […].”18 If we do not want to entirely dismiss plot or disruption as criteria for narrativity we could extend this idea to include both parameters so that some narratives have restricted narrativity as regards disruption and others as regards experience. In narratives, disruption and experience respectively can be exactly as small as men of average height can be tall. If one is large the other can be insignificant: A text by Beckett could contain a lot of “experienced” and pretty little disruption, whereas historiography or a news report about the war on Iraq could be heavy on disruption, but low on representing the “experience” of this disruption. This may again imply that any definition that tries to include all narratives and exclude all non-narratives may have its blind spots.

5. The Conventional and the Natural To Fludernik, as mentioned, natural narratives are prototypes of all narratives. I will conclude this paper with briefly comparing an unnatural approach to Fludernik’s natural one by distinguishing between the conventional and the natural. When new techniques or modes of telling are invented they often appear strange at first, but then – if they are successful – become conventionalized and cease to appear strange. More often than not, theorists then realize that the form is not entirely new, but that many historical examples exist. Fludernik’s model has a tremendous explanatory value in demonstrating how new forms emerge, become conventionalized and flourish and cease to appear strange or surprising. Some examples could be ‘omniscience,’ free indirect discourse, and psychonarration, which became frequent in third-person narratives and then later also in first-person narratives. Another example – at a completely different level – would be the explosion in recent years of so-called auto-fictions. All of this is well known not least thanks to the diachronic studies of Fludernik. It does however call for a distinction, I think. Living up to the expectations of a stereotypical classical narratologist equally fond of dichotomies 18

Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 26.

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and of putting things into small boxes, I wish to suggest the following schema that distinguishes between four categories by combining the natural/unnatural dichotomy with the conventional/unconventional dichotomy. Conventional

Unconventional

Natural

Oral storytelling. Conversational narration. Many autobiographies.

Truly mimetic, unsorted, unhomogenized representations of, say, five minutes of thought. Unorganized, abrupt, without marked beginning and end, etc.

Unnatural

Many literary narratives. Many traditional works of realism: use of omniscient narration, homogenized thought and speech representation etc.

Experimental fiction. Postmodernist narratives. Non-fictional traumanarratives?

A very good example of a narrative form that swiftly became conventionalized would be the emergence, within just a decade, of thousands of narratives cast in the first person, present tense in the nineteen nineties. These narratives seemed strange and difficult to theorize at first (cp. Cohn as late as 1999).19 Today, however, audiences are familiar with narratives cast in the first-person present tense. They may be familiar to an extent, perhaps, where they do not even notice it. Examples are legion, but include Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Ellis’ Glamorama (1999), and Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003). The same conventionalization seems to be just about to happen to second-person narratives. There is no doubt that new forms and techniques become conventionalized over time. To my mind, however, this does not mean that they become naturalized. This difference between naturalization and conventionalization is crucial: without it, any conventionalization of new techniques or forms would amount to naturalization. I would like to stress instead the unnaturalness also of conventional forms, like, say, the use of omniscience in traditional works of realism and the use of present-tense first-person narration in much recent fiction. And actually I think I am completely in line with Fludernik here except for the choice of words, since she writes first that she uses “[…] narrativization to describe a reading strategy that naturalizes texts by recourse to narrative schemata […]” (34), but towards the end stresses that: 19

Cohn, Dorrit, The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore 1999.

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Henrik Skov Nielsen Non-natural textual constellations refer to text-types that are naturally non-occuring. For this reason new generic options (such as reflector-mode narrative) do not in the process of narrativization become natural, although they become naturalized […].20

I agree with the point but would suggest then to say instead that they become conventionalized. To stick to first-person present-tense narratives: they have surely become conventionalized. But what does this tell us? Has first-person, present tense emerged because of some real-world emergence, like that of, say, live sport reports?: “I am sitting at this moment here at Stamford Bridge watching Chelsea ready to progress to the champions league final.” In other words: do existing and natural forms help us understand new forms? My answer – my polite answer – would be: perhaps, to some degree. There is, though, also a two-way traffic here in which emerging new forms tell us about existing ones. For example, rather than understanding first person, present tense narration as some sort of report like that of a soccer match, it can be understood as foregrounding the non-report and resistance to real-world descriptions – and accordingly as foregrounding the power of invention that some techniques of fictionality possess. So we understand new forms by means of old ones, but perhaps we also sometimes misunderstand new forms by means of old ones. This could be the case if we assume that they must be like naturally occurring narratives and hence situated, told by someone, etc. In this sense the argument can be made that unnatural narratives and the invention of new techniques and hitherto “impossible” ways of telling is a major force in narrative history. New ways of telling are not just new ways of telling the same stories. They expand our cognitive repertoire and the repertoire of what is altogether tellable and narratable. The narratives excluded from view if we take all narratives to be natural and communicational are by no means only marginal. They include much postmodernist and experimental fiction but also narratives of trauma, of encounters with foreign cultures, with incomprehensible thoughts or deeds. It seems to me an important task for the study of narrative to develop models that account for the specific properties that characterize all these narratives. The prototype approach tends implicitly to place some narratives in the centre and other in the periphery and to devote less interest to the specificity of what it considers the emus. The – for lack of a real word – “context-specific limitation”-approach on the other hand tends to compartmentalize and 20

Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 330.

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devote less attention to the general. The latter approach may be unable to see the wood for the trees, whereas the former may only see the wood and not any single tree. In David Herman’s introduction to Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, he distinguishes between “making sense of stories” and “stories as sense-making.”21 In Richard Walsh’s words this means that in one perspective, narrative is the object of interpretation; in the other, it is a means of interpretation. In that sense the two approaches seem to some degree to correspond to two different kinds of interests: sometimes the interest is primarily in describing and understanding the enormous role narratives play in the way we make meaning of almost all aspects of life (“stories as sense-making”). At other times the primary interest is the specificity and the specific possibilities of a certain kind of narrative – in the form of, say, a witness narrative from the Holocaust or an experimental novel (“making sense of stories”). If the latter is the case, then we may lose sight of some of the specific features of these narratives and even miss some of the very reasons why they are worth studying if we take natural narratives as models for all narratives. Models that account also for the unnatural features of some narratives (no one telling to no one on no occasion and for no reason about nothing happening) will have a profound impact on the way we think about storyworlds, about experientiality, about the relation between story and discourse, and about representations and narratives that resist description based on linguistic understandings of natural, oral communication. Highly sophisticated cultural documents like good fictional novels or complex non-fictional testimonies merit attention as privileged artefacts in need of theories and methods of their own not because they are isolated in some theoretical realm detached from the real world, but on the contrary because they expand the repertoire of what is understandable, narratable, and possible in this world.

6. Bibliography Apuleius, The Golden Ass, Cambridge, MA 1947. Cohn, Dorrit, The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore 1999. Ellis, Bret Easton, Glamorama, New York 1999. Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London/New York 1996. Frey, James, A Million Little Pieces, New York 2003. Hamburger, Käte, Die Logik der Dichtung, Stuttgart 1957. 21

Herman, David (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford 2003.

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Hamburger, Käte, The Logic of Literature [1973], transl. Marilynn J. Rose, Bloomington 1993. Heinze, Rüdiger, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, in: Narrative, 16, 2008, Nr. 3, 279–97. Herman, David (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford 2003. Herman, David, Basic Elements of Narrative, Malden, MA 2009. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, in: Narrative, 12, 2004, Nr. 2, 133–50. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “Telling Doubles and Literal Minded Reading in Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama”, in: Naomi Mandel / Alain-Philippe Durand (eds.), Novels of The Contemporary Extreme, London/New York 2006. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narratives” in: Jan Alber /Monika Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, Columbus forthcoming 2010. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “What’s in a Name? Double Exposures in Lunar Park”, in: Naomi Mandel (ed.), Bret Easton Ellis, forthcoming. Phelan, James, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology, Columbus 1996. Phelan, James, Living To Tell About It: A Rhetoric And Ethics Of Character Narration, New York 2005.

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Stefan Iversen (Aarhus)

“In flaming flames”: Crises of Experientiality in Non-Fictional Narratives

1. Introduction Among the extraordinary powers of narrative is its ability to endow the most private and chaotic of experiences, emotions, and perceptions with structure, meaning, and the ability to be shared. Narratives are tools as much as they are containers; they are for human consciousness as much as they are about human consciousness. Such insights are crucial to much of the current research in what David Herman calls “the nexus of narrative and mind,”1 an already vast and rapidly expanding branch of narratology, operating across classical dichotomies in the study of narrative, such as the division between fictional and non-fictional narratives and the division between oral and written narratives. The intensified and systematic work done on the relations between mind and narrative has produced a large number of important results, with major theoretical as well as methodological consequences, of which at least the following four should be mentioned: (1) Minds are more to narratives. What is usually referred to as Theory of Mind-approaches helps us understand not only how reading narratives works but also explain that it works so effortlessly because we are used to reading minds in our everyday interaction with other people.2 (2) Minds are constructed. The insight that minds are constructed in the reading process places focus on the reader and on the textual cues which the reader relies on. (3) There is more to minds in narratives. The reconstruction of minds on the part of the reader takes recourse to 1 2

David Herman, The Basic Elements of Narrative, Malden, MA 2009, 137. Lisa Zunshine puts it as follows: “Thus one preliminary implication of applying what we know about ToM [Theory of Mind] to our study of fiction is that ToM makes literature as we know it possible. The very process of making sense of what we read appears to be grounded in our ability to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we generously call ‘characters’ with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feelings, and desires, and then to look for the ‘cues’ that allow us to guess at their feelings and thus to predict their actions.” Zunshine, Lisa, “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness”, in: Narrative, 11, 2003, Nr. 3, 270–91.

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much more data in the narrative than traditional approaches to the subject do.3 (4) Minds are essential to narratives. One of the first and also one of the most influential formulations of the assumption that an experiencing mind must be seen as a constituent element of narrative can be found in Monika Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996). In what Fludernik calls “natural narratology” the evocation of an experiencing consciousness or as she calls it, experientiality, is seen as the necessary and sufficient criterion for the establishing of narrativity.4 An underlying premise for most of this recent work on the relations between mind and narrative is the idea that the abilities of narratives to encode human experiences and the abilities of readers to decode represented experiences are absolute and that they operate according to natural or prototypical parameters, drawn from our everyday experiences of ourselves as one self among other selves. As seen from inside natural narratology: if something is a narrative, it will always allow the reader to recognize experientiality and this experientiality will always be cognizable. My aim in this article is to highlight some of the potential problems raised by such approaches. I argue that they run the risk of creating blindness toward some types of texts, which most would call narratives but which present the reader with storyworlds, narrative acts, or experiences that act according to other logics than those that we consider to be normal, prototypical, or natural.5 I will discuss examples of narrated minds and experiences that defy or destabilize conventional mind- and consciousness-parameters, producing what I will suggest calling crises of experientiality. The examples are taken from non-fictional narratives in the form of testimonies by Holocaust-survivors and I will move forward through a discussion of the 3

4

5

The reader’s knowledge about a narrated mind, Alan Palmer claims, stems not only from those passages of the narrative where the content of the mind is verbalized, but also from the actions of the character, among those the social interaction with others in the narrative world. Against the fragmentation of “consciousness representation, focalization, characterization” this approach “encourages a detailed, precise, functional, and inclusive approach toward the whole of a fictional mind.” Palmer, Alan, Fictional Minds, Lincoln 2004, 185–6. Palmer places equal emphasis on the representation of the mind in his definition of narrative as “in essence the presentation of fictional mental functioning.” Palmer, Fictional, 177. In David Herman’s definition of what he considers the four basic elements of narrative, “what it’s like” holds a position as one of the elements. Herman, Basic, 143. My approach draws upon the work presented in the article “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology. Beyond Mimetic Models” by Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson, in: Narrative, 18, 2010, Nr. 2, 113–36.

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concept of experientiality as it relates to these narratives and conclude by suggesting a reworking of the concept of experientiality in order for it better to accommodate the particular features of these narratives.

2. Experientiality Revisited Today, most narrative theorists would agree that the representation of an experiencing anthropomorphic element is a necessary condition for the emergence of narrativity. In one of the most recent introductions to narrative theory, David Herman suggests naming this element of narrative “what it is like”: Narrative representations convey the experience of living through storyworlds-influx, highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousnesses affected by the occurrence at issue. Thus – with one important proviso – it can be argued that narrative is centrally concerned with qualia, a term used by philosophers of mind to refer to the sense of “what is it like” for someone or something to have a particular experience.6

Hence, according to Herman, all narratives entail a component of this “what it’s like”-quality and even though he places this element as one of four elements to be found in prototypical narratives, he is clearly inspired by and often refers to Fludernik’s concept of experientiality.7 Herman’s recent take on the basic elements of narrative share several fundamental assumptions with natural narratology: both highlight the importance of anthropomorphic experience to narrativity, both refer to naturally occurring situations as the source of the reader’s ability to understand new situations, and both take cognitive linguistics as their major theoretical foundation. What this means is that, besides being interesting in itself, natural narratology offers important insights into the reconceptualization of classical narratology during the 1990s as well as into several of the most influential cognitive approaches being presented in the twenty-first century. At the centre of natural narratology stands not a method but a model of how the process through which something is perceived as a narrative might be viewed. The primary interest of the model is in how we read, not in what we read. The major argument runs as follows: when we understand something as a narrative we do so using cognitive frames and scripts situated on one or more of three different levels: the first two levels offer basic, cross-cultural cognitive tools (intention, goal, causality on the first level and four different explanatory schemata of access to the story on the second level), while the 6 7

Herman, Basic, 137. Ibid., 140–4.

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third level is a culturally based toolbox of more complex schemata, such as recurring storytelling situations, genres, and so forth. On the fourth level of the model one finds what Fludernik refers to as the process of narrativization, that is, a normalization or naturalization of narratives. This occurs automatically when we read realist texts, but becomes a (more or less) conscious process when we encounter and try to make sense of strange or odd narratives. The two concepts of narrativization and experientiality might be thought of, respectively, as a means and an end. When a reader actively reconstructs something as a narrative, the goal of this process is to establish experientiality. Or the other way around: according to Fludernik, the topic of all narratives is human experientiality. Narrativization acts a sort of interpretive interface between what is more or less automatically recognized as a narrative and what is not. It sets out to “familiarize the unfamiliar.”8 This process occurs on both individual and collective levels, and it makes the concept of narrativization extremely useful for accomplishing what narratology has traditionally been poor at doing: tracking changes in, and reactions to changes in narrative form over time. Through the concept of narrativization, natural narratology injects much-needed doses of dynamism, constructivism, contextualism and historicism into narratology. When we turn to experientiality, we find it triggers a different set of theoretical connotations. Fludernik’s paradigm rests on the notion that narrativity has mediated experientiality as its necessary and sufficient condition. Experientiality is defined as the “quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience’” and it works by reflecting “a cognitive schema of embodiedness that relates to human existence and human concerns.”9 Narrativization, as a dynamic, context-oriented concept, aims to explain change, and reactions to change over time. Experientiality, however, aims to explain the common denominator for all narratives, pointing towards a static, given, common ground for all narratives, by all humans, in all cultures, at all times. In ‘natural’ narratology, ‘real-life experience,’ ‘embodiment’ and ‘consciousness’ exist outside of the differences generated by time, by culture, by form, by gender, by types of media. This fact has been a source of criticism. In his review of Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, Andrew Gibson mentions some of the problems of Fludernik’s paradigm. An extended critique along similar lines can be found in Jan Alber’s article “The ‘Moreness’ or ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’ Narratology” 8 9

Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London/New York 1996, 46. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 12–3.

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(2002). Using “extremely experimental writing”10 – Samuel Beckett’s “Lessness” – as a test case for natural narratology, Alber concludes that “experientiality […] remains a problematic criterion”; it is “too broad”; it may lead to misreadings because of its emphasis on consciousness and real-life experience, and the concept itself, along with the concept of embodiment, is a problematic one, since it apparently exists outside of changes and time.11 While I agree with the questions raised in connection with the non-contextualized nature of experientiality, my reservations here are connected to Alber’s critique of the concept’s reliance on real-life experiences. What I find to be a problem with the current version of the concept of experientiality (as well as the way the concept is put to work in Herman’s focus on “what it’s like”) is the assumption that the reconstruction of experientiality is an either-or process. The reader either succeeds in reconstructing experientiality (and then we have a narrative) or the reader does not succeed. Such an approach blocks insights into narratives that deliberately or unintentionally produce doubts as to what the reader is to make of the presented consciousness and its experiences. When it comes to operating with different degrees of experientiality, for instance in the form of a continuum from very little experientiality (as in some types of historic writing) to an all-pervasive experientiality (as in prose fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), Fludernik is open to suggestions of various kinds.12 But my argument does not regard the amount or degree but rather the nature or naturalness of experientiality. I would like to stress the following two points: some experiences may go beyond the scope of narrative comprehension while some narratives may present experiences that resist being recognized as parts of what we would typically refer to as a human mind. In an article from 2003, entitled “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters,” Fludernik provides a response to the criticism of her concept of experientiality. The following quote sums up the debate: What was problematic for readers of Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology was the kind of narrativization and the underlying definition of narrativity that I had proposed. Although I am far from modifying my definition of experientiality (which, since it

10

11 12

Alber, Jan, “The ‘Moreness’ or ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’ Narratology: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Lessness’ Reconsidered”, in: Style, 36, 2002, Nr. 1, 69. Ibid., 71, 69. Fludernik, Monika, “Letters and Chronicles: How Narrative are They?”, in: Göran Rossholm (ed.), Essays on Fiction and Perspective, Frankfurt/New York 2004, 129–53.

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Stefan Iversen is not synonymous with ‘experience’, can be neither male nor female, eighteenthcentury or contemporary), I do believe that the aesthetics of the narrative text changes drastically over time and that these developments will tend to influence narrativization.13

The beginning of this passage hints at the main objections raised by the critique, namely the fact that the core concepts of natural narratology can be said to be too universal, and that the proposed model – despite the theory’s explicit intention to rescue diachronic considerations for narratology – approaches changes over time with concepts that are themselves immune to change. The passage also hints at the ways in which Fludernik responds to the criticism of the theory as being too universal and too essentialist. She suggests a range of interesting expansions and differentiations of the concept of narrativization, while at the same time insisting on not modifying the concept of experientiality; she is in fact “far from modifying” the definition.

3. Holocaust Testimonies An obvious way of putting the concept of experientiality as well as natural narratology to the test would be to apply it to experimental literature.14 In this article, I have chosen a different route, in that I will focus on non-fiction in the form of autobiographical narratives of Holocaust survivors. I am not saying that experientiality should not be tested on cases of experimental narratives, only that the testing should not restrict itself to that. Besides, what could be more natural than someone telling a story from his or her own life? Clearly he or she must know “what it’s like”? I will move forward through a discussion of the most important conditions for the emergence of experientiality, as seen from inside natural narratology. In the article “Letters and Chronicles: How Narrative are They?” (2004), Fludernik lists the criteria that must be fulfilled in order for something to contain mediated experientiality, and thus qualify as a narrative. I will focus on four of these criteria: (1) a fictional or non-fictional human(ized) protagonist; (2) the centrality of consciousness; (3) specificity; and (4) tellability and point. The first criterion to be met is the presence of an anthropomorphic protagonist. This is a fairly uncontroversial claim since 13

14

Fludernik, Monika, “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters”, in: David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford 2003, 265. As done by Jan Alber in “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Study, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96.

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most of what people call narrative revolves around human agents. The second criterion is the notion that narratives, in order to be narratives, have to place special emphasis on the consciousness of the protagonist, the teller, the reader, or any of these in combination. The third criterion has to do with the anchoring of the protagonist in a specific setting at a specific time in a specific place, or in several specific places. According to Fludernik, this criterion helps draw the line between narrative proper and the lyrical, as well as the philosophical. The fourth criterion is a combination of two, namely ‘tellability’ and ‘point.’ ‘Tellability’ has to do with the way in which the story is told, based on ideas of its reception, while ‘point’ relates to the reasons for telling the story in the first place. They are answers to the following two different questions: How can one tell the story in an interesting way? What is the point of telling it? I will return to these criteria, or at least to the last three of them, in order to test them against the foil of my empirical data. However, let me first say a few words about the nature of this data, which is drawn from two different sources. The first source concerns videotaped testimonies from the Fortunoff Archive at Yale University. Co-founded by Dori Laub and Geoffrey Hartmann, the Fortunoff archive is the leading centre for the collection and preservation of videotaped narratives. The archive holds more than 10,000 hours of videotaped testimony. They use what they call an open-ended, freeflowing interviewing process. This mostly amounts to long, uninterrupted passages of narrative by Holocaust survivors. At times, the interviewers guide or suggest the course of the narrative by asking questions. The second source concerns a similar project, carried out on a much smaller scale in 2007 and 2008 by Stefan Kjerkegaard, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and myself. Taking the Norwegian book Tidsvitner [Witnesses] (2006)15 as its role model, the project set out to collect and transcribe narratives by Danish Holocaust survivors. The project has yielded two results: audio-taped narratives and a book, called Vidnesbyrd: Danske fortællinger fra tyske koncentrationslejre [Testimony: Danish Narratives from German Concentration Camps].16 The book contains seven long narratives told by former inmates of concentration camps. The narratives themselves were delivered in two-hour and three-hour settings with minimal interruptions from the interviewers. 15

16

Lothe, Jakob / Storeide, Anette, Tidsvitner: Fortellinger fra Auschwitz og Sachsenhausen, Oslo 2006. Iversen, Stefan / Kjerkegaard, Stefan / Nielsen, Henrik Skov (eds.), Vidnesbyrd: Danske fortællinger fra tyske koncentrationslejre [Testimony: Danish Narratives from German Concentration Camps], Aarhus 2008.

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Even though both of these sets of data are framed by an interview situation, few would argue that they are not narratives. How, then, do these narratives respond to the four criteria of experientiality previously described? (1) A fictional or non-fictional human(ized) protagonist. The first criterion is met more or less by default, since almost every kind of autobiographical Holocaust testimony revolves around the person giving that testimony, thus making that person the protagonist. (2) Centrality of consciousness. Since these texts are autobiographical narratives, a strong focus is automatically placed on the consciousness of the narrating self and the experiencing self (these two selves are taken to be instances of the same person). Furthermore, testimonies deal with personal experiences of atrocity, stretching the limits of the comprehensible both in the time of the events and in the time of recalling the events. In fact, it is this very tension between the time of experiencing the events and the time of recalling the events that gives rise to one of the main features of this kind of narrative, a feature that challenges our natural notion of how consciousness works. This fact finds one of its most acute formulations in the following passage, written by Charlotte Delbo, a former inmate of Auschwitz: I have the feeling […] that the ‘self ’ who was in the camp isn’t me, isn’t the person who is here, opposite you. No, it’s too unbelievable. And everything that happened to this other ‘self ’, the one from Auschwitz, doesn’t touch me now, me, doesn’t concern me, so distinct are deep memory [mémoire profonde] and common memory [mémoire ordinaire].17

To Delbo, the division between the experienced event and the narration of the event gives rise to a division of memory, which in turn gives rise to division not in the self but of the self. This is not a question of what Dorrit Cohn calls “dissonant narration in the first person narrative”18), but a more radical statement concerning a split in identity over time, a split that, as we see in the quotation, leaves the personal pronouns only usable in italics or quotation marks. This division between “common” and “deep memory,” articulated by Delbo, forms the basis of the critic Lawrence Langer’s work on video testimonies. Langer uses the term common memory to designate the cognitive tools that render normal life normal, that is, see it as something coherent 17

18

Delbo, quoted in: Langer, Lawrence, L., Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, New Haven 1991, 5. Cohn, Dorrit, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton 1978, 145.

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and meaningful. He uses the term “deep memory” to describe those parts of memory that were directly imprinted during the stay in the camp. In a series of readings, Langer shows how these two types of memory “vie for primacy […], each honest, each incomplete.” The tension between them remains unresolved and must remain so, unless we want to be reductive in our reading of the narratives they produce: […] literacy has little to do with the problem of entering into meaningful intellectual or emotional dialogue with the contents of these videotaped testimonies. As viewers, we have difficulty doing this because the testimonies are not based on common experience or an imaginable past, real or literary […] we are driven to the periphery of comprehension. Odd as it may sound, we need to search for the inner principles of incoherence that make these testimonies accessible to us.19

These narratives present the reader with unconventional states of consciousness, and hence force the reader to narrativize, but – and this is the point I would like to stress – these processes of narrativization can only be resolved by reading these specific narratives against their grain, by missing their main feature: a divided consciousness coming forth in a divided, or, as Langer calls it, an incoherent narrative. If we ignore these incoherencies, we do not really pay attention to what can be described as the dual voice of the testimony. This dual voice, manifesting itself in both form and content, forces the reader into a permanent, unsettled, and unsettling process of narrativization. As readers, we try to make sense of the mediated experientiality of the narrative, but the dual voice leaves us not with a voice too many, but rather a lack of unifying voice, a lack in the consciousness presented and narrating. One might be tempted in such instances to apply what Porter Abbott in another context calls a “stereotype”20 for naturalizing this narrative situation. For, one might argue, is a homodiegetic narrative containing double voices not narrativizable by using the frame of, say, the schizophrenic narrative? Even if such a stereotype made sense, how do we, based on “man’s experience of embodiedness in a real-world context”21, believe to understand what an instance of non-fictive schizophrenic narration might entail in terms of experience? I will claim 19 20

21

Langer, Ruins, 3, 16. Abbott deals with instances of what he calls unreadable minds. He restricts the concept to narrative fiction, and argues for the existence and value of “that peculiar combination of anxiety and wonder that is aroused when an unreadable mind is accepted as unreadable” that is when one refrains from naturalizing or normalizing it. Abbott, H. Porter, “Unreadable Minds and the Captive Reader”, in: Style, 42, 2008, Nr. 4, 448. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 17.

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that this narrative situation does not confirm to such a stereotype; rather, it testifies to the fact that real-life experiences may transcend the coherence capacity of narratives. Due to their formal and thematic set-up, these texts leave the reader in a situation similar to that which the witnesses themselves are facing, though the stakes are radically different: Where one would expect to find an identity over time, connecting the events and their retelling, one instead finds traces of something broken, shattered, or simply unable to take on a narrative form. (3) Specificity. Specificity of time and place is obviously one of the most important aspects of Holocaust testimonies. A testimony, it could be argued, is nothing if it does not rely on and relate acts and experiences situated in a very specific, very concrete, and very real world of not too long ago. These narratives can, and have been used to establish and enhance the level of detail of the objective, shared, and verified version of history, the version found in the history books. The testimonies themselves are filled with facts that aid such an interest. But, as has been the focus of recent research in testimonial narrative, these stories are first and foremost a personal version of the common history. Very often, the anchoring of these narratives in specific geographical and temporal settings appears incoherent, disturbed, and partly undecipherable. Traditionally, researchers of history have used this to criticize the trustworthiness of these narratives as sources of a common truth, while researchers such as Langer and Laub, on the other hand, were among the first to see this as another factor of the same mechanisms that disrupt the mediation of a unified and unifying consciousness in these narratives, that is, as a core feature of testimonial narratives.22 The following example from one of the audio-taped narratives produced during the work on the book, Vidnesbyrd, gives a fairly accurate rendering of a passage from the narrative of Iboja Wandall-Holm: Out of Auschwitz and on to Rajsko and there we were in the marked garden. It was hard work as everywhere else, and I have written in my book that we stood in the fields, but when the autumn came we saw in the twilight bodies of dead children and, what is it called again, not spades but … you stick them into the ground, but suddenly I cannot remember the name … [the interviewer helps find22

During the last decade, the specific kind of insights and experiences that personal testimonies are able to convey have been the source of appreciation from several historians working with the intersections between cultural memory and traumatic events. Prominent examples are Dominick La Capra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore 2000, and Arthur G. Neal’s National Trauma and Collective Memory: Extraordinary Events in the American Experience, Armonk 2005.

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ing the word] A dung fork, yes. Yes, they were on those dung forks, the bodies, they stuck them into the bodies of the dead children. There were not enough room in the crematories and then we saw these dead bodies in the air in flaming flames23, I mean there were flames and then we saw the shadows of them in the air and we felt the stench and it was close.24

The extreme experiences of Wandall-Holm come to the listener through repetition, oversights, and self-interruptions, all only partly contained by a tumultuous syntax. Here, the conflict between deep and common memory literally bursts into flames, into flaming flames in a passage of visionary meltdown of different levels of reality and remembrance. It is hard to make out what is what in this passage. The setting is obviously the area surrounding Auschwitz-Birkenau, but what is the reader to make of the specific details of this setting? What and where are the flaming flames? Can they be seen from her position, several miles away? We may choose to narrativize this by describing it as a mixture of images, derived from different places – some from nightmares, some from actual sights, others from attempts to reconstruct sights on the basis of knowledge gained after the fact – but by doing that, we lose the specificity, not of the actual time and place, but rather of this autobiographical narrative as transgressing natural frameworks of time and place. (4) Tellability and point. Several of the witnesses interviewed for Vidnesbyrd stated that they more or less live to tell their story. Arlette Andersen begins her story with the following words: “This is my 104th narrative.”25 The reasons for this ongoing retelling, as provided in the testimonies, can be grouped into two categories. First, one has to mention the wish to inform others of the facts from a personal viewpoint, and thereby help educate the younger generations and refute arguments of Holocaust-deniers. Second, the retelling contains therapeutic or cathartic elements. In the words of Birgit Fischermann: “Every time I tell my story it is like, yes, it is like stones are lifted away.”26 But alongside these obvious relations between tellability and point – “I must tell this as correctly as possible in order for the world not to forget and in order for me to not break down” – Holocaust testimonies are filled with more or less explicit, and more or less radical utterances of mistrust 23

24

25 26

The English translation attempts to capture the (also) very non-idiomatic Danish original: “i flammende flamer.” Audio-taped testimony of Iboja Wandall-Holm, conducted on the 14th of September, 2007, my translation, S. I. Iversen, Kjerkegaard, and Nielsen, Vidnesbyrd, 21. Ibid., 53.

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with regard to the intention of trying to turn their experiences into a moralizing, edifying, and coherent narrative. In interview T-511 from the Fortunoff Archive, Moses S. tells a series of cruel and horrifically detailed stories, involving cannibalism. As he completes his account of an incident in which 200 prisoners in Mauthausen were forced to wrap themselves in wet blankets and enter a cold-storage room during the winter, all of them freezing to death, his wife, who up until then had been sitting next to him, gets up and leaves the room. In Langer’s words, this is what happens afterwards: Shortly after the wife leaves, one of the interviewers says to the witness: “This is a nice place to stop.” Then we hear whispering off-camera. Meanwhile, Moses S. is saying to himself aloud, “And more, and more, and more. Do you want to hear more?” One of the interviewers replies: “No. Let’s end here.” He insists, “One more story.” She persists, “No, no. We’ll stop here.” But he overrides her objection, and tells the story of the prisoner choked to death by a Kapo for having eaten his friend’s bread. And here the interview ends – but it is the interviewer’s choice, not his.27

This interview from the Fortunoff Archive ends, as do several others, in what Langer calls a stalemate. There is a failure to resolve the conflict between the interviewer’s need to assimilate the narrative into common memory as a testimony to courage, strength, and indomitable will, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the bursts of deep memory, from which much darker truths of coincidences, pettiness, unbearable evil, and dumb luck leak out, and the interview concludes with a non-ending. First the wife, then the interviewer fails to see the point of going on, and they leave the narrator alone with his narrative. His use of episodic narratives almost as a sort of weapon against his listeners turns this into a demonstration of the missing point, of tellability run wild.

4. Conclusion To sum up the observations so far I would like to return to one of the key phrases in Fludernik’s recent reassessments of the concept of experientiality: By introducing the concept of experientiality, I was concerned to characterize the purpose and function of the storytelling as a process that captures the narrator’s past experience, reproduces it in vivid manner, and then evaluates and resolves it in terms of the protagonist’s reactions and of the narrator’s often explicit linking of the meaning of this experience with the current discourse context […].28 27 28

Langer, Ruins, 28. Fludernik, “Natural”, 245, my emphasis, S. I.

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I hope to have indicated the existence of narratives that defy, challenge, or transgress the core features of experientiality as highlighted in the quoted passage. Even though Holocaust testimonies obviously set out to “capture […] the narrator’s past experience,” they more often than not spring from and revolve around unmediated, but very present, conflicts between common and deep memory, conflicts that at the same time drive forth and disrupt the narratives and their structure. As for the reproduction “in a vivid manner” these narratives are indeed very vivid, but the vividness is often distorted not only by the oral features of the narrative situations (forgetfulness, repetition, etc.), but also in the very specificity of time and place, as in the case of the flaming flames mentioned by Wandall-Holm. Rather than “evaluate […] and resolve […],” many of these interviews end in some sort of stalemate, because of the survivor’s inability to make the past experience and the present knowledge come together as a coherent whole. In such cases, evaluation, let alone resolution, is far off. And when it comes to the “linking to current discourse context,” these narratives often miss their mark. At times they come to a forced end because their narrator is unable to make them end, as in the case of Moses S. To him, there is no redemption or catharsis at the end of the story. This inability to end the story is one of the consequences of the broken link between the story and the current discourse. What is the point of telling this story? It was not the purpose of this article to offer the necessary and sufficient theoretical and methodological means for analyzing testimonial narratives; if my goal had been in-depth narratological analysis of this particular type of narrative, I would have included other concepts and would have placed less focus on the notion of experientiality and the roles played by this concept in ‘natural’ and cognitive narratology. My goal was to test and challenge the concept of experientiality, and the excerpts from testimonial narratives served as examples of non-fictive, unnatural narrative situations whose specific traits risk disappearing in a naturalizing approach. I would like to conclude by suggesting a further differentiation of the notion of experientiality in order for it to better accommodate permanently unresolved processes of narrativization, which leads to crises of experientiality. As previously mentioned, the existing definition of narrativity as mediated experientiality assumes that if something is a narrative, it will always allow the reader to recognize experientiality, and this presented experientiality will always be cognizable by the reader. The teller will always be able to encode what something was or is like while the reader will always be able to decode this and know what something was or is like. This approach works very well for a wide range of narratives and it enables all kinds of important research

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on issues such as similarities and differences between fiction and non-fiction and the questions of evolution and revolution of narrative forms across cultures and across time. What this approach, through its reliance on naturalness and real-life parameters, might leave out are narratives in which the relations between experiences and consciousness diverge from what we are used to. One might differentiate between two types of such divergences. (1) The first type I suggest calling “demediated experientiality.” This phenomenon typically occurs in narratives that both invite and obstruct the reconstruction of consciousness, for instance, by simultaneously invoking mutually exclusive frames of experientiality. Such narratives have too many signs but too little life (i.e., too few, or contradictory, human anchoring-points). Samuel Beckett’s prose works would be a prime example. Apparently, someone is speaking, but who or what is that someone? Or as one might put it in Herman’s vocabulary: “To whom or what is something like this?” (2) The other type of divergence between experience and consciousness I would suggest calling “unmediated experientiality.” Unmediated experientiality occurs in narratives in which the mediating consciousness is unable to capture or grasp the recounted event. The generative force of this type of narrative supersedes the explanatory power of narrative. This lack is frequently, but not necessarily, tied to traumatic events. Such narratives have too much life and too few signs. Something has been experienced, but what and how? Or in Herman’s vocabulary: “I don’t know what it is like.” These two types of divergences will more often than not appear alongside the standard mediated experientiality as well as alongside each other. Some narratives may, either deliberately or unintentionally, give rise to the one form more than the other, but they are not mutually exclusive. On the one hand, Holocaust testimonies offer ample proof of the extraordinary explanatory power narratives possess thanks to their ability to process and share experiences. In and through the narrative itself, the personal history aims for coherence, it gains an ability to be shared; perhaps it even forms a meaning and the reader is able to grasp this meaning through her reconstruction of the experientiality stored in the narrative. On the other hand, these specific narratives carry with them, or in them, a reminder that some experiences are unable to be fully engulfed in a narrative structure. At the core of this type of narrative lie several phenomena that challenge the notion of experientiality as it stands today. We can understand most of what goes on in these narratives by using natural narratology, but if we do only that, we might lose the ability to describe their specificity. This does not mean that they cease to be narratives, or that they do not give way to attempts of reconstruction of experientiality on the part of the reader. But they

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do demonstrate that if we insist on experientiality as something wholly natural, we miss out on the lessons taught by their unnaturalness.

5. Bibliography Abbott, H. Porter, “Unreadable Minds and the Captive Reader”, in: Style, 42, 2008, Nr. 4, 448–67. Alber, Jan, “The ‘Moreness’ or ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’ Narratology: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Lessness’ Reconsidered”, in: Style, 36, 2002, Nr. 1, 54–75. –, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Study, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96. Alber, Jan / Iversen, Stefan / Nielsen, Henrik Skov / Richardson, Brian, “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models”, in: Narrative, 18, 21010, Nr. 2, 113–36. Cohn, Dorrit, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton 1978. Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London and New York 1996. –, “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters”, in: David Herman (ed.) Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford 2003, 243–67. –, “Letters and Chronicles: How Narrative are They?”, in: Göran Rossholm (ed.) Essays on Fiction and Perspective, Frankfurt and New York 2004, 129–53. Gibson, Andrew, “Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (review)”, in: Journal of Literary Semantics, 26, 1997, Nr. 3, 234–38. Herman, David, Basic Elements of Narrative, Malden, MA 2009. Iversen, Stefan / Kjerkegaard, Stefan / Nielsen, Henrik Skov (eds.), Vidnesbyrd: Danske fortællinger fra tyske koncentrationslejre [Testimony: Danish Narratives from German Concentration Camps], Aarhus 2008. La Capra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore 2000. Langer, Lawrence L., Holocaust Testimonies. The Ruins of Memory, New Haven 1991. Lothe, Jakob / Storeide, Anette, Tidsvitner: Fortellinger fra Auschwitz og Sachsenhausen, Oslo 2006. Margolin, Uri, “Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and Literary Narrative,” in: David Herman (ed.) Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford 2003, 271–94. Mäkelä, Maria, “Possible Minds”, in: Pekka Tammi and Hannu Tommola (eds.), FREElanguageINDIRECTtranslationDISCOURSEnarration. Linguistic, Translatological, and Literary-Theoretical Encounters, Tampere 2006, 231–60. Neal, Arthur G., National Trauma and Collective Memory: Extraordinary Events in the American Experience, Armonk 2005. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, in: Narrative, 12, 2004, Nr. 2, 133–50. Palmer, Alan, Fictional Minds, Lincoln 2004. Richardson, Brian, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006. Zunshine, Lisa, “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness”, in: Narrative, 11, 2003, Nr. 3, 270–91. Zunshine, Lisa, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Columbus 2006.

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Caroline Pirlet (Freiburg)

Toward a Hybrid Approach to the Unnatural: ‘Reading for the Consciousness’ and the Psychodynamics of Experientiality in Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire

1. Introduction There are – at least – two problems when defining unnatural narratives, namely the term ‘unnatural’ and the term ‘narrative.’ Regarding the latter, the ‘science of narrative’ has tried to define its object of inquiry since Tzvetan Todorov’s coining of the term ‘la narratologie’ in 1969. The task is to provide a diachronically working definition of narrative which encompasses a wide range of narrative genres, formats and media without privileging literary forms.1 For the past several decades, a growing diversity of narratological approaches has risen to meet the challenge of formulating such “a universal theory that can encompass all narratives.”2 Twentiethcentury experimental writing however has moved beyond mimetic conventions.3 Consequently, structuralist models whose definitions of narrative revolve around a notion of plot composed of temporality, causality and events have been of little avail. Considering that “the primacy of plot has been systematically eroded,”4 the ensuing question of “what [then] impels the discourse forward”5 has not been conclusively decided. A number of narratological endeavours have suggested theories on narrative dynamics and progression, but a majority still relies on the concept of narrative event.

