As can be expected, the three meanings of negotiation mentioned above—conflict solving, dealing with contextual templates, everyday give and take—rarely occur in isolation. In Narrative Negotiations, Kristin Veel presents an interesting combination.650 She looks upon the novel as a hybrid genre that combines narrative and informative strands in an endless and mutual interaction. She defines “narrative negotiation” as the process by which “ways of organizing information—information structures—are adopted, adapted, and incorporated into the narrative of cultural imagination with a particular focus on literary fiction.”651 The information structures are culturally organized and transformed in fictional narratives. Veel pays special attention to those novels that “overwhelm the reader with too much information.”652 She singles out such overwhelming novels in the precomputer age (J. W. Goethe, Robert Musil, and Arno Schmidt) and in our digital times.653 The reader has to come to terms with a narrative that contains too much information, so negotiation here involves not only the novel’s work with the cultural structures of information but also the reader’s way of coping with this. Negotiation here involves both resolving problems and dealing with contextual structures.
Circulation in its most general form refers to the transference from one social and cultural field to another. This is a collective process that regularly involves institutions (e.g., when publishing houses negotiate deals with film companies to turn a novel into a movie) and that typically depends on objective conditions such as class, sex, and age. These conditions assure the homology between the various fields and thereby make the migration and circulation easy. As we said before, the homology may be quite small. For instance, the circulation of supposedly original African stories in nineteenth-century western Europe did not rest on a similarity between African and European conditions but rather on the difference between the two, which helped to produce the appeal of the exotic. The degree of similarity and/or difference that underpins the circulation of narratives is open to negotiation.
Given the popularity of the term “circulation” in economics, such as in Marxist theories on the circulation of commodities, the development of an economics of narrative cannot be surprising. Jean-Pierre Faye’s “critique of narrative economics”654 studies “circulation” as a process that disseminates “economic signs” and “ideological narratives” in one and the same movement.655 Although it may be masked, there is always “a link between those movements in the production and circulation of signs in real life, on the one hand, and the production and circulation of ideological narratives, on the other hand.”656
Narratologists have also paid attention to narrative circulation. In the first proffered meaning of the term, narrative circulation refers to the act of telling as a form of dissemination and distribution: “Very literally, a primary ‘action’ that narrative performs is the circulation (telling, receiving, desiring) of narrative.”657 David Herman mentions “the bewilderingly diverse narratives circulating in the culture.”658 Sandra Heinen discusses various approaches dealing with “the analysis of stories circulating within an organization.”659 What is circulated in these examples is narrative itself.
Vilma Hänninen has developed a “model of narrative circulation,” one in which a told narrative, a lived narrative, and an inner narrative interact with each other and with a “personal stock of stories.”660 The latter derives from a “cultural stock of stories” and the “situation” in which the narrative arises.661 The “cultural stock of stories” ties in with the templates and the culturally prevailing narratives mentioned earlier; the “personal stock of stories” can be linked with what Arthur W. Frank calls the narrative habitus; and the “situation” is close to Bourdieu’s “field.” Hänninen defines the inner narrative “as a process of weaving together the situation and cultural story models.”662 These can be linked to the habitus’s negotiation between field and cultural templates. She sees the told narrative “as an expression of the inner narrative” and “as a shaper of the inner narrative,” which ties in with the interaction between habitus and field.663 The lived narrative seen as an enactment and transformation of the inner narrative can be compared to the constitutive and creative powers of narratives considered above.
In a second narratological sense of circulation, narrative becomes a vehicle for the circulation of what Greenblatt might call cultural materials, such as ideas, arguments, and ideology. What is circulated here is the content of the narrative. This view usually focuses on the cultural context and considers narrative as the heart of cultural circulation, as explained by N. Katherine Hayles: “Culture circulates through science no less than science circulates through culture. The heart that keeps this circulatory system flowing is narrative—narratives about culture, narratives within culture, narratives about science, narratives within science.”664 Hayles adds that this circulation transforms and constitutes cultural materials, rather than simply carrying them from one field to another.
Narratives that circulate a lot (in the first sense of the term) and that touch upon important cultural issues (in the second sense of circulation) may be called dominant. David Herman mentions “dominant storylines or master narratives circulating in the culture at large.” These narratives structure our thinking “about the way the world is,”665 which again indicates their creative power.666 As mentioned earlier, one aspect of cultural narratology and socio-narratology focuses on the link between these dominant narratives and the specific narratives at hand, for example, in a novel. These specific forms may go against the prevailing templates and may circulate in more restricted areas or fields than the culturally dominant narrative. David Herman illustrates this with reference to the novels of Ian McEwan: “Rather than simply shoring up a culture’s major storylines, postmodern literary narratives like McEwan’s engage with them (and the normative frameworks that they embed and work to reproduce) in a more or less critical or reflexive manner. That said, because of complex ways in which the institutions and practices of literary writing intersect with broader cultural institutions and practices, there is no a priori guarantee that a given literary text will align itself with the array of ‘counternarratives’ circulating in a given setting, in opposition to more dominant storylines.”667
Third, narrative studies have often drawn attention to the circulation of general narrative types, codes, patterns, and templates in concrete stories. Astrid Erll discusses the “circulation of certain narrative patterns in different media.”668 On the generic level the transfer and transformation of codes in the ever-changing narrative forms of the novel would provide a good example of this type of circulation.669 Another one would be the different chronotopes Mikhail Bakhtin sees as typical of the various narrative genres.670 H. Porter Abbott gives yet another example, namely the circulation of typical characters in a variety of narratives and genres: “All cultures and subcultures include numerous types that circulate through all the various narrative modes: the hypocrite, the flirt, the evil child, the Pollyanna, the strong mother, the stern father, the cheat, the shrew, the good Samaritan, the wimp, the nerd, the vixen, the stud, the schlemiel, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the guy with a chip on his shoulder, the orphan, the yuppie, the Uncle Tom, the rebel.”671
“Pegasian” negotiates and circulates the cultural template of the lesson. Schooling often takes up a big part of people’s lives, which is surely one of the reasons why it is such a popular topic in art—the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw and the movie Dead Poets Society are just two famous examples of narratives in which strong, passionate teachers change their students’ lives through education. “Pegasian” zooms in on a riding class, which seems to have all the trappings of what Ansgar Nünning would call the prefiguration of a narrative about a lesson—a competent individual is trying to transmit a skill (the ability to ride a horse) to a group; he or she is doing so in a location—or “field”—that is fit for the purpose (horses are available at the riding school and there is space for the pupils to use them in a way that facilitates the transmission of the skill); he or she disposes of the necessary attributes (a whip to control the horses so that they do not work against the educational process); and the story of the class focuses on the contact between the teacher and an individual student.
In her configuration of the template, Mutsaers does not spend a lot of effort on the evocation of the setting or the field. She starts in medias res with the report of a dialogue between the riding master and a pupil who is not wearing the kind of trousers that are supposedly suited to the occasion. This tacit presupposition is one of the constraints exerted by the field. So, the field is present in the story, though it is not explicitly staged.