1

2

3

4 5

Ryan, Marie-Laure, “Toward a Definition of Narrative”, in: David Herman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Cambridge 2007, 26. Richardson, Brian, “Plot after Postmodernism”, in: Christoph Henke / Martin Middeke (eds.), Drama and/after Postmodernism, Trier 2007, 59. For a brief outline of postmodernist unnaturalness’ precursors see also Alber, Jan, “Unnatural Narratives”, in: The Literary Encyclopedia, 2009, http://www.liten cyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=7202 (last accessed January 28, 2010). Richardson, “Plot”, 55. Ibid., 64.

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By contrast, Monika Fludernik in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996) postulates an innovative cognitive approach which radically marginalizes and even eliminates plot as a necessary constituent of narrative.6 Instead, she redefines narrative qua experientiality and thus identifies an anthropomorphic experiencer to whom something happens as the minimum requirement for narrativity. Nevertheless, her definition of embodied consciousness as the central component of experientiality remains vague and often proves difficult to locate when applied to experimental texts. By the same token, another approach, which focuses entirely on movement, is Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984). Analogous to Freud’s findings on the dynamics of the psyche, Brooks constructs a reader-oriented dynamic model and identifies human desire for closure as the motor force which drives the plot forward. Nevertheless, the model’s underlying assumption of an Aristotelian notion of plot limits the scope of applicability and essentially excludes narratives without a coherent plot or closure. What then denotes the term ‘unnatural’ and what do readers do – or do not do – with unnatural narratives? Generally speaking, a diachronically working definition of unnaturalness needs to account for shifts in signification. As Jan Alber has accurately pointed out, “during the course of literary history, many unnatural scenarios have already been naturalized, i.e. turned into a basic cognitive category.”7 In other words, if convention and frequency actively shape the ‘natural,’ then neither anti-mimetic texts (Richardson),8 nor physically or logically impossible scenarios (Alber)9 are permanently on the safe side of unnaturalness. Instead, I propose to define unnatural narratives as texts which require the reader to consciously revert to level IV of Fludernik’s model, i.e., the readerly process of narrativization.10 Conceptual 6 7 8

9

10

Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London/New York 1996, 13. See Alber, “Unnatural Narratives.” Richardson, Brian, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006, 5, 138. Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Study, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 80. The process of narrativization (at Fludernik’s level IV) is based on the following cognitive frames: pretextual schemata that involve our real-world knowledge and parameters used to parse events as intentional acts (level I); frames of narrative mediation such as “telling” (narratives focusing on a teller figure), “experiencing” (narratives that are focalized through the consciousness of a protagonist), “viewing” (the witnessing of events), and “reflecting” (the projection of a reflecting consciousness in the process of rumination) (level II); and criteria pertaining to genre as well as to narrative as a general mode of discourse (level III). Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 43–6.

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flexibility is thus ensured by the possibility for (unnatural) narrative phenomena which appear “on the scene in massive numbers”11 to move down to level III to become new cultural reference frames. Appropriately, the two texts I choose to discuss qualify as unnatural narratives according to my definition. Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire is among the particularly complex examples of creative non-representational texts in postmodern drama for whose narrativization a conscious effort on the reader’s part is required. Contrary to Heart’s Desire, my second example – Samuel Beckett’s television play Quad – does neither fulfill Alber’s, nor Richardson’s criteria for unnaturalness, but nevertheless requires level IV. In relation to the ongoing controversy among unnatural narratologists as to whether readers tend to naturalize or simply embrace the unnatural and its affects on them – what Alber calls “the Zen way of reading”12 –, my approach argues for the former scenario. Although certainly both kinds of readers and critical attitudes towards the unnatural exist, as a scholar, I find a merely descriptive approach ultimately unsatisfactory and my literary encounters with unnatural narratives have been anything but Zen. To deal with the question of how exactly readers do make sense of unnatural narratives which defy the notion of plot, the issue of alternative narrative dynamics will be addressed. I suggest that one way for readers to narrativize challenging, repetitive or disruptive narrative structures on level IV of Fludernik’s model is by viewing the dynamics of the fictional, anthropomorphic consciousness at work as operating according to the dynamics of the human psyche. Moreover, Brooks’s insights regarding repetition as binding – that is, as a means towards the mastery of trauma – may be of great interpretative help for stories in which a thematic reading supports the idea of a central consciousness struggling to process fictive events. Systematically, a more differentiated understanding of the dynamics of consciousness first of all necessitates a brief outline of the individual models and their key terminology. Henceforth, section two will discuss the possibility of a productive hybrid model.13 In section three, this model will be put to the test. 11 12 13

Ibid., 46. Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 83. Although aware of the need for terminological precision within academic discourses, I use the word ‘hybrid’ as a synonym for combination. My choice is based on a hope to benefit from its positive connotations in terms of validity and originality (similar to ‘unnatural’ within unnatural narratology, or ‘queer’ for queer theory). Along these lines, I will outline its potential synergetic effects to emphasize the benefits of strategic recycling and appropriation in the conclusion of this paper.

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2. The Theory – Two Babies and a Free Refill One of Monika Fludernik’s most basic premises in her cognitive, readeroriented approach is the constructivist nature of narrative.14 In other words, “narrativity is not a quality that inheres in a text but rather an attribute imposed on the text by the reader who interprets it as a narrative (thus ‘narrativizing’ it).”15 Fludernik specifies how narrativity is constructed by proposing an elaborate model with four cognitive levels available to readers when making sense of stories. Placing these human (or ‘natural’16) schemata, frames, and parameters at the foundation of its theoretical architecture, ‘natural’ narratology assumes spontaneous conversational storytelling as the prototype of narrative.17 Consequently, the latter’s basic quality of human experientiality is identified as the universal theme of narration. Narrativity is radically redefined and constituted exclusively by what Fludernik calls “experientiality, namely by the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience,’”18 or what David Herman refers to as “qualia,” i.e., “the sense of ‘what it is like’ for someone or something to have a particular experience.”19 Apprehensive of how “sequentiality per se […] is ultimately unable to embody narrative dynamics,”20 experientiality as the new deep-structural core of narrative eliminates plot as a necessary condition and “centrally incorporates consciousness as the basic factor of human cognition, emotion and experience.”21 Hence experientiality “always implies – and sometimes emphatically foregrounds – the protagonist’s consciousness.”22 More specifically, experientiality features four criteria: (1) the centrality of consciousness, (2) a human(ized) protagonist, (3) specificity of time and place, (4) tellability (newsworthiness of the story matter), and ‘point’ (significance for the current situation). The fourth criterion represents the point of entry for narrative dynamics. Since the human(ized) consciousness at work experiences 14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22

Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 31. Alber, Jan, “Natural Narratology”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / MarieLaure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London/New York 2005, 394. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 19; please note that like Fludernik, I use the term ‘natural’ within this paper as corresponding to the human, i.e., as related “to its anchorings in human everyday experience.” Ibid. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 12–3. Herman, David, Basic Elements of Narrative, Malden 2009, 14. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 20. Ibid., 374. Ibid., 30.

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and thus (emotionally and/or cognitively) reacts to some kind of change,23 the dynamics of experientiality relate “particularly to the resolution effect of narrative endpoint of the tale and to the tension between tellability and narrative ‘point.’”24 Incidentally, David Herman concurs: “unless a text or a discourse encodes the pressure of events on an experiencing human or at least human-like consciousness, it will not be a central instance of the narrative text type.”25 Ergo, narratives can exist without plot26 but not without an anthropomorphic experiencer (human consciousness) at some narrative level27 to whom something happens. Detached from the need for an action-oriented base structure, and with human experientiality at its core, narrativity can “also consist in the experiential depiction of human consciousness tout court.” In these cases, the aesthetic effect of narrative is characteristically produced by the mimetically evoked consciousness’ “(sometimes chaotic) experience of being in the world.”28 Of particular interest when dealing with plotless texts which nevertheless fulfil the requirements of experientiality is the readerly process of narrativization, level IV in Fludernik’s model. It is defined as “that process of naturalization which enables readers to re-cognize as narrative those kinds of texts that appear to be non-narrative according to either the natural parameters of level I and II or the cultural parameters of level III.”29 Constituting level IV, narrativization is the only conscious, interpretative strategy and represents the reader’s last resort when struggling to make sense of texts. Moreover, narrativization serves as the new realm of narrative dynamics and directionality: Teleology and dynamics in many experimental texts are constituted not on the level of emplotment (with its emphasis on suspense) but on the interpretative level where the reader imposes a generic aesthetics on recalcitrant textual givens.30

Here the advantages of a ‘natural’ narratology become apparent. Apart from her explicit disavowal of the centrality of plot31 and thereby defying “the

23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

Ibid., 318. Ibid., 29. Herman, David, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Cambridge 2007, 11; Herman, Basic Elements, 9. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 13. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 326.

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(post)structuralist obituary on narrative,”32 Fludernik accurately points out: “Natural Narratology covers a significantly larger ground historically, generically and in relation to the media of narrative.”33 However, if the textual dynamics can shift entirely to the interpretative level of the reader, how do we locate and theorize these “recalcitrant textual givens”34 which prompt the reader to stipulate a human(ized) consciousness at work? By the same token, how can overtly polysemous, nonrepresentational or disruptive, fragmented narrative structures assist in the process of naturalization, i.e. the reader’s understanding of the workings of consciousness? We have seen how narrativization in Fludernik’s model is a dialectical process of retrieving, as well as imposing narrativity on and from a text. Yet if in practice “motivated by the generic markers that go with the book”35 readers strategically project consciousness and a responsive agency onto a text to recuperate its narrativity,36 where then are the limits of experientiality? Moreover, can we specify the dynamics of experientiality by investigating the operating principles underlying the consciousness at work apart from relating it to “the tension between tellability and point?”37 Peter Brooks specifically focuses on the dynamics of narratives. His insightful revision of psychoanalytic criticism in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative is based on a synthetic “superimposition of the model of the functioning of the psychic apparatus on the functioning of the text.”38 Stipulating that Freud in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) is actually talking about the very “narratability” of life,39 Brooks invokes the psychoanalytically inflected notion of desire, which operates as the “motor force”40 for the movement of plot. Ultimately directed towards a totalizing closure and death as the final state of coherence,41 the paradoxical yet universal human desire to remove desire – a lack of stability – governs and shapes both real life and storyworlds alike. Brooks consequently positions desire at the heart of his teleological model of the dynamics of plot. Explicating its them32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41

Ibid., 27. Ibid., 332. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 29. Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Cambridge 1992, 112. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 90. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 93.

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atic, dynamic and formal significance for narratives, “Brooks locates desire in both Story and Discourse, since narratives not only tell stories of desire but also arouse and deploy readers’ and characters’ desire for meaning.”42 Plot as understood by Brooks operates as the organizing line and intention of narrative, “a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text.”43 In this ‘reading for the plot’, we try to make sense of meanings which develop through textual and temporal succession. Analogous to what Freud outlines as the dynamics of the human psyche when breached by a traumatic event, Brooks depicts the stages of narrative dynamics as moving from rest to arousal back to a state of equilibrium, which is restored through repetition “as the movement from passivity to mastery.”44 According to Brooks, Freud’s idea of the repetition compulsion and the death drive are therefore also crucial to any narrative. Adding to Freud’s theory he argues that the “binding” of such repetitions corresponds to narrative discourse’s structuring of story, particularly its arrangement of temporal progress into a satisfying, conclusive whole. Repetition in all its literary manifestations may in fact work as a “binding”, a binding of textual energies that allows them to be mastered by putting them into serviceable form, usable “bundles”, within the energetic economy of narrative.45

Thus plot in this model can be understood as a necessary detour46 or postponement of satisfaction.47 More specifically, plot moves “through the vacillation play of the middle, where repetition as binding works towards the generation of significance, towards recognition and the retrospective illumination.”48 Brooks convincingly answers the initial question why we continually desire and read fictional plots. In response to what he perceives as the defi42

43 44 45 46 47

48

Winnett, Susan, “Desire”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London/New York 2005, 102; also Brooks, Peter, “Narrative Desire”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 132. Brooks, “Narrative”, 132. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 98. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 103. Feminist critics have pointed out that Brook’s model is based on the idea of the male orgasm. See Mezei, Kathy (ed.), Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, Chapel Hill 1996, and Page, Ruth, “Feminist Narratology? Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on Gender and Narrativity”, in: Language and Literature, 12, 2003, 43–56. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 108.

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cits of structuralism, his intrinsically anthropocentric approach49 anticipates some of the basic assumptions of cognitive narratology. This branch of narratology characteristically emphasises the readerly process of reception and active construction of narrativity, rather than considering the text as a selfsufficient entity. David Herman’s definition of narrative as “a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change”,50 for example, similarly founds itself on the recognition of the need to process experience in a meaningful way. By the same token, Brooks’s teleological understanding of plot presupposes the existence of narrative events and heavily relies on the Aristotelian concept of plot as a unified whole, divided up into a beginning, a middle, and an end. Albeit progressive and original, his model reaches its limits when encountering texts without endings or multiple ones, or those which deny their readers closure, sometimes by providing too much of it – to name only a few.

3. Toward a Hybrid – ‘Binding’ Narrative Discourse and the Psychodynamics of Consciousness Apart from their common methodological denominators, the models’ respective weaknesses and strengths may be combined in such a way that particular aspects of each model compensate for the conceptual limits of the other. Monika Fludernik’s ‘natural’ narratology generally appears comprehensive and most suitable to account even for unnatural narratives which prove challenging to recuperate. Nevertheless, experientiality and its key component consciousness often remain difficult to pinpoint. In addition, her definition of narrativization on level IV is unclear as to the question of how (and also why) exactly readers employ this interpretative strategy of dialectically imposing and retrieving narrativity on and from a text. Peter Brooks’s approach must fail once a text has effectively disturbed the traditional notion of plot. Ergo, my synthesis leaves Fludernik’s model and premises mainly intact, yet aims at specifying her terminology by incorporating Brook’s ideas of desire for closure, the dynamics of the psyche, and repetition as binding. Generally speaking, this ‘Brooksian reading of Fludernik’ aspires to concretize the dynamics of consciousness and the process of narrativization. Moving from the theoretical to the more applicable, the following deliberations correspond to a ‘natural’ psychodynamic reading of conscious-

49 50

Brooks, “Narrative”, 131. Herman, Cambridge Companion, 3.

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ness in narratives (part one), the why (part two), and ultimately the how of narrativization (part three). In a Brooksian fashion, the first part of my synthesis applies the dynamics of the human psyche and its stages to the dynamics of consciousness in narratives. Logically speaking, if all narratives necessarily require an essentially anthropomorphic experiencer who reacts to the storyworld, then in principle all its representations of a consciousness at work must also be of a ‘natural’ (i.e., human) quality. Peter Brooks’s dynamic model convincingly delineates that quality as follows. In accordance with Freud’s psychological insights he argues that human beings – without exception – ultimately strive for equilibrium. Motivated by the desire to remove desire (a lack of equilibrium), the human psyche processes experience (Freud’s breach of the “I”) by attempting to restore itself (binding) and to regain control qua repetition. Consequently, a universal pattern of dynamics emerges which underlies and materializes in an infinite number of discharges. Like Brooks’s definition of plot,51 the dynamics of experientiality can be posited as metaphor, as the same-butdifferent. Because the consciousness at work in narrative is of an intrinsically human quality, its basic dynamic pattern is always the same. However, the stage at which readers encounter – narrativize – the central consciousness will differ. In effect, the fabula (the dynamic stages) of consciousness is constant, while the sjuzhet or discourse varies infinitely. Since Fludernik’s narrativization “circumscribes readers’ attempts at making sense of texts, particularly of texts which resist easy recuperation,”52 one if not the reason why readers go to great lengths may lie in their shared need to receive a sense of closure and coherence for their narrative and real-life experiences. For one thing, ‘natural’ narratology is essentially based on the assumption that readers impose and rely on the same frames (levels) for the construction of meanings to interpret texts and real-life experience alike.53 Accordingly, the human “cognitive faculty of sense-making […], since it always relies on natural categories of cognition, is by definition mimetic.”54 Brooks then claims: We are able to read present moments – in literature and, by extension, in life – as endowed with narrative meaning only because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot.55 51 52 53 54 55

Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 91. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 46. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 35–6. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 94.

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Postulating closure as the teleological necessity for endowing texts with meaning, he vindicates the desire for closure as the original motivational drive for readers to narrativize texts in the first place. Like Brooks, other critics have insightfully commented on and corroborated the significance of closure. Frank Kermode speaks of man being always in medias res56 and thus making “considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns”57 to serve as “fictive concords” which then “give meaning to lives and to poems.”58 Barbara Herrnstein-Smith identifies closure as the point of stability “from which all the preceding elements may be viewed comprehensively and their relations grasped as part of a significant design.”59 Like Brooks, she defines closure as equilibrium.60 In order to explain why we – in life and in narratives – “create or seek out ‘enclosures’”,61 she refers to the ability of closure to grant “ultimate unity and coherence to [our] experience.”62 On the one hand, closure is perceived as a “function of the perception of structure”63 which effectively shapes our complex experience of this world by imposing structures and dividing life into digestible entities. Narrativization of initially elusive texts also operates by means of the reader’s strategic recourse to more familiar “natural paradigms.”64 On the other hand, the teleology of closure frequently operates as the subjacent motivational drive to understand and permeate life and narratives with meaning. Although a valid theoretical asset to the psychodynamic reading of level IV, the teleology of closure may account for why we narrativize, yet its underlying reasons make little difference for narrativization in practice. Subsequently, my hybrid model will aim for a more implementable synthesis which, combined with the propositions of part one, will be put to the test in section three. The following and last part of my mapping of a potential hybrid model will now specify the how of narrativization. In postmodern literature, a variety of creative non-representational texts attempts to break up traditional notions of plot and conventional patterns of 56

57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64

Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, New York 1967, 7. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 7. Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, Chicago 1968, 36. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 4. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 46.

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perception.65 Unnatural narratives’ obstruction of the reader’s immediate access to meaning can be based on a number of narrative features: linguistic intrusions (Caryl Churchill’s Blue Kettle) or negations (denarration in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy); irreconcilable logical inconsistencies (Caryl Churchill’s Traps); physical impossibilities (Sarah Kane’s Cleansed); or a pronounced fragmentation of one or multiple discourses (Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life).66 Consequently, as in Samuel Beckett’s late plays, “audiences […] have less and less to go on.”67 His television play Quad for example consists entirely of its four players’ repeated movements along the lines of a square and its diagonals according to a meticulously outlined pattern.68 Entering and later exiting one by one, the players rhythmically move in, out and around its centre. Although ideally all “alike in build,”69 bearings and tempo, each player is acoustically and visually accompanied by a different type of percussions, coloured light, and matching gown.70 Regarding our two narratological theories, Brooks’s model proves of little assistance since there is no event or traditional plot to speak of. In addition, apart from the quantity of players present on stage at the time, the play’s beginning, middle, and end are qualitatively indistinguishable. However, the players’ repetitive and seemingly compulsory patterns of movement immediately evoke Brooks’s stages of the dynamics of plot (psyche) and his idea of repetition as “binding.”71 Thus while Brooks’s formal conditions render his approach unfit to deal with plotless unnatural narratives, his concepts as part of a thematic reading hold promise. Au contraire, Fludernik’s approach first and foremost reaches its explanatory limit when pinpointing the components of experientiality. With characters, temporality and space reduced to perplexing signs, the four players in their apathetic bearings show no indication as to whether they are conscious of themselves, each other or their surroundings (lack of specificity). Considering their evasion of each other when crossing paths in the center however, one could argue to the contrary, that the players do in fact exhibit signs of consciousness by avoiding collision. Nevertheless, the players evade the centre of their square even when circulating by themselves (i.e. the first to enter, the last to exit) thus implying an automated or habitual quality of movement at variance with any signs of intentionality or con65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Richardson, “Plot”, 55. See Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, for readings of most of these narratives. Connor, Steven, Samuel Beckett, Oxford 1988, 145. Beckett, Samuel, “Quad [1982]”, in: Collected Shorter Plays, London 1984, 291. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 292. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 101.

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sciousness in general. Although in fact intuitively assumed to be narrative, as with the case in point, whenever defamiliarizing narrative discourse thwarts the reader’s perception of a human(ized) experiencer, readers revert to level IV. But how then do we naturalize texts which deny us easy access, and how does consciousness manifest itself in these scenarios? As the aforementioned analysis shows, neither Fludernik’s nor Brooks’s model alone adequately account for why some readers would intuitively vouch for Quad’s narrativity. For that reason, a combination of Fludernik’s process of narrativization and Brooks’s idea of repetition in its literary manifestations functioning as ‘binding’ proves useful. I propose that one way readers understand and determine consciousness is by examining the underlying structural dynamics of narrative discourse. When repetitive, structural patterns (‘the how’) obstruct, supplant and impose themselves on the reader’s attempts to reconstruct the story or fabula (‘the what’), readers can naturalize these scenarios by interpreting the recursive narrative structures as ‘psychological binding experienced.’ In other words, to some extent the discourse is anthropomorphized in that its dynamics can be read as resembling the reaction of the human psyche trying to master a traumatic breach in the broadest sense. By implication, readers’ initial sense of palpable experientiality becomes explicable qua the above-mentioned sensed presence of an anthropomorphic experiencer on the level of discourse, who is coping with pressure by means of repetition. Moreover, Brooks’s notion of binding in literature through “formalizations […] that force us to recognize sameness within difference”72 does not just illuminate the process of narrativization and provide the reader with a first thematic impulse. The specific quality of structural repetitions (monotonous or diverse, regressive or intensifying) corroborates and propels the readers’ interpretation of the story even further. Coming back to the example of Beckett’s Quad, it is through the quality of the players’ movement (monotonous, rushed, and spatially restricted) that the idea of futility as theme is being introduced. In combination with the characters’ objectification (notably referred to as “players” with numbers instead of names, gowns hiding their faces, physically of equal height and size) which adds to the impression of compulsion, the play can be read as a bleak vision, or allegory of the human condition: unoriginal, repetitive, and intrinsically futile. By the same token, a play like Quad vehemently resists not just any but the idea of any one valid reading of it. Furthermore, self-conscious readers will notice the paradoxical nature of their own efforts to attribute significance to 72

Ibid.

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a text whose implied message is the very meaninglessness and futility of such undertakings. Thus a parody of narrativization itself, a play like Quad epitomizes and meta-theatrically asserts its own message. Conceivably, this reading of Beckett on level IV is complimented and fuelled by readers’ prior knowledge of the author and his work as part of level III in Fludernik’s model. If only the subtle irony when speaking of ‘certainty,’ ‘knowing,’ and ‘sensemaking’ for Beckettian texts could be passed over. In toto, I would hope that first synergetic effects of applying parts of my hybrid approach to Beckett’s Quad have been demonstrated. Nevertheless, in order to substantiate the largely theoretical propositions made in this section, a more extensive close reading is required. The following analysis of Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire will reveal whether the outlined combination of Fludernik and Brooks can effectively produce insights which each of its underlying approaches could not have produced individually. More specifically, we will see whether the reader’s efforts to naturalize the play – in turn presumably triggered and propelled by the reader’s desire for coherence – can be significantly enriched by investigating the ‘natural’ psychodynamics of the consciousness at work.

4. The Practice – Synergetic Effects of Reading for the Dynamics of Consciousness in Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire In order to verify the hitherto mainly theoretical synergetic effects of my hybrid approach, this section will undertake a pragmatic ‘reading for the dynamics of consciousness.’ In a nutshell, I want to answer the following four questions using my theoretical propositions above: Why is Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire an unnatural narrative? How do we approach the conundrum of its content (‘the what’)? What is the significance of its discourse (‘the how’)? Can we pinpoint the consciousness at work in Heart’s Desire (‘the who’)? Churchill essentially “rejects both the forms and the underlying assumptions of Aristotelian dramaturgy.”73 Considering the violation of the conventions of realist drama,74 Caryl Churchill’s play Heart’s Desire is aptly described as an unnatural narrative. Also, its storyworld is marked by logical and physi73

74

Kritzer, Amelia, The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre of Empowerment, Basingstoke 1991, 2. For the a text’s violation of the “established boundaries of realism” as denoting the unnatural see Richardson, Brian, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006, 138.

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cal impossibilities.75 Regarding instances of the latter, the stage directions announce the entrance of a “ten foot tall bird,”76 and in another scenic version the characters miraculously resurrect after “[t]wo GUNMEN burst in and kill them all.”77 In turn, the multiplicity of conflicting developments of the same domestic scene (a girl’s family members anticipating her arrival from abroad) represents an instance of logical impossibility, i.e., a violation of the principle of non-contradition. Moreover, the play’s subversion of traditional dramatic conventions relates to the contested issue of narrative temporality (story time vs. discourse time) and the distinction between fabula and sjuzhet. In Heart’s Desire, the notion of an underlying chronology of events as part of a pre-existing fabula is queried by the contradictory, fragmented, and varying repetitions (versions). Furthermore, the final “reset to top”78 appears just before the end and adumbrates an indefinite continuation of repetitions. Whereas the last line echoes the first, which ironically contains the word “time,”79 the play’s circularity additionally subverts the idea of a linear chronology. Contrary to the ‘natural’ assumption of mimetic reliability, “[t]he fabula keeps getting repeated, altered, partially negated, and extended.”80 Conclusively, in Heart’s Desire “the discourse serves to erase the story”81 and therefore denies its audience immediate access. As a result of the perplexing inference that there is no single pre-existent, retrievable series of events (story) – or story time for that matter – the putative events themselves are called into question as to their actual occurrence within the storyworld. Seeing that the self-negating versions put forth throughout the play cannot be reconciled to result in a coherent whole, a conscious effort is required to narrativize the nonmimetic play. For a first attempt at ‘the what’, we usually start at the beginning. Here the title provides an initial clue to the theme of the play. If Churchill’s Heart’s Desire is in fact about desire, then the ensuing questions would be: who desires, and what or whom? A first interpretation would attribute the desire to Brian,

75

76 77 78 79 80 81

For logical and physical impossibilities as the condition sine qua non for unnatural narratives see Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 80. Churchill, Caryl, “Heart’s Desire”, in: Blue Heart, London 1997, 32. Churchill, “Heart’s Desire”, 17. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 5, 36. Richardson, “Plot”, 59–60. Richardson, Brian, “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 52.

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the father, who refers to his daughter Susy as his “heart’s desire.”82 Although at first glance simply a term of endearment, its amorous and thus sexual connotations give rise to uneasy speculations. However, for a more extensive grasp of what Heart’s Desire is about, we are above all on the qui vive for continuity. In search for an overarching principle which would administer coherence among the seeming chaos, the recurring phenomenon of interruptions and resettings of the action emerges as the most frequent and lowest common denominator. Considering the qualitative dynamics of the narrative structures in Heart’s Desire, the restarts often strike one as frenzied, erratic, and oscillating. Moreover, they most notably occur whenever a character either verbally digresses, affronts another, or might feel threatened by the approaching course of action. For example, one of the first resettings occurs when aunt Maisie’s passionate appraisal of the Australian “fauna” – the “platypus” in particular – turns into an expansive soliloquy.83 Similarly, later on in the play she is again interrupted while contemplating her fear of mortality.84 Further examples of unwarranted scenarios which entail a resetting of the action are found when Lewis is about to drag their family life through the mine as a “load of – “85, when the parents dread the consequences of their daughter’s involvement in a tube accident,86 and when Brian struggles for words as his wife Alice admits to having had an affair for the past “[f]ifteen years.”87 Hence the occurrence of the resettings conceivably correlates with a hypothetical, viewpoint-dependant evaluation of what precedes them. In brief, the dynamics of the play seemingly react to the events. In combination with the varying length of the different episodes in between the restarts, these qualitative features of the structural dynamics of the play suggest teleology and volition, not arbitrariness. By virtue of detecting a principle of ‘natural’ selection, we extrapolate from the quality of the dynamics of discourse to consciousness. Experiencing the urge to repeat, the extrapolated consciousness signifies agitation, crisis, and compulsion. What on the discourse level manifests itself in narrative structures as a means of mastery (repetition as binding) resurfaces on the diegetic level in the characters’ seemingly involuntary utterance of their deepest urges and fears. As Amelia Kritzer observes, “[l]anguage expands […] to name previously unthought

82 83 84 85 86 87

Churchill, “Heart’s Desire”, 33, 36. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 32–3. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 20.

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desires.”88 As an example outside of Maisie’s above-mentioned fear of mortality, Brian’s intelligible longing for food is suddenly aggrandised when he reluctantly admits to “this terrible urge to eat myself.”89 Momentarily unable to respond to or even notice the women’s sympathetic advice, Brian is mysteriously taken over and rushed through his ulterior narcissistic vision of devouring himself: “ahh there goes my head into my mouth I’ve swallowed my whole self up I’m all mouth can my mouth swallow my mouth yes yes my mouth’s taking a big bite ahh.”90 Besides the use of repetition, for readers of the script the grammatical disintegration is reinforced by the missing punctuation. Assuming that a compulsion to repeat and digress manifests itself on the story level (characters’ speech) as well as the discourse level (structural intrusions), we may now ask to whom we can attribute that troubled consciousness driven by the need to repeat? To this effect, the reader may hypothesize a director figure whose strained aspirations for artistic perfection ultimately result in structural chaos. Alternatively, locating the consciousness on the diegetic level in the characters’ minds yields more profitable interpretations. Here the interruptions are narrativized in terms of a ‘natural’ defence mechanism which blocks unwarranted developments à la ‘saved by the reset to …’. The previous analysis has introduced the idea of reading intrusions (structural and linguistic) as the surfacing of a character’s consciousness trying to bind and cope with a compelling experience. Accordingly, the ensuing question of whose consciousness is at work imposes itself. One eligible candidate is the family patriarch Brian. Similar to the projected director figure interpretation, the structural recourses are thence interpreted as Brian’s attempts to construct the ideal reunion with his beloved daughter.91 Some supportive arguments of it being his consciousness which serves as the vehicle for conveying experientiality have already been touched upon in the brief consideration of the play’s title. Additionally, a significant number of the passages immediately preceding the resetting portray situations which appear especially frightening (e.g. Alice leaving him92) or annoying (e.g. Maisie about to explain her diet93) to him in particular. Furthermore, Brian’s fear of legal injustice can be reasonably de88 89 90 91

92 93

Kritzer, The Plays, 123. Churchill, “Heart’s Desire”, 21. Ibid., 22. Alber naturalizes the play by reading its unnatural elements as internal states. More specifically, he reads Brian’s mind as governing the action in more or less desperate attempts at perfectionism. Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 84–5. Churchill, “Heart’s Desire”, 7. Ibid., 14.

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duced to signify his desire for ultimate control. He vindicates a defence of his soundness of judgement saying: “I happen to know that a great many people are wrongfully convicted and I don’t live in a dream that suggests that terrible things only befall people in newspapers.”94 As part of one of the following versions’ course of action, these fears catch up with him and physically manifest themselves when he is actually being arrested.95 Although many other textual instances can be procured and read in compliance with Brian as the central consciousness at work in Heart’s Desire, it is in fact another character that may prove most promising for our analysis: his daughter Susy. Her continual postponement of the reunion with her family and her physical absence for most of the play indicate her utmost reluctance to return home. In respect to the postmodernist stance critical of the idea of stable, definite meaning, Susy becomes a free-floating signifier, incapable of one, true, and final arrival. Although her visit represents the focus of attention for characters and readers alike, the concept of ‘Susy’ is imbued with meaning by others only. She is either described or spoken for. In one scenario, Susy sends a friend in her place, “a young Australian woman,”96 whom the family has apparently never met before. Tellingly, when the Australian woman is asked whether Susy is coming home, she replies: “I thought that was something she didn’t want to do.” Although arguably already biased as her friend, why would the only amicable non-family character in the play lie when caring enough to appease Susy’s mother by politely adapting her statement to add “but of course I could be wrong?”97 Thus the reader is likely to deem her trustworthy. Based on these initial textual clues, we may naturalize Heart’s Desire as Susy’s vigorous efforts to process the underlying reason for her hesitation. Presumably related to its domestic setting, the trauma Susy is visibly coping with must be connected to her family. The brother’s persistent portrayal as an alcoholic98 gives away his own need to take refuge and reinforces the gravity of the matter. The uncanny ambivalence of the word desire as part of the title represents the final straw to conjecture sexual abuse by her father as the breach of Susy’s consciousness, which she is now trying to process. Spread throughout the play, other indicators reinforce this suspicion. Firstly, her own mother sympathizes with the idea of moving from one continent to another if thereby enabled to take refuge from Brian.99 Sec94 95 96 97 98 99

Ibid., 13. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 11, 16, 24. Ibid., 21.

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ondly, when his father informs him that Susy has not yet arrived, Lewis’s response contains tragic and allusive overtones: “Dad knows where she is, don’t you Dad? Daddy always knows where Susy is.”100 In addition, the gunmen episode,101 her father’s arrest by “a man in uniform”,102 as well as Brian’s devouring of himself (instead of her) can be read as different manifestations of a retaliation campaign by alternating means of violence, a schemed play on Brian’s greatest fear (loss of control) or fatal flaw (narcissism). In summary, when adhering closely to the text, the character of Susy can reasonably be identified as the central consciousness at work. Susy epitomizes what Peter Brooks has applied to humanity in general: “We are thus always trying to work back through time to that transcendent home, knowing, of course, that we cannot. All we can do is subvert or, perhaps better, pervert time: which is what narratives do.”103 The structural repetitions and recourses on the discourse level can be narrativized when regarded as Susy’s attempts to master the traumatic breach she has suffered from being sexually abused by her possessive father. It has been argued that Susy’s need for closure effectively propels the discourse of a play which otherwise defies narrative temporality and the idea of a single, pre-existent fabula. Susy’s consciousness can be inferred to operate according to the teleological dynamics of the human psyche and consequently allows the reader to naturalize an otherwise incoherent cluster of scenes. Although Susy is mostly talked about instead of speaking for herself, through the centrality of her consciousness which mediates experientiality and governs the dynamics of the discourse, she remains palpable throughout the play.

5. Conclusion Let me start by asking a rhetorical question. Considering the underlying presumptions of a shared anthropocentric bias and a universal desire for closure, how self-defeating would these investigations into the psychodynamic logics of consciousness in narratives be, if the ending did not revert back to the beginning? While starting with Brian Richardson’s valid question pertaining to the dynamics of post-plot narrative discourse, the focus of investigation gradually shifted from theories to theory to practice. This paper set out to meld two presumably same-but-different narratological approaches in 100 101 102 103

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 29. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 111.

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a hybrid model which would thrive on their collaborative strengths and offset each others’ limitations. Characteristically, postclassical approaches build on and integrate classical traditions to “expose the limits but also exploit […] the possibilities of older models.”104 Monika Fludernik’s own explicitly established modus operandi – illustrated by her metaphor of “[t]hrowing out the baby and preserving the bath water”105 – epitomizes this fashion of strategic recycling and appropriation. Looking back at the essay’s structure, in a seemingly self-fulfilling prophesy, first synergetic effects of a ‘reading for the dynamics of discourse’ in Beckett’s Quad were encountered. By incorporating Brooks’s notion of repetition and compulsion into the concept of experientiality, narrativizing the qualitative features of the dynamics of the play’s discourse ultimately led to a reading of the play as an allegory of the absurd human condition. The focus again shifted from a ‘tough cookie’ to a cookie jar. In a similar yet more extensive fashion, the unnaturalness of Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire was examined. Without a pre-existent, retrievable fabula, coherence was re-established qua pointing at the quality of the dynamics. Substantiating teleology effectively anthropomorphized the discourse. For the text’s central consciousness, the character of Susy was determined as the most eligible candidate to account for the resetting of action as a means to process her trauma. In the future, the concept of a human(ized) consciousness at work at the core of experientiality could pave the way for other psychoanalytic superimpositions apart from the idea of repetition as a means to mastery of psychological trauma. Nevertheless, I would generally advise against an uncritical hailing of Freudian psychology and remain opposed to the idea of equating folk-psychology with literary analysis. Although in need of further testing in the field, the analysis of both Quad and Heart’s Desire supported my theoretical findings and held promise in terms of specifying what exactly happens on level IV and why. For that matter, to illuminate the dynamics of consciousness at work has revealed itself as one possible interpretative strategy for readers to narrativize unfamiliar narrative structures. In his essay “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them” (2009), Jan Alber has already convincingly outlined five interpretative strategies to assist in the reader’s attempt to naturalize unnatural scenarios. My own analysis at different stages corresponds vaguely to the three “mental operations” he terms “reading events as internal states,” “fore-

104 105

Herman, Cambridge Companion, 12. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 34.

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grounding the thematic,” and “reading allegorically.”106 I believe there is room for more. If emotions are understood as a process which includes the reflective monitoring subsequent to the affective response, a reader’s emotional intelligence will influence how he or she will make sense of texts. The – both cognitive and affective – process of empathy may also figure on level IV as an additional strategy to assist the reader’s narrativization. A truly anthropocentric, reader-oriented cognitive approach like ‘natural’ narratology must sooner or later acknowledge readers’ affective responses to literature.

6. Bibliography Abbott, H. Porter, “Late Modernism: Samuel Beckett and the Art of the Oeuvre”, in: Enoch Brater / Ruby Cohn (eds.), Around the Absurd, Ann Arbor 1990, 73–96. Alber, Jan, “Natural Narratology”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London and New York 2005, 394–95. –, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Study, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96. –, “Unnatural Narratives”, The Literary Encyclopedia, 2009, http://www.litencyc.com/ php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=7202 (last accessed January 28, 2010). Beckett, Samuel, “Quad [1982]”, in: Collected Shorter Plays, London 1984, 289–94. –, Molloy: A Novel, New York 1955. Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Cambridge 1992. –, “Narrative Desire”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 130–37. Churchill, Caryl, “Blue Kettle”, in: Blue Heart, London 1997, 37–69. –, “Heart’s Desire”, in: Blue Heart, London 1997, 3–36. –, Traps, London 1989. Clayton, Jay, “Narrative and Theories of Desire”, in: Critical Inquiry, 16, 1989, Nr. 1, 33–53. Connor, Steven, Samuel Beckett, Oxford 1988. Crimp, Martin, “Attempts on Her Life [1997]”, in: Plays Two, London 2005, 197–284. Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London and New York 1996. Herman, David, Basic Elements of Narrative, Malden 2009. –, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Cambridge 2007. –, “Introduction”, in: David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, Stanford 2003, 1–30. Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, Chicago 1968. Kane, Sarah, “Cleansed [1998]”, in: Complete Plays, London 2001. Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, New York 1967. Kritzer, Amelia, The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre of Empowerment, Basingstoke 1991. Lawson, Hilary, Closure: A Story of Everything, London 2001.

106

Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 83.

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Mezei, Kathy (ed.), Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, Chapel Hill 1996. Page, Ruth, “Feminist Narratology? Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on Gender and Narrativity”, in: Language and Literature, 12, 2003, 43–56. Phelan, James, Experiencing Science: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative, Columbus 2007. Richardson, Brian, “Plot after Postmodernism”, in: Christoph Henke / Martin Middeke (eds.), Drama and/after Postmodernism, Trier 2007, 55–67. –, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006. –, “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 47–59. –, “Introduction: Plot and Emplotment”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 64–70. Ronen, Ruth, “Paradigm Shift in Plot Models: An Outline of the History of Narratology”, in: Poetics Today, 11, 1990, Nr. 4, 817–42. Ryan, Marie-Laure, “Toward a Definition of Narrative”, in: David Herman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Cambridge 2007, 22–35. Walsh, Richard, “The Narrative Imagination across Media”, in: Modern Fiction Studies, 52, 2006, Nr. 4, 855–68. Winnett, Susan, “Desire”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London and New York 2005, 102.

III. Unnatural Time and Causality

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Narrative Causality Denaturalized

The works on narrative time abound. Less attention has been paid, however, to narrative causality. Whereas most Formalists and structuralists catalogued certain types of action sequences characterized by more or less stable temporal ordering and causal connection (Propp’s morphology of the folktale, Todorov’s The Grammar of the Decameron), Roland Barthes envisaged the possibility of meaningful disruption of narrative teleology, introducing three kinds of narrative units (nuclei or cardinal functions, catalyzers, and indices) related to different types of causality. Cardinal functions and catalyzers manifest explicit causality of action; a more diffuse concept of indexical function refers to psychological states, spatio-temporal characteristics, or “atmosphere.” In modern fiction, indices often override teleology of action or trigger series of logically irreconcilable actions by accumulating independent potential of meaning. In his Poétique (1973; English translation 1981),1 Tzvetan Todorov points out certain types of causality typical of modernist fiction, for instance, the “parodic causality” of insignificant everyday events in Flaubert and Chekhov or the “irrational causality” in fantastic and absurdist fiction. In certain cases, as Todorov observes, the “habitual solidarity between temporality and causality” disintegrates or yields to the dominant temporality, such as calendar time (in chronicles and diaries) or subjective duration of consciousness (in modernist fiction). A number of recent works cast new light on linguistic-rhetorical and philosophical function of narrative causality and give impetus to further study of its various forms.2 In his Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative (1997), Brian Richardson touches upon philosophical and ideological aspects of causality and focuses on modern texts where chance plays an important role. Richardson conceptualizes causality in terms of the

1

2

Todorov, Tzvetan, Poétique, Paris 1973; Todorov, Tzvetan, Introduction to Poetics, Theory and History of Literature, Minneapolis 1981. See Richardson, Brian, Unlikely Stories. Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative, Newark 1997; Carroll, Noël, “On the Narrative Connection”, in: Noël Carroll (ed.), Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge, 2001, 118–33; Kern, Stephen, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought, Princeton/Oxford 2004; Kafalenos, Emma, Narrative Causalities, Columbus 2006.

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opposition “causal connection (supernatural, naturalistic or metafictional)3 versus chance (coincidence),” the latter undermining and subverting teleology of the natural order. However, chance often engenders its own causation (or, in Nabokov’s words, “mimics choice”), which may be suppressed or supported by human action: in the latter case, chance becomes a form of deferred causality. As Gregory Currie argues, “character turns outcomes that are otherwise unlikely, because they depend on accidents, into events with a dramatic inevitability.”4 The aim of this paper is to single out certain complex types of causality, which are rather frequent in modern fiction. The commonsensical understanding of “causality” refers to the logical relation of implication (‘an event A brings about an event B’) and projects regularity of natural phenomena onto the realm of human relations. The reader attaches this popular understanding, a result of the hasty uncritical conceptualization of experience, or, in Todorov’s words, the “determinist state of mind” to the very genre of narrative. E. M. Forster’s much-cited mini-narrative “The king died, and then the queen died of grief ” exemplifies this kind of causal implication. However, an interesting, “tellable” narrative sequence “at once anchors itself and deviates from experiential repertoires.”5 Fictional narrative de-naturalizes our stereotyped patterns of thought and behavior, and “allows one to see the surrounding world in a new light, which is accomplished not by the direct expression of surmises and hypotheses about the world, but by their construction and consideration in the process of interpretation.”6 Indeed, narratives “widen our mental universe beyond the actual and the familiar, and provide playfields for interesting thought experiments.”7 Upon closer critical scrutiny, narrative causality emerges as a complex, entangled set of relations. I shall start my discussion with Roland Barthes’s much cited and much debated dictum on the confusion of consecution and consequentiality

3

4

5 6

7

Cf. Todorov’s “mythological” and “ideological” narrative where “certain isolated and independent actions, often performed by different characters, reveal the same abstract rule” (Todorov, Introduction, 45). Currie, Gregory, “Narrative and the Psychology of the Character”, in: Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism, 67, 2009, Nr. 1, 61–71. Herman, David, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln 2002, 85. Grishakova, Marina, “Cognitive Science, Common Sense, and Fiction”, in: Narrative, 17, 2009, Nr. 2, 191. Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 2009, 93.

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[…] what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by; the narrative in this case would be a systematic application of the logical error condemned by Scholasticism in the formula post hoc, ergo propter hoc, which might well be the motto of Fate, of which the narrative is in fact merely the ‘language.’8

In Richardson’s opinion, Barthes erroneously equates causality with textual sequence.9 As a matter of fact, there are at least three problematic issues that intermingle in Barthes’s dictum: first, the concept of causality that evokes various philosophical interpretations; second, the sequence of real or fictional events to which the concept of causality is applied; and, finally, temporality and chronological order (antecedence or subsequence). Richardson’s own definition of causality highlights change as the main indicator of causal connection: he defines cause as a condition that occasions change in the course of events.10 However, the notion of “change” is context-sensitive: change may be part of a pattern or enactment of a singular event. As part of a pattern, it triggers a predictable chain of actions; as a singular, unpredictable event, it introduces novelty in the organization of the (real or fictional) world.11 Many natural phenomena are manifestations of recurrent causal patterns, where one event necessarily entails another (‘a stone thrown in the air falls down’; ‘heat melts snow,’ ‘rain soaks grass,’ etc.). In such cases, a change from one state of affairs to another one manifests regularity in the world’s organization. Such recurrent patterns also structure social-historical time, in which subjective and objective temporalities intermingle and tension between the finitude of subjective time (death) and presumable infinitude of social time is articulated. Iterativity and predictability are typical of both natural causality and ‘naturalized’ socio-historical connections – that is, sequences of events that repeat on a regular basis in definite contexts. These are prearranged stretches of public time (timetables, schedules, careers, life-courses) and re8 9 10 11

Barthes, Roland, The Semiotic Challenge, Los Angeles 1994, 108. Richardson, Unlikely Stories, 14–5. Ibid., Unlikely Stories, 36. Unpredictable effects of causation are used in jokes, anecdotes and aphorisms, such as, for instance, a widely known Liverpool joke: “An Irishman, an Italian and a Liverpudlian approach Jesus for healing. The Irishman is blind, the Italian has a withered arm and the Liverpudlian walks on crutches. Jesus touches the Irishman – and the latter regains his sight, he touches the Italian – and the arm functions again. Yet when he is about to touch the Liverpudlian, the latter jumps back and exclaims: ‘Don’t touch me! I’m on disability benefit!’” The very effect of this anecdote depends on the subversion of the causal chain “touch – recovery” typical of the miracle stories.

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hearsed actions (ceremonies, rituals) that are socially preserved, transmitted and naturalized as part of the social order.12 As humans rely on regular causal chains in their everyday automatic, subconscious action, they tend to ascribe causality to the natural world. However, causal connection has also been considered as the way we represent the world rather than a feature of the world itself. According to Kant, causality has an empirical basis: humans assume the principle of causality in order to account for empirical experience. From a more cautious and skeptical (Humean) point of view, causation is a type of mental connection that relates facts, i.e. data of human consciousness, rather than events of the physical reality: “Causality is not part of the perceptual level of experience but part of the interpretive level,” or, in other words, “causality is not part of events as experienced, but only of events as described.”13 The regularity of certain events as well as relations of antecedence-subsequence (in time) and contiguity (in space) are read as causal connection, though the very existence and nature of this connection may prove to be questionable. A sequence of events may be “naturalized” as causal, even if the relation of causality is probabilistic or hypothetical. Brian Richardson’s analysis of Beckett’s novel Molloy demonstrates how two opposite views on causality, deterministic and skeptical (Humean), shape the subjective worlds of Beckett’s characters: Moran’s obsession with causal connections is counterbalanced by Molloy’s inability to see any connection except correlation. Projected causality serves as a means to explain away or make sense of occurrences unavailable for testing or direct observation. This is exactly the case with narrative causality. Access to narrative causation is restricted in that the genuine relations and significance of events introduced early in narration do not become clear until later on, or else reference remains ambiguous and obscure on principle. The projection of ‘forward-looking’ causality onto a temporal sequence serves as a means of naturalizing the temporal order and leads to the representation of temporality as a logical order. On the contrary, Jon-K. Adams adopts the Humean view on narrative causality as a result of a posteriori description and explanation of narrative

12

13

Luckmann, Thomas, “The Constitution of Human Life in Time”, in: John Bender / David E. Wellbery (eds.), Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, Stanford 1991, 151–66. Adams, Jon-K., “Causality and Narrative”, in: Journal of Literary Semantics, 18, 1989, Nr. 3, 151.

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events by the narrator. From the narrator’s perspective, narrative is a mode of ‘retrodictive’ explanation: Rather than predicting what will occur under certain conditions, narrative describes what has occurred under certain conditions and, in so doing, provides a causal explanation by establishing those conditions and the events that are bound to them.14

A more dynamic view on narrative implies a mutual ongoing effort by the narrator and the reader (listener) as a necessary condition for narrative transaction. David Herman’s approach to narrative as a blueprint for a specific mode of world-creation seems to be particularly fruitful.15 From this double (reader’s-narrator’s) perspective, both “forward-looking” causality of experiencing or expectation and “backward-looking” causality of description or explanation constitute the process of narrative sense-making.16 Though Richardson refutes the very possibility of the substitution of consecution with consequentiality, he admits that the reader intuitively tends to read purely temporal conjunctions (like “A man in Paris nodded; some time later a man in China died”) as possible narratives and to speculate over the type of causes that may connect these apparently disconnected actions. It is easy to imagine a detective story or an action film in which this sequence would in fact establish such a causal connection. Due to the human propensity to project experiences of the physical world onto mental processes,17 those domains where causal connections are weak or underdetermined are translated into the language of causation. In fictional narratives, causal connections are frequently underdetermined. Even realist narratives supply only partial information on the sequencing and causality of events: The reader expects a certain vagueness and takes it in stride, is quite willing to conceive of the events as determinately ordered somehow within the merely indicated outline – but the narrator, trading on his innocence, may return to those events later in his narration and reveal a hidden significance that undoes our compliance.18

14 15 16

17 18

Adams, “Causality and Narrative”, 152. Herman, David, Basic Elements of Narrative, Wiley-Blackwell 2009. See also: Pier, John, “After this, therefore because of this”, in: John Pier/José Ángel Garcia Landa (eds.), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin, New York 2008, 109–140. See, e.g., Lakoff, George / Johnson, Mark, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago 1980. Fraasen, Bastiaan C. van, “Time in Physical and Narrative Structure”, in: John Bender / David E. Wellbery (eds.), Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, Stanford 1991, 31.

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Despite the partial and underdetermined character of causality, the ‘prototypical’ narrative sequence is not causally irrelevant. As philosopher Noël Carroll observes, practices that subvert or disrupt causality “themselves must presuppose something like the ordinary concept of narrative in order to negate it.”19 Even if causal connection is weak, it guides the process of reading (or listening) and foreshadows future patterns that may emerge from the pre-story (or “ante-narrative,” in David Boje’s terms). It incites expectation of certain consequences that earlier events might produce (or, if they have no consequences, their non-consequentiality acquires negative, apophatic significance, as in the case of the “Chekhovian gun” that must, but does not always, shoot in the end of the play). In Carroll’s formulation, “the earlier event is at least a necessary and indispensable contribution to a sufficient, though nonnecessary condition for the occurrence of the relevant later event in the narrative complex.”20 Therefore both factors (time and causality) have a foundational value in the definition of narrative sequence. Barthes is not altogether wrong in pointing to the interconnectedness of temporal ordering, causation, and deep-level narrative logic as the basis of narrative teleology and calling the narrative “the language of Fate.” This teleology is supported by social and generic conventions as well as naturalistic frameworks of narration, which, as a matter of fact, are targets of Barthes’s critique. Unlike natural sequences of action, intentional processes incited by human will are largely unpredictable; it is not easy to detect and separate exact causes of human behavior (intentions, motivations, desires, and beliefs). Somebody’s death from a bullet is simultaneously a manifestation of a natural causal pattern and a consequence of intentional or unintentional action. If one acknowledges the existence of both ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ (or natural and intentional) forms of causality, arising respectively from judgment by experience and judgment by perception in Kant, the question of the relationship between the bullet and the death arises. For example, the shooter might have (1) used natural causality, shooting the bullet at the person intentionally; (2) ignored the natural causality, i.e., pushed the trigger out of ignorance, unintentionally; (3) pretended to ignore the natural causality, while using it intentionally; (4) pushed the trigger by accident; (5) produced mediating actions that triggered the natural causality (as in a much cited philosophical example of a man who, while expecting a rich inheritance from his uncle, decides to speed up the uncle’s death and to poison him, but on the way to the uncle’s home his car hits a passerby who dies instantaneously and 19 20

Carroll, “On the Narrative Connection”, 36. Ibid., 124.

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who turns out to be his uncle; here the question is whether the man killed his uncle intentionally or unintentionally). The court verdict legitimizes one interpretation as logically relevant and discards others as irrelevant. The “action continuum,”21 where intentions and goals interact, spreads beyond a single event. The fact that intentions and motivations operate in clusters, as well as the existence of distributed and negative intentions, makes a formalized description of intentional causality difficult to obtain. As Bastiaan van Fraasen puts it, the conception of events or states of affairs as internally related […] is precisely the point where the rupture between the modern view of material, physical reality and the categories of the personal becomes visible. We can see such internal relations between events when the events are intentional, i.e. when the acts are characterizible in terms of intention involved. But we are unable to find intentionality in the world of physics: the regularities described by physics are simply the patterns in which events occur.22

Most often, processes and states of affairs, rather than ready-made facts and connections, are available to the observer who reconstructs a causal line (or lines) on the basis of his observations. Bertrand Russell has introduced the concept of the causal line to highlight the gradual character of long-term causal changes that maintain the persistence of certain states or qualities. The causal line involves transformation or metamorphosis rather than a radical change. Moreover, one phenomenon may be caused by two or more independent or mutually dependent interfering factors, in which case the causal line is difficult or impossible to detect. Though, as Rimmon-Kenan observes, readers tend to naturalize a “multi-line structure” into the “story” – i.e., a single-line narrative (e.g. King Lear’s or Emma Bovary’s story), – fuzzy causal lines erode and denaturalize the notion of deterministic causality.23 As Wolf Schmid argues, ambiguous (or, in our terms, fuzzy) causality is not a property unique to post-realist poetics.24 Thus, for instance, in Nikolai Gogol’s classic tale The Overcoat (1842), the theft of the new overcoat serves as the (highly improbable, from a commonsensical point of view) cause of the death of a Petersburg clerk. The theft of the overcoat is the dominant “story” extracted by critics from Gogol’s tale, whether they belong to the literary-historical, sociological or psychoanalytic school. In the latter case, the 21

22 23 24

Boesch, Ernest E., Symbolic Action Theory and Cultural Psychology, Berlin/New York 1991. Fraasen, “Time”, 28. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London 2002. Schmid, Wolf, “Narrativity and Eventfulness”, in: Tom Kindt / Hans-Harald Müller (eds.), What Is Narratology?, Berlin/New York 2003, 20.

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overcoat is endowed with feminine and vaginal connotations. There is, however, a whole cluster of factors that may have preordained the clerk’s fate: the Petersburg climate; the character’s poor health; the extreme narrowness of his interests, his only passion being copying documents, and estrangement from the real world; the extreme economy of his life and the emotional shock he experiences being subjected to a bad treatment by senior clerks or a high ranking person to whom he appeals for help. The clerk’s life is represented as a chain of grotesque accidents, any one of which might have turned out to be fatal: the clerk is permanently on the verge of disappearance. He is susceptible to danger every time he exits his natural writing environment: He had a special knack, as he walked in the street, of getting under a window at the precise moment when some sort of trash was being thrown out of it, and, as a result, he was eternally carrying around melon or watermelon rinds and other such rubbish on his hat. […] Even if he looked at something, [he] saw in everything his own neat lines, written in an even hand, and only when a horse’s muzzle, coming out of nowhere, placed itself on his shoulder and blew real wind from his nostrils onto his cheek – only then would he notice that he was […] in the middle of the street. […] [He] would hastily slurp up his cabbage soup and eat a piece of beef with onions, without ever noticing their taste, and he would eat it all with flies and whatever God sent him at the time.25

The slightly fantastic atmosphere of the tale coagulates when the clerk’s ghost haunts the streets of St. Petersburg taking overcoats from passersby. In his celebrated essay “How Gogol’s Overcoat is made” (1918), Boris Eikhenbaum demonstrates how Gogol’s unique narration style (skaz, imitating recitation and acoustically reproducing facial expressions and gestures) calls into existence an image of a garrulous narrator who provides a number of “useless” details and reveals ignorance of necessary ones, thus considerably expanding and obscuring the basic anecdotal kernel of the story. The very vagueness of his narration is coterminous with semantic richness. This is probably the reason why the famous Russian animator Juri Norshtein has been unable to complete the adaptation of The Overcoat in 25 years and is still working on it, while trying to capture minute psychological details and peculiarities of the character’s behavior (several short clips at www.youtube.com introduce Norshtein’s exquisite work). The next step toward the denaturalization of deterministic causality and ever increasing openness of causal lines is zero-degree causality. This term describes a situation in which a condition inherently rich with causal potentialities and sufficient to entail causal connection fails to produce it (the Chek25

Gogol, Nikolai, The Collected Tales, translated and annotated by R. Pevear and L. Volkhonsky, New York 1999, 397–98.

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hovian gun does not shoot after all). Instead it produces a series of correlated actions or states of affairs: “indices” and “catalyzers” predominate over “cardinal functions.” The situation is rather frequent in Kafka’s novels, where an apparently purposeful intentional action is muffled by accompanying actions and states of affairs. For example, in both The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), the protagonists (called Josef K. and K.) enter into countless new relations and conversations or spend hours discussing seemingly pointless details in their desperate attempt to grasp a pattern of meaning that governs the surrounding reality. The notion of “intentional causality” is used here in its extended sense – not only as a combination of the intentional stance and physical action, but also of the intentional stance and its mental outcome or interpretation. Considered from the perspective of intentional causality, the narrative structure is a result of both prospective and retrospective ordering: the prospective as expectation and anticipation, the retrospective as flashback, retrospective ordering of telling, imagining or remembering the events. The flashback as such does not subvert the temporal order; on the contrary, it aims at its restoration, filling in gaps and finding missing links in the sequence of events. As a result of the “backward” interpretive movement, facts and events of the story are restructured and assume a new, retrospective significance. In modernist and postmodernist fiction, reading “against the grain” of narrative logic and natural causality, i.e., retrograde causality, often predominates over the “forward-looking” structuring (which is the real spring of the plot) and becomes self-sufficient. Retrograde causality is implicitly present in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Defence (the Russian version 1930, the English version 1964), published almost simultaneously with Eugene Minkowski’s studies of time dissociation and the gravitation toward the past in schizophrenic consciousnesses.26 The protagonist of the novel, chess wunderkind Luzhin, discovers a recurrent pattern of events in his life, goes mad, and commits suicide as a sort of counter-move to disrupt fatalistic repetition. The reverse motion is represented as part of the narrative hermeneutics. Nabokov himself mentioned “retrograde analysis” as a modeling strategy of the novel. In retrograde analysis, the chess problem solver is supposed to restore the logic of the game from a “back-cast study,” the logic leading to the present board position (thus imitating the “backward” epistemic causality). One of the most astute Nabokov scholars, D. Barton Johnson, finds this parallel irrelevant and deliberately misleading since a strict structural analogy is ab26

Minkowski, Eugene, Le temps vécu: études phénoménologiques et psychopathologiques, Paris 1933.

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sent. Yet despite its absence, the implicit pattern of incomplete or partial return, together with the recurrent motif of retrospection and backward movement, are sufficient reasons to consider the metaphor of “retrograde analysis” the dominant hermeneutic figure of the novel. The retrograde motion is realized in various forms: (1) escape and return to the old place; (2) groping for the lost details of the past (e.g. the search for the “right door” of recollection after entering a wrong door in reality); (3) involuntary return of the past; (4) the motif of entering or starting from the “other end.” Thus, Luzhin senior’s novel about a young chess genius, which starts from the end (the early death of the genius), serves as a mise-en-abyme for Nabokov’s own text. There is, finally, the steady complex of motifs of “turning away” and “looking back,” which create a perspective of receding motion. The unfolding of the chain of motifs of backward motion culminates in the episode of Luzhin’s suicide, projected, as Alfred Appel has pointed out, on a still photo from Harold Lloyd’s film Safety Last (1923), where Lloyd hangs on the wall of a skyscraper clinging to the hand of a huge clock.27 The episode refers to Luzhin’s desire to “stop the clock of life, to suspend the game for good, to freeze.” Time provides a false causation, where “chance mimics choice,” disguising itself as destiny. Therefore stopping time would mean breaking the chain of false causality. Insofar as narrative logic epitomizes natural causality and physical time order, it leads to stasis, inertia and death. Nabokov’s protagonist desperately struggles against the ‘natural’ course of events, yet, being confined to the diegetic world and subjected to its laws, is doomed to perish. Nabokov’s strategy of retrograde causality has been employed and brought to its limits by Martin Amis in his novel Time’s Arrow. Written in 1991, Amis’s novel is a story of a German war criminal, Odilo Unverdorben, told from the end to the beginning. This is a sample of philosophical experimental fiction that discloses hidden aspects of narrative causality. The narrator is the disembodied mental ‘self,’ somehow unified with Odilo’s body, yet also separate. Chatman calls the narrator “Soul”: Tod and Soul move in opposite temporal directions. For Tod the discourse moves backwards, from his death to his birth; for Soul, the movement is ‘forward into the past’ […] The implied reader is presented with two narratives – the narrative of Tod’s life, and the narrative of Soul’s effort to uncover and understand that life.28

This type of narration is partially modeled upon Nabokov’s novella The Eye (written in 1930, English version 1965). In Nabokov’s story, the first-person 27 28

Appel, Alfred, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, New York 1974, 161. Chatman, Seymour, “Backwards”, in: Narrative, 17, 2009, Nr. 1, 41.

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narrator commits suicide, yet his mental self lives on and creates the world anew. The self (the “I”) has the function of the onlooker, witness, observer – the invisible “presence” or the mobile perspective on the diegetic world – although it retains some traits of bodily presence, too. The other half of the “I” exists under Smurov’s name as a character in the newly-created diegetic world and becomes visible as a mirror reflection on other characters’ “surfaces.” The extradiegetic “I” sees the self as the other, yet its visible part is also perceived by characters in the story. The split between the first-person narrator and the protagonist allows the activation of the whole potential of two-directional narrative hermeneutics. Critics often describe the technique of Amis’s novel as a match to its content.29 However, the novel is not just an embodiment of a nostalgic wish to “turn the clock backwards” to change the past. What is most interesting in Amis’s novel is the reversal of prospective and retrospective structuring: prospective structuring (chronology, telling the story) is turned backwards and retrospective (psychological, interpretive, hermeneutic) structuring is forward-looking. Two basic effects of this strange structure are the absence of suspense or foreshadowing (on the diegetic level) and semantic intensification or defamiliarization (on the level of signification).30 In terms of causality, this kind of structuring has two consequences. The backward movement of telling the story reveals that the narrative logic (i.e., 29

30

According to Andrew Sawyer, the reversal of temporality represents the Auschwitz’ “psychotically inversed world,” the Nazis’ inverted morality and the nostalgic wish to reverse time to make the past non-existent. Sawyer, Andrew, “‘Backward, Turn Backward’: Narratives of Reversed Time in Science Fiction”, in: Gary Westfahl / George Slusser / David Leiby (eds.), Worlds Enough and Time, Westport 2002, 49–62. Greg Harris also argues that “by progressing backwards, the narrative style in and of itself comments on the Nazis’ paradoxical version of ‘progress’ – that is, the revitalization of archaic myths in the name of national renewal.” Harris, Greg, “Men Giving Birth to New World Orders: Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow”, in: Studies in the Novel, 31, 1999, Nr. 4, 489. The possibility of “going back in time” is sometimes considered as the realization of the idea of retrogressive evolution. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Billy Pilgrim, who has become “unstuck in time” and randomly visits different parts of his life, watches war movies backwards to lead humankind back to the perfect time of Adam and Eve. Ralf Norrman considers Vonnegut’s protagonist’s behavior a contemporary reverberation of the archaic magical ritual, where reverse movement is sacred, and an expression of the human subliminal longing for symmetry “as the vehicle for a removal to a state before the beginning of, or a state after the end of, time.” Norrman, Ralf, Wholeness Restored. Love of Symmetry as a Shaping Force in the Writings of H. James, K. Vonnegut, S. Butler and R. Chandler, Frankfurt 1998, 14. Chatman, “Backwards”, 50.

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the connection between facts and events as perceived and narrated) is a fact of interpretation without any supporting natural order or convention, and leads to the loosening of apparently natural causal-logical connections. Amis’s experimental text demonstrates that time and causality are hypotheses, resulting from the human predisposition to conceive of events as causally linked to minimize indeterminacy. The narrative, in which retrospective and prospective structurings have changed places, lacks ready-made frames of interpretation; it demands a steady additional effort to understand its meaning. On the other hand, the phenomenon of causal closure characterizes the imaginary “natural world” of Amis’s novel: a series of closed conjunctions of events that preclude the opportunity to engender causal ties emerge as a result of the reversal of natural causality (letters re-appearing from the dustbin or fire, milk given back to the milkman, food regurgitated back to plates, babies disappearing in their mothers’ wombs, etc.). This world is moving towards an ever increasing degree of organization and order – distinct from the tendency toward entropy resulting from the law of irreversibility of time, according to the second law of thermodynamics, in the real world.31 If in the real world matter and energy change states in open-ended causal chains, the objects of the imaginary world of Time’s Arrow, on the contrary, tend to assume the final form, which closes off causality and precludes the further propagation of effects and their causes. Finally, narrative fiction employs a tension between natural and intentional causality when narration assumes the form of a causal loop, in which causes engender effects, and those effects reproduce the initial causes. According to Jonathan Culler, the narrative causal structure is a result of the tropological operation, when effect precedes and thus “produces” the cause by means of the tropological transfer of meaning in the course of narration and interpretation.32 Culler’s critics (for instance, John R. Searle) argue that Culler conflates the cause with its epistemic origins (eventually uncovered knowledge and interpretation), and that therefore his arguments do not deconstruct natural causality. Culler’s argumentation, however, as well as the Barthesian argument about the confusion of consecution and consequentiality, is to be understood as an attempt to reveal a conflict between perspectival, agentcentered, intentional causality and causal determinism of the natural world. 31

32

See Grishakova, Marina, The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction, Tartu 2006, 112–13; Głaz, Adam, “The Self in Time: Reversing the Irreversible in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow”, in: Journal of Literary Semantics, 35, 2006, 105–22. Culler, Jonathan, “Fabula and sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative: Some American Discussions”, in: Poetics Today, 1, 1980, Nr. 3, 27–37.

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Culler’s interpretation misses the point only because it ignores the causal loop. Prophecy, according to the laws of destiny, always engenders a causal connection (fulfillment of prophecy). The fate of Oedipus confirms the deterministic effect of the oracles not because the latter comes true, but because Oedipus’s attempt to escape causality leads him to fulfill the prophecy. The causal loop is characteristic of “catastrophe fiction.” It is incorporated, for instance, in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Dmitri Bykov’s Evacuator (2005). DeLillo’s novel starts with a description of the consequences of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The catastrophic event itself is represented implicitly and obliquely, yet it engenders several plot lines related to its impact on characters’ destinies. The novel has a structuring leitmotif, namely the performance of a falling trick in the New York streets. The artist who performs it falls and hangs from high buildings, bridges, and arcs on a thin security rope, as if reproducing the pose of the falling man on the photograph taken by Associated Press journalist Richard Drew on September 11, 2001. The editors of the volume Terror and the Arts describe DeLillo’s character’s falling act in Dominick Capra’s terms as “acting out, repeating the moment of terror.”33 The plot lines converge in the explicit description of the September 11 attacks from the point of view of a witness who was in a tower during the attack at the very end of the novel. Instead of forgetting and extinction (the “natural” movement towards oblivion and death, which the embedded stories about people who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease illustrate), an obsessive evocation and ever more detailed memorization of the initial episode occurs – despite or rather due to the characters’ helpless attempts to reduce the psychological impact of the attack, to recuperate and to forget: traumatic consequences obsessively reproduce their causes and evoke a hypermnesic effect. In Bykov’s fantastic-realist novel, the crisis on the earth reaches its culmination in a series of terrorist attacks in Russia and the U.S. As it turns out, the messengers of the other, perfect civilization – who live on Planet Earth and seem to be ordinary human beings – are able to rescue several groups of tellurians. Moreover, it turns out that the perfect civilization has reached its state of social harmony by exiling its corrupt members to the earth. However, certain descendants of the imperfect exiles demonstrate intellectual or moral development and deserve to be rescued. They land on the other, har33

Hyvärinen, Matti / Myszynski, Lisa, “Introduction: The Arts Investigating Terror”, in: Matti Hyvärinen / Lisa Myszynski (eds.), Terror and the Arts: Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of Violence from Dostoevsky to Abu Ghraib, New York et al. 2008, 3.

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monious planet, only to discover that the perfect civilization has fallen victim to less perfect yet more viable and militant invaders and is currently not much different from the earth. The building of civilization starts anew. Thus the causal loop closes: a perfect state is achieved through the expulsion of the imperfect members whose imperfection turns out to be an advantage, allowing them to invade the more perfect civilization and appropriate its achievements, whereas invasion triggers a new cycle of exfoliation of population and separation of the corrupt. In both De Lillo’s and Bykov’s novel, the causal loop serves re-enactment and amplification of the initial cause whose traumatic consequences are far-reaching. Thus, epistemic or interpretive causality introduces a meaningful order, distinctive from mere temporal sequence. ‘Unnatural’ forms of causality do not aim at the radical cancellation of time and natural causality (time as “defined in terms of the direction of causation”34), as Culler’s critics suspect. Rather, they aim at discovering another order of meaning behind natural causality and narrative sequence. This new, emergent intelligible order restructures natural causality and temporality. In William James’ words, the “present” is the metaphorical “saddle-back” between “no-more” and “yet-to-come” (two absences that are integrated into the present). As Husserl pointed out, this integration or time synthesis (the fusion of the actual, present phase of consciousness with retentions of the past and protentions of a coming phase) is a continuous and immanent process, not a deliberate cognitive act.35 The cognitive acts of retrospection and recollection may disrupt or transform time synthesis. Disturbances in the integration process produce deviating time patterns: stagnation; dilation of time; disengagement from the ‘objective’ time order; ‘falling back’; temporal stasis or the reversal of time, which are closely scrutinized by psychiatrists and cultivated by writers. These potentially ‘pathological’ types of temporality are rather usual in fiction.36 34 35

36

Tooley, Michael, Time, Tense and Causation, Oxford 2000, 31. “We must, therefore, distinguish the pre-empirical being of the lived experiences, their being prior to the reflective glance of attention directed toward them, and their being as phenomena. Through the attending directed glance of attention and comprehension, the lived experience acquires a new mode of being. It comes to be differentiated, ‘thrown into relief,’ and this act of differentiation is nothing other than the act of comprehension […].” Husserl, Edmund, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, Bloomington/London 1964, 178–79. See the chapter on the models of time in: Grishakova, The Models of Time, Space and Vision. Cf.: “To literary minds, good psychic health has seemed almost an affront to human dignity, as if mankind is too rich, too capricious, too absurd, too magnificently corrupt, to be confined to some psychiatric schema of sanity; human

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Early in the 20th century, psychologists (Ribot, Janet, Minkowski) discovered a whole range of peculiar pathological types of time ordering and demonstrated that time dissociation is accompanied by a radical alteration of the microstructure of experience. Pierre Janet has shown that the difficulty of constituting the present leads to time dissociation, which is often compensated for by confabulation that fills gaps in memory and constructs a new order of experience. For instance, Janet mentions a patient in a psychiatric clinic who refuses to acknowledge her mother’s death. The patient interprets death as being improbable since, she believes, she must have been grieved by her mother’s death; and since she is not grieved, she thinks it is unlikely that her mother has died. Interestingly enough, for Janet time dissociation and emancipation from the direct necessity of action trigger both artistic fabulation (as in Greek epics, whose authors neglected the rules of verisimilitude) and fabulation as a compensatory mechanism of a psychopathological disorder. For Janet, there is a difference in degree, not in kind, between these two phenomena.37 Their common root is difficulty in constituting the present. From this point of view, fictional narrative neither provides a concordance of the discordances nor resolves the aporias of time, as Ricoeur argued in his classic work Time and Narrative.38 Rather, it manifests irreparable splits within time order and represents imaginary take-off from the present. It is another component of the narrative sequence, namely causality, which restores the intelligible order. In his last book, Culture and Explosion (2009), Juri Lotman cites the Chestertonian dialogue of the anarchist and the police detective from G. K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) to prove that there are two types of unpredictability: the unpredictability of the train crash and the unpredictability of the train’s arrival in the station. From a romantic-anarchist perspective, the first is definitely more interesting as an event deviating from the ordinary ‘prosaic’ progression. From the ‘realist’ perspective of the police detective, there are innumerable invisible alternatives hiding under the surface of any recurrent progression. Taking into account all virtual obstacles that the train might have overcome and acci-

37 38

faculties overflow limits, overflow categories and hierarchies. Especially during the last two centuries, literature has justified mankind by exalting its disorder, its superabundance.” Albright, Daniel, “Literary and Psychological Models of the Self ”, in: Ulric Neisser / Robyn Fivush (eds.), The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative, Cambridge 1994, 20. Janet, Pierre, L’évolution de la mémoire et de la notion de temps, Paris 1928. Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1–3, transl. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago 1984–88.

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dents that might have prevented the train from reaching the station, a ‘norm’ is an intentional miracle rather than a predictable regularity. However, it becomes regularity only upon completion and the naturalization of the action – i.e., the perception of the event sequence as logical and inevitable. From this point of view, to understand the meaning of causal connections, the observer may adopt two perspectives: the perspective from the past on the future and the perspective from the future on the past.39 Either perspective changes the object of observation: Looking from the past into the future, we see the present as a complete collection of a series of equally probable possibilities. When we look into the past reality acquires the status of fact and we are inclined to see it as the only possible realisation. Unrealised possibilities are transformed into unrealisable possibilities. They acquire an ephemeral character. The retrospective view allows the historian to examine the past from two points of view: being located in the future in relation to the event described, he sees before himself a whole chain of completed actions; transporting himself mentally into the past and looking from the past into the future, he already knows the results of the process. However, it is as if these results had not yet been completed and they are presented to the reader as predictions. In the course of this process the element of chance disappears completely from the historical process. The historian may be compared with the theatrical spectator who watches a play for the second time: on the one hand, he knows how it will end and there is nothing unpredictable about it for him. The play, for him, takes place, as it were, in the past from which he extracts his knowledge of the matter. But, simultaneously, as a spectator who looks upon the scene, he finds himself once again in the present and experiences a feeling of uncertainty, an alleged “ignorance” of how the play will end. These mutual but also mutually opposing experiences merge, paradoxically, into a certain feeling of simultaneity.40

What seemed initially uncertain or meaningless in the “forward-looking” perspective becomes definite and meaningful in retrospective interpretation or, vice versa, seemingly meaningful connections lose their significance. In the “backward-looking” perspective, causal lines are perceived as manifes39

40

In Borges’ short story “The Garden of the Forking Paths”, the Chinese wiseman Ts’ui Pen writes a book in the form of a maze to overcome the limits of causality: “In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of the almost inextricable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.” Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths, London 2000, 51. As M.-L. Ryan observes, the problem with this narrative is that it cannot be written. See Ryan, Marie-Laure, “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative”, in: Poetics Today, 27, 2006, Nr. 4, 653. Lotman, Juri, Culture and Explosion, ed. Marina Grishakova, Berlin/New York 2009, 126.

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tations of an intelligible order that reorganizes and replaces the ‘natural’ order of experience. Thus, whereas temporal sequence enmeshed with natural causality establishes the relation of antecedence-subsequence and necessary implication, interpretive causality establishes an intelligible order: the meaning of time is to be defined in terms of causality. The forms of interpretive causality delineated above (fuzzy causality, zero-degree causality, retrograde or backward causality, causal closure and causal loop) restructure the ‘natural’ order of time and experience: interpretive causality serves as a function of an overarching hermeneutic operation that creates a new order of meaning. Interpretive causality undermines, relaxes, or supports the teleology of narrative sequence, the symbolic order of necessity or inertia, by rearranging the storyworld events in the light of new meanings, such as nostalgic attraction or obsessive fixation on the past, the vagueness and unpredictability of the future, the indirect significance of events, the irrationality of the world, and the impossibility of establishing a meaningful order, etc. The research has been supported by the Estonian Science Foundation (Grant 8874).

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Gogol, Nikolai, The Collected Tales, translated and annotated by R. Pevear and L. Volkhonsky, New York 1999. Grishakova, Marina, The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction, Tartu 2006. –, “Cognitive Science, Common Sense and Fiction”, in: Narrative, 17, 2009, Nr. 2, 188–97. Harris, Greg, “Men Giving Birth to New World Orders: Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow”, in: Studies in the Novel, 31, 1999, Nr. 4, 489–505. Herman, David, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln 2002. Hyvärinen, Matti / Lisa Myszynski, “Introduction: The Arts Investigating Terror”, in: Matti Hyvärinen / Lisa Myszynski (eds.), Terror and the Arts: Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of Violence from Dostoevsky to Abu Ghraib, New York et al. 2008, 1–22. Janet, Pierre, L’évolution de la mémoire et de la notion de temps, Paris 1928. Kafalenos, Emma, Narrative Causalities, Columbus 2006. Kern, Stephen, A Cultural History of Causality. Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. Lakoff, George / Johnson, Mark, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago 1980. Lotman, Juri, Culture and Explosion, ed. Marina Grishakova, Berlin/New York 2009. Luckmann, Thomas, “The Constitution of Human Life in Time”, in: John Bender / David E. Wellbery (eds.), Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, Stanford 1991, 151–66. Minkowski, Eugene, Le temps vécu: études phénoménologiques et psychopathologiques, Paris 1933. Norrman, Ralf, Wholeness Restored: Love of Symmetry as a Shaping Force in the Writings of H. James, K. Vonnegut, S. Butler and R. Chandler, Frankfurt 1998. Pier, John, “After this, therefore because of this”, in: John Pier/José Ángel Garcia Landa (eds.), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin, New York 2008, 109–140. Richardson, Brian, Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative, Newark 1997. Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1–3, transl. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago 1984–88. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London 2002. Ryan, Marie-Laure, “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative”, in: Poetics Today, 27, 2006, Nr. 4, 633–74. Sawyer, Andrew, “‘Backward, Turn Backward’: Narratives of Reversed Time in Science Fiction”, in: Gary Westfahl / George Slusser / David Leiby (eds.), Worlds Enough and Time, Westport 2002, 49–62. Schmid, Wolf, “Narrativity and Eventfulness”, in: Tom Kindt / Hans-Harald Müller (eds.), What Is Narratology?, Berlin/New York 2003, 17–34. Todorov, Tzvetan, Poétique. Paris 1973. –, Introduction to Poetics, Minneapolis 1981. Tooley, Michael, Time, Tense and Causation, Oxford 2000.