Badly equipped pupils and teachers losing their patience over them are both staples of the prefiguration of a narrative about a lesson, but “Pegasian” clearly delights in developing this aspect. The pupil does not simply accept the admonition; she wants to know why “a real pair of riding breeches” would be so much better—that is, she wants to lay bare the tacit understanding, invisibly imposed by the field—and whether they increase the riding speed, and she even becomes sarcastic by comparing them to the fat of overweight women. This is a gross statement, but it clearly hits the mark, since the teacher gives up his or her task of trying to explain. “Pegasian” therefore seems to negotiate the cultural template of a class so as to bring out the tenuous hold of a teacher over a pupil. This hold is based on the harmony between habitus and field, that is, upon unacknowledged constraints of the field and the equally unnoticed subjugation of the habitus to those demands. The student is asking to turn this unspoken agreement into a subject of discussion.
In a class situation, authority and power can apparently be called into question quite easily, and the teacher in the story finds no better way to react than to (literally) crack the whip. He or she refuses to turn the harmonization of habitus and field into a topic of conversation. He or she simply reinstalls it, showing who is in power. Giving up on the insubordinate student, he or she prefers to reestablish the instructor’s authority by attempting to save the class for the rest of the group. The text leaves unclear whether the tension between the two protagonists has been resolved, thus perhaps slightly refiguring the narrative template of the lesson in readers for whom the teacher’s authority is the be all and end all of educational proceedings.
This outcome, however, is perhaps not exactly reinforced by the final paragraph of the story, which seems to undo the upending of the teacher-pupil relationship and the resulting point about the division of roles in the field of education. Indeed the girl “understands” the point about the relevance of the special breeches offered by the riding master, which seems to restore the roles of the template by confirming the latter’s authority. The instructor’s lack of a real explanation for the advantage of a “real pair” over a denim pair may lead to another moment of doubt on the part of the girl (“Is it the idea or is it the sensation?”), but she quickly is resigned. Still, in what could be construed as another twist in the configuration of the template, her motivation for accepting the initial advice may well derive from an interpretation of the “real pair” that is so idiosyncratic it underscores her independence from the teacher. To be sure, “taking off” thanks to a “real pair” instead of a denim pair is quite far-fetched, but this view of the trousers seems true to the individual stance the girl shows through her initial questions about them. Needless to say, whether the specific configuration of “Pegasian” leads to a refiguration of the narrative template will depend on how separate readers or communities of readers decide to value the final sentences. If these are felt to illustrate an attitude that strongly defies authority, a lesson might (perhaps only temporarily) appear as a contest of opinions rather than a transmission of knowledge or skills.
The map too is a cultural template that often circulates in a narrativized form. As a handy tool to organize a voyage, it immediately suggests action and a degree of adventure. No wonder many editions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings contain a map of Middle Earth, the fictional region where the epic events of the story take place. In the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade a map is even used in various sequences to represent a big journey in the story, with a dotted line being drawn from one city to another. In the digital age Google Maps and other global positioning apps put maps on our individual screens, pointing the way through the world and creating a sense of order in the process.
Maps definitely further movement, but they can be aesthetically pleasing in their own right, and it is perhaps the combination of these two effects that turns them into such valuable items. In Krol’s “The Map,” the map of a village and its surroundings is associated with forbidden pleasure, since the main character happens to spot a small part of it on a Sunday, visible in the display window of a Christian shop, the shades of which haven’t been drawn properly. The protagonist is immediately in awe of the object he partly has to imagine (“Everything clear and close, everything enlarged. Never had I seen such a map, with such minute detail”), which makes him want to acquire it as soon as he can.
Since the map of the village of Dorkwerd and its surroundings has been spotted furtively and illegitimately, its promise is inevitably high, but once it is opened on the table, it does not disappoint: “A whole table full of new things.” Krol’s configuration of the map develops the catalyst that makes up an essential part of the prefiguration; the enticing object becomes a matrix for movement and control. It is not just that the object becomes a script for action; it is also a device for sense-making: “What excited me was the thought that it now made sense to have been everywhere. The prospect I was going to cover the earth with my body. To be everywhere . . .”
The main character is so enamored with this idea that he does not stop at the map he has acquired; he goes on to draw a blank map of his entire country so that he can indicate all the roads where he has biked. It looks as if his habitus is keen on mapping all the places (or fields) in the Netherlands. This development constitutes a turning point in the configuration of the template. Whereas normally the map is a tool, the protagonist’s map of the Netherlands becomes an end in itself, proof of the successes in his grandiose bid “to be everywhere.” This climactic period is rapidly followed by a letdown. Once the main character starts traveling by train, “so not really by myself and neither in direct contact with the road,” the dream of mastery and its representation on the map fades, making the object ultimately “meaningless.”
In the story as a whole, “The Map” first seems to heighten the usual functionality and visual impact of a map so as to undercut or at least relativize them in the end. Again, whether this negotiation of a cultural template leads to its refiguration will depend on the specific circumstances in which “The Map” is read. One can, for instance, imagine a reading list for a course on narrative and mobility in which the story would figure as an indictment of our need for order and control, as well as of the activities and objects it engenders. In that case, Krol’s story may have an impact on the students’ image of a map. But one can also imagine an older reader who recognizes the folly of youth in the protagonist’s behavior and regards the map as a mere stimulus for all that frantic activity, leaving it completely unassailed as an instance of cultural material.
As we said at the outset of chapter 3, recent decades have witnessed a broadening of narratology’s scope. Narrative analyses have been applied to an ever-increasing number of social and cultural phenomena. Sometimes this implies that the narratological toolbox gets reduced to a minimum.
Such a reduction seems to be part of “storytelling,” a recent and hard-to-delineate discipline that investigates from a very broad perspective the human capacity to tell stories. Essential to the perspective are notions such as intention, goal, discussion, and balance. It seems that telling stories is a conscious and goal-directed effort to order life and to balance relations with others and with reality. A clear example of such a view can be found in “corporate storytelling,” which claims that stories are intentionally used to balance the goals and concerns of the various parties involved: “In a strategic business context, storytelling is understood as the conscious attempt to produce, promote or change a story. Thus, within the framework of corporate communication, narratives or narrative elements are used to establish and maintain the organizational brand, image, culture and identity of various groups of internal and external stakeholders.”672 Similar to the diverging uses of the term “negotiation” we discussed above, different theorists underscore different aspects of the balancing act that storytelling is supposed to be. Birgitte Norlyk, Marianne Wolff Lundholt, and Per Krogh Hansen argue that “first wave” theorists tend to underscore equilibrium, whereas “second wave” approaches pay more attention to the disruptive aspects of storytelling.673
Whatever aspect of the balancing act is foregrounded, storytelling always zooms in on the constitutive role of narrative in everyday life, on both a small and a large scale. Narrative is never seen as a mere vehicle; it is shown to be creative and performative. Examples of small-scale analyses can be found in psychologically—and quite often therapeutically—oriented narrative studies of the self and others.674 Examples of macroapproaches are provided by narrative studies of climate change, advertising, political campaigns, and so on.675 This second type has been highlighted in the popular study Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind, by Christian Salmon. He dissects Western capitalist economics and politics, showing that “the brand is a story,” that management depends upon storytelling, that military battles are fought in narrative terms too, and that presidential campaigns cannot succeed without the right type of storytelling.676
Quite often the performative aspect of the investigated object (i.e., storytelling) affects the investigative approach, which becomes directive and advisory. This can be seen in countless handbooks prescribing how to use storytelling in all kinds of fields and for various kinds of purposes. Handbooks of creative writing, guides for successful management, psychological self-help books, and so on—they all tend to share the storytelling approach.677 Obviously, this is a far cry from the distanced and supposedly neutral narratology defended by the structuralists and their followers.