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Hollywood Goes Computer Game: Narrative Remediation in the Time-Loop Quests Groundhog Day and 12:01

1. Introduction In 1993, Hollywood production Groundhog Day and Fox TV movie 12:011 presented a similar but, until then, unique narrative plot for a full-length film. Their respective protagonists, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) and Barry Thomas (Jonathan Silverman) are caught in a time loop which forces them to relive the same 24 hours over and over again while everybody else around them is oblivious to the time cycle. Phil, a weatherman for a local TV station, has to live through and report on Groundhog Day, which he deeply detests, repetitively and cannot even manage to make Rita (Andie MacDowell), his producer, fall in love with him. Barry, who has an office job at UTREL Corporation, a company carrying out scientific experiments, has to repeatedly observe how Lisa (Helen Slater), a fellow employee, is shot and killed before his eyes by assassins hired by company boss Dr Thadius Moxley (Martin Landau). In the course of the narratives, both protagonists learn from their previous twenty-four hour encounters. This gives them the option to alter the outcome of that very same day in their next run. In the end, Phil and Barry not only change what is happening around them but also who they are, and so eventually make it to a ‘real’ tomorrow. In comparison to what US mainstream filmmaking had to offer at the beginning of the 1990s, the films’ plots display an experimental and game-like quality unusual for American TV and “a bit daring for a Hollywood feature”2 of that time. The fact that Groundhog Day and 12:01 are so alike, not only in their basic premise of an ever-repeating day but also in the consequences the 1

2

Groundhog Day, Director Harold Ramis, Columbia Pictures Corporation 1993; 12:01, Director Jack Sholder, Chanticleer Films/Fox West Pictures/New Line Television 1993. References to film scenes and dialogue passages are given in hours:minutes:seconds and refer to the DVD publications by DVD Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment (Groundhog Day) and DVD New Line Entertainment (12:01). Thompson, Kristin, Storytelling in New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique, Cambridge 1999, 131.

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scenario imposes on its main character, makes it viable to assume that the advent of time-loop narratives in movies was not just a coincidence but partially the result of a rising cultural phenomenon. Computer games became increasingly popular in the years prior to Groundhog Day and 12:01 and proved to be influential on the medium of film, mainly by the adaptation of successful computer games or by the adoption of computer game aesthetics, especially prominent in the use of computer graphic animation. With respect to visual refashioning of film by the introduction of computer-generated images, this process has been conceptualized as remediation. According to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, remediation is the representation of one medium in another medium. Whereas they restrict this process mainly to the media’s aesthetics, I will show here that remediation in time-loop quests can also take place on a narrative level. Thus, it will be argued that the introduction and increasing popularity of computer games had a stimulating effect on the introduction, understanding, and acceptance of the time-loop narrative, which, consequently, resembles the course and logic of adventure computer games such as Maniac Mansion (1987). At the same time, however, this type of story draws on the traditional literary strategy of the quest.3 This is where Groundhog Day and 12:01 are markedly different from previous time-loop narratives. Richard A. Lupoff ’s short story “12:01 P. M.” (1973), on which 12:01 is based, and Jonathan Heap’s short film adaptation “12:01 PM” (1990) present the time loop as an eternal prison from which the protagonist cannot escape. Hence, one could then refer to Groundhog Day and 12:01 as time-loop quests whereas the short story and short film represent time-loop prisons. I will show that the narratives of Groundhog Day and 12:01 employ a double strategy of narrative remediation, remediating retrogradely the narrative structure of the adventure computer game, and, furthermore, remediating the literary narrative strategy of the quest. Independent of the medium in which they are presented, it would appear that unconventional, unnatural narratives need to be rooted in established traditions of storytelling in order to be appreciated by a wider audience. In order to show this, I will first explain what time-loop narratives are, why they belong to the category of narratives of the unnatural and how they differ from forking-path narratives, with which they are often confused. After this crucial definition of the relevant text corpus, there will be a succinct survey 3

Quest stories describe the various stages of a hero’s journey. As this narrative strategy focuses on events and adventures, it is fundamental to narratives which have their emphasis on story. The characteristics and variations of quest narratives are discussed in more detail in section 5.

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of the development and increasing cultural significance of computer games and their influence on the film industry in general, particularly in the years before and after the production of Groundhog Day and 12:01. I will, then, outline the concept of remediation as developed by Bolter and Grusin. After that, the analysis of the two films will demonstrate the ways in which computer game elements are represented in the medium of film, stressing the parallels between both movies. Here, this essay will not only make use of basic observations about computer games but will also draw on computer game theories to elaborate its argument. In the final section, I will identify Groundhog Day and 12:01 as two alternatives of the classical quest story. The new aspect of Groundhog Day and 12:01 as time-loop narratives is the philosophy behind their unconventional use of story time. Both time-loop narratives and so-called “forking path films”4 – such as Przypadek (1987), Sliding Doors (1998) or Lola rennt (1998), which have their original inspiration in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941)5 – present the audience with the repetition of a particular period of time. According to Alber’s definition, this kind of scenario, “impossible by the known laws governing the physical world,”6 puts them both into the category of narratives of the unnatural. Nevertheless, they represent two distinctive types of unnatural narrative. The distinguishing characteristic of Groundhog Day and 12:01 as time-loop narratives is that they do not present parallel worlds centering on the question of ‘what if ’ but instead follow the linear logic of trial-and-error. Yet, as both sorts of narratives, time-loop and ‘forking-path’, prominently feature the repetition of a certain time-frame, they are quite often confused with each other and, as a result, treated as if they were following the same logic and dealing with the same issues and questions.7 This, however, is misleading. 4

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Bordwell, David, “Film Futures”, in: SubStance, 31.1 (Special Issue: The American Production of French Theory), 2002, 88–104, 91. For a discussion of “The Garden of Forking Paths” in narratological terms, cf. Ryan, Marie-Laure, “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative”, in: Poetics Today, 27, 2006, Nr. 4, 633–74, 653–5. Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1.1, 2009, 79–96, 79. Cf. Bordwell, “Film Futures”, 103; Hartmann, Bernd, Literatur, Film und das Computerspiel, Münster 2004, 28; Hildebrand, Claudia, “‘Here, we’ll start over again’ – Game over and Restart in Screwball Comedies mit dem Fokus auf Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours”, in: Rainer Leschke (ed.), Spielformen im Spielfilm: Zur Medienmorphologie des Kinos nach der Postmoderne, Bielefeld 2007, 21–40, 31; Thompson, “Storytelling in New Hollywood”, 378.

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‘Forking-path’ stories address first and foremost the issue of chance and fate when they offer alternative storylines after a narrative crossroad. In Przypadek, for example, the story of the protagonist Witek (Boguslaw Linda) is told three times with the outcome of each story depending on what happens to him when he tries to catch a train at the last minute (this is the narrative’s crossroad or “forking point,”8 the moment from which events depart in different directions). Thus, the forking point is constructed as the decisive moment in Witek’s life, setting him up for three alternative futures which are shown one after the other: he either becomes a communist politician, or he joins the opposition against the communist regime, or, as a third alternative, he is killed in an airplane crash while trying to leave the country for good. When Witek’s future unfolds for a second and third time, he, unlike the audience, is at no point aware of the development and outcome of his first and second fork respectively. Thus, he is not able to actively change anything about his life by making conscious decisions but is completely at the mercy of good (or bad) fortune.9 The situation is different for Phil in Groundhog Day and Barry in 12:01 in time-loop narratives. Their memories are not reset at the beginning of each turn, unlike everybody else’s, and so they are able to use “memorized information”10 from their previous runs through the day. The best examples for this are Barry’s timetable on which he records the events from earlier days and Phil’s enquiries into Nancy Taylor’s (Marita Geraghty) personal details, which he makes in order to be able to seduce her the following day (when she cannot know that Phil is in fact not a high school friend but out to make a sexual conquest). While some knowledge is easily acquired, both

8 9

10

Bordwell, “Film Futures”, 103. In this respect, Przypadek is a prototypical example for a forking-path narrative. In Sliding Doors and Lola rennt, this strict separation of the parallel worlds is not entirely maintained. Inexplicably, the main characters Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Lola (Franka Potente) are able to profit somewhat from the previous experience of their parallel self “thereby flouting any sense that parallel worlds are sealed off from one another” (Bordwell 2002: 99). At the end of Sliding Doors, Helen knows about a Monty Python reference that only her parallel self learned about in the course of the film. Lola, in the first version of Lola rennt, is told how to release her gun’s safety, knowledge that her parallel self in the second alternative will put to use. However, this capability to learn from the experiences of the parallel self is restricted to this one instance only in both stories and thus seems merely to take place on a selective intuitive subconscious level. Thus, it is not to be mistaken for the conscious and active learning process that Phil and Barry undergo. Thompson, “Storytelling in New Hollywood”, 141.

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protagonists also have to go through a series of trial-and-error experiments which take several days, or in Phil’s case presumably several weeks or even months, to complete. Accordingly, if time-loop narratives worked the same way as forking-path narratives – by having the protagonist start from scratch at each turn – Phil would never learn how to play the piano and Barry would still think that his initial suspect, Robert Denk (Nicolas Surovy), is responsible for the time bounce and Lisa’s murder. A forking point, in consequence, does not exist in time-loop narratives. At least it could not be referred to as a forking point because the narrative only develops one storyline, the one of the protagonist’s learning process and transformation. It is better, then, to think of the time-loop sequence’s beginning as the starting point of the protagonist’s learning process, resembling the starting point of a (computer) game rather than a crossroad.

2. The New Media in Hollywood Filmmaking The game-like quality of time-loop narratives is not surprising when one takes into account the rising popularity of computer games and the increasing appeal of such games to the movie industry. The change in the computer game industry can be well illustrated by looking at the development of adventure games, one of the main computer genres.11 In addition, adventure games are of further relevance here as the story is an integral part of the game “where the user participates in an unfolding story”12 rather than simply using the story as a pretext for “jump ’n run” or shooting action. Until the end of the 1980s, computer games like Classical Cave Adventure (1976) or the Zork trilogy (1980, 1981, 1982), which relied mainly on text as a communication code, dominated the computer game market. Computer games which used graphics to convey information to the user started to emerge as early as 1980 but only became increasingly popular with the advance of the 1980s (e.g. King’s Quest [1984] or Maniac Mansion [1987]). By the beginning of the 1990s, graphic adventures had replaced the then old-fashioned text adventure games.13 The shift towards graphic computer games was only logical as the introduction of new hardware allowed for more graphically demanding

11

12 13

Cf. Aarseth, Espen J., Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Baltimore 1997; Kocher, Mela, Folge dem Pixelkaninchen!: Ästhetik und Narrativität digitaler Spiele, Zürich 2007; Lischka, Konrad, Spielplatz Computer: Kultur, Geschichte und Ästhetik des Computerspiels, Hannover 2002. Tosca in: Hartmann, Computerspiel, 70. Aarseth, Cybertext, 101; Lischka, Spielplatz Computer, 78.

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games. This not only increased the pleasure of those already familiar with computer games but also opened up the market for new users.14 As a result, computer games gained more and more economic and cultural significance and started to have an impact on the Hollywood film industry as well.15 In the early 1990s, this led to, on the one hand, a number of computer game adaptations (e.g. Super Mario Bros. [1993], Street Fighter [1994], and Mortal Kombat [1995]) and, on the other hand, to several films which dealt explicitly with cyberspace such as The Lawnmower Man (1992), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and Virtuosity (1995). The substantial number of computergame related films from Hollywood is even more remarkable considering that, before 1990, computer games were simply not an issue in the US film market at all, neglecting the single exception of TRON in 1982. As one can deduce from the examples mentioned above, American movies were primarily interested in adopting computer game aesthetics, themes or characters, thereby inviting computer game users not only to play the game but also to watch the movie (this is especially true for the computer game adaptations, however with varying success).16 Not only did the rise of the computer game industry affect films with regard to content and style, in some instances it also affected the narrative structure of film.

3. (Retrograde) Remediation In their book Remediation (1999), Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that new media become culturally significant by refashioning older media. They call this process remediation, “the representation of one medium in another [medium].”17 They believe that “[a] medium in our culture can never 14 15

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Lischka, Spielplatz Computer, 62. Jahn-Sudmann, Andreas, “Spiel-Filme und das Postklassische/Postmoderne (Hollywood-)Kino: Zwei Paradigmen”, in: Rainer Leschke (ed.), Spielformen im Spielfilm: Zur Medienmorphologie des Kinos nach der Postmoderne, Bielefeld 2007, 155–178, 157. Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter were fairly successful at the box office grossing 100 million dollars and more world-wide (“Box office results Mortal Kombat”, n.n., http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=mortalkombat.htm, last accessed August 10, 2009; “Box office results Street Fighter”, n.n., http://boxoffice mojo.com/movies/?id=streetfighter.htm, last accessed August 10, 2009) while Super Mario Bros. was not only an artistic but also an economic failure (“Box office results Super Mario Bros.”, n.n., http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=super mariobros.htm, last accessed August 10, 2009). Bolter, Jay David / Grusin, Richard, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge 1999, 45.

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operate in isolation, because it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media.”18 Accordingly, since the effects of the relationship between old media and a new medium are mutual, the older media also react to the advent of a new medium. They call the latter practice “retrograde remediation.”19 As a result, “new technologies of representation proceed by reforming or remediating earlier ones, while earlier technologies are struggling to maintain their legitimacy by remediating newer ones.”20 Naturally, the theory of (retrograde) remediation also applies to digital media and film. There, we can also find the reciprocal effects of new and older medium: [J]ust as computer games seek to borrow the cachet of cinema by styling themselves as interactive film, so Hollywood cinema is trying to co-opt our culture’s fascination with new media by using digital graphics to refashion traditional, linear film.21

Bolter and Grusin see the potential for remediation of digital media in film mainly in the employment of computer graphics. They point to the use of digital graphics in animated and live-action Hollywood films of the 1990s. Terminator 2 (1991), in its display of morphing effects, is “a celebration of graphic technology.”22 The same is also certainly true for Jurassic Park (1993) in bringing computer animated life-like dinosaurs to the screen. Moreover, animated features, particularly the Disney films of the 1990s, are excellent examples of retrograde remediation: “In Beauty and the Beast (1991), for example, computer graphics imitate tracking shots or other film conventions that were difficult or impossible to animate with purely manual techniques.”23 A climax in the use of digital graphics and the influence of computer technology on the film industry was reached when Toy Story was released in 1995. Toy Story was extraordinary in that it represented the first film in which only computer-generated imagery was used. Despite the fact that the film Toy Story allows itself to be monopolized by digital images, it nevertheless remains “a linear film intended to be viewed in the traditional way. It borrows the graphic power of digital media but removes the promise (or threat) of interactivity.”24

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Ibid., 65. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 149.

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This assessment clearly points to the limits of film when retrogradely remediating digital media. The linear nature of film makes it unsuitable for interactivity. Even though there were a number of experiments with interactive cinema in the 1990s, for example by Glorianna Davenport or Grahame Weinbren, these attempts at an interactive cinema can be dismissed as “a much hyped hybrid that never did quite make it.”25 Accordingly, user impact has remained foreign to film as it still does not play a significant role in general and even less so in mainstream movies.

4. Characters as Users and Puppets The question arises if and how it is possible at all for films to simulate the experience of computer gaming and thus remediate them on a narrative level. As the viewer of a film cannot be but inactive, the attributes and capabilities of the computer game user as player are transferred to the protagonist in time-loop narratives. Due to the ostensible impossibility of interactivity in film, the human viewer of this game no longer functions as an agent losing the privilege of the computer game user who is able to observe and influence things at the same time.26 Instead, he is restricted to the role of passive observer, which is due to the conventions of the medium of film. The main character in this type of film, on the other hand, relives, or rather replays, the same scenario over and over again and starts to become a manipulator of his/her environment, which functions as a game world to him/her. Thus, whereas computer games turn users into characters,27 filmic narrative remediations of computer games turn characters into users. In this way, Phil and Barry are distinctively different from the ordinary protagonist in film (or literature). Those conventional characters are able to live, and thus play, only once, and what they do and how they behave is irreversible and fixed in time.28 In contrast, the main character, and nobody else, in a time-loop narrative is allowed to live, or rather play, the same day all over. What he does in the course of the day becomes undone when the next day, i.e. the next round, starts, which forces – or allows – him to start all over. This logic is shown noticeably in 12:01 at the end of day 3 when the events of the day rewind before 25

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Lunenfeld, Peter, “The Myths of Interactive Cinema”, in: Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln 2004, 377–90, 378. Hartmann, Computerspiel, 81. Ryan, Marie-Laure, “Will Digital Media Produce New Narratives?”, in: MarieLaure Ryan (ed.), Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln 2004, 337–60, 349. Frasca in: Hartmann, Computerspiel, 82.

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our eyes.29 Phil in Groundhog Day grasps the implications of this logic at the end of the third Groundhog Day when the locals from the bowling club tell him: “That would mean there’d be no consequences.”30 From this point on, he sees himself as the player of a game, testing what possibilities this particular game can offer him (driving on the railroad tracks, robbing a money transport, eating as much as he can, etc.). As players, Phil and Barry find themselves in a situation that is comparable to that of the player in an adventure game. Aarseth refers to this situation as intrigue and identifies three major elements: the intrigue itself, the intriguee, and the intrigant. For my discussion, only the first two are of main interest.31 The intrigue describes the character of the game: […] I propose intrigue, to suggest a secret plot in which the user is the innocent, but voluntary, target (victim is too strong a term), with an outcome that is not yet decided – or rather with several possible outcomes that depend on various factors, such as the cleverness and experience of the player.32

The secret plot of the intrigue in Groundhog Day and 12:01 is Phil and Barry being caught in a time loop. They endeavor to elude this intrigue, which results in diverse repercussions at the end of each day. In the case of Barry’s game, this means going home frustrated (day 1), going to prison (day 2), having sex with his sweetheart (day 3), being killed with a gun (day 4), being killed in a car crash (day 5), ending the time loop (day 6). A difference between the computer game intrigue and the time loop intrigue is that Phil and Barry do not start the game voluntarily. The result is that the time-loop film protagonist is in fact the victim, rather than the target of something he does not quite understand at the beginning.33 The user’s initial feeling of con29

30 31

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The first time the protagonist lives through the day, the test run of the game so to say, will be counted as day 1, the first repetition as day 2, etc. Ramis, Groundhog Day, 0:30:47. The intrigant is described by Aarseth as “the intrigue’s alternative to the narrative’s narrator”, the architect of the intrigue (Aarseth, Cybertext, 114). Since a time-loop film is not a real game but a conventional narrative imitating a computer game, the element of the intrigant is to be equalled with the cinematic narrator. Following this model, the narrators of Groundhog Day and 12:01 set the rules by which the time loop starts and by which it ends. However, this is not of further relevance in the discussion here. Aarseth, Cybertext, 112. The plot of Groundhog Day actually suggests that Phil is not even innocent but somehow deserves to be trapped in the time bounce. Unlike Barry, who has to shut down Moxley’s machine in order to stop the time bounce, Phil’s transformation from a cynical misanthropist to a generous philanthropist alone seems to bring an end to never-ending February 2. This is further supported by the fact

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fusion, then again, is not uncommon for adventure games as “ergodic intrigue is directed against the user, who must figure out for herself what is going on.”34 Newman confirms this when he notes that “the games do not tell the player how to conquer the game space, nor do they initially present any more than the barest of parameters for play.”35 Neither Phil nor Barry are initially told how the time warp comes about – Phil actually never finds out – and, even more importantly, how it is going to be stopped. What they realize quite soon, without ever being explicitly told, is that they are trapped within a 24-hour cycle that keeps repeating itself. In the course of the game, they learn that neither their own deaths nor staying up all night allow them to stop the game or get out (something Phil tries after he stops enjoying playing the game36 and before his numerous suicide attempts). The second element is the figure of the intriguee who is the target, or rather the victim as argued above, of the intrigue, that is Phil in Groundhog Day and Barry in 12:01. As previously asserted, Phil and Barry are not only the main characters but also the users in their games. This impression can easily be inferred from Aarseth’s observation regarding the adventure game intrigue: The target of the intrigue might be called the intriguee and is a parallel to the narratee, to the implied reader of the narratologists, as well as to the main character (or “puppet,” as Sloane calls it.) As I argue elsewhere, the distance between these three positions collapses in the adventure game: the user assumes the role of the main character and, therefore, will not come to see this person as an other, or as a person at all, but rather as a remote-controlled extension of herself.37

In a regular computer game, the user is the person sitting in front of the screen and the main character is the “remote-controlled extension” on that screen. There, the “puppet” loses all its newly gained abilities at the start of the next game whereas the user in front of the computer screen remembers the course of the game and the consequences of his/her decision. In Groundhog Day and 12:01 as computer game narrative, the distance between main character and user is virtually nonexistent as they cannot be divided in any way. They are both represented by the figures of Phil Connors and Barry Thomas respectively. This accounts for the observation that Phil has bodily

34 35 36 37

that in the original script, according to director Harold Ramis, an ex-lover of Phil’s casts a spell on him which causes Groundhog Day to incessantly repeat itself (cf. audio commentary on DVD). Aarseth, Cybertext, 113. Newman, James, Videogames, London 2004, 21. Ramis, Groundhog Day, 0:54:47. Aarseth, Cybertext, 113.

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memories despite physically starting from scratch every day. Phil has become aware of his body’s ability to memorize courses of motion without actually growing older. He comments: “I am an immortal.”38 Phil as the computer game puppet feels the consequences of staying up all night, or his hands remember how to throw cards into a hat or how to play the piano. This seems possible because the puppet is physically united with the user and is not just a ‘remote-controlled extension.’ The options denied to the protagonist as user in time-loop narratives in comparison to real adventure computer game users are all located outside the fictional world of the computer game and concern the missing game menu options. Game menu options are, for example, to start the game, to exit, to save, etc. One of the main differences between the user of the computer adventure game and Phil and Barry in their adventure game is the fact that they were never asked if they wanted to play the game at all. To complicate matters further, they not only have to find out what is going on in the game but they have to first realize that they are actually part of a game. However, after the first repetitive run through the day in which both Phil and Barry do not trust their new situation as players – Phil performs a test by breaking a pencil in half to see it restored in full the next morning – they soon start to engage in the game. Another significant difference between the time-loop game user and the actual computer game user is analogous to the missing ‘start the game’ option. Phil and Barry are not given the opportunity to exit the game at the end of each day, as is usually the case when a round is over: “The case has ended. Would you like to start your investigation over from scratch? (Y/N).”39 In the films, the exit-option is dropped. A third game menu option, game save, is also not available to Phil and Barry as users. The scenes in the bar and in the restaurant, in which the player Phil is going over and over the same passage until he knows what to do in order to succeed, might suggest that he, in fact, can save preliminary results. The editing of those trial-and-error scenes, restarting the scene just before Phil made the mistake in the previous run, might give the impression that Phil relies on saved states as he is easily able to reconstruct the same situation. However, this is not always true. Phil, for example, is not able to reconstruct that genuine but incidental romantic moment with Rita when they lie in the snow just after the snowball fight with the Punxsutawney kids. When he ac38

39

Ramis, Groundhog Day, 1:03:54. In addition, the original script assumed that Phil would have to live the Groundhog Day for 10,000 years which would more than underline his physical restart every day. Aarseth, Cybertext, 124.

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tively tries to recreate that moment, Phil’s behavior appears forced and Rita is obviously irritated by him.40 Phil’s inability to copy (part of) the events of previous days suggests that instead of restarting from a save point, Phil has to work through the whole day again. Whilst this is a task he can now adeptly execute, it does not necessarily lead him to previously accomplished results. In the course of playing the game, Phil and Barry in their role as puppet/ user do and experience what other users of computer games do and experience. They test different strategies, thereby reaching a different outcome to eventually win the game, they learn from previous mistakes to do better the next time, they experience frustration, and they try to stop playing. In the beginning, both main characters pursue a strategy that will not allow them to win the game, in other words, to break the time-bounce. Barry, at first, is so absorbed in saving Lisa and having her fall in love with him that he manages to sleep with her before he is able to stop the time warp. Phil indulges in seducing women, robbing banks, watching Jeopardy or throwing cards into a hat before he starts to become a better person, which proves to be his gamewinning strategy. A good example of the application of the trial-and-error method in order to improve game performance is Phil’s attempts to get Rita to fall in love and sleep with him. By spending time with Rita, picking up clues as to what she likes (“sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist,”41 drink to world peace) and dislikes (“white chocolate”42), he makes increasing progress in seducing her. The film illustrates his step-by-step, trial-and-error routine by restarting his seduction attempts immediately after he makes a mistake.43 So, when he laughs at the fact that she studied nineteenth-century French poetry in college, we get to see him react to this confession a second time, and then reciting French lyrics. This impresses Rita immensely and brings him closer to his goal of sleeping with her. Having successfully reached the next stage of his plan, he then tests various approaches to progress even further in his game. Barry, in his attempts to stop the time bounce, is conscious of the possibilities that are available to him as a player of a game. When he fails once again in winning the game and stopping the time bounce,

40

41 42 43

The film’s logic seems to be that romantic moments and love cannot be rationally planned or forced. Ramis, Groundhog Day, 0:44:39. Ramis, Groundhog Day, 0:46:30. Heidbrink, Henriette, “Wie der Sinn über die Runden kommt. Zu den Grenzen der Integration von Spielformen”, in: Rainer Leschke (ed.), Spielformen im Spielfilm: Zur Medienmorphologie des Kinos nach der Postmoderne, Bielefeld 2007, 117–53, 129.

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he simply points out what must be, by then, his new attitude towards life: “I’ll just keep coming back until I get it right.”44 When Phil and Barry’s attempts to end the time loop fail, they experience frustration at their inability to win the game. The feeling of frustration is commonly observed among computer game players so that, sometimes, “the controller has been thrown across the room in disgust a few times”45 before the game is won. As it happens, both protagonists vent their anger in a physical way, too, by smashing their alarm clocks. It is hardly surprising that the alarm clock functions as the object at which the players’ anger is directed. It signals another round of playing to them and, thus, is a reminder of the fact that they have not succeeded in winning and ending the game so far. Phil’s frustration reaches such an extent that he tries to end the game without having won; something a regular computer game user might also experience after the monotony of perpetual losing. Phil commits suicide in a variety of ways, but this only starts the next round of playing, so that he eventually abandons that strategy. Barry’s death during his investigations also leads to the immediate and automatic start of the next day. This mode of operation is in perfect harmony with Aarseth’s reflections about adventure games: Rather than signifying closure – the end – “cyberdeath” signifies a sort of reincarnation of the main character: death implies beginning. […] The main character is simply dead, erased and must begin again. […] The user […] learns from the mistakes and previous experiences and is able to play a different game.46

Since Barry and Phil are simultaneously user and main character, they are not only able to experience their own death – both protagonists look seriously distressed when they wake up the next day – they also remember and learn from it. However, as already pointed out, they are not able to exit the game prematurely, which is something that a regular user would be able to do.

5. The Computer Game as Quest Narrative remediation in time-loop films not only takes place in the form of retrograde remediation. The narrative strategy that drives the story of Groundhog Day and 12:01 remains ultimately traditional because both represent variations of the quest narrative. Quest narratives are “one of the most

44 45 46

Sholder, 12:01, 1:28:10. Newman, Videogames, 4. Aarseth, Espen J., “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory”, in: George P. Landow (ed.), Hyper-Text-Theory. Baltimore 1994, 51–86, 74.

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basic narrative strategies in all literature”47 and have been a part of Western literature ever since Homer’s Odyssey (c. 750 BC). They continued to be popular throughout literary history and are still common today, especially in fantasy literature.48 Quests, which can either be internal or external, describe a hero’s journey “across strange landscapes, encountering many adventures.”49 In internal quests, “the protagonist, whose goal is (broadly) selfknowledge, embarks upon an internal search.”50 A traditional example from English literature is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Plagued by the knowledge of sin, the protagonist Christian travels from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City in order to relieve himself of that burden and thus become a changed man. The external quester, by contrast, embarks on a search for something that is outside his own self, usually an object, a partner or a piece of knowledge.51 One of the oldest examples in literature is Appollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica (c. 300 BC). It tells the story of the voyage of Jason who travels to the mythical land of Colchis to capture the Golden Fleece. Groundhog Day is an example of an internal quest. Phil’s internal search takes place over the repetitive Groundhog Day and leads him to the insight of what matters in life and how to become a content human being. At the beginning of the film, Phil is preoccupied with starting a big career, claiming that “there is a major network interested in me.”52 His only fear is that “someday somebody is gonna see me interviewing a groundhog and think I don’t have a future.”53 This already broaches the issue of the transformation that Phil will undergo. Ironically, he will not get a future, which is a day after February 2, until he starts to care for the groundhog and the people of Punxsutawney. In the end, Phil’s goals are turned upside down: he chooses to live in Punxsutawney instead of pursuing the big network job.54 Another aspect of Phil’s transformation concerns the way he treats people. Before his transformation, Phil is an egocentric “jerk”55 who only interacts with people to 47

48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55

Schweitzer, Darrell, “Quests”, in: Gary Westfahl (ed.), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Volume 2: Themes L-Z), Westport 2005, 645–7, 645. Cf. Schweitzer, “Quests”, 645–6. Schweitzer, “Quests”, 645. Clute, John, “Quests”, in: John Clute / John Grant (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, London 1997, 796, 796. Clute, “Quests”, 796. Ramis, Groundhog Day, 0:02:34. Ibid., 0:04:40. Thompson, “Storytelling in New Hollywood”, 133. Ramis, Groundhog Day, 1:07:59.

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exploit them or to make fun of them. He uses Nancy for sex and also tries to seduce Rita. He mocks Larry’s (Chris Elliott) table manners, imitates Rita mimicking the groundhog and ridicules the bed-and-breakfast’s hostess (Angela Paton). Later on, he realizes that it is exactly this character trait that stands in the way of him and Rita, that is him and happiness, and ultimately between him and the next day: “I don’t deserve someone like you.”56 It is after this realization that he starts to change, becomes a blessing for the people around him (changing tires, mending relationships, saving lives), and this is why, at the end of his long day – a journey in time rather than in space –, he is able to feel good about himself, too: “No matter what happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I’m happy now.”57 When he reaches that state of bliss, he not only wins Rita’s love but he automatically breaks the time cycle, which ends his quest. The fact that the quest ends here is logical since Phil’s transformation is complete. As is typical for the internal quester, he “returns to the world as an integrated person,”58 made explicit by his wish to stay in Punxsutawney, where he has become a well-liked community member. 12:01, on the other hand, is an example of an external quest, yet also takes up elements of the internal quest.59 Barry’s noticeable change, from a shy and clumsy nobody – for example, company boss Moxley does not know who he is – to the self-confident and determined hero, is indicative of the internal quester. However, Barry’s transformation alone does not end his quest. In fact, he has become a different man by day 3, at the end of which he has managed to save Lisa’s life and has her fall in love with him. However, his day starts once again and the narrative continues. This makes it obvious that the goal of his quest is neither becoming a different person – as would be the case in the internal quest – nor is it winning the desired partner, one of the possible variations in the external quest. Instead, his goal is to find out what causes the time bounce and who is responsible for it so that he can stop it. Thus, his quest is not restricted to getting a certain piece of information; he also has to do something with it. Accordingly, Barry picks up clues to decipher what is going on, gives voice to suspicions, and, finally, must take the initiative to put an end to the time cycle. In contrast to Phil, who rather hits upon the solution of how to end the quest as a by-product of his introspec56 57 58 59

Ibid., 1:11:19. Ibid., 1:30:05. Clute, “Quests”, 796. Combining both elements is a common narrative strategy. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–5) is a prominent example.

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tive journey, Barry’s actions are much more goal-oriented because he is an external quester and pursues a tangible objective.

6. The double strategy of time-loop narratives Time-loop films, as the examples of Groundhog Day and 12:01 clearly show, are simultaneously a conventional and exceptional type of narrative. This is the result of the double strategy of narrative remediation employed in both films. At the beginning of the 1990s, the New Media not only made an impact on the level of visual aesthetics but also on the narrative level in timeloop films. These films present an original, unnatural narrative, bordering on the avant-garde, by imitating the structure and mode of operation of the (adventure) computer game. The division of the time-loop film’s plot into individual rounds in the course of which the protagonist improves his/her performance by enduring several stages of trial-and-error is the fundamental parallel to the structure of playing a computer game. In this filmic computer game, the main character takes on the role of the computer game player to overcome the medial differences between interactive computer game and linear film. In this way, Groundhog Day and 12:01 are examples of narrative retrograde remediation. Despite the unconventionality of the narrative’s plot, both films were targeted at a mainstream audience. Remediating the narrative strategy of the quest, a long-established tradition in classic oral and written literature, time-loop films ensure accessibility and comprehension. This suggests that unnatural narratives incorporate conventional modes of storytelling so that they can be decoded by readers and viewers. It seems that the unnatural is only appealing if it can be understood through mindsets shaped by human experience in life and/or literature. Otherwise, narratives of the unnatural in fact cease to be narratives and instead become abstract forms of literature.

7. Bibliography Aarseth, Espen J., “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory”, in: George P. Landow (ed.), Hyper-Text-Theory, Baltimore 1994, 51–86. –, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Baltimore 1997. Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96. Bolter, Jay David / Grusin, Richard, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge 1999. Bordwell, David, “Film Futures”, in: SubStance, 31 (Special Issue: The American Production of French Theory), 2002, Nr. 1, 88–104.

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“Box office results Mortal Kombat”, n.n., http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/ ?id=mortalkombat.htm (last accessed August 10, 2009). “Box office results Streetfighter”, n.n., http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=street fighter.htm (last accessed August 10, 2009). “Box office results Super Mario Bros.”, n.n., http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/ ?id=supermariobros.htm (last accessed August 10, 2009). Clute, John, “Quests”, in: John Clute / John Grant (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, London 1997, 796. Hartmann, Bernd, Literatur, Film und das Computerspiel, Münster 2004. Heap, Jonathan, 12:01 PM, Chanticleer Films, 1990. Heidbrink, Henriette, “Wie der Sinn über die Runden kommt. Zu den Grenzen der Integration von Spielformen”, in: Rainer Leschke (ed.), Spielformen im Spielfilm: Zur Medienmorphologie des Kinos nach der Postmoderne, Bielefeld 2007, 117–53. Hildebrand, Claudia, “‘Here, we’ll start over again’ – Game over and Restart in Screwball Comedies mit dem Fokus auf Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours”, in: Rainer Leschke (ed.), Spielformen im Spielfilm: Zur Medienmorphologie des Kinos nach der Postmoderne, Bielefeld 2007. Howitt, Peter, Sliding Doors, Intermedia Films/Mirage Enterprises/Miramax Films/ Paramount Pictures 1998. Jahn-Sudmann, Andreas, “Spiel-Filme und das Postklassische/Postmoderne (Hollywood) Kino: Zwei Paradigmen”, in: Rainer Leschke (ed.), Spielformen im Spielfilm: Zur Medienmorphologie des Kinos nach der Postmoderne, Bielefeld 2007. Kieslowsi, Krzysztof, Przypadek, P.P. Film Polski, 1987. Kocher, Mela, Folge dem Pixelkaninchen!: Ästhetik und Narrativität digitaler Spiele, Zürich 2007. Lischka, Konrad, Spielplatz Computer: Kultur, Geschichte und Ästhetik des Computerspiels, Hannover 2002. Lunenfeld, Peter, “The Myths of Interactive Cinema”, in: Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln 2004, 377–390. Lupoff, Richard A., “12:02 P. M.”, in: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 25, 1973, Nr. 12, 44–58. Newman, James, Videogames, London 2004. Ramis, Harold, Groundhog Day, Columbia Pictures Corporation 1993. Ryan, Laure, “Will Digital Media Produce New Narratives?”, in: Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln 2004, 337–60. Ryan, Marie-Laure, “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative”, in: Poetics Today, 27, 2006, Nr. 4, 633–674. Schweitzer, Darrell, “Quests”, in: Gary Westfahl (ed.), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Volume 2: Themes L-Z), Westport 2005, 645–7. Sholder, Jack, 12:01, Chanticleer Films/Fox West Pictures/New Line Television 1993. Thompson, Kristin, Storytelling in New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique, Cambridge 1999. Tykwer, Tom, Lola rennt, X-Filme Creative Pool/Westdeutscher Rundfunk/Arte 1998.

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Per Krogh Hansen (Kolding)

Backmasked Messages: On the Fabula Construction in Episodically Reversed Narratives

“Life must be understood backwards. But […] it must be lived forwards.” Søren Kierkegaard “A man […] who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.” Walter Benjamin “Time destroys everything.” Irréversible

1. Introduction This article focuses on what Seymour Chatman calls ‘sustained episodic reversal’ of narrative progression1 – that is, narratives in which the sequential, chronological order of the events is reversed and thereby ‘denaturalized’. To speak of ‘unnatural narratives’ and ‘unnatural narratology’ presupposes a common understanding of what is ‘natural.’ The article therefore opens with a thorough discussion of the project of ‘unnatural narratology,’ and it claims that if our experience of a given narrative as ‘natural’ is grounded on its confirmation of the conventions for the mode or genre the narrative belongs to, then the task for an ‘unnatural narratology’ is to investigate the exceptions, that is, cases where conventions are broken and perhaps reformulated. Sustained episodic reversals of event sequences belong to this field of interest insofar as one of the basic features of ‘natural narrative’ is that the sequence of clauses (or more generally, the sjuzhet or discourse) is typically matched to the sequence of the events being narrated (the fabula or story).2 The denaturalizing function and effect of the sustained reversal will be illustrated through an analysis of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000) and – 1 2

Chatman, Seymour, “Backwards”, in: Narrative, 17, 2009, Nr. 1, 31–55. Labov, William / Waletzky, Joshua, “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience”, in: June Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, Seattle 1967, 12–44.

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in more detail – Gaspar Noé’s film Irréversible (2002). I will show that the reversal has radical consequences for the spectator’s (re)construction of the narrative’s fabula, and that it engages the reader in a game of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

2. The (Un)naturalness of Narrative To label a new branch of narratology with the prefix ‘un-’ is risky business. First, the subject of interest is hereby defined by what it is not (that is: natural) rather than in positive terms. Second, the negation suggests a common and agreeable understanding of what it is that is being negated – what ‘the natural’ in relation to narrative is. On the Aarhus University-based homepage for ‘Unnatural Narratology’, the field of interest is defined in this way: In narrative theory there has been a wish to describe all narration – fictional and non-fictional, conversational and literary under the umbrella of one unified theory – most often taking its departure in conversational and oral storytelling. If we analyze all narratives according to the same model, however, we miss something in some of them. It is an important task for narrative theory to develop models that account for the specific properties of storyworlds, of experientiality, and of representations and narratives that resist description and understanding based on linguistic understandings of natural, oral communication. In the research group “Unnatural narratology” we analyze and theorize the aspects of fictional narratives that transcend the boundaries of traditional realism and violate the conventions of natural narratives. Though many of us are particularly interested in nonand anti-mimetic kinds of narrative such as postmodernism, we also point out the many unnatural, conventional, and unrealistic elements of realism. These include omniscience, paralepsis, a streamlined plot, a definitive closure, and what James Phelan refers to as redundant telling.3

According to the outline here, unnatural narratology is on the one hand concerned with narratives that deviate from a ‘natural’ (that is conventionally accepted and orally oriented) narrative form, and on the other with narratives of the unnatural – that is stories relating events and/or characters which violate our general understanding of the ‘natural’ or ‘the real’ and promote non- and antimimetic strategies. One might claim that the outset is slightly misrepresentative insofar as it can be questioned whether narrative theory “most often” takes its departure in conversational and oral storytelling. It is of course true of the cognitivist interest in ‘natural narratology’ formulated by Monika Fludernik and related 3

“Unnatural Narratology”, http://www.nordisk.au.dk/forskningscentre/nrl/ unnatural (last accessed December 22, 2009).

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theorists, and also of the large group of rhetoric-based narrative theorists following up on Wayne C. Booth’s influential work. Here the current definition of narrative is “the act of somebody telling somebody else on a particular occasion for some purpose that something happened.”4 Obviously this definition is grounded in an oral storytelling situation, and just as obviously it demonstrates problems when applied to a large group of other narrative modes. How does cinematic narrative fit into this definition? And how are we to understand the ‘occasion’ of a narrative novel? From this perspective most narratives will be inadequate and in that sense ‘unnatural’. But in general the outset for theorizing and studying narrative is less dependent on oral or conversational storytelling than on a more general understanding of verbal language. With reference to tradition, some have argued that narrative is first and foremost a mode of verbal presentation and involves the linguistic recounting and retelling of events rather than their enactment on e.g. stage or screen.5 Others have considered the study of narrative a subdivision of structuralism’s enterprise and have therefore based their conception on Saussurian structural linguistics insofar as it was claimed to serve as the model upon which a general theory of signs and communication (semiology) should be formulated.6 But oral and conversational storytelling was not given primacy. Quite to the contrary: considerable efforts have been made to deanthropomorphize the concept of the narrator in this tradition and to disclose defamiliarizing techniques and strategies as a ‘natural’ inventory of narrative communication. In my opinion, the interest that ‘unnatural narratology’ claims to have in “unnatural, unconventional, and unrealistic elements of realism” – including narrative techniques such as omniscience, paralepsis, redundant telling – do not really differ from those of ‘narratology proper’ insofar as all of these concepts are derived from the latter. If it shall make sense to operate with an ‘unnatural narratology’ we will therefore have to be more precise in our definition of the ‘unnatural’. Unnatural narratology is said to have an interest in “aspects of fictional narratives that transcend the boundaries of traditional realism” and in “the many unnatural, unconventional, and unrealistic elements of realism”, but we are given no definition of realism. The concept seems to be understood in both 4

5

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Phelan, James, Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration, Ithaca 2005, 217. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Ithaca 1980; Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse Revisited, Ithaca 1988. Todorov, Tzvetan, Grammaire du Décaméron, The Hague 1969; Barthes, Roland, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives”, in: Sontag, Susan (ed.), Roland Barthes: A Barthes Reader, London 1993, 251–95.

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its literary sense (a mode or genre governed by literary conventions – omniscience, narrative closure, etc.) and as designating what contemporary humanity considers ‘real’. Jan Alber, for example, looks at “impossible storyworlds,” and defines the term “unnatural” as “physically impossible scenarios and events, that is, impossible by the known laws governing the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones, that is, impossible by accepted principles of logic.”7 Alber develops five reading strategies “by means of which readers can use real-world and literary scripts to naturalize unnatural scenarios” (82). These are (1) reading the events as internal states; (2) considering them as foregrounding the theme of the narrative; (3) seeing them as allegories or as a matter of allegoresis; (4) blending preexisting frames such as letting animals talk and/or inanimate objects become alive; and (5) enriching the existing frames of understanding beyond real-world possibilities until they can include the phenomena we are confronted with. In this article, Alber’s interest is in postmodernist fiction, but his definition also covers science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, etc., since these genres fully confirm with the characteristics outlined above. However, these cases clearly differ from unnatural scenarios and events in postmodernist fiction. In the former case, impossibilities are perceived against the background of the genre and the individual work’s storyworld. Therefore, Alber discriminates between “(1) unnatural scenarios and events that have already been naturalized, i.e., turned ‘into a basic cognitive category,’ and (2) unnatural scenarios and events that have not yet been naturalized and still strike us as odd or strange.”8 Jonathan Culler gave narratology a useful tool to handle textual inconsistencies when he formulated the concept of ‘naturalization.’ Culler argues that “to naturalize a text is to bring it into relation with a type of discourse or model which is already, in some sense, natural and legible.”9 Since then, cognitively oriented approaches have done considerable efforts to describe these naturalizing strategies, most prominently of course in Monika Fludernik’s seminal work Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, where the concept is developed into that of ‘narrativization,’ describing how readers recuperate intractable texts as narrative, and Jan Alber’s study of ‘impossible storyworlds’ is

7

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Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96, 80. Alber refers to Doleˇzel, Lubomír, Heterocosmica. Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore/London 1998. See Alber’s contribution to this volume. Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics. Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, London 1975, 138.

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obviously moving in the same direction.10 But if important work has been done in describing how readers naturalize textual inconsistencies, less has been said regarding the denaturalizing function of these inconsistencies. For example, Jan Alber gives us convincing outlines of how readers naturalize and interpret ‘impossibilities’ and ‘unnatural’ elements deliberately created by authors and dramatists, but he does little to explain how these elements function in the first place. According to Alber, unnatural elements are brought out of their unnaturalness and translated into univocal and unambiguous meaning by the reader or interpreter. It might very well be that this is what we do as readers when we try to understand narratives, and the disclosure of our naturalizing strategies is an important task for narrative studies. However, what should be of interest to an unnatural narratology is the denaturalizing elements and strategies, their function in the narrative and what they do to the reader and the reading process, less than what the readers do with them.11 So far we have primarily been concerned with the story (fabula) aspect of an unnatural narratology. But as suggested above in the quotation from the webpage, the unnatural is not limited to storyworld disruptions, but also a matter we find in narration (i.e., the discourse or sjuzhet), and it will necessarily have to be compared to what we define as ‘natural’ in this respect. Gerald Prince defines natural narrative as a “narrative occurring spontaneously in ‘normal,’ everyday conversation. The term is supposed to distinguish nar10

11

For another important study of how readers naturalize textual inconsistencies, see Yacobi, Tamar, “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem”, in: Poetics Today, 2, 1981, Nr. 2, 113–26. See the contributions by Brian Richardson and Henrik Skov Nielsen in this volume. I have myself investigated film musicals from this perspective. See Hansen, Per Krogh, “Prolegomena: On Film Musicals and Narrative”, in: Per Krogh Hansen (ed.), Borderliners: Searching the Boundaries of Narrativity and Narratology/ Afsøgning af narrativitetens og narratologiens grænser, København 2009, 263–78. In the article the musical’s double integrative task is illustrated. The musical wants to tell a story with syntagmatic progression, but it also wants to break up the same progression in favour of a ‘lyrical’ mode of expression (the song and dance act most often is given a paradigmatic function by doubling an element of the storyline). Another task of the article is to overcome a paradox: the musical most often sets its story in a realistic framework, whereby the ability to break out in spontaneous dancing and singing to some extent seems an impossibility; but it is nonetheless effectuated. The article explores some of the genre’s integrative strategies: graduated integration, metaleptic integration, spectator integration and integration through conceptualization. I argue that the models suggested can be developed to conceptualize subgenre distinctions and historical changes within the framework of the genre.

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ratives produced without deliberation (‘naturally’) from narratives that have a ‘constructed’ character and appear in specific story-telling contexts.” This does not mean, though, that ‘natural narrative’ and/or oral narrative do not use the repertoire of “unnatural elements” pointed out in the quote above: “omniscience, paralepsis, a streamlined plot, a definitive closure, and […] redundant telling.” And we might also add ‘literary’ techniques such as free indirect discourse, historical presence, quoted interior monologue and constructed dialogue – all techniques that find local use in oral or natural narrative, and some of them are perhaps even derived from there.12 We might therefore want to talk about ‘unconventional’ instead of ‘unnatural’ uses of different narrative techniques insofar as it is impossible to define ‘natural’ techniques. An alternative to the insufficient rhetorical definition of narrative above could be: a narrative is a message which through representation tells of events involving participants.13 The keywords in this definition are ‘message’ (the narrative is an object of communication and carries information and/or meaning; as receivers we expect to learn or experience something through the narrative); ‘telling’ (a narrative is mediated as an act of narration with or without a [or several] narrator[s]); ‘representation’ (the telling/mediation respects the significance of the process in the sequential order of the events being narrated; the events are not only being talked-about, they are being re-presented); ‘of events’ (what is being told involves a change in states); and ‘involving participants’ (the involvement of human or humanlike protagonists). If we consider this definition as the basis for narrative in general, we might claim that when we experience a given narrative as ‘natural’, it is because it confirms the conventions for the mode or genre the narrative belongs to. In our reception, we are aware that we are facing a narrative, but our attention is directed toward the ‘events involving participants’ insofar as the level of mediation does not claim distinct interest. However, when the conventions are broken – e.g. when the representation of the events is disrupted, reordered or fragmented – we experience the narrative as ‘unnatural’ – at least 12

13

Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London/New York 1996, and Fludernik, Monika, An Introduction to Narratology, London/New York 2009, 111. For further examples of the unnatural within natural narratives, see Andrea Moll’s contribution and footnote 96 in Alber’s essay in this collection. My definition is close to Michael Toolan’s: “A narrative is a perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events, typically involving, as the experiencing agonist, humans or quasi-humans, or other sentient beings, from whose experience we humans can ‘learn’”. Toolan, Michael J., Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, London/New York 2001, 8.

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until the broken convention is repeated a sufficient number of times to form a new convention. On the level of narration the nowadays common use of first-person present-tense (simultaneous narration) is an obvious example: this type of narration was developed as an experimental strategy by authors such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, J. M. Coetzee, and others, and it had a denaturalizing function because of the incongruity of the narrative situation (from where does the narrator narrate?). However, today it is a pretty common narrational form. The basic, differentiating features are the same as before, but we do not to the same degree perceive them as unnatural. Instead simultaneous narration belongs to the ‘natural’ inventory for novelistic narration.14 If it has been the interest of (classical) narratology to provide us with general concepts and terminologies to describe the rules of ‘narrative proper,’ it should be the task of an unnatural narratology to investigate the exceptions, that is, cases where conventions are broken and perhaps reformulated. This will be the task in what follows with regard to the episodically reversal of narrative sequencing.

3. Reversed Narrative – Understanding Backward, Backward Understanding The significance of representation of the sequence of events in narrative has been acknowledged ever since Aristotle’s definition of plot (‘mythos’) as a whole consisting of a beginning, middle, and an ending. Labov and Waletzky argue that what differentiates a narrative mode of speech from others is that the sequence of clauses is matched to the sequence of the events being narrated. To both Aristotle and Labov/Waletzky the point was that change in the order of the narrated sequence will produce change in the interpretation of the assumed chronology of the narrated events. Thereby it is also implied that it is a crucial characteristic of narrative that the order of how events are told (discourse/sjuzhet) does not necessarily follow the order in which they happened (story/fabula). The spectrum for these modifications is wide and

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In Alber’s terminology, this would be an unnatural scenario that has gradually become naturalized. On simultaneous narration see Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology; Cohn, Dorrit, The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore/London 1999; Hansen, Per Krogh, “First Person, Present Tense. Authorial Presence and Unreliable Narration in Simultaneous Narration”, in: Elke D’hoker / Gunther Martens (eds.), Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel, Berlin/New York 2008, 317–38.

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stretches from the occasional use of pro- and analepsis to much more radical fragmentations of the narrative discourse. Of special interest here are ‘reverse’ or what Brian Richardson calls “antinomic” narratives,15 that is narratives told backwards: Either in the form of what Chatman labels a “sustained episodic reversal”, where the sequential order of the events is reversed, or as a “sustained continuous reversal,” by which he refers to reversals of the normal temporal progression of chronology at the level of the events.16 We can observe sustained episodic reversals in a wide variety of novels, short stories, and films,17 while the sustained continuous reversal is less frequently used.18 Episodic and continuous reversals clearly differ from one another, and one might claim that episodic ones can easily be “situated within the standard temporal concepts that inform almost all contemporary narrative the-

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Richardson, Brian, “Beyond Story and Discourse. Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”, in: Richardson, Brian (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 47–63. Chatman, “Backwards”. Chatman subdivides the latter category into two, depending on whether the continuous reversal is accompanied by an “antonymizing” gesture or not. This gesture refers to cases where the temporal reversal results in the actions being perceived as their semantic opposite – ‘swallowing’ becomes ‘spitting’; ‘buying’ becomes ‘selling’ etc. Seymour Chatman’s request for titles on the mailing list for the International Society for the Study of Narrative resulted in a great variety of examples – e.g., C. H. Sisson’s Christopher Homm (1965), E. J. Howard’s The Long View (1956), Lorrie Moore’s “How To Talk to Your Mother (notes)” (from Self-Help [1985]), A. B. Yehoshua’s Mr. Mani (1989), and J. G. Ballard’s “Time of Passage” (from The Overloaded Man (1967)). Harold Pinter’s play and movie Betrayal (1983) seems to be the first cinematic example, but in recent years we have seen several others, e.g. Irréversible by Gaspar Noé (2002), Memento by Christopher Nolan (2000), Chang-Dong Lee’s Bakha Satang (1991, English title: Peppermint Candy) and François Ozon’s 5x2 (2004). It should be noted that Chatman puts Memento (which I shall return to shortly) in another category called extended “flashbacked” reversal, probably due to the fact that it also (in the black-and-white sequences) moves forward. However, for me, Memento is a borderline-case that has to be placed on the overlap between these categories. Martin Amis’ novel Times Arrow (1991) and Ilse Aichinger’s short story “Spiegelgeschichte” (1952) are canonized examples. The former belongs to the category including the antonymizing strategy, while the latter’s reversal is purely temporal. We also find the continuous reversal strategy in Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World (1967). There are not many cinematic examples even though the play-back of sequences in reverse often is seen in comical genres and cartoons. Chatman comments on a Czech film by Oldrich Lipsky, Stastny Konec (1968, English title: Happy End).

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ory – that is the order of the syuzhet is simply the opposite of the order of the fabula”, as Brian Richardson puts it.19 To Richardson, the examples by Amis and Aichinger are more “complexly retroverted narratives” than the cases where the reversal of the narrative is based on a mere inversion of the sequential structure of the fabula, which I agree with to a certain extent. Especially in the case of Amis, the antonymizing reversal of causality is supplemented with an inversion of values and morality – most clearly expressed in the celebration of the miracle performed in Auschwitz where human beings are created rather than exterminated. But I am not as certain that continuously reversed examples present more “recalcitrant conundrums”, to use Richardson’s terminology, than the latter, or that they – as Chatman claims – are the “least challenging to read”20 of the two forms. It might be that the episodic reversals do not employ explicit anti-mimetic strategies (as those detected by Jan Alber in his survey of ‘impossible storyworlds’), but they force us not only to reconfigure the events of the story line, but also to consider patterns of meaning and progression that are not present if the story is told forward. The Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that life might be lived forward, but has to be understood backward. This is generally understood as expressing the fact that we can only understand the past against the foil of the circumstances of the present. We find this formulated in Kierkegaard’s first work, Af en endnu Levendes Papirer (1834, English title: From the Papers of One Still Living), when he says that “[…] for the one who doesn’t allow his life to burn out silently, but who tries to bring its separate statements back to themselves again, a moment […] will necessarily occur where Life is understood backwards through the Idea.”21 Kierkegaard can hardly be considered a narratologist, but the conception he is working with is nonetheless fairly close to the way we understand narrative ending and closure, whether it is formulated in the apocalyptic visions discussed by Frank Kermode,22 in Peter Brooks’ conception of how we are anticipating retro-

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Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse”, 49. Chatman, “Backwards”, 34. The Danish original reads as follows: “[…] for den, der ikke tillader sit Liv altfor meget at futte ud, men saavidt som muligt søger at føre dets enkelte Yttringer tilbage i sig selv igjen, maa der nødvendigvis indtræde et Øieblik, i hvilket […] Livet forstaaes baglænds gjennem Ideen.” Kierkegaard, Søren, Samlede værker, København 1962, vol. 1, 35f. Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, New York 1967.

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spection when engaging with narratives,23 or in Walter Benjamin’s idea of death being the condition upon which novelistic narrative is based. Benjamin writes: A man […] who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five. In other words, the statement that makes no sense for real life becomes indisputable for remembered life. The nature of the character in a novel cannot be presented any better than is done in this statement, which says that the “meaning” of his life is revealed only in his death. But the reader of a novel actually does look for human beings from whom he derives the “meaning of life.” Therefore he must, no matter what, know in advance that he will share their experience of death: if need be their figurative death – the end of the novel – but preferably their actual one. How do the characters make him understand that death is already waiting for them – a very definite death and at a very definite place? That is the question which feeds the reader’s consuming interest in the events of the novel.24

It seems as though reverse narratives were created with this knowledge in mind. By giving the spectator the resolution before the conflict they implement the mode of tragic irony: working our way backward through the story, we understand all events and actions with regard to their outcome, and we therefore possess a knowledge the characters do not have in the situation. On the other hand, we do not know where the characters come from or what they know. Our interest in the events is therefore less an interest in resolution than in cause, in ‘life’ rather than in ‘death,’ whether understood literally or figuratively as in Benjamin’s formulation. If, as Peter Brooks notes, “the motor of narrative is desire, totalizing, building ever-larger units of meaning, the ultimate determinants of meaning lie at the end, and narrative desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end.”25 I think that this is true; but how are we to understand an end placed at our entry to the narrative? Aristotle teaches us that an “end […] is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.”26 We might therefore expect that when the end of 23

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Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Cambridge, MA 1992. Benjamin, Walter, “Der Erzähler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows”, in: Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften, Frankfurt a.M. 1977 (1936), 385–410, 402–3. English translation: Benjamin, Walter, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”, http://www.slought.org/files/downloads/events/ SF_1331-Benjamin.pdf (last accessed November 7, 2007). Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 52. Aristotle, “Poetics”, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.html (last accessed November 7, 2007).

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the fabula is the beginning of the sjuzhet, what has to precede (fabula)/follow (sjuzhet) is more of explanatory relevance to us than of experiencing. Our narrative desire is here driven by our wish to know the reasons for the end, for the ‘moment’ or the ‘idea’ (to speak with Kierkegaard) that lets us understand the end as the event finalizing a series of events of which we, paradoxically speaking, only have knowledge with respect to what will come, not what has happened.

4. Erased Memory and Doubled Tragic Irony: Memento This specific interplay between narrative desire and reversed structure becomes clear once we take a closer look at Christopher Nolan’s Memento.27 The film presents us with a revenge story in which the protagonist Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) seeks revenge over the unknown intruders who raped and killed his wife sometime in the past. Due to the attack Leonard has lost his short-term memory, and instead he has developed a complicated system for externalizing his memory in notes, Polaroid photos, and tattooed messages as an attempt to keep track of where he is in his manhunt. He is being helped by a police-officer who calls himself ‘Teddy’ (Joe Pantoliano), but in the very first scene of the movie (being the final scene of the fabula) we witness Leonard shoot Teddy, because his collected evidence tells him that Teddy is the one he is after. During the course of the sjuzhet, however, the spectator is given reason to doubt Leonard’s conclusion, and our narrative desire is directed towards a clarification hereof.28 In the final scene (being among the first on the fabula level), Teddy informs Leonard on how he has misused his condition on several occasions by making him hunt down and/or kill people he, Teddy, wanted to get rid of, but who had nothing to do with Leonard’s case, and he questions Lenny’s story in general, claiming that 27 28

Nolan, Christopher, Memento, Summit Entertainment 2000. It is a common feature of other episodically reversed films (Irréversible, 5x2) that they unwind suspense rather than establish it, but Memento differs here. As David Bordwell has noticed, while arguing that the film’s public popularity is caused by its submission to the ‘Hollywood model’, this happens due to the fact that even though we are shown who Lenny kills as his wife’s murderer in the first scene, shortly after we are informed that it is uncertain whether he actually is the right guy, and the spectator’s interest is therefore driven by the urge to know who the actual killer is. In this sense the plot still moves forward, even though it is against the chronological order of the events – an effect supported by the fact that to Lenny it really does not make any difference whether the fabula moves in one or the other direction: due to his amnesia, he is more or less ‘blank’ in every sequence. Bordwell, David, The Way Hollywood Tells It, Berkeley 2006, 79–80.

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also his long-term memory is a false construction. Teddy’s version is partly supported through the visuals. Throughout the film, Lenny’s telling of what he can remember from his past is supported by flashback scenes. However, when Teddy starts to question Lenny’s interpretation of the past, we are given glimpses of different versions of these flashbacks, and the reliability of Lenny’s account is destabilized.29 Facing the fact that his quest for revenge might be misguided and that his condition might be even worse than he thinks, Lenny deliberately chooses to turn Teddy into the one he is after, knowing that later on, he will forget that this is a decision, not a fact. The last scene takes place in the same building as the first scene of the movie, making a loop in so far as the film opens with Lenny shooting Teddy – that is fulfilling the task he sets for himself at the end of the movie (which is the beginning of the fabula). The film’s structure can be visualized as follows:30 Scene A B/W Color

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Memento has gained increasing interest since its release as an independent film in 2000. Attention has been paid to the issue of unreliability in the narrational act31; also, the reversed sequencing has been discussed in relation

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For a detailed analysis of the aspect of narrational unreliability in Memento see Laass, Eva, Broken Taboos, Subjective Truths: Forms and Functions of Unreliable Narration in Contemporary American Cinema: A Contribution to Film Narratology, Trier 2008, 166–80. The top row illustrates the order of the scenes at the level of the sjuzhet (with alphabetical signs), while the second and the third rows capture the fabula through the numeric signs. In-between the reversed ordered scenes another string of events is intercut. Visualized in black-and-white, we here meet Leonard, the central protagonist, in a hotel room, talking to someone on the phone and telling the story of his former life as an insurance consultant. The black-and-white-scenes are not reversely ordered. At first glance, it is hard to place them within the overall chronology of the film, but gradually we learn that they are preceding the colored, reversed series. By the end of the movie, the two tracks are united through a color change (from B/W to color) in one scene (KK/18) whereby the spectator understands that the film is actually structured like a boomerang: forward in the blackand-white series; backward in the colored one. Ferenz, Volker, “Fight Clubs, American Psychos and Mementos: The Scope of Unreliable Narration in Film”, in: New Review of Film and Television Studies, 3, 2005, Nr. 2, 133–59; Laass, Broken Taboos, Subjective Truths.

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to trauma-theory,32 ‘cultural schizophrenia,’33 and theories of memory and mind.34 However, less has been said regarding the formal structure and perceptive effect of the reversed sequencing.35 The immediate function of the reverse narration is of course to illustrate Leonard’s condition by telling the main story backward in segments adjusted to the time-span of Leonard’s short-term memory.36 The reverse sequencing of the events places the spectator in a situation similar to Leonard’s, but not identical. To begin with, we share his condition of not knowing what has happened before and where we are, but in contrast to Lenny, we build up a memory through the course of events. But since it is a memory of what is going to happen to Lenny and not what has happened, we are – at least as firsttime viewers – pretty close to his condition. We do build up a sense of superiority over, and distance to, Lenny during the sjuzhet insofar as we have the final outcome of the events in mind (that is the killing of Teddy), but the final ‘twist’ where Teddy questions the motives for Lenny’s quest destabilizes our sense of superiority and places us in a situation where we know exactly as much about Lenny as he himself does: next to nothing. The important difference is that when Lenny leaves the film’s final scene to start his next hunt for his wife’s killer, he will forget what has happened. The spectator will not. One of the general effects of the reverse representation of events is tragic irony (insofar as the spectator knows more than the protagonist). But it is worth noting that Memento doubles the tragic irony in the final scene where Teddy questions Lenny’s story. This scene has the function of both an Aristotelian anagnorisis and a peripeteia.37 On the one hand, the hero recognizes what he really is (even though it is only briefly so in the case of Lenny, but permanently so for the spectator). On the other hand, the circumstances based upon which we have understood the story so far are reversed, and 32 33

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Little, William G., “Surviving Memento”, in: Narrative, 13, 2005, Nr. 1, 67–83. Goh, Robbie B. H., “Myths of Reversal: Backwards Narratives, Normative Schizophrenia and the Culture of Causal Agnosticism”, in: Social Semiotics, 18, 2008, 61–77. Parker, Jo Alyson, “Remembering the Future: Memento, the Reverse of Time’s Arrow, and the Defects of Memory”, in: KronoScope, 4, 2004, 239–57. David Bordwell is an exception to this rule. Please see note 28. Parker refers the neuroscientist Esther Sternberg for having called Memento “close to a perfect exploration of the neurobiology of memory.” See Parker, “Remembering the Future”, 242. Anagnorisis is here understood in the sense of ‘recognition’, that is, the protagonist’s sudden awareness of his own real status and of the fact of the events he has been partaking in, whereas peripeteia designates a reversal of circumstances, that is, the central turning point of the narrative.

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we are forced to restructure our understanding – this time forward. Teddy’s de(con)struction of Lenny’s story does not only have consequences for Lenny’s past, but also for the spectator’s past with Lenny – that is, the future events we have watched. Here is the key to the doubling of the tragic irony: we do not only know more than Lenny when we get to the end of the film; we additionally know more than we did ourselves minutes earlier, and see our former self caught in an ironic gap between believing and disbelieving. The double tragic-ironical effect where the reader firstly reckons that Lenny is on the wrong track and secondly that s/he her-/himself is, depends on the reverse sequencing of the events. If we briefly consider what the effect had been had the story been told chronologically, we see that only one of the tragic ironies is effectuated, just as it does not make sense to talk about peripeteia and anagnorisis. Teddy’s deconstruction of Lenny’s past would then serve as a setup for the movie instead of its turning point. Thus, it is evident that the reversal of the episodic progression of the story line in memento has several denaturalizing purposes. At the diegetic level, it serves as illustration of Lenny’s condition, ‘miming’ his amnesia and the trauma he is suffering from. But on another level, the reversal of the progression and the final omission of any narrative closure make the reader aware of his/her own narrativizing efforts and shortcomings.

5. Fatality and Contingency: Irréversible Compared to Memento, my second example, Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002), does not have an immediate diegetic motive for reversing the sequencing of the narrative, but the two films have other things in common. Like Memento, Irréversible is about revenge. The film follows a young couple, Alex (Monica Belluci) and Marcus (Vincent Cassel), and a former lover of Alex called Pierre (Albert Dupontel), through a day. Before the three of them go to a party, Alex finds out that she is pregnant but she does not tell Marcus about it. At the party, Marcus gets heavily inebriated by wine and drugs, while Pierre tries to talk him into sense. Alex leaves the party alone but gets raped and beaten up badly in a street tunnel by a person who has the nickname “The Tapeworm” (Jo Prestia). When Marcus finds out minutes later, he starts a frantic search for The Tapeworm to get revenge. Pierre tries to calm him down, but without success, and the two men end their manhunt in a gay S/M nightclub called Club Rectum. Here, they mistake somebody else for The Tapeworm and Marcus attacks this person. Marcus is pinned down, has his arm snapped and is nearly raped when Pierre knocks the attacker over and smashes his face with a fire extinguisher. Pierre is finally led away

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by the police, while Marcus is brought away in an ambulance. This event sequence is shown backwards, and hence we move from chaos, death, and destruction towards love, harmony, and maternity. This movement also guides the camerawork. In the first sequences, the camera is constantly in movement: spinning, tilting, swerving, often losing focus, etc. In the almost unbearable nine-minute rape scene, the camera ‘calms down’ and forces us to witness the assault directly. After that – as we enter the calmer sequences of the narrative – the camera is less ‘visible’ and follows standard rules for filming, except when shifting to a new sequence. Here, the camera ‘comes alive’ again. Irréversible opens with a sort of pro- or epilogue (depending on whether we are concerned with the sjuzhet or the fabula level) where two old men with no other part in the narrative talk to each other. The first one argues that for him, “time destroys everything.” He then tells the other how he regrets having had a sexual relationship with his daughter, which led to imprisonment and made him lose everything, including his daughter. The other man tells him to relax and claims that “there are no misdeeds, only deeds.” “We make a blunder”, he says, and continues “and afterwards they call it a major crime.” In the movie, these two approaches to time are put into dialogue: on the one hand, we are confronted with an understanding of time destroying everything – what once was pure and beautiful is now ugly and infected from the retrograde perspective. On the other hand, the film presents us with an understanding according to which the context defines a deed as good or bad. Where the first perspective claims the significance of causality, the second maintains a fundamental singularity for the events – but admits that context will overrule this singularity. Let us take a look at the story told in Irréversible. The most conspicuous aspect of the reconfigured fabula is that it primarily consists of a long series of coincidences and very little ‘strong’ causality. That Alex ends as a rape-victim is a matter of coincidence and unfortunate circumstances. So is the fact that Pierre and Marcus capture and kill the wrong guy in the end of the fabula, and that it is Pierre and not Marcus who ends up as the killer. There is – at first glance – no narrative or fatalistic motivation for these outcomes. We might perhaps go so far as to claim that Irréversible is nearly without narrativity if this term is understood to denote a sense-making causal-temporal relation of events. But this only counts as long as we consider the narrative with respect to the chronological order of the events. When experienced in the order it is told – that is in the reversed sequencing – the story changes. Due to the brutality and explicitness of Pierre’s killing of the man he takes for being the rapist and of the rape scene, we ascribe fatalism to a large part of otherwise

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random details in the fabula, and the reverse plot might be described as the display of all that later will be regretted: Marcus’ behavior at the party (the primary reason for Alex to leave alone); his expressed wish to practice anal sex with her (Alex is raped anally); his hand around her neck while they are sitting in the metro (she shows discomfort and his gesture reminds the spectator of the rape scene where The Tapeworm takes the same position); her pregnancy and his lack of enthusiasm when she informs him of the possibility. That ‘time destroys everything’ is here made very clear since we as spectators understand every detail against the background of the future events, every little deed as a misdeed. But due to the fact that the ‘hints’ of any sense of inscribed fatality are very cautious, nearly invisible, we are at the same time aware that we enter a game with the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Here, the ‘wisdom’ of the second old man is illustrated: “We make a blunder, and afterwards they call it a major crime.” It is history that judges whether what we do is good or bad, and Benjamin’s words of a “man […] who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five”, suits this experience well.38 This is, though, not the only way of understanding the movie. In the final sequence of the film (being the beginning of the fabula), we are given other possibilities for closing the narrative structure. When Marcus and Alex wake up, Marcus shakes his right arm and says that he cannot feel it, and Alex tells him that she has had a strange dream about walking into a red tunnel which split into two – and she (and Marcus indirectly) is thereby anticipating the future events. Marcus’ arm will be snapped later and Alex will most certainly enter a red tunnel which actually splits into two. At first glance, we interpret this as a confirmation of the strategy we have been following in the preceding section insofar as fate and predictions now seem to be an active rule of logic for the fabula’s structure. Seen from this perspective, the idea that ‘time destroys everything’ is a more uncompromising statement than we first suspected since it refers not only to memory destroying the past, but more generally to time as a process which will lead to destruction. This understanding is enforced by the overall metaphor for the film, namely digestion, but ‘played’ in reverse. The two old men we meet in the 38

In an article, where the film is interpreted through Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘time-image’ and Leo Bersani’s theory of the homoerotic ‘jouissance’ conceived as ‘self-shattering’, Eugenie Brinkema argues convincingly that the reversal can be approached through the classic psychoanalytic logic of trauma formulated in the concept of Nachträglichkeit: “the deferred action of trauma by which an initial mental wound is activated after the event”. Brinkema, Eugenie, “Rape and the Rectum: Bersani, Deleuze, Noé”, in: Camera Obscura, 20, 2005, Nr. 58, 42.

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Figure 1: Stills from the final sequence of Irréversible. The two final frames illustrate the stroboeffect between black and white and ending with the sign saying ‘time destroys everything’.

beginning of the film are what one may refer to as ‘human dirt’ – inebriated, without any belongings (one of them is even naked), any relatives or family left, even without any values or morality. It is therefore not surprising that we find them just outside the Club Rectum. Marcel and Pierre enter Rectum to find The Tapeworm and drive him out of the bowels, but they fail and are themselves carried out as human dirt. And the rape-scene also carries traces of the digestion metaphor: Alex enters the red pedestrian tunnel and runs into The Tapeworm who, after having forced himself into her anus, beats her up and leaves her shattered. Digestion destroys everything and leaves only waste. And if the digestive system is invaded by parasites (like a tapeworm), the otherwise natural process is being disturbed, infected and perhaps even sped up. But no matter what, we will eventually end as human waste like the two old men, the film seems to say, and this might also explain the disturbed camerawork at the beginning of the movie, which most of all gives the impression of a fly observing the events – and as we know, flies are attracted by dirt, like we as viewers are attracted by the film.

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But this fatalism is not the only possible outcome of the film’s final sequence since it also contains signals and cues which counter this understanding. The sequence opens with a shot of an entity that alludes to the red tunnel, before the film cuts to the sleeping couple (frame 1 in figure 1). The tunnel-picture does not actually have a ‘natural’ place in the sjuzhet, but when Alex mentions her dream about the tunnel we are encouraged to naturalize it by considering it a glimpse of introspection into Alex’ mind.39 A consequence of this is that we have to debate whether the whole preceding part of the movie should be considered a part of this dream, and whether Marcus’ numb arm suggests that they have shared a dream in some mysterious way. If so, this sequence is not to be considered as the first in the fabula but actually placed correctly insofar as it embeds the former sequences. Furthermore, this assumption gives us a frame for understanding the final scene of the movie: the camera leaves Alex on the couch through a tilt and returns to her, lying on the bed, dressed. Here it leaves her again, but finds her on a lawn with playing children around her, and reading An Experiment with Time by John William Dunne. We can hear Beethoven’s 7th Symphony in the background, and the camera spins around faster and faster, until it blacks out into a strobe effect and a roaring sound, while a rapidly spinning image of a galaxy can be dimly perceived. The final title card reads: LE TEMPS DETRUIT TOUT (Time Destroys Everything). One can understand this scene as showing Alex’ ‘real’ future: It might be that she chose the wrong direction in the tunnel in her dream, but the other one is still open in life. Here the tunnel is not a metaphor for the digestive system, but for the birth canal, and our interpretation is supported by the affinities between the coloring of the pedestrian tunnel and the hallway leading to the bathroom in the apartment where Alex finds out about her pregnancy (see figure 2), and by the likeness between the ‘Passage’ sign in the tunnel, the sign for the Club Rectum, and the writing on the maternity test she takes (figure 3). The film points at other paths, at other stories, than those we have been following. If, on the other hand, we understand the glimpse we see of the tunnel before the awakening as introspection, the final scene with the pregnant Alex in the park might also be a matter of introspection. That is, Alex here imagines her future. But since fate is set and dreams tell us where we are going (as the book Alex reads says), this will never be, and instead she will end in time’s destructive digestive system. This understanding is cued by the return of the 39

This is an example of Alber’s reading strategy 1 (“reading events as internal states”). Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 84–5.

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Figure 2: The affinities between the ‘two tunnels’ of Irréversible, the tunnel where Alex is raped and the hallway to the bathroom where she takes her maternity test, leads the spectator to consider parallel storylines.

Figure 3: The visual similarity of red signs. The similarity between the ‘Passage’ sign in the tunnel, the sign for the Club Rectum, and the writing on the maternity test Alex takes supports the possibility of juxtaposed storylines.

stroboscope light from the beginning of the film and emphasized by a sign repeating what the pedophile has said: “Time destroys everything.” It is of course an important quality of the film that it leaves both possibilities open, and even though it ends by recalling the sad wisdom of the pedophile, it does so against a background of vitality, innocence, and fertility. On the level of the fabula, it might be that the story develops towards the end of all things. But on the level of the sjuzhet, the movement is the exact opposite. Here we are going from old and depraved men to maternity and innocence; from night to day; from culture to nature; from depraved sexuality to maternal love and protection; from violence and destruction to care and humanity.40 But even though we feel the vital power of these movements in the movie, they are all placed within a frame of loss and destruction. Loss and

40

Allan Cameron suggests that the film can be seen as “a reversed apocalyptic narrative: it commences with the book of Revelation (the hellish world of Rectum) and ends with Genesis (the conception of Alex’s child as well as the scene in which Marcus and Alex awaken together, a naked and innocent Adam and Eve).” Cameron, Allan, “Contingency, Order, and the Modular Narrative: 21 Grams and Irrèversible”, in: Velvet Light Trap: A Critical Journal of Film & Television, 58, 2006, 70.

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destruction were there first even if they are only effectuated in the end, which in a literal sense is always already there in these cases. Life is lived forwards but understood backwards, as Kierkegaard points out.

6. Conclusion: Backward? Then again, one of the great values of the reverse narratives I have examined in this paper is that they show us that it is not necessarily as simple as that. Kierkegaard himself came to a similar conclusion some ten years after his book on Hans Christian Andersen from where our initial quote was taken. In his diary from 1843, he states the following: It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived forwards. This sentence, the more one ponders it, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because I at no moment can find complete quiet to take the position: backward.41

Even though Kierkegaard talks about real life rather than fiction, his figure of thought illustrates very well the paradoxes reverse narratives raise in the films we have examined here. Both films reject an overall idea through which we can come to a full understanding of what we have seen, and they implement at the same time a subtle form of tragic irony, where we have knowledge of what is to come for the characters in the action, but not where it comes from. Reverse narratives invite the spectator into a game of interpretive opening and rejection, in which we are deliberately given the position ‘backward’ from the first frame, but really cannot use it for anything – perhaps because these narratives are given to us in reversed form and therefore will have to be understood forward. They situate the spectator in a situation where consciousness of one’s own presence in the narrative structuring is primary, and they produce, together with the spectator, a ‘virtual fabula’. In that sense reversed narratives of the type of Memento and Irréversible are not as far from those of Martin Amis’ or Ilse Aichinger’s as first suspected, since the reader is cued to reverse the causal-structure also and understand the initial event as the final – the reason as the resolution. 41

Kierkegaard, Søren, Søren Kierkegaards skrifter, København 1997, vol. 18, 194. The Danish original reads as follows: “Det er ganske sandt, hvad Philosophien siger, at Livet maa forstaaes baglænds. Men derover glemmer man den anden Sætning, at det maa leves forlænds. Hvilken Sætning, jo meer den gjennemtænkes, netop ender med, at Livet i Timeligheden aldrig ret bliver forstaaeligt, netop fordi jeg intet Øieblik kan faae fuldelig Ro til at indtage Stillingen: baglænds.”