The idea that stories are essential to everyday life is of course not new. It has received attention from all kinds of disciplines, including philosophy, religion, and Darwinian science, all of which predate the birth of narratology. The narrative turn we mentioned earlier is just one of many recent developments that have underscored the prominence of storytelling. An additional boost to narrative theories of society and culture is the rise of new digital media, which have turned the world into a network of “storytelling communities.”678 There is also of course postmodernism, which became widespread in the 1980s and which maintains that life is a story.
In line with the narrative turn, theories ranging from constructivist cultural studies to Darwinian natural sciences have upheld the crucial importance of narratives for everyday life. From a cultural perspective, a memorable instance is Christopher Nash’s groundbreaking collection of studies on storytelling in science, philosophy, and literature. It starts from the claim “that the narrative mode of discourse is omnipresent in human affairs. We’re obliged to consider the ungainly fact that in our culture, where we least expect it and even most vociferously disclaim it, there may actually be storytelling going on, and that the implications may indeed be ‘considerable.’”679 From a Darwinian perspective, it has become fashionable to talk about the “storytelling animal”680 and the “literary animal.”681 Evolutionary theories treat narrative as a crucial strategy in the process of adaptation that is the engine of all evolution. Brian Boyd defines art (including narrative) from this angle: “art is an adaptation whose functions are shaping and sharing attention, and, arising from that, fostering social cohesion and creativity.”682 Boyd’s “biocultural approach to fiction” explicitly distances itself from the “structuralist” and “poststructuralist mode [ . . . ] in narratology” and instead looks for “specieswide competences” that have evolved from animal skills and that have now become unique to human beings.683
Although such a broad and hypothetical perspective yields interesting results, it falls outside the scope of our handbook, as it does not really rely on the toolbox of narrative analysis. We will focus on three approaches centering on the similarities and differences between everyday storytelling and literary narratives. In this discussion thorny topics we have treated before will resurface, such as the distinction between fictional and “true” storytelling, or between literary and everyday language. These issues will not be solved, but we will be able to look at them from a wider perspective than the ones presented before.
Although postmodernism has become famous (and to many, infamous) for its so-called “doctrine of panfictionality” holding that life is like a fictional narrative,684 narrative theories operating in this tradition do not study fictional and literary narratives as if they were the same as everyday conversations and stories. On the contrary, time and again postmodern narratologists underscore the rupture between the two forms of narration. In that sense they are closely linked to the unnatural narratologists we will encounter shortly. Indeed they can be seen as early adapters of the (at the time still tentative and inchoate) unnatural frame. Still, as they were not perceived as such, we think it fitting to give them a separate treatment.
There is no such thing as a clearly defined postmodern narratology. This is not surprising, considering that the term “postmodern” is so vague and limitless that it can be used to denote an immense variety of things.685 Yet at the same time this is precisely the first characteristic of postmodern narratology: it combines classical elements with new insights without striving for a kind of higher synthesis. Such a synthesis would constitute a “metanarrative,” which has become an object of ridicule in postmodern thought.686
A good example of a narratological combination-without-synthesis can be found in Mark Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theory.687 As we have explained in the section on cultural narratology, Currie bases his plea for an expansion of narratology to socio-narratology on the typically poststructuralist idea that everything is a narrative and a text. Lacanian psychoanalysis has shown that identity is a construction of language, historiography of the Hayden White school shows that history exists only as a plot and a story, and the postcolonial approach of theorists like Homi K. Bhabha interprets the nation-state as a narrative as well.688
According to Daniel Punday, the connection of the narrative text with social reality creates an interesting tension in postmodern narratology. On the one hand it breaks the text open by leaving room for context, including the social relationships and the subjective idiosyncrasies of reader and author. Punday argues that this makes the text more tangible: the story is embedded in the world of objects and subjects, things and bodies.689 This embedding diminishes the autonomy and thus also the power of the narrative text. On the other hand, this connection between text and reality also extends this power since the contextual elements (such as reader and body) can be grasped only as narratives. If this produces a new totality, a new kind of coherence between the textual story and extratextual history, it may result in a “post-deconstructive” integration of text and context.690
These notions have at least two drastic consequences for literary narratology. First, the study of a literary text is no longer limited to its so-called intrinsically literary aspects. It also concerns elements that are excluded from classical narratology: ideology, biography, social position, and so on. Second, the notion of narrative has become so broad that anything can be a narrative text, and nearly any form of representation can have a narrative character. A film, the Gulf War, the news, and the capitalist economy, to list only a few—are all considered narrative constructions.
The disadvantage of this theory is that it has no fixed methodology and is therefore very dependent on the insights and qualities of the individual narratologist. This is even more the case than in classical narratology, and it brings us to the second characteristic of postmodern narratology. Narrative theory too resembles a story, and this erases the boundaries between narrative text and narratology. This characteristic fits the typically postmodern combination of level (text) and metalevel (textual analysis), as well as its rejection of hierarchies. Andrew Gibson, for instance, argues in favor of a postmodern narrative theory that no longer adheres to hierarchically separate levels like story, narrative, and narration. A narrative text is not like a house with clearly demarcated floors but more like a horizontal and often cluttered conglomerate of the most diverse narrative elements. The attitude of the classical narratologist who puts himself or herself above the text and dissects it into different layers is rejected in favor of “narrative laterality.”691
Obviously, the classical distinction between text and interpretation cannot hold and the supposedly objective position of the metalevel is an illusion. But the postmodern combination of levels threatens to turn narratology into a very elusive undertaking. Currie rightly notes that the literary analyses of poststructuralists such as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man are often very personal fabulations that do not contain any clearly applicable method.692 However, the search for ambiguities, for places where the text contradicts itself and where the dualisms it posits turn in upon themselves, might be considered a methodology of sorts.
Postmodern narratologists might base their analyses of “Pegasian” on the story’s ambiguous representation of consciousness: sometimes we do not know who is thinking or uttering what sentence. Whereas structuralists would try to arrive at a decision by investigating other textual elements, postmodernists would say that the undecidability of the question is crucial to any story and particularly to this one: it shows how unimportant the differences between the two protagonists are. Whether you follow the rigid method of the riding master or the casual approach of the rider, “Whatever. As long as you take off.” The riding master is associated not just with the symbols of dressage such as the whip and the lesson but also with signifiers of freedom and elusiveness. The instructor talks about “a very special kind of wind” and “this heavenly sensation.” The contrast between riding master and rider is undermined because the master shares some aspects of the rider.