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This brings us back to our initial discussion of whether the sustained episodic reversal of narrative is, as Chatman and Richardson suggested, less complicated or interesting than the continuous reversal of e.g. Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow. There shall be no doubt that Amis’ retroverted description of the life of the Nazi doctor Odilo Unverdorben (who changes his name into Hamilton de Souza, John Young, and finally into Tod Friendly) is a great piece of artistry, and Chatman’s detailed analysis of the narration most certainly proves its complexity and cognitive challenge for the reader. But we will also have to admit that all of Amis’ denaturalizing efforts have a pretty straightforward purpose on a thematic level: up is down, good is bad, wrong is right, etc., and we might perhaps go as far as claiming that what Amis has to tell us is captured in the publisher’s blurb on the back cover of the paperback edition: “Tod’s life races backwards toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense.”42 Amis himself has pointed out this thematic motivation in an interview when he said that that the Holocaust seemed “the only story that would gain meaning backwards.”43 Whether one appreciates this kind of monothematic and instructive narratives over polythematic and negotiable narratives we have been examining here is a matter of taste, and I do not want to enter in a critical discussion of ‘whose is the better one’. But I think Chatman and Richardson disregard important qualities of the episodically reversed structure when they consider the continuous reversal as more “recalcitrant conundrums” (Richardson) than the former, or that they are the “least challenging to read” (Chatman). From the perspective I have suggested in this article, they are perhaps the most challenging to read, that is if we understand reading as a matter of sense-making. This difference in complexity can be illustrated if we focus on the endings of the three examples compared here. It is conspicuous that all three use the end of the sjuzhet (that is the beginning of the fabula) to promote an ‘extra-reversing’ effect. Memento reveals to us that Lenny’s project is “empty” (this was what I referred to earlier as the ‘double tragic irony’). In Irréversible we are given the opportunity to revise what we understood as an episodic reversion and frame it as a dream-representation. In both cases the effect is that we are mentally sent back again through the narrative we have just processed. Time’s Arrow also sends us backward again by the end of the narrative, but more literally insofar as the narrator suddenly experiences time moving forward again, when he observes an arrow move in the ‘wrong’ direction – that is with the arrowhead first. Tod Friendly is seemingly caught in 42 43

Blurb quoted Chatman, “Backwards”, 49. Ibid., 52.

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a limbo, being sent back and forward in life after death, without being given the possibility to rest. Thus it is evident that the ending of Time’s Arrow does not invite the reader to the same interpretive reorientation regarding what has been told as the other examples discussed here do. We might even claim that the unnatural order and causality in the novel do not demand an active naturalization by the reader. This naturalization is performed by the text itself due to the thematic motivation of the reversal.44 One might of course also claim that this has less to do with the ‘episodic vs. continuous reversal’-discussion than with some specific features of the examples in focus here, but I think Chatman is right in concluding that a “strong thematic motivation is required to justify its [the continuous reversal] use”, if the result shall not be mere gags and slapstick-like scenarios. The same demand cannot be said to count for episodic reversals, insofar as they establish a more open structure. We might therefore say that what really distinguishes the continuous from the episodically reversed narration is that the latter leaves the act of transforming the events into a narrative to the spectator insofar as s/he brings the necessary experience with him or her to create this story. This can very well be considered as a matter of ‘naturalizing’ the ‘unnatural’ insofar as we bring the ‘unnatural’ narrative ordering to rest by producing an interpretative and narrativizing frame for it. But insofar as what seems to be the thematic motivation for the episodic reversal, at least in the examples discussed here,45 is a highlighting of contingency’s dominance over faith and of humanity’s fundamental ability to ascribe progression and causal patterns to history and surroundings to make meaning in what seems meaningless, order in what is chaos, we might just as well conceive it as a matter of denaturalizing (making sense of) what is natural (reality as meaningless). To quote Kierkegaard again: in “the temporal existence [life] never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because I at no moment can find complete quiet to take the position: backward.”

44

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Chatman’s analysis shows (albeit only indirectly) that the real conundrum of Time’s Arrow is the narrator’s split personality, more than it is the reversal of events and order. See also Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, 85. It should be added that both 5x2 and to some extent Peppermint Candy have comparable themes.

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7. Bibliography Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96. Aristotle, “Poetics”, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.html (last accessed November 7, 2007). Barthes, Roland, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives [1966]”, in: Susan Sontag (ed.), Roland Barthes: A Barthes Reader, London 1993, 251–95. Benjamin, Walter, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”, http://www.slought.org/files/downloads/events/SF_1331-Benjamin.pdf (last accessed November 7, 2007). –, “Der Erzähler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows [1936]”, Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften, Frankfurt a.M. 1977, 385–410. Bordwell, David, The Way Hollywood Tells It, Berkeley 2006. Brinkema, Eugenie, “Rape and the Rectum: Bersani, Deleuze, Noé”, in: Camera Obscura, 20, 2005, Nr. 58, 33–57. Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Cambridge, MA, 1992. Cameron, Allan, “Contingency, Order, and the Modular Narrative: 21 Grams and Irreversible”, in: Velvet Light Trap: A Critical Journal of Film & Television, 58, 2006, 65–78. Chatman, Seymour, “Backwards”, in: Narrative, 17, 2009, Nr. 1, 31–55. Cohn, Dorrit, The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore/London 1999. Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, London 1975. Doleˇzel, Lubomír, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore/London 1998. –, “Possible Worlds of Fiction and History”, in: New Literary History, 29, 1998, Nr. 4, 785–809. Ferenz, Volker, “Fight Clubs, American Psychos and Mementos: The Scope of Unreliable Narration in Film”, in: New Review of Film and Television Studies, 3, 2005, Nr. 2, 133–59. Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London/New York 1996. –, An Introduction to Narratology, London/New York 2009. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Ithaca 1980. –, Narrative Discourse Revisited, Ithaca 1988. Goh, Robbie B. H., “Myths of Reversal: Backwards Narratives, Normative Schizophrenia and the Culture of Causal Agnosticism”, in: Social Semiotics, 18, 2008, 61–77. Hansen, Per Krogh, “First Person, Present Tense. Authorial Presence and Unreliable Narration in Simultaneous Narration”, in: Elke D’hoker / Gunther Martens (eds.), Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel, Berlin/New York 2008, 317–38. –, “Prolegomena: On Film Musicals and Narrative”, in: Per Krogh Hansen (ed.), Borderliners: Searching the Boundaries of Narrativity and Narratology/ Afsøgning af narrativitetens og narratologiens grænser, København 2009, 263–78. Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, New York 1967. Kierkegaard, Søren, Samlede værker, København 1962. –, Søren Kierkegaards skrifter, København 1997.

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Labov, William / Waletzky, Joshua “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience”, in: June Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, Seattle 1967, 12–44. Little, William G., “Surviving Memento”, in: Narrative, 13, 2005, Nr. 1, 67–83. Laass, Eva, Broken Taboos, Subjective Truths: Forms and Functions of Unreliable Narration in Contemporary American Cinema. A Contribution to Film Narratology, Trier 2008. Noé, Gaspar, Irréversible, Lions Gate Films 2002. Nolan, Christopher, Memento, Summit Entertainment 2000. Parker, Jo Alyson, “Remembering the Future: Memento, the Reverse of Time’s Arrow, and the Defects of Memory”, in: KronoScope, 4, 2004, 239–57. Phelan, James, Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration, Ithaca 2005. Richardson, Brian, “Beyond Story and Discourse. Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure and Frames, Columbus 2002, 47–63. Todorov, Tzvetan, Grammaire du Décaméron, The Hague 1969. Toolan, Michael J., Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, London/New York 2001. “Unnatural Narratology”, http://www.nordisk.au.dk/forskningscentre/nrl/unnatural (last accessed December 22, 2009). Yacobi, Tamar, “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem”, in: Poetics Today, 2, 1981, Nr. 2, 113–26.

IV. Unnatural Worlds and Events

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Unnatural Narrative and Metalepsis: Grant Morrison’s Animal Man1

1. Introduction In one of the most well-known examples of what narrative theory terms metalepsis, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), a novelist is tortured by characters from his own books. This incident may startle readers, yet they will know that the fate of the hapless writer cannot befall them. In the real world people are safe from incursions by fictional beings, just as they are unable to trespass into the land of any novel, film, play, etc. In other words, metalepsis, the transgression of diegetic levels so forcefully demonstrated by O’Brien, is possible only in the world of imagination. As such, it might be considered a feature of what Jan Alber and others have dubbed “unnatural narrative,” i.e., of narrative that disregards real-life parameters and experientiality, of narrative that contains “physically [or logically] impossible scenarios and events.”2 As a way of qualifying metalepsis as an unnatural phenomenon, I propose to examine the degree to which it can be made sense of by recipients or, in Jonathan Culler’s terms, naturalized, given “a place in the world which our culture defines.”3 There are obviously many things in narratives that do not abide by the laws which we assume to govern our world, as any work of speculative fiction can testify to. However, the term unnatural is only applicable to those elements that pose trouble to the framework with which we approach narrative, that resist being incorporated into the “modes of order which culture makes available.”4 1

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I wish to thank Jan Alber, Katharina Bantleon, Johannes Fehrle, Monika Fludernik, Michael Fuchs, Rüdiger Heinze, Karin Kukkonen, Klaus Rieser, and Werner Wolf for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 80. Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, Ithaca 1975, 137. Note that other critics have developed ways of identifying and describing unnatural phenomena that do not rely upon the act of naturalizing or making sense of them. See Richardson, Brian, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006, as well as Richardson’s and Henrik Skov Nielsen’s respective contributions to this volume. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 137.

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In this paper I explore the unnatural quality of metalepsis and the ways in which it may or may not be naturalizable, specifically how different kinds of metalepses relate to this issue. Based upon the idea that this device essentially consists of violating a story world’s autonomy, I propose to distinguish between three prototypes of metalepsis, to which I will devote a section each: II(I) transgressions between a story world and another (imaginary) world; I(II) feigned transgressions between a story world and reality; and (III) transgressions between story and discourse. As the term ‘prototype’ indicates, the boundaries between these categories are fuzzy ones. As an actual narrative to discuss metalepsis in, I have chosen a superhero comic, Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, which ran for twenty-six issues between 1988 and 1990. At first glance, this may seem an unlikely place to search for unnatural phenomena. As a genre, superhero comics are characterized by the supernatural, i.e., naturalized (physical) impossibilities such as humans who can fly. Since we fully expect the stories of Superman and Co. to eschew the laws of nature, one might expect them to accommodate other, as yet unnaturalized, impossibilities with much more ease than genres that shun the supernatural.5 Moreover, the output of mainstream publishers such as DC was, at least until recently, not exactly known for its avant-gardist leanings, and, judging from the material analyzed by Alber or Brian Richardson,6 the unnatural can be primarily found in the ‘difficult’ texts of modernism and postmodernism. When Animal Man was published, the superhero comics deemed most progressive were actually those that displayed a heightened degree of realism, namely Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Watchmen (1986–87) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Morrison’s book initially followed the trend of his contemporaries, but soon began to flaunt an everincreasing array of anti-mimetic techniques, foremost among them metalepsis. In Animal Man metalepsis causes entities belonging to different narrative levels to interact in impossible ways and disrupts the ontology of their respective story worlds. It also repeatedly endangers the distinction between the telling and the told and by extension the principle of representation in general. And finally, metalepsis does its best to make us believe that the 5

6

For a general assessment of the relationship between unnatural and supernatural elements in comics, see Johannes Fehrle’s contribution to this volume. See Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, and Richardson, Unnatural Voices. To be fair, the present volume testifies to a greater diversity of unnatural narratives. Alber, for instance, now covers texts written from the Old English period onwards.

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boundary between the fictional world and ours has been shattered. All of this marks the device and the narrative it is used in as unnatural.7 However, the comic also offers its readers relatively clear strategies to make sense of what is going on and stays away from some of metalepsis’s more radical possibilities in order to maintain readability. For the most part, Morrison does this not, as one might presume, by simply folding the unnatural back into the generic framework of superhero comics, e.g., by making the ability to travel between reality and fiction a superpower of his protagonist. Rather, he appeals to narrative schemata and tropes that are far more deeply embedded in Western culture. Despite its experimental trappings, the comic ultimately reads like a variation on the familiar story of rebellion against the gods. In a sense, Animal Man shows how a popular medium is very well able to “make it strange” (in Shklovsky’s sense)8 and put obstacles in the way of readerly comprehension, but it also shows how this tampering is kept within bounds by the desire to tell a good story about a costumed hero’s fight for justice.

2. Transgressions Between a Story World and Another Imaginary World Gérard Genette originally described metalepsis as “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse,” as a violation of the “shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells.”9 This characterization has since been greatly expanded upon, and the version of metalepsis I put forth here is informed by possible-worlds theory, cognitive narratology, and intermediality studies. Notably, I take my cue from Werner Wolf ’s definition of metalepsis as a “usually intentional paradoxical transgression of, or confusion between, (onto-)logically distinct (sub)worlds and/or levels that exist, or are referred to, within representations of possible worlds.”10 Wolf establishes metalepsis 7

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For a diverging opinion see Meister, Jan Christoph, The Metalepticon: A Computational Approach to Metalepsis, 2003, http://www.jcmeister.de/downloads/texts/ jcm-metalepticon.html (last accessed June 7, 2009). Meister claims that metalepsis has on the whole already been naturalized through its long-standing use in popular culture. Shklovsky, Viktor, “Art as Technique”, in: Lee T. Lemon / Marion J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism, Lincoln 1965, 3–24. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, transl. Jane E. Lewin, Oxford 1980, 234–5, 236. Wolf, Werner, “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon: A Case Study of the Possibilities of ‘Exporting’ Narratological Concepts”, in: Jan

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as a category that transcends narrativity and occurs in other forms of representation too. Yet, for present purposes, metalepsis will be examined in the context of narrative. The possible worlds represented by narratives are, of course, known as story worlds, or, in David Herman’s cognitive wording, “storyworlds,” “mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate […] as they work to comprehend narrative.”11 As Marie-Laure Ryan explains, while we know that a story world is but imaginary and dependent upon the text that creates it – and recipients who conceive it, one might add –, for the time of our immersion in a narrative we “recenter” to the world this narrative presents and regard it as possessing an ontology of its own.12 It is precisely this self-contained nature of the story world that metalepsis throws into turmoil by violating the line that separates the inside from the outside of a particular world, and it does so in a way that is perceived to be paradoxical (in the sense of contrary to received opinion). As a first prototypical method of achieving this, I would like to single out transgressions between a story world and another (imaginary) world. Obviously, narratives can contain numerous other (imaginary) worlds. Often this is done through embedding, specifically in the form of the storywithin-the-story: a narrative represents a story world in which there exists a narrative representing a distinct, secondary story world. In this scenario the relationship between the two worlds, between embedding and embedded, diegetic and hypodiegetic level, is usually one between reality vs. fiction or imagination (always speaking from an intrafictional perspective).13 Metaleptic transgressions occur when entities travel between the different planes or interact with the other ontological sphere in ways that are perceived to be impossible. If story worlds are embedded recursively, metalepsis can, of course, also extend to and affect these additional levels. The conventional strategy of

11 12

13

Christoph Meister (ed.), Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, Berlin 2005, 91. Herman, David, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln 2002, 5. Ryan, Marie-Laure, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington 1991, 22–3. Note that I am here describing only the most typical case. While metalepsis in narratives always involves a story world, the second world implicated need not actually be a story world in the sense of a narrated world. It may be any sort of imaginary world, for example one represented by a (non-narrative) painting. The two worlds can also be arranged in a parallel rather than hierarchical fashion. However, this possibility is exploited less often, probably due to the fact that the distinction between parallel worlds is rarely as binary as that between a real embedding and a fictional embedded world.

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coping with such Chinese-box structures would be to try and keep a mental map of the position and corresponding degree of realness or fictitiousness of a certain level in the back of one’s mind. However, metalepsis inevitably blurs the line between reality and fiction – at least within the fiction –, if it does not abolish it altogether. It renders the ontological status of initially and ideally distinct worlds and their inhabitants questionable, resulting in what Ryan calls their “mutual contamination.”14 If one links them to the issue of unnatural narrative, transgressions of this type seem like a highly pertinent phenomenon, as they ask readers to make sense of worlds containing irresolvable ontological contradictions, namely, the coexistence of beings or objects that really exist in a given world and beings or objects that do not. In Animal Man this kind of metalepsis occurs in the first episode that marks Morrison’s foray into unnatural terrain. As hinted at in the introduction, the series starts out as a fairly run-of-the-mill 1980s comic book. Its first issue opens on the world of Buddy Baker (or, as it is known in comics parlance, the DC Universe, the place inhabited by most of this publisher’s characters), a second-rate superhero capable of borrowing animals’ traits and struggling to keep up his career as Animal Man. While early installments deal with Buddy’s domestic troubles and follow his fight against evil in genre-typical fashion, issue 5, “The Coyote Gospel,” introduces the themes that will come to dominate Animal Man by its end. Timothy Callahan goes so far as to call issues 1 to 4 an “Alan Moore pastiche” and states that while Morrison here “gave in to the temptation of ‘realism’ […,] the rest of the series was his attempt to reject th[at] very notion.”15 This issue contains an embedded narrative about a coyote named Crafty. Two things are readily apparent: first, that its story world possesses a separate ontology; second, that it is fictional with regard to the comic’s primary diegesis. Crafty is, in fact, a dimly disguised version of Wile E. Coyote, and his universe is modeled after classic Warner Brothers cartoons, whose anthropomorphic animals with their exaggerated features possess a visibly smaller degree of realism than the more faithfully rendered human beings in Buddy’s universe. As we learn, Crafty wishes to stop the “endless round of violence and cruelty”16 pervading his cartoon world. He therefore rebels and confronts God (depicted with a brush!), who promises peace but in return demands that the coyote “spend eternity in the hell above.” Crafty agrees, is given “new flesh and blood,”17 14 15 16 17

Ryan, Marie-Laure, “Metaleptic Machines”, in: Semiotica, 150, 2004, 442. Callahan, Timothy, Grant Morrison: The Early Years, Edwardsville 2007, 65, 119. Morrison, Grant, Animal Man [rpt. Animal Man nos. 1–9], New York 1991, 18. Ibid., 20.

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and subsequently ends up face to face with Animal Man, meaning that the ontological border between the two story worlds has been transgressed and that the coyote has been turned from a fictional into a real being. This is clearly an impossible scenario, however, it is imbued with biblical language and mythological motifs – rebellion against a deity, self-sacrifice, banishment to hell – that reintegrate it into the realm of the familiar and permit an effortless naturalization. Although “The Coyote Gospel” functions as a sort of blueprint for the rest of the series, it is only in the last two issues that Morrison explicitly comes back to the subject matter explored in it. In the meantime, Animal Man apparently resumes its conventional superhero narrative while slowly introducing the theme of its protagonist’s growing awareness that he is merely a character in a comic book – a faintly metaleptic awareness that functions as a bedrock on which more marked forms of metalepsis are to be built. During the course of his adventures, Buddy meets two aliens who claim to be “agents of the power that brings [his] world into being”18 and possess the meta-awareness he lacks. Yet it is only on a peyote trip with his friend Highwater in issue 19 that our hero appears to fully realize that he is not as real as he thought. When, upon returning home, Animal Man finds his family brutally murdered, he finally decides to investigate who is actually in control of things. In issues 23 and 24, a gathering of superheroes initiated by the Psycho-Pirate, a supervillain who knows the truth about their universe, confirms that Buddy and everyone else are indeed part of a comic book. (Most of these crucial episodes are punctured by metalepses, some of which I will discuss in the next two sections.) Animal Man’s quest continues, and at the end of the penultimate issue, he eventually finds himself in an oddly realistic-looking environment where he meets a man named Grant. It seems that he has now left his fictional world to join reality, which would actually correspond to the second prototype of metalepsis, feigned transgressions between a story world and reality, and not the one under consideration here. However, while the comic initially suggests that Animal Man is now in our world, where he encounters the real-life Grant Morrison, it does not do so for very long. As will be seen, it turns out that this reality is very unlike the one inhabited by recipients. This is why I have chosen to discuss this hybrid case as being closer to the first prototype. The reality in question has in fact been present at least since issue 8, which contains furtive glimpses of a computer screen apparently unrelated to the 18

Morrison, Grant, Animal Man: Origin of the Species [rpt. Animal Man nos. 10–17], New York 2002, 98.

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rest of the story. These glimpses are then gradually extended to show a man sitting at his desk – we never see his face or learn his name, though –, until, by the middle of the series, it becomes more and more clear to readers that what they apparently see here is the real world, the man behind the computer being the writer of Animal Man. Buddy’s diegetic world thus turns out to be a hypodiegetic one, although, due to the extreme scarcity of scenes set in the actual diegetic world, it is probably still received as the comic’s primary world. As in the case of the embedded narrative in “The Coyote Gospel,” it is possible to tell apart the two worlds through the style in which they are drawn, the real world appearing considerably bleaker than the superheroes’. If one compares panels depicting all three worlds (Grant’s, Buddy’s, and Crafty’s), the full spectrum of visual keys used to set apart more real/fictional from less real/fictional worlds becomes evident: the reality-pole of the spectrum is marked by a dominance of hatching lines and subdued coloration, while the fiction-pole is marked by a dominance of line drawing, plane surfaces, and a more intense coloration. Callahan speaks of a “contrast between the starkness of reality and the brilliant colors of fantasy” in this context.19 It appears that Grant Morrison (and the artists who drew the comic) have gone to great lengths to carefully introduce a world labeled reality and make sure readers can identify it as such. The cover of the last issue, “Deus Ex Machina,” even shows a photo of Morrison’s office with a drawn Animal Man lying on the floor, the details of which are then faithfully reproduced inside the comic, thus delivering further proof of verisimilitude. Needless to say, all of this merely prepares the ground for the metaleptic mingling and deconstruction of mimeticism that is to ensue. Animal Man’s sudden presence in Grant’s world, where his outlandish appearance stands out among the pallid environment, is an obvious case of metalepsis. It replicates the impossible coexistence of real and fictional entities found earlier, though in a more forceful and arguably more unnatural way. The comic’s real world has hitherto been a more or less believable reproduction of ours, something which Buddy’s world never even attempted to be. Up to this point, the episode could be understood as a feigned transgression between a story world and reality, yet this is about to change. After Grant confesses to a nonplussed Buddy that he is indeed the “evil mastermind behind the scenes,”20 the writer who creates the fictional universe via his word processor, they walk past a pond. Here Grant magically summons a team of 19 20

Callahan, Grant Morrison, 115. Morrison, Grant, Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina [rpt. Animal Man nos. 18–26], New York 2003, 207.

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Figure 1: Animal Man #26. © 1990 DC Comics, Inc.

superheroes out of the water only to kill them in the next panel and explain that he “only put them in to make th[eir] conversation more interesting to draw.”21 As the superhero and his writer walk on, their surroundings start to fluctuate randomly: first we see them surrounded by a locomotive, large mushrooms and an evil figure lurking out from a manhole, then in front of a huge portrait of the Cheshire Cat, and finally in front of a dinosaur leading a human being on a leash (see figure 1). The idea that this world might ever have been the real one promptly vanishes. It is no less imaginary than Buddy’s or even Crafty’s world. Moreover, it emerges that Grant is not only the author of Buddy’s world but also of this one, the one he inhabits, which 21

Ibid., 216.

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results in another metalepsis. Logically speaking, any world Grant creates through writing would have to be located on a lower level, as is the story world of Animal Man, yet somehow his awareness of being in a comic book enables him to make the world of his imagination coalesce with the world he lives in. Since this also implies that Grant can influence the narration of the story he is only a character in, it is a transgression between story and discourse as well, turning this into another composite case of metalepsis. If this whole episode seems like a highly impossible scenario, one that manifestly defies the laws of logic, it is almost instantaneously naturalizable by the fact that Grant is, of course, merely a stand-in for Grant Morrison, the real-life “mastermind behind the scenes,” who, at least according to a conventional notion of authorship, has complete power over his creation. Here one could debate whether the comic still pretends that there is an ontological identity between Grant and Grant Morrison, i.e., that Grant is not merely a stand-in for Morrison but is Morrison. In that case, one would be left with the impression that an entity has crossed the border between reality and fiction, yet it would not be Buddy, it would be his writer. However, in view of the fact Animal Man has by this point dispensed with the idea that anything in its world is real, this assumption is difficult to hold up. Powerful as he may appear, Grant is but another string puppet controlled by someone above him, a mere spokesperson for his author. The almighty author, the Author-God, is, in fact, the overarching theme of “Deus Ex Machina.” Early on we see Buddy vehemently protesting the idea that his creator determines his every thought and action. Eager to avenge the death of his family, he lifts Grant out of a window and kills him, yet, upon turning around, realizes the writer is still standing behind him. Grant then explains: “To hurt me you’d have to get into the real world and that’s something you can never do. You can’t get into my world but I can get into yours. I can fake the real world here on the comic page.”22 Since his actual foe is out of reach, Buddy’s rebellion is doomed to fail. However, Grant manages to placate him with the age-old trope of art’s immortality: he tells Buddy that he existed long before his author started writing the series and might continue to exist long after his death.23 After pronouncing “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,”24 Grant eventually sends his character back into (second-order) fiction.

22 23

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Ibid., 211. Ibid., 214. Animal Man was indeed not created by Morrison, but has existed as a minor character in the DC Universe since the 1960s. Ibid., 218.

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In its last issue, Animal Man thus harks back to “The Coyote Gospel” with its theme of rebelling against and meeting one’s maker. Both Buddy and Crafty have sought to bring justice to their world, which has brought each into conflict and face to face with an all-powerful creator who puts him in his place. On the one hand, the unnatural quality of the metalepses encountered here cannot be denied, even in a genre in which other, fully naturalized transgressions between worlds such as time travel or inter-dimensional travel, both of which are also present in Animal Man, are commonplace. On the other hand, the archetypal mythological plot and the closely related trope of the Author-God are so powerful that readers should have little trouble assimilating the manifold impossibilities presented by the series’ metaleptic apotheosis or, in fact, most of the events that have led up to it. By reversing the mutual contamination of worlds and reestablishing the status quo, the comic book even provides a sense of closure. One could add that the conflict between creator and creation is actually one of the contexts metalepsis is most often found in, even if not always with such overt religious connotations.25

3. Feigned Transgressions between a Story World and Reality Two major transgressions based on the first prototype thus bracket the series’ main storyline, the latter of which is also partially understandable as a transgression between a story world and reality. This second prototype refers to situations where a narrative suggests a paradoxical continuity between a story world and the real world of its recipients. I say “suggests” because obviously fiction and reality cannot really merge in this way. As Ryan emphasizes, “ontological transgressions cannot involve the ground level of reality,”26 but there is no reason for a narrative not to claim the opposite, or for readers not to go along with such a claim for as long as they are engaged in the game of make-believe. Despite the fact that such cases only constitute apparent transgressions, their potential for unnatural narration is not lessened. If we maintain that fictional worlds do not exist in the way that ours does, the notion that characters in them could somehow perceive and communicate with our reality, or that we could physically cross over into theirs, must be considered an impossibility. Much like the first prototype, the main feature of this type is a blurring of the lines between reality and fiction and a 25

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See for its copious use in postmodernism, e.g., McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, London 1987, 121–4, 210–5. Ryan, “Metaleptic Machines”, 444.

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Figure 2: Animal Man #19. © 1989 DC Comics, Inc.

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porous story world, but with a twist. Whereas in the former case we perceive an actual contamination of an (intra)fictional boundary, in the latter case we take the boundary to be real but the transgression to be make-believe. In Morrison’s comic the first major instance of this kind of metalepsis occurs on Animal Man’s peyote trip in issue 19, “A New Science of Life.” Here the protagonist is told that if he “really want[s] to know the truth,” he should “turn around.”27 Upon doing so, the next page, a splash page (a page taken up by a single image), shows him staring in the direction of the viewer and exclaiming “I can see you!”28 (see figure 2). Of course, when Buddy claims he can perceive his readers and addresses them, this is merely an apparent blending of fiction and reality. And yet, in a narrative which has up until now refrained from breaking the so-called fourth wall between characters and audience, it is surely capable of dealing a blow to recipients’ conception of the story world. Since this metalepsis takes place during a peyote trip, readers might have the easy option of naturalizing it as drug-induced hallucination, though. After the effects of the drug wear off, Buddy is even seen pondering how much of his experience was real. Then again, hallucinating that one is a comic book character who is suddenly able to see his readers may be dismissed as too unlikely to be considered a plausible explanation.29 Still, the episode makes sense in the larger context of the story, with its themes of selfawareness and desire to find out what is beyond one’s world. However, what could here potentially be interpreted as taking place within the characters’ minds becomes quite real later on. When in issue 23, “Crisis,” the Psycho-Pirate rallies heroes and villains from the DC Universe to tell them that their universe is merely an imaginary one, he does so in an eminently metaleptic way. Surrounded by other characters, he directs his gaze outside the panel and calls out: “There! You see them? Leering down? Enjoying our pain.”30 Instigated by his rhetoric, his fellow creatures realize they are in a comic book produced for the entertainment of the people on the other side, and one of them destroys a panel border (an event I will come back to). For the Psycho-Pirate, destroying this barrier between story and discourse equals destroying the one between fiction and reality. Having already looked at us readers once before, he now does so again and threatens us: “We’re through! We’re through! And we’re coming to get you!”31 As other 27 28 29

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Morrison, Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina, 40. Ibid., 41. Cf. Wolf, “Metalepsis”, 93, 96–7. Wolf discusses the possibility (and impossibility) of naturalizing metalepses through the fact that they occur in a dream. Morrison, Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina, 151. Ibid., 153.

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characters argue over the implications of his revelation and start to fight, he advises them: “Stop! You’re forgetting the real enemy! Out there! Don’t fight! That’s what they want!”32 Advocating that “[t]he first story of the new world will be a story of revenge!”33, the Psycho-Pirate envisages the impossible scenario of the superheroes and villains leaving their story world to exact justice upon those who have so far consumed this and other narratives like it, a narrative to end all narratives of sorts. While Animal Man’s rebellion is directed against the author, the Psycho-Pirate’s is thus directed against readers, who appear no less godlike to the characters than the writer. As another character at the meeting remarks: “We’re just minor characters in a story to entertain … I don’t know … the gods … if you like.”34 In mainstream comics a character’s fate is, of course, very much decided by whether the public likes them and buys a specific title or not.35 Just like Animal Man’s, the Psycho-Pirate’s plan never comes to fruition, though, not only because it simply is impossible to realize, but also because the characters are ultimately appeased by the notion that they “outlive [their] creators” since “every time someone reads [their] story, [they] live again”36 – the same argument Grant later on uses against Buddy. Animal Man thus toys with the concept of continuity between a story world and reality and asks readers to at least momentarily imagine the impossible: that its world contains a rift through which characters might access their world. Yet this tension is resolved in a very traditional way: by appealing to a supposed immortality of art in view of which the idea of escaping from art to life appears ludicrous. Once more, recipients are thus offered much the same familiar frames in which to place the unnatural. Metalepsis here clearly stretches our understanding of what conventionally goes under the name of speaking ad spectatores or breaking the fourth wall. This is not about characters imparting information to or acknowledging the presence of an audience, but about wiping out the very line that separates both. In the end, this “natural order” which the characters had attempted to overthrow is restored and reaffirmed.

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Ibid., 161. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 158. There is a particular poignancy to this here since the DC heroes and villains assembled by the Psycho-Pirate are, in fact, exceptionally unpopular ones who had been written out of continuity a few years earlier, i.e., retroactively denied existence. Ibid., 171.

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4. Transgressions between Story and Discourse As hinted at, the episode just discussed is in part triggered by a transgression between story and discourse. As a matter of a fact, both the peyote trip and the characters’ uprising are marked by some of the most blatant metalepses of this third variety. This prototype consists in entwining the levels of story and discourse in ways which we perceive as illicit, as entangling the logic by which representation – and hence narration – is supposed to proceed. In comics a sequence of panels encompassing drawings, speech balloons, captions, sound effects and so on makes up the discourse that signifies the story and its world and allows readers to construct a mental model of the latter. Normally, we do not have trouble distinguishing the how? and the what? of comics narrative. Yet there is a peculiar tension between story and discourse, rooted in the medium’s characteristic of representing a 3D world on a 2D plane, which manifests itself in what comics theorist Thierry Groensteen describes as the “possibility, for the surface of inscription, of substituting itself to the diegetic space,” a “short-circuit,” or metalepsis, between the space of narration and the narrated space.37 In such cases readers’ attempts at conceiving the story world are severely obstructed, for how are they to distinguish between the telling and the told, between what is part of the represented world and what is merely a means of representing it? On Buddy’s peyote trip, only a few pages after the protagonist has glimpsed his readers, something arguably even stranger happens to him: For no obvious reason, he suddenly finds himself outside the row of three panels on this page, while his friend Highwater is searching for him on the inside. Animal Man reaches into the bottom panel from his location, where his hand appears as that of a giant to Highwater (see figure 3). It appears as if Buddy is quite literally “on the page” here, i.e., no longer part of the narrated space of the story world but somehow part of the narrating space with which the former is paradoxically connected. In the bottom panel the logic of representation is conspicuously turned upside-down: Buddy’s size on the page should be merely a question of the perspective from which he is drawn, but here it also affects his actual physical size in the diegesis. While this discourse-story metalepsis seriously upsets notions of space, the temporal dimension is curiously left untouched: Buddy’s three speech balloons and his downward movement correspond to the reading direction and the chronological order of the panels. As before, readers have the option of natural37

Groensteen, Thierry, The System of Comics, transl. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, Jackson 2007, 64, 69.

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Figure 3: Animal Man #19. © 1989 DC Comics, Inc.

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izing this scene as a drug-induced hallucination, but it probably makes more sense to read it in terms of the themes explored by the series as a whole. This option is also chosen by Callahan, who concludes that “[b]ecause he [Buddy] has become fully aware of his fictional status, he is able to transcend the normal bounds of reality.”38 Unsurprisingly, the Psycho-Pirate is the second character who transcends the story-discourse dichotomy, but only to set off a much larger violation of boundaries. While addressing the congregation of DC characters, he touches the upper border of a panel and exclaims: “This cage we’re in. They keep us here and make us do tricks for their cheap amusement! Haven’t you seen it before? Look!”39 On the next page the characters become aware of the cage they are in and achieve a literal breakthrough: Ultraman, realizing that “there’s a wall,”40 leans against the right panel border until the panel bursts (see figure 4). Since panel borders are part of the narrating space but not the narrated space, this constitutes an obvious case of metalepsis. We usually perceive panels as transparent, as opening a “window on the world,” yet here window and world become indistinguishable. Once characters treat panel borders as if they physically existed inside the story, the three-dimensional world we mentally construct using the comic’s visual clues is conflated into the two-dimensional space of the page on which these clues are located. If this page is nevertheless easily readable, it is because the panels still remain separate from one another and offer a clear chronological and causal sequence. More radical possibilities of coupling two distinct, non-contiguous panels – for example, by having a character reach from the lower-left panel into the one above it – are left unexploited. In any case, the events on this page threaten to throw the diegetic world into chaos, not only because it is impossible for readers to conceive it in a coherent and sensible way, but also because this metalepsis opens up a new dimension for its inhabitants, as has been discussed above. In the course of the characters’ rebellion, Buddy dares to venture forth into the unknown and leaves the diegesis via the opening created by Ultraman. Having once more left the story to exist “purely” on the level of discourse, he is faced with a curious challenge: supervillain Overman, the only character who does not accept his fictionality, threatens to blow up the world. Animal Man thereupon engages in a battle with him while still being located outside this world. In this fight between discourse and story, so to 38 39 40

Callahan, Grant Morrison, 98. Morrison, Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina, 151. Ibid., 152.

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Figure 4: Animal Man #23. © 1990 DC Comics, Inc.

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speak, Buddy has a considerable advantage: he can hide behind panels or in the gutter (the empty space between panels), to the dismay of his opponent, who is unaware of anything outside the diegetic world. After having briefly been dragged outside the diegesis, Overman is then trapped in a panel, which, as it shrinks in size, appears to kill him (see figure 5). Animal Man looks on and in the end finds himself back inside a regular panel, safe and sound. This whole episode is filled with paradoxes and impossibilities. Panels become objects which can be freely manipulated in ways that render the story-discourse distinction futile; the space of narration simply turns into additional narrated space. Where panel borders have on numerous previous occasions been pierced from the inside, it seems as if on the last page the discourse finally reasserts itself by literally crushing the story. Needless to say, none of this can be accommodated with our assumptions concerning the principles of logic or the physical laws of our world. And yet the episode follows a narrative archetype which ensures its naturalization: our hero faces an adversary whom he battles and finally vanquishes – the very meat and potatoes of superhero comic books. Interestingly enough, this is, at least among the examples I discuss, the only time Morrison clearly and explicitly appeals to the generic framework in order to make the unnatural easier to digest. Moreover, even when in this sequence a character is located outside the diegesis, he is still clearly associated with one particular panel, which enables readers to process the information in much the same orderly fashion as a conventional comics page. Once again chronology and causality, and hence readability, are maintained. In spite of the comic’s containment strategies, however, this last prototype emerges as the most unnatural variant of metalepsis. This is because it subverts the very idea of representation and renders the possibility to tell a sign from its referent questionable. Concomitantly, the principle of narration and the intelligibility of any story world are endangered too. Grant Morrison’s tinkering with space shows how facile it is to undermine a crucial notion in comics, namely that the space of the page can represent the space of the story. Since so much depends upon space in this medium, since even temporal or causal relationships are usually expressed by spatial ones, i.e., through the arrangement of panels, these manipulations open up a broad range of techniques to defamiliarize comics narrative. Morrison obviously only chose some of them.

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Figure 5: Animal Man #25. © 1990 DC Comics, Inc.

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5. Conclusion Ultimately, what Animal Man bears out is a certain dialectics of unnaturalness and naturalization with regard to metalepsis. The more firmly barriers are established, the more firmly they are shattered – yet the more firmly they are also reestablished. Metalepsis is clearly unnatural per se, yet the narrative in which this device is present in such abundance does not have too much trouble incorporating it into a familiar setting. Even if story worlds or narration as such are often on the verge of collapsing, the comic always reins in the unnatural and gives out ample explanation for whatever impossibilities are left. For Grant Morrison the task is clearly to eat one’s cake and have it too. One might be tempted to argue that this is due to superhero comics being a conservative genre with an equally conservative audience that accept only so much deviation from norms and conventions and demand closure. Yet this would not tell the full story. While I do not wish to claim that Animal Man is representative for the use of metalepsis in all narratives or even all superhero comic book narratives, it still fits into a more or less clearly delineated type of (postmodernist) metanarrative in which metaleptic transgressions abound. We only need to think back on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-TwoBirds, which also employs metalepsis in the context of rebellious characters and overly powerful writers. The same issues have been explored, in somewhat more accessible fashion, by animated cartoons such as Duck Amuck (1953) or films such as Stranger than Fiction (2006). In such classic tales of characters’ meta-awareness and the conflict between creator and created, I would contend that the question of metalepsis’s unnaturalness and concomitant naturalization appears in a very similar manner. In other words, while such narratives favor metaleptic constellations, they also provide a way to naturalize them through their very subject matter.

6. Bibliography Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96. Callahan, Timothy, Grant Morrison: The Early Years, Edwardsville 2007. Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, Ithaca 1975. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, transl. Jane E. Lewin, Oxford 1980. Groensteen, Thierry, The System of Comics, transl. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, Jackson 2007. Herman, David, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln 2002. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, London 1987.