In “The Map” a similar approach might exploit the ambiguous relationship between “blind” and “all-seeing.” On the level of the text there is the antithesis between the shaded shop and the map it still reveals, despite the blinds. But what the boy learns to see in this way (“[a] whole table full of new things”) soon loses its value: the map is starting to fill up and is no longer worth seeing (“and one day I would remove the map from the wall”), hence the reference to “a blank map of the Netherlands”: that which supposedly provides new insight is itself a form of blindness. A postmodernist would no doubt extrapolate this insight to the metalevel as well. First, to the level of narration itself: the older first-person narrator pretends to know and see more than his younger self, but in fact his narration is captive to the same illusion as the boy’s bike trips. He thinks that he can map things, that he can see and survey his youth as it “really” was. Second, on the metalevel of interpretation: a postmodern or deconstructive reading is also a form of insight-through-blindness, blindness (among other things) to so many other facets of the story and to the inevitable blind spots in one’s own point of departure.693
These short analyses clarify the third characteristic of postmodern narratology: it primarily pays attention to everything that does not fit into a neat system, anything that undermines itself. Following Foucault and Derrida, Gibson talks about the “monster,” an aggregate of elements that resist classification in any structure.694 That which is excluded by classical narratology becomes the center of attention. While classical narratology streamlines and tidies up narratives, the postmodern variety favors “savage narratives” that refuse to submit to the discipline of structuralist narrative theory.695
What does the monster look like? What does not fit the classical paradigm but does find a place in the postmodern model? First of all, nonlinear time. Postmodern narrative analyses show a preference for textual passages that are hard to date or that go against the separation of past, present, and future. They prefer the chaotic swirl of time to the domesticated time of structuralist diagrams. Consequently, they reject the notion of a generally accepted temporal framework—the fabula or story—but assume instead that any literary text is crisscrossed by dozens of different time frames and scales.
Ursula K. Heise describes this situation with the term “chronoschisms,” referring specifically to “the incommensurability of different time scales.”696 However incommensurable they may be, in the postmodern experience of time they occur simultaneously. On the one hand there is the time that is fast and microscopic, the nanosecond, the immediacy of so-called real time, which characterizes not only computer technology but also the economic distribution of goods. On the other hand there is the slow and extended time of cosmology, which speculates about millions of years and the Big Bang. The two time dimensions cross each other in many different ways and make it impossible to establish a primary and normative time scale.697 The mutually opposed times coalesce in an inextricable and contradictory present that Heise refers to as the “hyper-present” and that Joseph Francese calls the “continuous present.”698 In the same vein Punday describes postmodern time as a condensed and heterogeneous simultaneity without the modernist inclination toward the integration of contradictions.699 According to Elana Gomel, all of these monstrous time aspects are seen at their clearest in the genre of postmodern science fiction.700 She singles out “three main chronotopical categories of postmodern SF’s representation of temporality: time travel; alternate history; and apocalypse,” plus “three main postmodern timeshapes: determinism, contingency and End Time.”701
Whereas structuralists attempt to systematize the various time scales in a literary text by connecting them with fixed points of reference such as the fabula, focalizers, or narrators, postmodern narratology focuses primarily on temporal elements of the text that make this kind of systematization impossible. This implies that postmodern narratologists do not believe in a primary, “real” time that can be reconstructed or in a stable subject giving sense and direction to that time.702 Instead they point out that stories can never be reconstructions of the past, because there was no “real” event first and a narrative repetition afterward.703 Narrators who reconstruct themselves through their memories do not end up with their “real” or “original” selves but with yet another construction, another story about themselves.
In “The Map” the past is only reconstructed as a pretense. Its fixedness is clearly suggested by temporal indications in the first four paragraphs, until the boy gets hold of the map. Each paragraph starts with an exact temporal setting: “On Sundays the Christian shops had their shades drawn”; “This bookstore’s shades were drawn on Sundays”; “Monday afternoon, in the bookshop”; and “That Saturday . . . At one thirty I brought it home with me.” From then on, the temporal indications become more vague, revealing the illusion of mapping. The map makes everything hazy. The distance between then and now is obscured as well: the final paragraph constantly shuttles back and forth between the moment of the bike trips, an unspecified moment some time later (“one day”), and the present time (“I haven’t kept it either”). There is no genuine reconstruction here.
The paradoxical simultaneity of different time scales is not limited to the literary text. It is also part of the context, or, more precisely, it only arises in the interaction with that context. The context refers not only to social reality, which combines the most diverse time scales, but also to the actual reading experience. Narratologists who read and analyze a text read traces of other passages in every passage, as well as traces of their own temporal concepts. The traditional narratological reconstruction of a single temporal evolution in a story or a novel is an extreme simplification, which is blind to its own background. It is established after numerous readings, and the earlier readings resonate in every new reading. This resonance disrupts linear evolution because the narratologist reads each passage with the previous and the following passages in mind.704 Thus, heterogeneous simultaneity and the “hyper-present” also play a role at the level of analysis. It follows that the “real” temporal evolution of a narrative text can never be reconstructed and certainly not via a traditional straightforward development.
The collapse of linear time also entails a far-reaching relativization of causality, which is after all closely linked with the linear succession of two moments: cause and effect. Spatial setting is relativized in the same way. A linear notion of time sees evolution as a line between two or more points—in other words, as movement in a clearly definable space. From that perspective, classical narratology represents the space of the text in anthropomorphous, almost Euclidean terms that require fixed centers and calibrations. Postmodern narratology, on the other hand, proceeds from a space that is in constant motion and has no established centers.705 Space is motion, “the ongoing transformation of one space into another.”706 This chaos of different time scales has its spatial counterpart in the uncentered web, the labyrinth, or the rhizome.707
In the postmodern description of narrative space, the terms “multiplicity” and “metamorphosis” pop up time and again. Francese, for instance, characterizes postmodern space as a form of “multiperspectivism” and a “flux.”708 Punday relates “spatial multiplicity” to “alterity.”709 The latter term refers to the fact that space can never be defined in terms of its own characteristics and coordinates, because the definition depends on reference to other spaces. Punday argues that the space of a particular narrative passage cannot be reduced to the description of the setting. Instead it should be seen as an entanglement, because the setting refers to the setting of other narrative passages, to the reader’s spatial conceptions, and to the narratives that are attached to that setting in social reality.710
Adding a psychoanalytic touch to this, Andrew Hock-soon Ng studies postmodern “monstrous space” as the intermingling of space, time, and body that also involves a narrative emergence of the unconscious: “My argument is that the living environment—be it a city or an apartment block—can host aspects of the unconscious which, in certain situations, can be [sic] re-surface to haunt its inhabitants.”711 This implies a refusal of linear time (even of death) and of realist architecture in the “architectural uncanny.”712 The result is a narrative representation of the void that has become the postmodern self: “Here, lived space takes on a monstrous reality of the repressed returning, bringing to the fore deep, dismal secrets of the self.”713
Postmodern narratologists do not establish temporal or spatial axes in order to situate the events of a story. They consider the act of situating to be a misunderstanding because of its anthropomorphous and referentialist connection of the text with everyday human reality. The reader of “The Map” and “Pegasian” hardly ever gains a solid foothold in the spatial setting. The space that he or she reconstructs changes constantly and resists unambiguous and invariable representation. Those kinds of representations belong to classical structuralist narratology rather than to the narrative text itself.
Nevertheless, the “text itself” remains out of reach for postmodern narratologists as well. Regardless of the extent to which structured time-space may be a structuralist construct, the dynamic and multiperspectivist time-space of postmodern theoreticians is no less of a construct. Their starting points and preferences naturally color their analyses. There is a difference, however. Structuralists look for so-called objective analyses, for verifiable interpretations that are suggested by the text itself. That is why they downplay the narratologist’s subjective preferences, prejudices, and views. Postmodern narratologists, on the other hand, make their own points of departure explicit, insofar as this is possible. We use the term “point of departure” because it indicates that this bias is often theorized by means of spatial imagery: it is about the narratologists’ position, the place from which they analyze the narrative.
In this connection Punday talks about the narratologist’s situatedness. This is not a fixed point but an interaction. The analysis of a narrative text generates an interchange between literary clichés pertaining to the text (such as patterns of setting and narrative strategy) and interpretive habits. At the spatiotemporal level, this interaction links the textual setting to the extratextual space and time, which is referred to as “site.”714 Readers constantly oscillate between text and site, and that is why they can never grasp the spatiotemporal setting as it would exist in the narrative itself.715 Inevitably, the act of analysis will always be colored by narratives that precede the analyzed text and that resonate in the form of literary clichés and interpretive habits.
Time and space, therefore, are not compelling characteristics of the literary text: they are constructs on the borderline between text and context. This context is often identified as postmodernity, and its characteristics are usually found in sociological and economic analyses.716 The fragmented and multiperspectivist time-space of postmodernism is, for instance, related to the contemporary, late-capitalist means of production. David Harvey studies postmodern narrative time-space from the perspective of the accelerated mechanisms of production, distribution, and consumption,717 thereby following in the footsteps of authors such as Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard.718 Such contextualizations of the postmodern text and textual analysis often point out that traditional spatiotemporal footholds are disappearing. This results from the increasing importance of nonreal time-spaces such as the internet and from the growing fetishization of objects that lose their clear position in the production process and are consumed as self-contained entities.
Let us return to the literary text. The monstrous characteristics covered so far all relate to what is traditionally called narrative content: time, space, causal logic. A second monstrous aspect is connected with narration and concerns nonparaphrasability. Classical narratology assumes that narrative elements can be paraphrased and translated into theoretical terminology without destroying what is crucial to the text. To postmodern narratology, any paraphrase necessarily amounts to a disruption. This ties in with our earlier observation: postmodern narratology sticks so closely to the story that it threatens to become a narrative itself.
The distrust of paraphrase is linked to another central postmodern concern: the close attention to imagery—that is, metaphor and metonymy. Metaphors can never be put in other words; they resist any kind of paraphrase, hence the considerable attention poststructuralists have devoted to metaphor.719 A well-known example is Lacan’s analysis of a metaphor taken from the story “Berenice,” by Edgar Allan Poe. Egaeus, the protagonist, is convinced that Berenice’s teeth are ideas.720 This metaphorical connection between teeth and ideas can never be paraphrased or exhaustively described. Yet the metaphor is crucial to the story, which shows how the protagonist’s obsession (i.e., fixed idea) leads him to dig up the apparently dead Berenice and extract her teeth. The dynamics and specificity of the story lie in its imagery or, more precisely, in the interaction between metaphor and metonymy. In psychoanalysis, teeth are metonymically connected with the vagina (as body parts they are literally part of the same whole) and ideas are metonymically linked with fears and delusions. The metaphorical connection between teeth and ideas thus refers, via a metonymic shift, to the vagina and fear—that is, to castration anxiety, which in its turn is a metaphorical combination of body and mind.721
The central metaphor in “Pegasian” is that of the muse turned horse, Pegasus. The question is how this horse can “take wing,” how the muse can lift humankind. Does this happen through dressage? By putting on the right clothes? Or out of the blue, suddenly, whenever the horse feels like it? The whole story is an unfurling of images related to the horse: riding breeches, horseback riding, the carousel, cavalry, and so on. A structuralist approach would try to classify these images in order to obtain a clear answer to the questions posed. Postmodern narratology, by contrast, would show how the images affect and enrich each other, precluding any unambiguous answer. It remains an open question: is there a right way to reach the goal—to go up in the air?
This openness surfaces in the discussion between the riding master and the rider. The problem is put in terms of metonymic images, which present parts of a larger whole. The flaps of the riding breeches (as parts of the rider), for instance, are supposedly necessary to reach the goal. The books on cavalry and the background information are parts of the lesson, and the fat that would take the place of fat ladies’ riding breeches is part of the body. These elements all refer to the right method in a figurative or indirect way. But they also slow down the story and the lesson. This effect is expressed by means of a new metaphor: “These horses are moving around like turtles.”
The end of the story combines the metonyms with the metaphors, which leads to insight and understanding: “Finally she understands: the riding breeches give the horse wings, and the horse gives those wings to you.” The riding breeches are a metonymic part of the rider but become metaphors for the horse’s wings. In turn these wings become a part of the rider, allowing her to go up in the air. In other words, the alternation of metaphors and metonyms makes it possible to get off the ground. This can in turn be read as a statement on writing itself: inspiration—metaphorically expressed by the horse Pegasus, which stands for the muse—is a process in which one image leads to another. This results in a flux, a creative rush. In the text this is the moment when horse and rider go up in the air, which is not a moment of synthesis or choice between the disciplined approach of the riding master and the flexible approach of the rider: “Whatever. As long as you take off.”
A similar point can be made about “The Map,” which develops the central metaphor of mapping in a variety of related images: the blank map, the earth being covered, the map getting so crammed that it does not show anything anymore. Again, there is no obvious conclusion, but an incongruity shows up instead: the more roads the boy maps, the less they mean to him. As soon as something is mapped, it ceases to hold any interest; truly interesting things do not appear on maps and cannot be represented in such a straightforward fashion.
In these cases, the metaphor does not create a dialectical synthesis or a higher integration of opposites. On the contrary, it is the icon par excellence of a “cultural schizophrenia” that is never resolved.722 It connects different domains without ever reconciling them and is thus in tune with the contradictions that have come to be considered typical of the “cultural logic of late capitalism.”723 Thus, metaphor initiates the step from textual to contextual analysis. The interaction between the parts of a metaphor is in itself limitless. It becomes even more endless through the interplay with other metaphors in the text and through contact with the context. Narratological analysis therefore always remains unfinished.
The extent to which postmodern analysis still makes use of classical terminology varies with each writer. With a little goodwill, one could discern a continuum from near-total rejection to adaptation and cautious acceptance. The left end of the spectrum is taken up by the most combative brand of postmodern narratology, one that leaves behind classical terminology like focalizer and heterodiegesis and uses a new arsenal of jargon referring to imagery, contradiction, and the broader cultural implications of the text. One example is Gibson’s theory, which explicitly and extensively explains why classical notions will not do, while introducing a terminology of its own. Less negative about classical theory is Mark Currie, who continues to use a number of fundamental classical concepts without clarification while at the same time explicitly resisting the presuppositions that underlie them.