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Meister, Jan Christoph, The Metalepticon: A Computational Approach to Metalepsis, 2003, http://www.jcmeister.de/downloads/texts/jcm-metalepticon.html (last accessed June 7, 2009). Morrison, Grant, Animal Man [rpt. Animal Man nos. 1–9], New York 1991. –, Animal Man: Origin of the Species [rpt. Animal Man nos. 10–17], New York 2002. –, Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina [rpt. Animal Man nos. 18–26], New York 2003. Richardson, Brian, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006. Ryan, Marie-Laure, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington 1991. –, “Metaleptic Machines”, in: Semiotica, 150, 2004, 439–69. Shklovsky, Viktor, “Art as Technique”, in: Lee T. Lemon / Marion J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism, Lincoln 1965, 3–24. Wolf, Werner, “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon: A Case Study of the Possibilities of ‘Exporting’ Narratological Concepts”, in: Jan Christoph Meister (ed.), Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, Berlin 2005, 83–107.

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Johannes Fehrle (Vancouver)

Unnatural Worlds and Unnatural Narration in Comics? A Critical Examination1

1. Introduction In his appraisal of Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Palestine, Edward Saïd reflects upon his experiences of reading comics as an adolescent: […] there was the release provided to my sexually repressed young life by outrageous characters […] who did and said things that could not be admitted either for reasons of probability and logic or, perhaps more crucially, because they violated conventional norms – norms of behavior, thought, accepted social forms. Comics played havoc with the logic of a+b+c+d […]. Besides, comics provided one with a directness of approach (the attractively and literally overstated combination of pictures and words) that seemed unassailably true on the one hand, and marvelously close, impinging familiar on the other. In ways that I still find fascinating to decode, comics in their relentless foregrounding […] seemed to say what couldn’t otherwise be said, perhaps wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought, which are policed, shaped and re-shaped by all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological pressures.2

In this statement Saïd grants comics astonishing powers that defy the common associations with illiteracy the medium often still bears: they do “things that [can]not be admitted for reasons of probability and logic,” play “havoc with the logic of a+b+c+d,” and even defy “the ordinary processes of thought.” As such they would seem to be an ideal subject for an examination of unnaturalness.

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I would like to gratefully acknowledge Kerstin Müller’s, Rudvan Askin’s, and Jeff Thoss’s comments on earlier versions of this essay, as well as their insightful positions in various discussions on the concept of unnaturalness. I would also like to thank Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze for their comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article. Saïd, Edward, “Homage to Joe Sacco”, Introduction, in: Joe Sacco, Palestine, London 2003, ii.

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In the following pages I want to examine this notion, and apply the concept of unnaturalness to various comics and graphic novels.3 I will argue that the concept of unnaturalness can be productive, but needs to be adapted to the particularities of the comics medium. As I will show, many events that qualify as unnatural according to Alber’s definition are fairly common in the storyworlds of comics.4 I thus suggest that comics as a medium has a much higher tolerance towards the unnatural than most prose. Indeed, no other medium seems as ‘natural’ in its unnaturalness as comics, whose norms are not as much based on the conventions of literary realism as those of novels or films. On the other hand, those elements that are experimental or estranging in comics generally do not fall under the current definition of the unnatural.5

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Throughout I use the terms ‘comics’ and ‘graphic novel’ to refer to “sequential art” (to borrow Eisner’s term). Accordingly one-panel cartoons are excluded, but “sequential art” without words is a possibility (cf. Eisner, Will, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist, New York/London 2008, and, in more detail, McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York 1993). As far as I know there has not yet been a convincing typology setting off ‘graphic novels’ from ‘comics.’ I understand graphic novels as a subgenre of comics. Eisner seems to see graphic novels as a distinct genre (Eisner, Comics, 148f.), yet the distinction is rather vague: graphic novels tend to be longer and potentially more complex than (popular) comics, and feature a unified plot. Furthermore, they tend to be aimed at adult audiences. Since most of these points also hold true for underground comix (the comics which developed out of the 1960s counterculture), the terms remain blurred as the more ‘salable’ and culturally ‘acceptable’ term ‘graphic novel’ is used for exactly the marketing reason it was (at least in part) invented for (cf. Eisner, Will, Preface, A Contract with God: A Novel, New York/London 2006, ix-x). To complicate matters further, comics series (such as The Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen) or collections of short sequential art are published as one-volume editions and consequently referred to as graphic novels. Either way, the narrative principles governing comics and graphic novels are mostly, if not entirely, the same. Throughout this paper I adopt David Herman’s term and definition of “storyworlds” as “mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate – or make a deictic shift – as they work to comprehend a narrative.” Herman, David, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln/London 2002, 9. In this article I will use the term ‘unnatural’ according to Jan Alber’s definition, cf. Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96. While I argue for a broader concept of the unnatural, i.e. one which is not limited to physical or logical impossibilities, in my conclusion, I will use other terms, such as estranging, to refer to such narratives in this article to avoid confusion.

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I will begin by examining the two parts of Alber’s definition of unnaturalness, physical and logical impossibilities. I will then briefly outline how comics narrate and elaborate on the implications this has for a theory of unnaturalness. In the final part of this article I will turn my attention to some examples of estranging storyworlds and extreme narration.6 I want to specifically highlight how estrangement is linked to reader expectation and thus can be evoked by first guiding a reader to expect either a natural or an unnatural storyworld, then breaking these assumptions. As a last point I want to suggest a number of aspects that in my opinion should be considered in order to arrive at a more universal concept of unnaturalness, one which is able to incorporate, among other things, the intermedial turn narratology is currently taking.7

2. What is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratives? To my knowledge Jan Alber is the first critic to systematically define the term “unnatural” with reference to narratives.8 Following Brian Richardson’s earlier example of examining forms of “extreme narration” especially in modern and postmodern texts,9 Alber applies a cognitive approach to understand how unnatural scenarios are naturalized or made explicable.10 He defines the term “unnatural” as “denot[ing] physically impossible scenarios and events, that is, impossible by the known laws governing the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones, that is, impossible by accepted principles of logic.”11 Alber goes on to describe the effect of such scenarios as estrang6

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I borrow the term “extreme narration” from Brian Richardson, cf. Richardson’s subtitle: Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006. Cf. for instance Meister, Jan Christoph (ed.), Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, Berlin/New York 2005, in particular Marie-Laure Ryan’s article in this collection and Schüwer, Martin, Wie Comics erzählen: Grundriss einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen Literatur, Trier 2008. Earlier Monika Fludernik set off the term “natural” against “non-natural (rather than unnatural). The non-natural […] refers to strategies or aspects of discourse that do not have a natural grounding in familiar cognitive parameters or in familiar real-life situations.” Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London/ New York 1996, 11. Fludernik’s emphasis thus is slightly different from Alber’s, although in the end both definitions describe similar fictional techniques, techniques which are employed to upset readers’ cognitive strategies, Alber’s in a narrower, Fludernik’s in a slightly broader sense. Cf. Richardson, Unnatural Voices. Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 79–80. Ibid., 80. In contrast to Richardson, Alber focuses mainly on the level of the story, rather than that of narration, which informs Richardson’s study.

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ing. While I agree that “not all instances of estrangement involve the unnatural,”12 I disagree with his claim that “all instances of the unnatural have an estranging effect.”13 As I will show in the following, especially ‘physically impossible’ scenarios in comics often fail to have an estranging effect, simply because they are expected by readers with literacy in comics.14 The observation that not all violations of real-world parameters are estranging is of course fairly obvious. Indeed, Alber mentions “the speaking animal” as “an unnatural scenario that has already been naturalized, that is, turned into a cognitive category, presumably because it is frequently used in fables and animated cartoons”15 in his original article – a notion he expands in his contribution to the present volume. Here Alber specifies that the “naturalized unnatural,” i.e. a physical or logical impossibility which has been incorporated into the reader’s cognitive framework, would not cause estrangement. Thus Alber operates with three categories: the natural, i.e. everything that is in accordance with the physical and logical laws of our world, the naturalized unnatural, defined as “unnatural scenarios and events that have already been naturalized, i.e., turned ‘into a basic cognitive category’” and thus do not have an estranging effect, and the not yet naturalized unnatural or ‘unnatural proper’ which causes estrangement.16 As Alber remarks, fictional texts do not necessarily represent the ‘real’ world or a world that is even close to it. Nevertheless, he follows in a tradition which argues that, when approaching a text, most contemporary readers and critics will be guided in approaching a text by assumptions that are grounded in a tradition of the representational mimetic, or ‘realism,’ and, as Ryan and others claim, equipped with “real-world narrative frames.”17 Comics, however, have not suffered from as strict a ‘dictatorship’ of the mimetic as other 12 13

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Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 80. Ibid. See also Alber, Jan, “Unnatural Narratives”, The Literary Encyclopedia, 2009, http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=7202 (last accessed November 23, 2009). This is also true of a number of genres like fairy tales or fantasy that I will not discuss in this paper. Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 94, endnote 4. See Alber’s contribution to this volume; for his definition of the ‘natural’ see footnote 27. Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 80–1. Cf. Marie-Laure Ryan’s “principle of minimal departure,” Ryan, Marie-Laure, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington 1991, 48–50. See also Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. For a critique of what he calls the “‘cognition-über-alles’ position,” see Bamberg, Michael, “Narrative Discourse and Identities”, in: Jens Meister (ed.), Narratology beyond Literary Criticism, 213–37.

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forms of narrative fiction. I thus have my doubts whether Ryan’s principle, according to which we assume that our real-world knowledge is also the basis of storyworld laws unless the narrative tells us differently, applies to comics to the same extent. This doubt derives not only from comics’ lack of association with literary realism, but is also connected to the nature of narration and images in comics, a notion I will discuss in more detail later.

3. Comics and “physically impossible scenarios” The relative independence of comics from the realist paradigm can already be seen by looking at the artwork of many comics. Often, artists do not aim for verisimilitude, but employ simplification and cartoonish styles.18 Furthermore, images in comics are, as Thierry Groensteen argues, less interested in showing than in telling, i.e. they are “narrative drawings” – drawings which tell the story rather than provide a background. They are an integral part of narration in comics. Groensteen divides this tendency of comics images to ‘tell’ into five characteristics, four of which are related to techniques of simplification: “synecdochic simplification” (or “typification” in the case of characters), which “often evacuates that which is not necessary to the intelligibility of the represented situation,” (frequently bordering on stereotyping in the case of characters), “expressivity” and “rhetorical convergence.” “Expressivity” means that each image “constitutes a chosen moment, withdrawn from the supposed continuity of action,” “rhetorical convergence” describes the mutual reinforcement of various elements of the image through the use of color, composition, framing and so on.19 As a result the way in which comics images narrate is often in violation of real-world parameters. The abstraction of many images in comics establishes a distance between the ‘real’ world and the storyworld, as the images ‘draw in’ the reader to accept their ‘truth.’20 Robert Crumb’s character “the moron” with his gigantic nose, 18

19 20

This is of course true to a greater or lesser degree depending on an artist’s style as well as the genre. The superhero genre’s focus on action, for instance, requires a greater degree of ‘authenticity’ with regard to anatomy, even though the ‘authentic’ way to depict a pose might not be the anatomically correct one, as Schüwer points out through an example of a “correct” depiction of a jumping horse, Wie Comics erzählen, 43–4. Groensteen, Thierry, The System of Comics, Jackson 2007, 162. I would like to suggest in passing that, at least in our culture, we have a certain bias to take pictures and images for granted and accept the story they tell at face value, often being less critical of them than of texts – a thought I do not have space to develop any further.

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for instance, can be said to violate what would be expected of the anatomy of an average person, yet his cartoonish style visually counters a too strongly mimetic approach on the part of the reader.21 Scott McCloud goes even further in arguing that simplification leads to a universality of the shown subjects. As readers fill in the details that are left out they identify with the main character: When cartoons are used throughout a story, the world of that story may seem to pulse with life. Inanimate objects may seem to possess separate identities so that if one jumped up and started singing it wouldn’t feel out of place.22

While all such instances clearly violate real-world parameters, they are not estranging. They are instead part of the way in which comics create their storyworlds. The ‘distorted’ way of depicting characters and storyworlds in comics is not only closely linked to the medium, but also to genres. As Martin Schüwer describes, the drawing style influences how we approach a comic and also how much of a deviation from real-world parameters we accept from a certain comic. Among other things we judge from the style which physical laws are likely to govern a comic: Es zeigt sich, dass die Konvention, die Zeichenstil und Genre aneinander bindet, in der Tat ausgeprägt ist. Mit Werner Wolf (1999) kann man den Zeichenstil als wirkmächtige Form des “framing” bezeichnen: Die Leser werden auf implizite Weise zu einer bestimmten Lesehaltung bzw. zur Aktivierung bestimmter kognitiver Schemata aufgefordert, die in diesem Fall ihr Vorwissen über das Comicgenre enthalten. […] So entscheidet der Unterschied zwischen “Funny” und “Adventure Strip”, um nur ein Beispiel zu nennen, etwa auch darüber, ob eine Figur, der ein großer Felsbrocken auf den Kopf fällt, tot ist oder lediglich […] Sternchen sieht.23

What is even more fascinating is the way in which comic creators can play with these conventions. The comic Happy Tree Friends achieves its unique effect specifically by raising expectations associated with the ‘funny’ genre 21

22 23

Crumb, Robert, “Bad Karma with the Moron”, in: Mystic Funnies, 2, San Francisco 1999. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 41; McCloud’s emphases. Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, 369. “It appears that the convention linking style and genre, is indeed pronounced. Following Werner Wolf (1999) one can regard drawing style as a powerful form of ‘framing’: readers are implicitly invited to read the comic in a certain way or to activate certain cognitive schemata, which in this case include their previous knowledge of the comic genre. […] Therefore, the distinction between a ‘funny’ and an ‘adventure strip,’ to name but one example, also determines whether a character who is hit on the head by a giant boulder dies or merely sees stars” (my translation).

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through its style, then completely contradicting these conventions by slowly disfiguring and killing its characters.24 The comics’ impact thus relies primarily on estrangement. While violations of ‘real-world parameters’ are quite common and accepted in the ‘funny’ or ‘semi-funny’ genres, they are avoided in a number of comics of the ‘adventure’ genre. Nevertheless, they are strongly associated with the medium as a whole. Indeed, I would claim that events that would have to be classified as unnatural according to Alber’s definition do happen at some point in a majority of comics. In fact, unnatural events, such as speaking animals or supernatural skills, have been a part of the majority of comics ever since the birth of the medium, whereas more ‘realistic’ narratives – although they have always existed to a degree – have gained prominence only in the past decades, most notably through the format of the, often auto-biographical, graphic novel. It could of course be argued that this long tradition has led to a ‘conventionalization’ of these originally unnatural and estranging acts, presumably first dulling, and eventually ridding them of their initial estranging effect. However, I find it more convincing to argue that there is no preeminence of the ‘natural’ in comics comparable to that in highbrow fiction. This becomes clear when looking a bit closer at the history of the medium: comics did not start out as a natural, ‘realist’ medium, whose rules were gradually expanded to include ever more unnatural instances, as the concept of a naturalized unnatural suggests. Instead the medium has been deeply unnatural from its beginnings: the work of George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat, for instance, is highly experimental and unnatural to the point of having no other subject than its own experimentality. In its playfulness it often problematizes, among other things, the classical narratological distinction between story and discourse,25 almost making it a postmodern narrative avant la lettre. Another example of a highly experimental early comic strip is Windsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. Especially in its depiction of architecture it constantly transcends realism (traditional central perspective), although contained within the naturalizing framework of a nightmare. Even the two earliest American comic strips, The Yellow Kid (Hogan’s Alley) and The Katzenjammer Kids frequently contain unnatural elements. I would thus argue that, from their inception in the late nineteenth century, comics were filled with unnatural characters and storyworlds. They can even be said 24 25

Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, 369–70, footnote 303. Cf. Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, 17–19. See also the contribution by Jeff Thoss in this collection.

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to lose some of their experimentality and unnaturalness with the beginning of the superhero genre, a genre usually closely associated with both comics and violations of ‘real-world parameters.’ Despite its obvious fantastic elements, the superhero genre, to me, seems like a step back into a more conventional framework, with the aim of reaching a different and broader readership. I believe that the medium of comics is closer to the “marvelous” tradition (in Todorov’s sense) than to the mimetic, realist tradition of the novel.26 The superhero genre’s origins, for instance, lie in the pulp tradition of the early twentieth century.27 Comics have traditionally also been associated with children’s literature, as Will Eisner points out: “Between 1940 and the early 1960s the industry commonly accepted the profile of the average comic book reader as that of a ‘ten year old from Iowa.’”28 Through these connections to genres less interested in the strictly mimetic tradition, comics has managed to ‘sidestep’ many of the ‘laws’ learned from realist fiction. It has ignored – at least in part – the rules of naturalness learned through ‘serious’ literature, while avoiding ‘unlearning’ the unnaturalness that makes up a great part of children’s games. Rather than understanding the laws of comics as an instance of naturalized unnaturalness, I would stress the constructivist truism that ‘reality’ is not an objective absolute that can be referred to free of judgment, but is rather structured and understood through narratives (among other things). ‘Realist,’ natural narratives also structure ‘reality,’ and narrative frames learned from tales and fiction also influence real-world narrative frames. In other words, we should not necessarily assume that the natural has a privileged position over the unnatural, as the concept of the ‘naturalized unnatural’ seems to suggest. Their relation, I would argue, less

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The ‘marvelous’ makes the reader realize “that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the [strange] phenomena.” Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Cleveland etc. 1973, 41. For Todorov, the opposite genre is the uncanny in which the “laws of nature” stay intact. For him, “the fantastic” exists only on the dividing line between these two as long as the ambiguity about the strange occurrences in the text is not resolved and we oscillate between a realist and a supernatural reading. Cf. Trushell, John M., “American Dreams of Mutants: The X-Men – ‘Pulp’ Fiction, Science Fiction, and Superheroes”, The Journal of Popular Culture, 38, 2004, Nr. 1, 150. Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art, 149. While this belief has since been overcome in the industry, the stigma of ‘juvenility’ attached to comics only slowly begins to vanish in the general public. Cf. Lopez, Paul, Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book, Philadelphia 2009, xix–xxi, and throughout.

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hierarchical; fiction does not merely employ a parasitic function as a simulacrum, but rather influences our view of ‘reality.’ Lubomír Doleˇzel’s concept of fictional encyclopedias (a concept he himself takes over from Umberto Eco) seems adequate to describe comics’ distinct tradition and the reader reactions and expectations it leads to. According to Doleˇzel reading strategies (or frames) exist for texts which differ from ‘frames’ based on everyday experiences. These encyclopedias form and are continually expanded during reading and “to a greater or lesser degree digress from the actual-world encyclopedia.”29 While I find the concept of fictional encyclopedias useful, I would like to remind the reader of one of the basics of a natural (and unnatural) narratology: “Mimesis is […] conceived in radically constructivist terms.”30 As such a privileging of an ‘actual world’ encyclopedia needs to be treated carefully, if it is desirable at all. This is particularly true for an understanding of naturalness and unnaturalness linked to ‘objective’ scientific laws. Such a concept seems to be in danger of obliterating this crucial point by privileging the ‘real’ – if not in the mind of the critic, at least in that of his or her readers. In superhero comics, unnatural acts or skills that occur in a storyworld, which otherwise closely resembles our actual world, are often explained with reference to real-world beliefs or laws: the hero’s or villain’s special powers are explained by a reference to the laws of science (it is not unusual for the protagonist to be a scientist); as James Kakalios has pointed out in his book, The Physics of Superheroes, in a great number of cases this is done in an astonishingly correct way: Reading classic and contemporary superhero comic books now, with the benefit of a Ph.D. in physics, I have found many examples of the correct description and application of physics concepts in superhero comic books. Of course, nearly without exception, the use of superpowers themselves involves direct violations of the known laws of physics, requiring deliberate suspension of disbelief. However, many comics needed only a single ‘miracle exception’ – one thing you have to buy into to make the superhero plausible – and the rest that follows as the hero and villain square off would be consistent with the principles of science.31

However, as Kakalios remarks, comics use not only the laws of science for such explanations. Referring briefly to changes in the stories of origin of characters like Green Lantern and Spiderman, he points to other discourses

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Doleˇzel, Lubomír, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore/London 1998, 177. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 37. Kakalios, James, The Physics of Superheroes, London 2006, 15.

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that naturalize unnatural abilities: while Spiderman’s powers were originally explained by the bite of a radioactively contaminated spider when the hero was invented in 1962, an era of fear of total annihilation through nuclear war, it has since been changed to a bite by a genetically modified spider.32 While Kakalios comments that each time apparently writes its own anxieties into these explanations,33 it is also worth noting that each of the explanations is taken from an area that was at the time a frontier area of scientific research, an area in which the general public was almost completely ignorant. In analogy to Kakalios’ argument, it can thus be argued that each time also brings forth the explanation which best naturalizes the same power – through cultural anxieties, as well as references to wondrously strange areas of science; areas which in their societal discussions often border on the metaphysical. While such explanations of a hero’s or villain’s ability serve as naturalizations, I doubt that they are strictly necessary for a reader to come to terms with that hero or his powers. Instead, I believe that they serve to bring the storyworld – which, apart from the main characters and their physically impossible abilities, mirror our present day world – closer to the ‘actual’ world the reader lives in: it is, the comics seem to suggest, a depiction of the world we live in sharing the same characteristics and laws – we only have not discovered the technology that, say, Batman has at his hands, yet. Looking at Superman and linking him with more traditional mythic characters, Umberto Eco has made the claim for an identification of the reader with the anthropomorphized main character. Despite his special abilities, Superman, according to Umberto Eco, in his disguise as inept news reporter Clark Kent […] personifies fairly typically the average reader […]. Through an obvious process of self-identification, any accountant in any American city secretly feeds the hope that one day, from the slough of his actual personality, there can spring forth a superman who is capable of redeeming years of mediocre existence.34

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In Sam Raimi’s recent movie adaptation Spiderman’s abilities were once again changed. The webshooters, a technological invention of scientist Peter Parker were changed to an organic extension of his body, which led some fans of the original comic book to complain bitterly. Cf. Lefèvre, Pascal, “Incompatible Visual Ontologies? The Problematic Adaptation of Drawn Images”, in: Ian Gordon / Mark Jancovich / Matthew P. McAllister (eds.), Film and Comic Books, Jackson 2007, 5. Kakalios, Physics, 10. Eco, Umberto, “The Myth of Superman”, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Bloomington/London 1979, 108.

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As such Superman’s abilities become, if not naturalized, at least less unnatural through reader identification.35 Let me briefly summarize my points on “physical impossibilities” in comics: A brief look at early examples of the comics medium has shown that the unnatural is present almost from the beginning and thus can be considered part of the medium’s convention, or its fictional encyclopedia. Comics’ historic distance from genres focusing on the representational mimetic, such as the classic novel, results in a greater acceptance of unnaturalness in the comics medium. In addition, a number of naturalization strategies are offered by some texts, especially of the (often less experimental and daring) genre of superhero comics, as in personification/anthropomorphization and (pseudo-)scientific or cultural-historic explanations of otherwise physically impossible scenarios. All of these factors lead to an encyclopedia of the comics medium that is quite tolerant of violations of physical realworld parameters; as a result it is not easy to estrange readers of comics by mere violations of physical real-world parameters, a fact that I believe is better explained by the medium’s permanent historic and cultural link to unnaturalness right from its inception than by the idea of a naturalized unnaturalness, an idea that implies progression and development, as well as a privileged position of the ‘natural’ in all fields and genres of fiction.

4. Narration in Comics and the Problem of “logically impossible scenarios” For a full exploration of unnaturalness in comics, Alber’s second criterion of unnaturalness, the use of “logically impossible scenarios,” still needs to be explored. The examination of how this aspect applies to comics necessitates a more general look at the way in which narration functions in comics. While some of the aspects of unnaturalness are shared with, or adapted from, other media, as explored in Jeff Thoss’ excellent article on metalepsis in Grant Morrison’s Animal Man in this collection, much of what I will say in the following relates directly to the way narration in comics differs from narration in other media. As I will argue, the peculiar way in which meaning is generated in comics makes the adaptation of the concept of ‘logical impossibility’ quite problematic. While logically impossible scenarios are imaginable, they are to my knowledge as yet quite rare in actual works in the medium. Comics 35

Scott McCloud makes a similar argument for all comics characters, claiming that the cartoonish simplification and abstraction used in most comics characters invites reader identification with the main characters. Cf. Understanding Comics, 27–51.

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artists and writers rather chose more medium-specific ways of estranging their readership, such as the juxtaposition of contradictory images and words in one panel. Like other media, comics consist of a general set of rules which the individual comic draws upon, expands and sometimes revises, as briefly explored above in the discussion of style and generic laws. Like film or the novel, comics have a unique history and means of expression, and as a result the medium needs a special literacy.36 The most obvious difference between a novel and a comic is that most comics contain both a visual and written text. In many well-made comics each contains different pieces of information which add up to a complete reading of the text. If these two codes engage in a conflict the result can be an estranging effect (though not necessarily an unnatural one according to the above definition). An example of this can be found in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, which frequently combines words and images from different storylines or story times in the same panel to achieve an often ironic and metanarrative comment on the comic’s main plot line, most prominently in the fictional pirate comic The Tales of the Black Freighter.37 The juxtaposition of images and words is not what defines comics, however. After all there are other forms combining images and words (press photos, cartoons and advertisements, to name just three), and there are also comics without words. It is a different aspect that defines comics and is constitutive for the processing of comics by the reader: the combination of related images in a sequence in what Groensteen has called a “spatio-topical relation,” in which the images are at once visual and discursive: 36

37

Cf. Chute, Hillary, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative”, in: PMLA, 123, 2008, Nr. 2, 452–65. The question of how comics narrate is a relatively recent one and the details are still very much contested in those narratological circles that have even begun to ask this question. Some of the differences in interpreting the medium are quite drastic: Thierry Groensteen for instance argues that in comics narration is primarily driven by the images, whereas other critics argue that comics can only be understood through their hybridity, i.e. as a medium in which the narration is distributed over both text and images, which complement each other. I find Groensteen’s argumentation compelling and agree with him that the general drift of a comic’s plot can often be grasped by following only the images, I would nevertheless claim that it does not speak for the quality of the writing if the words can be entirely or even mostly dismissed. Indeed I would claim that the medium does not use its full potential when one of the two texts (graphic or printed) is superfluous. For an insightful discussion of the different ways in which images and words can be combined see Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, 450–58.

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At the end of the day, what makes comics a language that cannot be confused with any other is, on the one hand, the simultaneous mobilization of the entirety of codes (visual and discursive) that constitute it, and, at the same time, the fact that none of these codes probably belongs purely to it, consequently specifying themselves when they apply to particular “subjects of expression,” which is the drawing. […] Comics are therefore an original combination of a (or two, with writing) subject(s) of expression, and of a collection of codes.38

This is also the point at which the medium transcends a number of limitations, generally associated with media consisting of only images: It gains a spatio-temporal extension,39 and thus transcends the limited narrative potential Marie-Laure Ryan accords to visual media: “being limited to the visible, they are unable to express abstract ideas, such as causality.”40 Putting images into relation to each other, even without words, the language of comics can thus “make it explicit that the queen died of grief over the death of the king,” a causal combination Ryan believes is limited to the field of verbal or written language.41 What is more important to the discussion of unnaturalness in comics, however, is one aspect unique in comics: the division of the story into different panels separated by blank spaces, the so-called gutter. The gutter stands for a shift in time or space or both. In the panels the reader is presented with moments in a sequence, which is continuous in a comic’s storyworld. To become understandable it requires closure by the reader.42 In contrast, the film medium for instance – although technically also a series of still images – creates the illusion of motion through projection, providing a viewer with longer continuous sequences of the storyworld, at the same time providing more detail because of their photographic nature.43 As a result, comics artists need to be much more economic than directors or novelists, having to provide a convincing depiction of a storyworld in a small number of ‘moments,’ 38

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40 41 42

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Groensteen, System, 6. Most other theorists agree, cf. Eisner, Comics, McCloud, Chute, and Schüwer. Cf. Ryan, Marie-Laure, “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology”, in: Jan Christoph Meister (ed.), Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, Berlin/New Nork 2005, 1–23, 19. Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, 30–5, 209–38, and throughout. Ryan, “Foundations”, 9. Ibid. Cf. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 60–2. As Lubomír Doleˇzel points out, such ‘gaps’ which have to be filled in are to a lesser degree a characteristic of all “[f]inite texts, the only texts that humans are capable of producing.” Finite texts always construct incomplete worlds and are thus always full of gaps. (Doleˇzel, Heterocosmica, 169). In comics, however, this phenomenon is much more pronounced. Obviously the latter does not apply to animated films.

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i.e. panels. As a result panels often ‘freeze’ the most visually striking pose of a continuous motion or suggest movement by other means such as motion lines or simultaneously showing multiple stages of a single movement in one panel.44 Another, for the purpose of examining logical impossibilities in comics even more important point, derives out of the sparsity of the information provided: not only is closure achieved only in the mind of the reader, causal and temporal relations between different panels also have to be established by the reader: Comics is a genre founded on reticence. Not only do the silent and immobile images lack the illusionist power of the filmic image, but their connections, far from producing continuity that mimics reality, offer the reader a story that is full of holes, which appear as gaps in the meaning.45

The reader’s part in the reading process is the crux when asking for logical impossibility, as the reader constructs the logic behind the image sequence and ‘digs out’ the plot: “Comics, more than film, benefits from a collaboration of the readers: one tells them a story that they tell to themselves,” in legendary director Federico Fellini’s words.46 In comics, the reader establishes logical connections between panels based on the medium’s vocabulary: typical forms of transition from one panel to the next or elements of style such as frame shapes signifying dreams or remembrance are interpreted on the basis of narrative conventions, as well as the context provided.47 Thus, communication and reading techniques work differently in comics than in other media: whereas the ideal reader of a novel would imagine everything that she is told, possibly filling in a gap here and there, comics “makes us imagine everything other than what is actually shown.”48 Logical impossibilities thus also would have to be presented differently in the comics medium. As a number of theorists have noted, there seems to be an unwritten contract between the reader and the creators of a comic: the reader fills in the gaps, but she assumes that the storyworld is consistent and accessible based on what she knows (either from reality, comics or other narrative genres). To 44

45 46 47

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For a fuller exploration of how motion is depicted in individual panels cf. Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, 41–82. Groensteen, System, 10. Quoted in Groensteen, System, 11. I.e. if a character announces that he will go to another character’s house, a reader will assume that the house or living room depicted in the next panel is indeed the other character’s and that the new character is the owner. Oftentimes this is not stated explicitly in comics, whereas a prose text would be hard pressed not to state that this is character B’s house or that character B opens the door. Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre, quoted in Groensteen, System, 11.

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quote Groensteen once more: “the story is possibly full of holes, but it projects me into a world that is portrayed as consistent, and it is the continuity attributed to the fictional world that allows me to effortlessly fill in the gaps.”49 As a result the reader can be misled in a number of ways: contexts can be left out, making the narrative confusing or estranging, even though the narrative might not be unnatural according to the above definition – the lack of chronology and jump between three generations that essentially all look more or less identical in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth might serve as such an example. The reader’s role of constructing the logical sequence of a story can be employed by the creators of the comic to guide a reader from one moment to the next, as well as to confuse, mislead and estrange her. When a transition between panels is linked with a (double) page break it can most effectively be used to upset the reader’s expectation. Indeed, in the case of a graphically immediately apparent instance of unexpected events, such a transition needs to be linked to the page break, because of the visual simultaneity of the images on the page or ‘tableau’: whereas sentences are read sequentially, one at a time, the images on a page are perceived – if not with all their intricacies and details – almost instantaneously, in a “synthetic global vision.”50 Any visual signals that are not supposed to be immediately apparent thus have to be either put on the following double page or presented in a way that necessitates a closer look. Two pages from Frank Miller’s Sin City will serve as an example of the former: Copying a filmic technique, Miller shows part of a room from the top down, slowly ‘pulling out’ (figure 1a). Only the heart-shaped bed is visible, the rest of the room is cloaked in darkness.51 Drawing on his (learned) knowledge of filmic techniques and rules, the reader expects the bed to stand in a gigantic room (possibly a Honeymoon Suite) which extends significantly in all directions – only to turn the page and learn that he has been misled and that the bed, in fact, fills almost the entire room (figure 1b). The two conflicting space dimensions – the implied huge dimension of the first page and 49 50

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Groensteen, System, 11. Groensteen, System, 19. Cf. also Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, 161: “Die Panels einer Seite (und im Grunde sogar einer Doppelseite) werden stets sowohl sequentiell als auch simultan wahrgenommen” [The panels of a page (or in fact a double page) are always perceived both sequentially and simultaneously]. My translation, emphasis in original. On the influence of film on comics see Eisner, Will, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist, New York/London 2008, 71–3.

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Figure 1a: Frank Miller. Sin City.

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Figure 1b: Frank Miller. Sin City.

the claustrophobic dimensions on the second page – reflect the protagonist’s feelings of limitless possibilities upon finding his “goddess” in the first tableau, and the crashing down of these hopes upon finding her dead the same night. The basis of comics narration sketched out above confronts artists and writers with a more fundamental problem, should they attempt to create ‘logically impossible’ scenarios: since readers look for a logical plot based on the assumption of a consistent world they may pick a natural explanation rather than noticing logical breaks intended in the text, thus overlooking or naturalizing narrative breaks and logical impossibilities without even a willful effort, as described by Rüdiger Heinze in the case of first-person paraleptic narration.52 To give an example, a comics artist might have a hard time 52

“First-person paraleptic narrators are more easily naturalized than one would initially think, possibly because the readers’ capacities and anthropological need for naturalizing/narrativizing whatever is peculiar about a story is potentially unlimited. As Phelan remarks, he is ‘struck by the power of the interpretative habit to preserve the mimetic.’” Heinze, Rüdiger, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, in: Narrative, 16, 2008, Nr. 3, 293.

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graphically expressing the contradiction ‘it is raining, it is not raining,’ since the gutter between panels would likely lead readers to the interpretation that it had simply stopped raining. More experimental comics, such as those coming out of the underground comix movement, frequently play with the limitations of the genre. Richard McGuire’s six-page comic “Here,” for instance, attempts to collapse time in the space of a comic page by showing different moments in time ranging from 500,957,406,073 B.C. to 2033 A.D. in the same geographical space. The comic jumps back and forth in time between panels and sometimes shows up to four different years in the same panel (figure 2).53 Yet the effect of this to me does not seem particularly estranging. In all examples there always remains a spatial separation (or safe zone) not only between the panels but also through the panel borders with which the various glimpses into another time are set off from each other. “Here” depicts temporally separate events within the same panel, demonstrating the amazing power of comics to engage in this kind of play while remaining relatively orderly and non-estranging. The astonishingly stable lines around the panels and insets manage to keep the space-time relation intact, a relation which is further strengthened by the dates provided in the panels and insets.54 The most common form of playing with sequence and logical connections is probably the logical non-sequitur, which Scott McCloud recognizes as a distinct category of transition from one frame to the next.55 Of course here again, closure and naturalization set in. McCloud addresses this issue as follows: Is it possible for any sequence of panels to be totally unrelated to each other? Personally I don’t think so. No matter how dissimilar one image may be to another, there is a kind of alchemy at work in the space between panels which can help us find meaning or resonance in even the most jarring of combinations. Such transitions may not make “sense” in any traditional way, but still a relationship of some sort will 53

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McGuire, Richard, “Here”, in: Ivan Brunetti (ed.), An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, New Haven 2006, 88–93. In Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware uses a similar juxtaposition of different times. Ware’s experiment is ultimately more effective, because he uses the tableau to create one big image of the storyworld, while showing various stages in the building of a house or a time before that house had been built in the individual panels, while inserting elements of the narrative ‘present’ into them: the kids playing hide-and-seek imagining how it would have been to try to hide behind “an Indian on horseback”; Ware, Chris, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, New York 2000, n.p. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 74.

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Figure 2: Richard McGuire. “Here” (1st page).

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inevitably develop. By creating a sequence with two or more images, we are endowing them with a single overriding identity, and forcing the viewer to consider them as a whole.56

While I tend to agree with McCloud, some sequences are so disjunctive that it is impossible to interpret them in any way that might still be associated with classical elements of narrativity such as plot. On the other hand, one can of course still judge the comic on a purely aesthetic or symbolic level and derive some meaning out of it. Robert Crumb’s “Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics” serves as a good example of this effect (figure 3).57 A connection between panels exists in the drawing style (“super modernistic” – a postmodern pastiche of modernist stereotypes), as well as on the content level – in the recurrence of various objects, such as musical notes or (female) body parts. There is, however, no plot, which is of course the whole point of the piece: a parody of high modernist obscurantism. This extreme example of logically disruptive comics is, in my opinion, representative of the type of logical ‘peculiarities’ one is most likely to encounter in comics. As remarked at the beginning of this section, ‘logical impossibilities’ are hard to find or easily explained away in comics. Due to the way comics are received and interpreted by the reader, other more proper ‘logically impossible scenarios’ in the comics medium are extremely rare, potentially problematic to create and easily naturalized as a part of a generic or fictional encyclopedia.58 Instances such as Mr. Spot who “borrows” money from himself “in the future” by hanging a fishing line into a later panel, achieve their estranging effect as much from their formal experimentation with medial laws and reading habits as from their impossibility.59

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Ibid., 73. Crumb, Robert, “Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics”, in: Robert Crumb / Peter Poplaski, The R. Crumb Handbook, London 2005. While not a comic, one instance from the TV series The Simpsons comes to mind. When Bart complains about the lack of logic in an animated cartoon, Lisa tells Bart: “Oh Bart, cartoons don’t have to be 100 % realistic.” As she speaks, Homer walks past the window, while simultaneously sitting on his couch. Due to Lisa’s comment and the over-the-top humor often employed in the show this seems not particularly estranging or hard to naturalize. “Boy-Scoutz ’n the Hood”, The Simpsons, Season 5, Episode 8, dir. Jeffrey Lynch, 20th Century Fox Television 1993. Feazell, Matt, “The Incredible Mr. Spot”, quoted in McCloud, Understanding Comics, 105.

Figure 3: Robert Crumb. “Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics” (page 2 and 3 of a 3-page comic strip).

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5. Estrangement and the Guiding of Reader Expectations In the fifth part of my essay, I want to focus on some examples of extreme narration, astonishing storyworlds, and breaks with classical narrative models in comics which are not part of the above definition of unnaturalness. However, at least some of them should be included in the broader definition of unnaturalness I argue for. As I have shown above, there are many instances in which comics do not represent a natural (i.e. physically possible or realist) scenario, but instead follow a medial convention which is so established and expected that it does not cause estrangement. As I will argue, the breaking of one of these conventions, even though it might technically re-establish the physically ‘natural,’ may in some cases seem ‘less right,’ and more estranging to a reader than a realist scenario. Pascal Lefèvre’s observation of the problems of comic book adaptations might serve as a starting point: “Real locations often look too ordinary and are just not adjusted to the fictive and graphic world of a comic book.”60 Similarly, a screen adaptation in which the actor playing Superman openly uses a device to fly would be far more upsetting to a viewer – despite being more natural in the above sense – and the viewer would certainly search for an explanation for this transgression of the laws of the storyworld. In the following, I want to explore a number of possibilities of estrangement through violations of storyworld parameters. Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ‘defamiliarization,’61 which Jan Alber draws on when defining the effect of unnaturalness, can serve to show how comics can play with their readers, based, among other things, on their fictional encyclopedias (or narrative frames), by upsetting the narrative principles of the medium. According to Shklovsky, in everyday life “perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.”62 “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”63 I would argue that it is not important why the objects Shklovsky discusses are familiar: they could be the everyday objects Shklovsky mentions, but could also be part of a long-standing fictional encyclopedia such as a generic model or a character, setting or storyworld law in a long-standing series. 60

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Lefèvre, Pascal, “Imcompatible Visual Ontologies? The Problematic Adaptation of Drawn Images”, in: Ian Gordon / Mark Jancovich / Matthew P. McAllister (eds.), Film and Comic Books, Jackson 2007, 1–12, 10. Shklovsky, Viktor, “Art as Technique”, in: Lee T. Lemon / Marion J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln 1965, 3–24. Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”, 11. Ibid., 12.