At the right end of the spectrum we find moderate postmodern narratologists like Patrick O’Neill, who retains nearly all the fundamental concepts of Genette, Bal, and Rimmon-Kenan but expands and makes them more flexible in order to make them better suited to typically postmodern concerns such as instability and the paradoxical combination of contradictory textual elements. O’Neill enhances the classical triad of story, narrative, and narration with a fourth level—textuality—which connects the narrative text with its communicative context, that is, its author and reader.724 He studies these four levels using possible world theory combined with rudimentary game theory. Both the literary text and narratology are games that make up and at the same time relativize their own rules. This mostly takes place through a confrontation of different rules and players: a text is never one single game and can never be played by a single agent. This is why O’Neill replaces the one-sided structuralist terminology with concepts that refer to composite entities. He replaces the notion of the narrator, for example, with that of a composite, polyphonic narration that he calls “compound discourse.”725
We feel that a complete rejection of structuralist terminology does more harm than good. Terms such as “focalization” and “consciousness representation” may cause a lot of problems, but at the same time they clarify things that would otherwise remain obscure. Moreover, it is an illusion to think that the new concepts proposed by narratologists like Gibson are free of such pitfalls. When Gibson talks about the laterality and monstrosity of a text, he is still using problematic notions. Even though spatial conceptualization is rejected by postmodernists, laterality is obviously a spatial concept. Furthermore, Gibson falls prey to an anthropomorphous view since he regards the monstrous as the nonhuman. These terms are in fact metaphors and therefore make use of the processes they are meant to study. This is not exactly a way out of the structuralist traps. What is more, the introduction of new terminology does not always lead to drastically different interpretations of narrative texts. Gibson sometimes reverts to precisely the structuralist terminology and methodology he seeks to avoid.726
Whereas postmodern narratology homes in on the “monstrous” deviations that set literary fiction apart from everyday narratives (especially in terms of time, space, and body), natural narratology, proposed in 1996 by Monika Fludernik, starts from the opposite position—that is, a continuity between fictional and everyday, oral storytelling.727 Postmodern narratology celebrates the undecidable and the ungraspable aspects of narratives, whereas Fludernik investigates the ways in which readers grasp what may at first seem baffling to them.
As she explains, her position is influenced by three traditions. The first is “discourse analysis in the Labovian tradition” and more specifically Labov’s work on “natural narratives,” that is, “unelicited conversational storytelling.”728 A second source of inspiration is a brand of (Austrian) cognitive linguistics that focuses on embodiment and experience as crucial ways to make sense of the world, including narratives.729 The final reference is to Jonathan Culler’s “naturalization,” a term he introduced in 1975 “to account for readers’ interpretative strategies when confronting textual or semantic inconsistencies.”730 Fludernik quotes Culler: “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.”731 Following these sources, Fludernik aligns literary with natural storytelling, zooms in on the (embodied) experiential processing of narratives, and claims that the interpretive process is basically a way of turning the strange into the natural.
The process of translating the unknown into the known involves four levels. Every level has its own type of frame used to process the narrative on offer. The first one employs frames taken from “real-life experience”: “On this level are situated the core schemata from frame theory, which accommodate presupposed understandings of agency, goals, intellection, emotions, motivation, and so on.”732 The second level mobilizes frames that are more specifically narrative. Four aspects enable the interpreter to gain access to the narrative: telling, viewing, experiencing, and acting. For instance, to come to grips with the story, one might focus on the actions or on the experiences, or on any combination of the different aspects. The third level “comprises well-known naturally recurring story-telling situations.”733 These are (proto)typical scripts and genres known to the reader. A narrative that begins with a grotesque character and a futuristic setting will mobilize other generic frames and prototypes than a realist beginning will. Finally, the fourth level makes use of all the previous ones to naturalize (in Culler’s sense) the narrative. Fludernik calls this the level of “narrativization.”734
Crucial in the process of narrativization is the experiencing frame or, in terms of narrative processing, experientiality. Whereas the term “experience” may be used without any idea of narrative or storytelling, Fludernik’s “experientiality” is always linked with narrativization—that is, with the last of the four levels just discussed.735 Even if a narrative fails to make sense on the level of viewing, telling, and action, the reader (or listener) may use the experiences described and evoked by the story to come to terms with it: “narrativity is a function of narrative texts and centres on experientiality of an anthropomorphic nature.”736 When a reader can discern an experiencing and human-like figure, he or she will be able to come to terms with the text as a narrative. Obviously this is not an “all or nothing” position, but a matter of degree: different narratives have different degrees of experientiality.737 As with most (even all) of the postclassical narratologies we have dealt with so far, the reader remains an abstract and idealized figure in Fludernik’s theory, as she herself freely admits in a response to Maria Mäkelä’s analysis of the reader in Towards a “Natural” Narratology.738
The fundamental nature of experientiality leads Fludernik to reject the traditional idea that “sequentiality and logical connectedness” are basic conditions of narratives.739 Actions also are not central: “existence takes priority over action parameters, rather than treating consciousness as an incidental side effect of human action.”740 Even realist and clearly delineated characters are not essential, because experience takes priority over the experiencing agent. What is vital is an embodied form of consciousness: “The feature that is, however, most basic to experientiality is embodiment rather than specificity or individuality because these can in fact be subsumed under it.”741 The structuralist three-tier model (of story, narrative, and narration) and Stanzel’s dichotomy of narrator and reflector both prioritized the narrating agent. Fludernik reverses this and turns embodied consciousness into the central aspect of narrativity and narrativization.
This reversal implies that the traditional distinction between story on the one hand and narrative plus narration on the other is by no means as absolute as many narratologists think. The distinction is largely based on a realist conception of narration that stipulates that an event precedes its representation. However, it is extremely difficult to isolate an event from the way in which it is represented. As Fludernik no longer defines the narrative text by linking it to a sequence of facts, she does not need to look for the “real story” or the bias involved in representation. In this way she puts into perspective the eccentricity of many twentieth-century texts in which hardly anything happens. These are only eccentric for classical narratologists who cling to the story as a norm.
Of course the conceptualization of the story remains useful as one of the realist parameters to read a text. When a narrator describes events from the past, the reader will “naturally” be inclined to read his report as the representation of successive events. This merely demonstrates, however, that classical narratological theories are based on a realist frame. It therefore seems inevitable that they interpret texts on the basis of anthropomorphic and psychologizing concepts. This insight need not undermine the theory, but it does stimulate reflection on the structuralist concepts, even when dealing with an extremely simple text that fully allows realist projection. According to Fludernik, anthropomorphization is not a problem in itself, because it constitutes the essence of processing narrative text.
Narrativization is not just a process that a particular reader uses at a given moment in time. It is also a dynamic process, a series of changing ways of reading. What readers used when narrativizing stories in the eighteenth century is different from what we use today. The Russian formalists showed that what was defamiliarizing in one period may become familiar in another.742 Hans-Georg Gadamer demonstrated how a rupture between the textual “horizon of expectation” and the readerly horizon might evolve into a fusion.743 Along the same lines Fludernik underscores the importance of diachrony, saying that narrativization can “ultimately feed into diachronic change, in the incorporation of new options into the realm of familiar genres or discourse types.”744 It sometimes looks as if the history of reading showed an ever-increasing faculty to turn the strange into the familiar.745
To be fair, Fludernik has always recognized that some texts remain hard to narrativize and that, more generally, narrativization may continue to fail. In a reply to Jonathan Culler, who had asked whether narrativization always succeeds, Fludernik clarifies first that some texts (such as the “Ithaca” chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses) remain problematic and, second, that narrativization need not solve all the problems.746 It is not a final and restless solution of narrative riddles. Like fictionality, narrativity and narrativization are scalar: “narrativity is now conceived of as scalar, with minimal experientiality (only action report) for many factual narratives and for oral small stories [ . . . ] and increasing levels of experientiality towards the other end of the scale, where fiction and conversational stories hold pride of place.”747 The extent to which these scales go together with diachronic evolutions is one of the topics Fludernik wants to investigate and, as we explained earlier, one of the more central issues in present-day narratology.748
In “Pegasian” nothing much happens, but because of its orientation toward human experience, readers will inevitably interpret it as a story. The two characters feel strongly about the topic of the conversation, and the narrator makes an effort to dramatize this involvement by using free indirect speech. The narrator remains in the background but, as we have suggested before, is not neutral either. The narrator’s manipulative representation of the characters’ thoughts and utterances may lead the reader to develop a negative or positive view of either of these figures.
Even if the thoughts and utterances may blend in refined ways, readers will face few problems in interpreting this text. They recognize a conversation and connect it with everyday, natural conversations. The application of real-life parameters (Fludernik’s first level) would probably be easier without the confusing use of free indirect speech, but the circumstances of the conversation become clear rather quickly. A riding master and a girl are talking to each other in a riding school. The real-life frames Fludernik proposes can easily be detected: there is a purpose and an intention to the lesson, and both characters seem to know quite well what they want to obtain.
The prototypical situation of the lesson (a frame of Fludernik’s third level) underlies and naturalizes these goals. After a small time lapse at the end of the first part, the girl has an insight while riding. This insight may be a little unexpected, certainly considering the girl’s stubborn resistance earlier, but as a positive and clear ending to the story, it perfectly fits the expectations of readers with realist tendencies. In a didactic frame one or more characters undergo an evolution that is nicely wrapped up at the end of the story.
At first “The Map” seems to invoke real-life frames even more than “Pegasian” does. Krol’s narrator clearly tells his story in retrospect, and the importance of the map makes it possible to see a clear distinction between “authentic” reality and its cartographic representation. As he gets older, the narrator’s emotional attachment to the map diminishes, but this does not prevent him from devoting a separate narration to this object.
This paradox may be an obstacle to readers using real-life parameters. It may lead readers to focus on the experientiality of the narrator. Does he claim that he no longer considers the map to be important, or does he suggest that the map exerts a permanent influence on him? Is there a clear distinction between present and past? Is “authentic” reality not as artificial as the reality of the map? Is this map really so irrelevant, given the fact that the narrator devotes an entire story to it? Since “The Map” does not fully correspond to the average reader’s expectations, this story, more than “Pegasian,” seems to resist everyday framing. In both cases, however, the text has a relatively unexpected ending that may raise all kinds of additional questions with respect to, for instance, the narrator’s attitude. In responding to these questions, readers will undoubtedly be drawn into the game. The answers will be colored by their ideology, their views on possibility and actuality, their frames and scripts, and their knowledge of natural narratives. The discussion between Fludernik and unnatural narratology revolves around the “right” ways to answer these questions.
Unnatural narratology started around the year 2000 with the work of Brian Richardson, who collected his investigations of unnatural narratives in his 2006 study Unnatural Voices. The approach quickly attracted a group of young scholars who focused on unusual fiction and questioned the usual narratological concepts. Among them were Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Maria Mäkelä, and Henrik Skov Nielsen.
The term “unnatural” obviously alludes to Monika Fludernik’s “natural narratology.” The antagonistic terminology and the main differences between the two approaches were clearly outlined in 2010 in a joint article by Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson.749 In their view, classical and natural narratology are guilty of “mimetic reductionism.”750 They “have a clear mimetic bias and take ordinary realist texts or ‘natural’ narratives as being prototypical manifestations of narrative. [ . . . ] What we want to highlight by means of the notion of the unnatural is the fact that narratives are also full of unnatural elements. Many narratives defy, flaunt, mock, play, and experiment with some (or all) of these core assumptions about narrative.”751 Alber and his colleagues point to three forms of unnaturalness, or three domains in which narratives may defy mimetic conventions: unnatural storyworlds (in which impossible things happen), unnatural minds (e.g., an omniscient character or a character who knows he or she is being narrated by someone else), and unnatural acts of narration (e.g., Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which “the heart is not only a tell-tale heart but also a tale-telling one”752).
These three levels may seem clear-cut at first sight, but which aspects may count as “unnatural” is not easy to decide. As with the term “natural,” the exact meaning of “unnatural” seems to fluctuate. It is always related to what deviates from “normal” narratives, but the precise nature of that deviation differs from one unnatural narratologist to another. Jan Alber “restricts the use of the term unnatural to physically, logically, and humanly impossible scenarios and events (regardless of whether we find them estranging or not).”753 So a science fiction narrative in which human beings turn into animals would be considered unnatural. Brian Richardson would call such a narrative “nonmimetic”: it does not follow realist conventions, but it obeys other (generic) conventions, and when one uses these conventions, the narrative can be naturalized. The narrated transformation is not unusual in science fiction. It has become “conventionalized.” For a narrative to be “unnatural” in the eyes of Richardson, it must be “antimimetic,” that is, “unconventionalized”: “By antimimetic, I mean representations that contravene the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, violate mimetic expectations and the practices of realism, and defy the conventions of existing, established genres.”754
The terminology is further complicated by the views of the other two unnatural narratologists involved in the 2010 manifesto by Alber et al. Stefan Iversen “ties the notion of the ‘unnatural’ to narratives that present the reader with clashes between the rules governing a storyworld and scenarios or events producing or taking place inside this storyworld, clashes that defy easy explanations.” Henrik Skov Nielsen “defines unnatural narratives as a subset of fictional narratives that—unlike many realist and mimetic narratives—cue the reader to employ interpretational strategies that are different from those she employs in non-fictionalized, conversational storytelling situations.”755
As is the case with Fludernik’s approach, the reader and the diachronic dimension come to the fore in the work of the “unnaturals” as well. What is considered antimimetic and unconventionalized varies from reader to reader and from period to period. To decide what is “physically, logically, and humanly impossible,” Jan Alber adopts the stance of a typical Western reader: “I should emphasize that in this study I assume the position of a contemporary and neurotypical reader who has a rationalist-scientific and empirically minded worldview.”756 Again, there is no empirical testing. The reader may be central, but he or she remains an abstract entity.
In her reaction to the joint 2010 essay by Alber et al., Fludernik even restricts (partly or completely—that remains unclear) the unnatural to clearly delineated historical periods and narrative forms. First, there are the “pre-eighteenth-century narratives,” especially “the discourse of fable, romance, before-the-novel narrative.” Second, there is “the discourse of postmodernist anti-illusionism, transgression, and metafiction.”757 In their reply Alber et al. reject this historical reduction and claim that unnatural elements have always been present, from the simplest and earliest forms of narratives to the most complex present-day incarnations.758 Moreover, limiting the unnatural to genres such as the fable and the postmodern novel would go against Richardson’s idea of the unnatural as the unconventionalized narrative, unrelated to generic forms of naturalization.