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The term “long-standing” is central in this context, since it is important to note that a comic first has to establish its own encyclopedia or establish realworld parameters as applying to its storyworld over a longer period, such as a series or the major part of a graphic novel, to be able to evoke an estranging effect by breaking its own storyworld rules. The storyworld of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for instance, is by no means identical to that of a realist novel. The main part of the plot takes place at the end of the nineteenth century, where Miss Mina Murray (formerly Mrs. Harker) of Dracula fame assembles a secret group of government agents with such notables as Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde. The comic abounds with literary allusions, ranging from Dickens to Wilde, and the second volume, which features a battle against a Martian invasion, draws strongly on H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. There is, however, one real-world parameter that is enforced throughout the book (and that is also suggested by the style placing it within the ‘adventure’ genre): people age and die. Book 3, The Black Dossier is set in 1950s Britain.64 Again we encounter Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain, the two main characters of the series. Not only have they not aged; Allan, who is first introduced as his own son, is at least thirty years younger than he was in the first two books. While in the case of Mina one could assume that her agelessness has something to do with her history – Dracula is never explicitly mentioned but nevertheless a strong presence in the book, the most visible sign of his past existence being Mina’s badly scarred neck – the explanation for Allan’s new found youth is withheld until very late in the volume. What is more, other characters constantly refer to the fact that both Allan and Mina should by now be either very old or dead, as are all the other characters from the first two novels. If not for this constant reminder of the unnaturalness of their curious state within the laws of the storyworld, we would likely have accepted the characters’ immunity to age, as we do with all the protagonists in long-running superheroes comics, who perpetually stay in their twenties while the world around them constantly changes.65 The Black Dossier also features a number of formal experimentations: different paper types are used in the book to represent pages of the storyworld “Black Dossier,” a collection of secret documents the protagonists steal in the story, reflecting the assembled nature of this dossier on a tangible, as well 64

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Moore, Allan / O’Neill, Kevin, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier [Volume 3], La Jolla 2008. In his examination of Superman’s resistance to “consumption” Umberto Eco has in this context spoken of a “temporal paradox.” Eco, “Myth”, 116.

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as a visual level. Even more unusual, 3D paper anaglyph ‘glasses’ are included in the book, allowing the reader to transcend the two-dimensional nature of the comic page and view the last pages in ‘3D.’ Hence, the comic is able to offer a different vision of “the blazing world,” to which the protagonists flee in the end. On top of this, the blazing world also includes alternative versions of the images: depending on which eye the reader closes she will see H. P. Lovecraft’s creation Nyarlathotep in one of his disguises as a man or as a “Great Old One,” speaking either in normal letters or hieroglyphs.66 Owing to a mix of conservativeness as regards ‘their’ heroes’ traits and abilities and an obsession with minute details (or in Lefèvre’s less kind words an “almost autistic-savant knowledge of a particular superhero comic book series”),67 readers of many long-running mainstream comic series can be estranged by what would at first look like minor details. A full page drawing of Captain America which came out shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9–11 shows Captain America with a grim look on his face and a badly damaged shield with two giant holes in his hands.68 While it might not seem particularly unusual to the uninitiated, it nevertheless plays with a ‘law’ of the storyworld: as any reader of the series knows, Captain America’s shield is indestructible. The two holes in his shield and his battered but defiant look thus become a metaphor for a shaken American self-image – the image of a country hurt in an equally ‘impossible’ way through the destruction of the symbolic and supposedly robust Two Towers.69 Not only storyworld laws are subject to such experiments, however, but also the major characters themselves. In many long-standing comic series, characters develop only very slowly, if at all, remaining for the most part remarkably static. This applies both to a character’s traits (the agelessness of superheroes mentioned earlier), and to her motivations and behavior.70 Thus a reader’s expectation forms over time, as the fictional encyclopedia manifests certain traits for a character. This can be used to create an estranging ef66 67 68

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Moore / O’Neill, Black Dossier, n.p. [4th page from the end]. Lefèvre, “Incompatible Visual Ontologies?”, 5. Miller, Frank, No title, Heroes: The World’s Greatest Super Hero Creators Honor the World’s Greatest Heroes, New York 2001, n.p. Cf. our slightly different argument in Fehrle, Johannes / Heinze, Rüdiger, “‘Waiting for that other show to drop’: Der 11. September in Comicbüchern”, in: Ingo Irsigler / Christoph Jürgensen (eds.), Nine Eleven: Ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001, Heidelberg 2008, 228. An expression of this stasis can be found in superhero comics’ tendency to periodically retell their protagonist’s ‘story of origin,’ in order to remain accessible to new readers.

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fect. In the late 1980s two story lines in the Batman saga came out which significantly altered Batman’s portrayal. While Batman had been a shining superhero following World War II owing especially to an abominable 1960s TV series, he now became a darker and more haunted character in the skillful hands of Frank Miller. Aptly titled The Dark Knight Returns the graphic novel portrays an aged Batman who, ten years after retiring, is driven back into his ‘superhero’ existence by his inner demons.71 Not only is he physically aged, slow and hurting while combating the forces of crime, he is, in a cynic comment on the Reagan era policy, virtually indistinguishable from them:72 he constantly tries to inflict as much pain on his adversaries as possible without killing them, and, even more drastically, creates his own antagonists: TwoFace has been driven entirely over the edge by Bruce Wayne’s attempts to restore his face and thus cure his insanity, while, even more cynically, the Joker is thrown back into his old, mad habits after hearing of Batman’s return on TV. He thus regains his ‘humanity’ (for all it is worth) from a vegetable-like state in Arkham Asylum, complementing his ‘Other’, the Dark Knight. The details that Robin now is a girl and that Batman fights his long-term ally Superman in the comic only add to the comic’s estranging effect.73 One of the next major installments in the Batman series, Arkham Asylum, continued to rewrite the Dark Knight in the same vein. Not only is the notion of a half-insane Batman even more openly pronounced, this time by Batman himself: “I’m afraid the Joker may be right. […] I’m afraid that when I walk through those Asylum gates […]. It’ll be just like coming home”74; the drawing style of the comic adds to its eerie, estranging effect. It is often hard 71

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Miller, Frank / Janson, Klaus / Varley, Lynn, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, New York 1996. Cf. Frank Miller’s comment on his “Dark Knight” saga: “Whatever stories I write have to do with my reactions to what’s going on around me; with the world I live in right now, with 1980s America – which is a very frightening, silly … uhm … place … and it’s often silly and frightening at the same time and I hope Dark Knight is often silly and frightening at the same time.” Comic Book Confidential, dir. Ron Mann, Cinecom Pictures 1989. Frank Miller relates the outrage his comic created within the comics field when it first appeared, once again stressing the conservativeness of long-term fans and some comics creators: “In the mainstream media [The Dark Knight Returns] got a great deal of attention – positive and negative, mostly positive; within the comics industry it seemed to be the closest thing to a bar fight anybody could ask for […] it was quite controversial. I actually got called up by former Batman writers saying I ruined their character.” Comic Book Confidential. Morrison, Grant / McKean, Dave, Batman: Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, New York 2004, n.p.

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to tell what is being depicted, as the artwork is unusually abstract in places, sometimes to the point of surrendering some of its narrative potential, the words are few. As a result it is difficult to evaluate what is happening or if something is really happening in the storyworld or merely a depiction of the inner world of one of the characters. Throughout the comic the lines between sanity and insanity, reality, dreaming and hallucination are blurred. The intention the Joker has in forcing Batman to admit his insanity and remaining in the asylum is mirrored on a formal level: the images shift not only from the depiction of the asylum to Batman’s inner world, but the story of the asylum’s founder Arkham is also underlying the whole narrative – sometimes literally, when two levels of non-simultaneous action are depicted on the same page – or rather in the same space, in a way singular to the comics medium (figure 4). The story blurs the two plot lines of Batman’s entrance into the asylum to test his sanity against the Joker and that of Dr. Arkham, who descends into insanity when his family gets killed by one of his patients. Dave McKean’s intense artwork reflects this struggle so well that on a first reading the plot is at times barely accessible in all its details.75 A particularly effective and media-specific way of evoking estrangement in comics is through engaging images and words in a conflict, thus sending out a double message to the reader. As Hillary Chute reminds us: “comics contain ‘double vision’ in their structural hybridity, their double (but nonsynthesized) narratives of words and images. In one frame of comics, the image and the words may mean differently, and thus the work sends out doublecoded narratives or semantics.”76 This double-coding can be used for a media-specific case of ‘extreme narration,’ with which Art Spiegelman experiments in a number of strips in his anthology Breakdowns and which he later returns to in more subtle ways in his seminal Holocaust biography Maus.77 In the reprint of Breakdowns Spiegelman reuses the images of one 75

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As Jeff Thoss pointed out after reading an earlier version of this essay, this depiction can be seen as an instance of psychological realism. Although psychological realism would not seem out of place in a Modernist novel, it is not part of the convention of comics, and thus in this context seems estranging. Chute, “Comics as Literature?”, 459. Spiegelman, Art, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@§*!, London 2008. Concerning an instance in Maus in which the image contradicts and corrects Vladek’s narrative of Auschwitz, Jeanne C. Ewert writes: “While Vladek’s own voice speaks every word, Spiegelman’s drawings tell the son’s version of his father’s story. […] The visual narrative […] contradicts Vladek’s oral narrative, and gives the reader an important clue as to how the son assesses the relative merits of his father’s account and the accepted truths of the historical record.” Ewert, Jeanne C., “Reading Visual Narrative: Art Spiegelman’s Maus”, in: Narrative, 8, 2000, Nr. 1, 88–90.

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Figure 4: Grant Morrison, Dave McKean. Arkham Asylum.

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Figure 5: Art Spiegelman. “Form and Content”.

of his earlier strips, but alters the words significantly. The original, fairly straightforward seven-panel strip, “The Insult that made a Man out of ‘Mac!’,” tells the story of a bigger boy stealing a toy from little Art and spitting Art’s mother in the face after she attempts to threaten the other boy. While there are some graphic exaggerations, they are not particularly remarkable within the language of comics. The same sequence of images gains a different quality, however, when Spiegelman replaces the original words with an excerpt from Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique” (figure 5). Spiegelman’s comic serves as a case in point demonstration of Shklovsky’s theories: Spiegelman visually underlines the intentional defamiliarization by ‘desynchronizing’ the images themselves through a superimposition of pictures from other stories, as well as the creation of a fuzzy look through shifting and turning the different layers of color producing Zipatone. The form does in

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this instance mirror the content, as the strip’s title, “Form and Content,” suggests, despite its seemingly unrelated levels.78 Other examples from Breakdowns, such as the ‘story’ “The Malpractice Suite,” are more extreme in their formal experimentation. In a way, these experiments are remarkable mainly for their experimental nature. They lose most of their narrativity, a flaw Art Spiegelman himself suggests in his Afterword to the recent reissue of Breakdowns: I remember babbling to [Robert Crumb] about my incipient ideas of what comics might do (“Panels can be inset into bigger panels to show different points in space simultaneously! Repeating panels can freeze the flow of time! Time is an illusion that can be shattered in comics! Showing the same scene from different angles freezes it in time by turning the page into a diagram – an orthographic projection!”) and wandering off to nearby Golden Gate Park to drop acid.79

There is one final aspect of estrangement in the comics medium that I want to mention. Often comics visualize / ‘literalize’ thoughts and metaphors by presenting them as images without making explicit that the depicted image does not reflect external ‘reality.’ In Art Spiegelman’s Maus the piles of corpses from Auschwitz suddenly lying on the floor of his studio reflect the character’s feelings.80 In Brian Talbot’s The Tale of One Bad Rat the main character Helen’s decision to confront her abusive father is depicted in a comparable way. She is depicted as quite literally ‘breaking through the wall of silence’ with a scream, deciding not to be victimized any longer (figure 6):81 Helen screams and the world seems to shatter like a piece of glass. Similar instances are found in a number of places in The Tale of One Bad Rat. The first page of the comic, for instance, depicts Helen jumping in front of a subway train, then sitting in the place she was sitting in before – a ‘literalized’ depiction of her fantasy of killing herself, as a result of her feeling of guilt for being abused as a child.

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It is worth noting that the original plot (bigger kid steals bat from smaller kid, who runs to his mother screaming; bigger kid demeans mother, smaller kid resumes playing with the bat, while his mother sits in shock) can be reconstructed from the images, providing an illustration of the narrative power of comics imagery that Spiegelman had earlier thematized (in the strip “Little Signs”). Spiegelman, Art, “An Afterword”, Breakdowns, n.p. Spiegelman, Art, The Complete Maus, London etc. 2003, 201–03. Talbot, Brian, The Tale of One Bad Rat, London 2008.

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Figure 6: Brian Talbot. The Tale of One Bad Rat.

6. Conclusion and Outlook As I have demonstrated, estrangement in comics can be evoked through a number of different means, which are not necessarily connected to unnaturalness. Vice versa, unnaturalness when understood as a physically or logically impossible scenario is not necessarily the cause of estrangement in comics. Some of the techniques of evoking estrangement are directly related to the nature of the medium, such as estrangement through graphic abstraction in Arkham Asylum, the non-synchronized juxtaposition of words and images in some strips from Breakdowns and the use of ‘visualization’ of thoughts, feelings and metaphors in Talbot’s The Tale of One Bad Rat or Spiegelman’s Maus. While ‘physical impossibilities’ do not usually result in estrangement, ‘logical impossibilities’ are extremely rare in the comics medium. Examples such as Robert Crumb’s use of images that resist any obvious logical combination into a plot are much more common. As a final point I want to attempt to arrive at some more general conclusions regarding the unnatural, deriving from my specific look at comics. As I have argued, not all fiction is bound by the same parameters of naturalness developed with reference to the realist paradigms usually taken as the norm by narratologists. What Brian Richardson remarks with reference to traditional narratology is also an important aspect to keep in mind in an intermedial and unnatural field: Since the time of Aristotle, narrative theory has had a pronounced mimetic bias. Fictional works are largely treated as if they were lifelike reproductions of human

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beings and human actions and could be analyzed according to real world notions of consistency, probability, individual and group psychology, and correspondence with accepted beliefs about the world. […] An insistently mimetic narrative theory, however, is largely useless when faced with the rich tradition of works by nonor antimimetic authors.82

Since many of the instances of estrangement discussed above happen – at least in part – on the level of the image, they are not only specific to comics as a visual medium, but also need an expanded understanding of narratology. Thierry Groensteen’s critique of the mono-mediality of the field of narratology at large thus brings up points that are also of relevance for unnatural narratology, if it is to include – as this collection of articles suggests – more than ‘classic’ prose: [N]arratology suffers from having developed in reference only to literature, when its field of natural investigation is in reality the narrative genre, and should no longer exclude the art of visual stories. […] The widening of research into comics (and into the photo-novel) can only lead to the necessity of modifying or revitalizing certain concepts.83

The current concept of unnaturalness with its link to physical and logical laws (and thus the idea of mimesis as natural) needs to be reconsidered. Many of the storyworlds we encounter in both experimental novels and in comics are storyworlds that are governed by other laws and, more importantly, ones in which naturalness, when linked to ‘real world laws,’ is in many ways much less pronounced, as storyworld laws and encyclopedias differ significantly from real-world laws and encyclopedias. Accordingly, I want to suggest some issues that should be taken into consideration for a broader, transmedial definition of the unnatural. I want to start by quoting Lubomír Doleˇzel, who makes an important distinction in his theory of possible worlds: By a ‘possible world’ […] we do not mean only a physically possible world. Countless worlds which are physically impossible are numbered among the possible worlds. […] Physically possible worlds form a proper subset of all possible worlds; or, to make the contrast somewhat sharper, we might say that the set of physically possible worlds forms a proper subset of all logically possible worlds. […] In other words, physically impossible worlds are logically possible. Only worlds containing or implying contradictions are logically impossible or impossible simpliciter […]. By using a modal criterion to distinguish natural and supernatural worlds, we avoid

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Richardson, Brian, “Theses on Unnatural Narratology”, 2009, http://www.nor disk.au.dk/forskningscentre/nrl/unnatural/brtheses (last accessed July 15, 2009). Groensteen, System, 160.

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ontological commitment and subjective beliefs and skirt changes in scientific knowledge and interpretation of laws of nature.84

This quotation suggests that physically impossible worlds that are logically possible are not particularly hard to naturalize for a reader. This observation sheds some light on the potential of physically impossible worlds to cause estrangement, which I would claim is usually not high and/or lasting enough to warrant them a ‘permanent ticket’ to unnaturalness. Doleˇzel’s last sentence especially touches an important point: by tying a definition of unnaturalness to an ontological view of the world such as physical possibility or impossibility we are in danger of misreading texts that precede a certain paradigm shift, say the change from a Medieval belief in a world inhabited by witches that could fly to a more enlightened world in which such supernatural creatures do not exist for most people. What is more, several findings of quantum physics in the twentieth century, to choose a non-literary example, although describing the (current) “laws governing [or rather describing] the physical world” seem much stranger than fiction, and would thus certainly be classified as unnatural and estranging by most readers when presented in a work of fiction. In his article, Alber situates the naturalization of the unnatural in the cognitive abilities of the recipient. Why should we not also locate both the natural and the unnatural in the reader’s individual perception, which in turn is based on his experience, world views and encyclopedia both of the ‘real world’ and fiction (as Alber suggests in some of his reading strategies),85 but without the implicit preference given to the natural by defining the unnatural as a breaking of cognitive frames? Such an approach, which starts from the aspect of estrangement and defines the unnatural in reference to estrangement, rather than the other way around, would have the benefit of being able to more easily account for changes in reading habits and literary trends without introducing a third category of the naturalized unnatural. Furthermore, a limitation of the category of unnaturalness to texts that have an estranging effect, as suggested by Brian Richardson in his contribution to this volume, seems helpful to avoid confusing differentiations between estranging and non-estranging unnaturalness (i.e. naturalized and not yet naturalized unnaturalness). What is more, I believe that an analysis of the unnatural should, as Richardson suggests, start with an inductive approach: “we begin with the literature that exists and then go on to construct our the84

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Doleˇzel, Heterocosmica, p. 115–6. Of course there are, ever so often, changes in the theory of logics as well. Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, esp. strategies 2 and 3.

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ories around it,”86 rather than with a prescriptive approach linked to extratextual laws. We should, I believe, start by examining estranging texts and ask why they are estranging, rather than look at texts that go against certain laws and see whether we consider them estranging. To be sure, such an approach will find many examples of estranging scenarios which are either logically or physically impossible (although I assume there will be less of the latter), but it will also include other instances of estrangement, some of which are, as I have tried to show, media-specific and thus hard to grasp with a definition developed primarily with prose texts in mind. This more flexible approach would have the additional benefit of being able to account not only for trends, and changes in reading habits, but, more substantially, would also be less inhibited by changing perceptions of the world around us, and consequently allow for more self-reflexive diachronic readings of texts. It would also be able to more easily take into account generic and media-specific encyclopedias. In its attempts to move away from naturalness as the underlying principle of all storyworlds, the unnatural should, in my opinion, take into account more strongly the unconventional and the unexpected, which in a number of instances are more relevant causes for estrangement than a mere violation of a physical law. As Gilles Deleuze points out, “there is nothing more unsettling than the continual movement of something that seems fixed.”87 What seems fixed will certainly include some logical or physical laws we take for granted in our everyday life, yet it is by no means limited to them.88 As a result, the unnatural should be defined not with reference to laws of physics, but rather as a response to a narrative that goes against a (pre)established (cognitive) framework. Such a model of unnaturalness, defined with reference to estrangement or cognitive frames, would necessarily have to take into account personal expectations and reactions by individual readers, based on their literacy of different media and their unwritten laws, and the reader’s general belief system. Although these factors as relating to an individual reader are almost impossible to reflect in a (non-empirical) analysis, we should at least keep in mind the effect a certain literary technique or element of the storyworld can have on a reader unacquainted with it (even though another reader might regard it as non-estranging and conventional based on that reader’s experience). When 86 87

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Richardson, “Theses”. Deleuze, Gilles, quoted in Campbell, Neil, The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age, Lincoln/London 2008, 1. Although it seems obvious, it might perhaps be worth noting that a huge difference exists between breaking physical laws in the real world and in fictional texts, the former being of course far more difficult and unsettling.

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taking this into account the question of whether or not a certain technique, such as second-person narration, should be regarded as naturalized could be answered or rather rephrased, since the answer will depend on whether a reader encounters this specific technique for the first time or has studied it for a long time. These concerns about the current definition of the unnatural do not mean that the main points of the previous examination of unnatural narratives become irrelevant. Approaches like Jan Alber’s attempt to define readers’ strategies to come to terms with estranging narratives should be easily integrable into such a modified definition. The study of unnatural narrative should, however, keep in mind Brian Richardson’s words: “Unnatural narratology scorns the goal of universal narratological categories that are able to comprehend fictional and nonfictional texts; we assert that what is needed is a poetics of natural narratives and an anti-poetics of unnatural narratives.”89

7. Bibliography Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96. –, “Unnatural Narratives”, The Literary Encyclopedia, 2009, http://www.litencyc.com/ php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=7202 (last accessed November 23, 2009). Bamberg, Michael, “Narrative Discourse and Identities”, in: Jan Christoph Meister (ed.), Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, Berlin/New York 2005, 213–37. “Boy-Scoutz ’n the Hood”, The Simpsons, Season 5, Episode 8, dir. Jeffrey Lynch, 20th Century Fox Television 1993. Campbell, Neil, The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age, Lincoln/London 2008. Chute, Hillary, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative”, in: PMLA, 123, 2008, Nr. 2, 452–65. Comic Book Confidential, dir. Ron Mann, Cinecom Pictures 1988. Crumb, Robert, Mystic Funnies, 2, San Francisco 1999. –, “Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics”, in: Robert Crumb / Peter Poplaski, The R. Crumb Handbook, London 2005. Doleˇzel, Lubomír, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore/London 1998. Eco, Umberto, “The Myth of Superman”, in: The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Bloomington/London 1979, 107–24. Eisner, Will, A Contract with God: A Novel, New York/London 2006. –, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist, rev. ed., New York/London 2008. –, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist, rev. ed., New York/London 2008. 89

Richardson, “Theses”.

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Ewert, Jeanne C., “Reading Visual Narrative: Art Spiegelman’s Maus”, in: Narrative, 8, 2000, Nr. 1, 87–103. Fehrle, Johannes / Heinze, Rüdiger, “‘Waiting for that other show to drop’: Der 11. September in Comicbüchern”, in: Ingo Irsigler / Christoph Jürgensen (eds.), Nine Eleven: Ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001, Heidelberg 2008, 219–49. Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London/New York 1996. Groensteen, Thierry, The System of Comics, Jackson 2007. Heinze, Rüdiger, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, in: Narrative, 16, 2008, Nr. 3, 279–97. Herman, David, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln/London 2002. Kakalios, James, The Physics of Superheroes, London 2006. Lefèvre, Pascal, “Incompatible Visual Ontologies? The Problematic Adaptation of Drawn Images”, in: Ian Gordon / Mark Jancovich / Matthew P. McAllister (eds.), Film and Comic Books, Jackson 2007, 1–12. Lopez, Paul, Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book, Philadelphia 2009. McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York 1993. McGuire, Richard, “Here”, in: Ivan Brunetti (ed.), An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, New Haven 2006, 88–93. Meister, Jan Christoph (ed.), Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, Berlin/New York 2005. Miller, Frank / Janson, Klaus / Varley, Lynn, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, New York 1996. –, No title, Heroes: The World’s Greatest Super Hero Creators Honor the World’s Greatest Heroes, New York 2001, n.p. –, Sin City, Milwaukee 1993. Moore, Allan / O’Neill, Kevin, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier [Volume 3], La Jolla 2008. Morrison, Grant / McKean, Dave, Batman: Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, New York 2004. Richardson, Brian, “Theses on Unnatural Narratology”, 2009, http://www.nor disk.au.dk/forskningscentre/nrl/unnatural/brtheses (last accessed July 15, 2009). –, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Columbus 2006. Ryan, Marie-Laure, “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology”, in: Jan Christoph Meister (ed.), Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, Berlin/New York 2005, 1–23. –, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington 1991. Saïd, Edward, “Homage to Joe Sacco”, in: Joe Sacco, Palestine, London 2003, i-v. Schüwer, Martin, Wie Comics Erzählen: Grundriss einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen Literatur, Trier 2008. Shklovsky, Viktor, “Art as Technique”, in: Lee T. Lemon / Marion J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln 1965, 3–24. Spiegelman, Art, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@§*!, London 2008. –, The Complete Maus, London etc. 2003. Talbot, Brian, The Tale of One Bad Rat, London 2008.

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Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Cleveland etc. 1973. Trushell, John M., “American Dreams of Mutants: The X-Men – ‘Pulp’ Fiction, Science Fiction, and Superheroes”, The Journal of Popular Culture, 38, 2004, Nr. 1, 149–68. Ware, Chris, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, New York 2000.

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Andrea Moll (Freiburg)

Natural or Unnatural? Linguistic Deep Level Structures in AbE: A Case Study of New South Wales Aboriginal English1

1. Introduction In the absence of a writing system and hence written documentation, orally based cultures have always heavily relied on the intergenerational transmission of knowledge via storytelling. When compared to literate societies, the socio-cultural function that traditional stories assume is thus arguably of heightened importance in those communities: Stories do not only constitute an important means for the cultural initiation of children and adolescents, but – maybe even more importantly – allow the general perpetuation of cultural core concepts and their ongoing validity in the community’s everyday life. While at least some narratives of the vast pool of traditional Aboriginal stories have been published and thus become accessible for a wider audience, their meaning and deeper sense often remain obscure for a Western reader. More often than not, they are dismissed as “fairy tale stuff,”2 that is apt for the entertainment of children only. What makes a “serious” interpretation of traditional Aboriginal stories particularly problematic from a Western point of view is the fact that they often include references to mythological creatures and wondrous events. They thus often stretch the boundaries of what is considered to be physically and logically possible and thereby blur the distinction between fiction and reality. In addition, narratological variations of such seemingly “unnatural” elements in the sense of “physically or logi-

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2

This article is based on my unpublished master thesis entitled “Linguistic Surface and Deep Level Structures in Aboriginal English: A Case Study of New South Wales Aboriginal English”, which was supervised by Prof. Dr. Christian Mair of the University of Freiburg and Prof. Dr. Peter Mühlhäusler of the University of Adelaide, both of whom I want to thank for their support. Klapproth, Danièle, Narrative as Social Practice in Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions, Berlin/New York 2004.

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cally impossible scenarios and events”3 are far from being limited to traditional Aboriginal storytelling. They also surface in contemporary oral histories detailing the vita of living Aboriginal persons, which could therefore count as modern Aboriginal stories. The aim of this paper is to provide a short introduction to modern urban Aboriginal storytelling as well as its underlying cultural concepts and to thereby question the universal validity of our understanding of natural vs. unnatural narrative in the sense that the latter has been used by Jan Alber4 in particular. In this context, I will basically argue in favor of taking cultural differences into account when assessing the “naturalness” or “unnaturalness” of narratives. To contextualize the current study from a linguistic point of view, the first part of this paper includes a general overview of the linguistic situation in Australia as well as a possible linguistic definition of Aboriginal English. In a second step, I will then discuss the question of whether the corpus that I analyzed in this study contains narratives that could be characterized as “unnatural”, taking seemingly unnatural elements and narrative strategies used by the informants into account. In order to embed the discussion into the socio-cultural context of which the narratives are a product, Dell Hymes’ model of the “Ethnography of Communication” will be applied to the data in order to contemplate discourse strategies, cognitive metaphors, Aboriginal story schemata and the Australian Indigenous genre of the so-called “life-story-thing”. In my opinion, it is a combination of these elements that constitutes the “Aboriginalness” of urban Aboriginal narratives.

2. The Linguistic Situation in Australia According to Norman B. Tindale’s linguistic map of Australia based on tribal boundaries in pre-colonial times, the original number of Australian Indigenous languages is estimated to have exceeded 250, with each colored field in the map actually representing one language. A report for the Australian Department of Environment and Heritage conducted in 1996 by McConvell and Thieberger,5 however, shows that the situation has seriously changed

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Alber, Jan, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Study, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 80. Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, 80. McConvell, Patrick / Thieberger, Nicholas, The State of Indigenous Languages in Australia, Second Technical Paper Series No. 2, A Report compiled for Environment Australia, Department of Environment and Heritage 2001.

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since the arrival of the colonizers at the end of the eighteenth century: The percentage of Australian Indigenous people speaking their ancestral language is said to have dropped from 100 % in 1800 to only 13 % in 1996, and the number of Australian Indigenous languages spoken fluently by all age groups has decreased by 90 %. All in all then, the report describes a deplorable situation of language death, which can hopefully be stopped by language maintenance and language revival programs currently under way in Australia. However, Mufwene6 points out that in settings such as in Australia, where the survival and maintenance of Indigenous languages was and is at stake, language contact does not only often lead to language death, but also to language birth. In the Australian context, the emergence of varieties of Aboriginal English (henceforth AbE), as well as the Australian Creoles spoken in the northern parts of Australia and in the Torres Straits can be considered as linguistic outcomes of the contact situation in colonial times.

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Mufwene, Salikoko S., “Language Birth and Death”, in: Annual Reviews Anthropology, 33, 2004, 202.

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Attempts to describe the linguistic relationship between AbE and the Australian Creoles remain, however, problematic, and there is little consensus when it comes to precisely defining “Aboriginal English” as a variety: Varieties of Aboriginal English range from something that is virtually identical to Standard Australian English in everything but accent, through to pure creole, which is so remote from Standard Australian English as to be mutually unintelligible […].7

Although there may be linguistic similarities between Australian Creoles and some varieties of AbE – especially those spoken in adjacent regions where we find a situation of ongoing linguistic contact – varieties of AbE are not necessarily the result of a process of decreolisation. In fact, research has not asserted the existence of a linguistically genetic post-creole continuum of the sort found in other Creole-speaking areas in the world: It is not clear, at the present stage of knowledge about Aboriginal English, whether a full cycle of pidginization-creolization-decreolization has occurred everywhere in Australia, including places where there is no trace of a Creole today. In many areas there may have been a transition from pidgin to a non-standard form of English closer to Standard Australian English without an intervening stage of creolization.8

Discrepancies in the diachronic process of their individual emergence as well as synchronic differences indicate that we are dealing with a high amount of linguistic heterogeneity. The label “Aboriginal English” therefore needs to be understood as a mere umbrella term referring to a number of regionally distinct varieties of English spoken by Australian Indigenous people. As a label, however, “Aboriginal English” assumes social importance in that the Aboriginal Languages association has come to regard varieties of AbE as well as Australian Creoles as modern Aboriginal languages expressing Aboriginal culture.9 This indicates that at least officially the Indigenous population of Australia believes that their ancestral languages are living on in modern varieties of AbE. Due to their structural closeness with mainstream Australian English, the influence of Indigenous substrate languages and therefore the “Aboriginalness” of varieties of English has been most heavily debated for the areas 7

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Burridge, Kate / Mulder, Jean, English in Australia and New Zealand: An Introduction to Its History, Structure and Use, Melbourne 1998, 287. Sandefur, John, “Modern Australian Aboriginal Languages: The Present State of Knowledge”, in: English World-Wide, 4, 1983, Nr. 1, 55. Sandefur, “Modern Australian Aboriginal Languages: The Present State of Knowledge”, 46.

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Eades (1981)10

often called “settled Australia”, which New South Wales forms an integral part of. However, it is exactly the “Aboriginalness” of urban New South Wales AbE on a “deeper” level of language, including pragmatic and cultural aspects, which is important in the context of this paper. 10

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According to Eades (1981), the word “jinung” is taken from an Australian Indigenous language spoken in Southeast Queensland and can be translated into English as “foot”.

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3. Natural or Unnatural Narratives? A linguist by training, I asked myself whether the oral narratives presented in the corpus11 can be subsumed under the label “unnatural” as used by Jan Alber.12 First of all, the corpus represents what linguists call “natural spoken data”, referring to the fact that the interviews and the stories included in them are a product of unplanned oral speech. The stories can also be seen as “natural” in that many linguists see oral narratives as directly related to cultural conceptualizations because they provide a widely-used means of “packaging reality”: According to Danièle Klapproth, schema-theoretical narratological research contends that stories from the oral tradition use narrative schemata that are prototypical of the culture of their origin. They are internalized by the members of this culture and constitute a powerful means of understanding the world. […] narrative practice creates conceptual worlds, worlds in which the members of a culture understand themselves and the people, things and events that surround them. Narrative practice, I maintained, creates and reiterates such structure of coherence and it is through such conceptions of how the world coheres that we are able to make sense of our human experience.13

As already mentioned in the introduction to this paper, the narratives, however, often contain elements that can be called “unnatural” in the sense of “physically or logically impossible scenarios and events”14 that deviate from our, that is Western, real-world frames. This would include e.g. encounters with mythical creatures like the often referred to Yuuri man who is not only conceived to be capable of understanding human speech, but also thought to have the same family structures as human beings, there- by alluding to a very anthropomorphic vision of nature and the spiritual world. 11

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The corpus I used in my study consists of interviews recorded by Frank Povah in 1990. His personal aim was to record the continued knowledge of Aboriginal mythological creatures and legends, including the well-known Yuurii man and Bunyip stories. In this context he interviewed 12 senior adults living in NSW whose mother tongue was a variety of English. To comply with Frank Povah’s wish that his informants be mentioned in order to give them credit, I want to thank them for making the data available for academic research by providing their names: Beryl Adams, Audrey Freeburn, Paul Gordon, Vivienne Griffin, Ray, Valda and Rita Keed, Nancy King, Glen Morries, Denny Riley, Beverly and Keith Smith as well as Joyce Williams. Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”. Klapproth, Narrative as Social Practice in Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions, 309. Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, 80.

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Transformations of human beings into mythical creatures and vice versa as illustrated in the examples taken from transcripts 7 and 10 may be thought to have an even more estranging effect: Example from transcript 7 429 PG: 435 (---) 436

437 =we would ALL walk over the SCRUB, 438 (---) 439 an:440 (---) 441 WHEN ’e disapPEARS INto the Other SIDE? 442

443 (think) this MAN would WALK out the scrub. Example from transcript 10 22 A: an’ as we’re DRIvin just on the OUTskirts of DUbbo i looked aCROSS at the23 (--) 24 were the (.) GRAVES of the BOYS were25 =an i started to ?CRY! an26 an my DAUghter said27 (--) 28 TO’ me not to CRY, 29 (--) (children in the background) 30 cause these TWO young kangaROOS had just HOpped over the other31 (--) 32 side of the ROAD an’33 (1.3) 34 we35 (---) 36 looked at the kangaROOS: an’ we thought about the BOYS’:37 (--) 38 !SPI!rits bein’ in the kangaROOS:,

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Malcolm and Rochecouste nevertheless observe that narrators often relate a mysterious experience as fact and without any attempt to provide an explanation for it. In addition, the following description of Aboriginal oral narratives taken from Attwood and Magowan includes several keywords that allude to the use of narrative strategies known from so-called “unnatural narratives”: […] indigenous narrators seldom represent their lives in terms of an ‘I’ but rather of ‘we’, and emphasise relationships with family, kin and others; their accounts often seem fragmented and discontinuous; and they only infrequently reveal any sense of agency and self-reflection.15 (my emphasis)

While the terms “fragmented” and “discontinuous” may be associated with postmodern narrative techniques classified as “unnatural” in the sense of mimesis, the use of the first person plural pronoun is not necessarily controversial in this context since the identity of “we” is most often transparent and refers to the Aboriginal community as a whole. However, the discourse strategies used to express this collective viewpoint are interesting as they result in what Klapproth calls a “flat organizational structure” of the narrative which clashes with the Anglo-Western narrative schema of the so-called “high-point model” with its individualistic, complication- and goal-oriented concept.16 What is also remarkable is the fact that collective viewpoints appear in what we would call “autobiographical accounts,” thereby defying our understanding of this genre. Using the “Ethnography of Communication” in order to contextualize the narratives as to their social context and background, the next section of this paper will therefore focus in detail on these seemingly “unnatural” aspects of Aboriginal storytelling, starting with a brief introduction of the method just mentioned.

4. Analysis of Aboriginal Oral Narratives 4.1 Method: The Ethnography of Communication The “Ethnography of Communication” is a research method initiated by Dell Hymes in 1972 that focuses on the interaction of language and social life. In general, it aims at giving an account of “[…] the social and linguistic elements which combine to produce the society’s speech events [and to relate 15

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Attwood, Bain / Magowan, Fiona, “Introduction”, in: Bain Attwood / Fiona Magowan (eds.), Telling Stories. Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand, Crows Nest, 2001, 1–7. Klapproth, Narrative as Social Practice in Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions, 283.

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them] in a systematic way.”17 What is analyzed is thus the way in which meaning depends on the communicative event that it is embedded in. To study this kind of meaning, Hymes contends that we have to look beyond isolated instances of language and take their socio-cultural context into account: Hymes also demonstrated in 1972 […] how a basically taxonomic approach to the analysis of the components of a communicative event could, as he put it, ‘bring out the parallelism in organisation of … events’, showing how a cultural common thread might unite such apparently disparate events as the shaman’s retribution ritual, a girl’s puberty rite and the testing of children.18

The narrative, “[…] understood as an instance of socio-communicative verbal interaction in which stories are told and shared”19 constitutes an important genre of Aboriginal communicative events. According to Malcolm and Sharifian, it is distinct from other communicative events in that it exhibits […] (a) recurrent semantic and formal patterning […], (b) evidence of speakers’ use of indigenous schemas in associative responses as well as in processing oral narrative, and (c) schema maintenance in discourse in non-traditional settings and in the context of non-traditional subjects.20

In the following, the narratives included in the corpus that forms the basis of my study are analyzed by paying special attention to Hymes’ categories of Genre, Act Sequence and Norms of Interpretation, given that in the course of my research, the study of these aspects turned out to be most promising for the analysis of narrative as a communicative event. Other categories included in the framework of the “Ethnography of Communication”, which is often referred to by the acronym Speaking, include the situation, the participants, the ends of the communicative event, its key and instrumentality. 4.2 Genre: The “life story thing” Though allusions to traditional Aboriginal narratives surface in the data, the following citation illustrates that they are often not explicitly identified as such by the narrator: 17

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Malcolm, Ian G., “Speech Use in Aboriginal Communities: A Preliminary Survey”, in: Anthropological Forum, 5, 1980–1982, Nr. 1, 54. Malcolm, Ian G., “Aboriginal English Inside and Outside the Classroom”, in: Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 17, 1994, Nr. 2, 153. Klapproth, Narrative as Social Practice in Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions, 28. Malcolm, Ian G. / Sharifian, Farzad, “Aspects of Aboriginal English Oral Discourse: An Application of Cultural Schema Theory”, in: Discourse studies, 4, 2002, Nr. 2, 167.

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Example from transcript 2 1033 P: DID they Ever; 1031 ever TELL you aNY: – 1032 (--) 1033 (coughing) 1034 Any of the their – 1035 (-) 1036 their !OLD! STOry of the DREAMtime STOries an THAT all, 1037 (---) 1038