In general, unnatural narratology shows that even so-called conventional narratives contain a lot of odd and unwieldy elements. Maria Mäkelä, for instance, uncovers “the unnatural and the distorted essence of literary perception in realism through a couple of examples from Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Leo Tolstoy.”759 The narratives are filled with excessive and overly detailed descriptions, which are not motivated in the traditional sense (that is, by story logic or psychology) and not clearly anchored in a center of perception or “experientiality.” They destabilize narrative progression and produce a grotesque effect. “From this perspective,” Mäkelä concludes, “realism would seem to be more an art of distortion than reproduction.”760
Apart from the terminological problem—the definition of “unnatural”—there is a methodological difficulty: how do you approach the so-called unapproachable narrative aspects? In theory, unnatural narratology points to narrative elements that resist interpretation and naturalization, but even so, it tries to make sense of these strange elements. Fludernik first commends unnatural narratology: “one of the most appealing features of ‘unnatural’ narratology is its avowed desire to preserve the oddity of the strange and illogical in otherwise realistic texts.”761 But then she demonstrates that the readings by Richardson et al. do not preserve the oddity as they make sense of it, quite regularly by linking the strange elements to genres, themes, or psychology. For instance, the interpretation of Robert Coover’s story “The Babysitter” makes sense of the nonsensical: “by explaining some of the possible rationales of Coover’s story, they in fact introduce a familiarization of the unnatural within a well-known postmodernist framework.”762
This general methodological problem is solved—or at least confronted—in different ways by different unnatural narratologists. One might place the various solutions on a continuum that begins on the left side with an avowed noninterference (that is, leave the unfamiliar as it is) and ends on the right side, with an almost Fludernik-like attempt to come to terms with the strange elements. The first option is Richardson’s (and by and large also Iversen’s and Nielsen’s); the second one is Alber’s. The latter outlines nine reading strategies to make sense of what seems incomprehensible in narratives: frame blending, generification (using genre conventions to make sense of the unnatural), subjectification (reading the unnatural as a representation of “internal states”), thematic foregrounding, allegorical reading, satirical and parodic interpretation, using transcendental realms to explain the unnatural, turning the text into your own story, and, finally, “the Zen way of reading,” which comes closest to Richardson’s respect for the power of the unnatural.763 In his readings Alber always points to a number of these cognitive strategies, and he does so on the basis of his own (rationally informed) ways of reading. In the end he turns unnatural narratives into texts addressing the “human interest question.”764 To him, such a narrative “is always part of a purposeful and meaningful communicative act.”765
Although Richardson also points to the pragmatic, social, and cultural value of antimimetic narratives,766 he repeatedly states that he wants to leave the unnatural as it is. For instance: “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.”767 Obviously, this can never be fully realized, as any interpretation transforms the narrative elements under discussion. Still, Richardson advocates a “resistance to interpretive recuperation,” which acknowledges strategies of sense-making but refuses to reduce the narrative to those strategies: “we should recognize the hints of allegory, the thematic associations, the suggestions of fantasy or dreamlike events, the parody of ordinary human interactions—but not reduce the unnatural elements to one or two of these other aspects in an effort to place the entire work safely within a single totalizing interpretation.”768
The negative connotation of the term “totalizing” can be found in all forms of unnatural narratology. The new approach presents itself as a complement, not as a replacement for existing theories and certainly not as a new master theory that would be able to deal with all narrative texts. Alber et al. defend a “dialectical view: most narratives can adequately be described in terms of the permanent interaction between the natural on the one hand and the unnatural on the other.”769 This form of dialectics on the level of the method fits in with the dual nature of narratives. Richardson advocates “a dual or oscillating conception of narratives, one mimetic, the other antimimetic. Most narrative theorists advocate a single theory of narrative that can be applied to all narratives, fictional and nonfictional. To me, this aspiration is quixotic.”770
That is why Richardson uses existing narratological concepts, such as fabula and syuzhet, and then opens them up to include the antimimetic dimensions of unnatural narratives. He thus arrives at “infinite fabulas,” “denarrated fabulas” (the refutation of what has been told before), and “entirely variable syuzhet patterns.”771 As he uses classical narratology and at the same time shows how a text undermines its application, Richardson is happy to be called a “dual-level-reader,” that is, “one who perceives the generic system or otherwise conventional framework and enjoys the antimimetic assaults on those conventions.”772
Combining this unnatural narratological toolbox with the three unnatural levels mentioned by Alber et al. in 2010, one might propose a methodology that focuses on oddities in the storyworld, on the kind of consciousness (or “experientiality”), and on the sort of narration. Taken together, these levels would shed new light on the syuzhet and the fabula (e.g., is it natural? can it be reconstructed at all?) and would enable the reader to decide if the narrative is nonmimetic or antimimetic. This is just the first methodological phase, which may be called “diagnostic,” in that it lists the unfamiliar elements in the narrative. The question of what is to be done with these strange elements is part of a second analytical step. In both phases the reader plays a decisive role: he or she decides what is odd and what is to be done about it. As we saw, Mäkelä points to the disproportionate and excessive narration in classical realism, but some readers may find these detailed descriptions part and parcel of conventional realism.
In Wasco’s “City” the reader may find the narrative typical of science fiction, in which case he or she zooms in on the conventionalized, nonmimetic elements. Staples of science fiction are the flying saucer, the futuristic urban environment, and the reconnaissance trip. The emptiness of the city might be naturalized by linking it to postapocalyptic or posthuman genres. In Alber’s terms the reader uses (and up to a point blends) genre conventions to make sense of the nonmimetic storyworld. In addition, he or she might read this as a satirical expression of the inhumane contemporary city or as a presentation of a theme (e.g., the uninhabitable city).
On the other hand, one might look for odd elements that can hardly be naturalized. For instance, the setting of the storyworld contains incongruities that remain riddles even when they are linked to generic frames, social satire, or themes. For one, the setting seems to do away with the spatial logic of high and low, in and out. There are holes in the ground, and out of one of these holes (in panel nineteen) a spire protrudes. The ground does not really seem to be the ground anymore. “Low” becomes “high.” It is often impossible to decide if a sidewalk is down on the ground or up in the air, as can be seen in panels six and eight. Similarly, “in” and “out” seem to be mixed. For instance, one may wonder if panel twelve shows an outdoor urban scene or a large room in a museum. In the first case, one might ask why the road is covered with sharp, tower-like objects that make driving impossible. In the second case, one might wonder about the difference between a city and a museum.
The closer one looks, the more oddities one discovers. That in itself is a major contribution of unnatural narratology. It is an essential correction of theories—such as classical structuralism—that aim for a complete systematization and disregard elements that may unhinge the system. It is also a welcome reminder of the unique qualities of narratives, which cannot be reduced to theories, no matter how totalizing or relativistic these are. Even if one were to use all the theories proposed in this handbook, narratives and readers would still have the final word.