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James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, and Robyn Warhol, Series Editors for Anita Real Mysteries THEORY AND INterpretATION OF NArrATIVE James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, and Robyn Warhol, Series Editors FOR ANITA REAL MYSTERIES NArrATIVE AND THE UNKNOWABLE H. Porter Abbott THE OHIO STATE UNIVersitY Press COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abbott, H. Porter. Real mysteries : narrative and the unknowable / H. Porter Abbott. p. cm. — (Theory and interpretation of narrative) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1232-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1232-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9335-5 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0-8142-9335-2 (cd-rom) [etc.] Fiction—History and criticism. 2. Narration (Rhetoric) 3. Knowledge, Theory of, in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Theory and interpretation of narrative series. PN3383.N35A234 2013 808.3—dc23 2013016965 Cover design by Thao Thai Typesetting by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materi- als. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 I wanted to write a real mystery —Tim O’Brien CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix INtrODuctiON 1 PART ONE Unimaginable Unknowns CHApter 1 Apophatic Narrative 27 CHApter 2 Conjuring Stories 45 PART TWO Inexpressible States CHApter 3 Sentences & Worlds 65 CHApter 4 Syntactical Poetics 84 PART ThrEE Egregious Gaps CHApter 5 Untold Events 107 CHApter 6 Unreadable Minds 123 CONCLusiON Why All This Matters 141 Works Cited 155 Index 169 AcKNOWLEDGMENTS THE SEEDS for this book were sewn in three essays: “Unreadable Minds and the Captive Reader,” Style (2008); “Immersions in the Cognitive Sub- lime,” Narrative (2009); and “Garden Paths and Ineffable effects,” in Frederick Aldama’s Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts (2010). For all their studied autonomy, they were at heart three different takes on the same sub- ject, with the same over-arching set of interrelated themes. To bring this out, both their differences and their sameness, the three parts of this book rewrite, extend, adapt, expand, extensively supplement, and basically rethink these three essays. I am grateful to the publishers of Style, Narrative, and the Uni- versity of Texas Press, respectively, for permission to use portions of these essays in this book. I am also grateful to the University of Gdansk Press for permission to reprint material from the essay “So, It’s not only Unspeakable, It’s Unknowable. But Is It Unnarratable? Beckett and the Apophatic Tradi- tion,” which appeared in Tomasz Wiśniewski’s Back to the Beckett Text (2012). Along the way, I’ve had opportunities to test-drive my ideas before captive audiences, notably in a conference at Purdue University in 2007 (“Theory of Mind and Literature”); a Project Narrative workshop at The Ohio State Uni- versity, also in 2007; another conference in Sopot, Poland, in 2010 (“Back to the Beckett text”); and several of the annual conferences of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. They all made a difference. ix x | AcKNOWLEDGMENTS In the actual writing of this book, I once again owe the most to Anita Abbott, my beloved dedicatee and first among readers, who read two drafts of this work and saved me from countless errors, obscurities, and failures of plain common sense. I was also blessed with three uncommonly dedicated and astute readers for the press—Jim Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and an anon- ymous third—each of whom in their different ways combined an exacting critical eye with a willingness to enter into the spirit of what they read. My thanks to Alan Palmer, the most congenial of sparring partners, with whom I enjoyed a two-stop road show in the fall of 2007, and to Lisa Zunshine for serial invitations to serve on cognitive panels. She, like Alan, provided a well- developed theory of fiction for my contrarian bent. Thanks, too, to Barbara Abbott, whose informed and uncompromising intelligence alerted me to dan- gers as I wandered into the field of linguistics. Edward Branigan, who is as positive in spirit as he is complex in mind, gave me good tips as I worked on Part Two of this book. Finally, my thanks go to Sandy Crooms and the staff of The Ohio State University Press, whose efficiency and friendly attentiveness did much to lighten the long slog of getting a book into print. Introduction FAIL BETTER Sometime in the mid-1980s, a student asked me “Did Beckett really say that? ‘Fail better’?” He was smiling, and I, smiling, assured him that Beckett had indeed put those two words together. They had appeared a few years before in Beckett’s last long composition in prose, Worstward Ho (1983), and now as it seemed had already gone viral. Global culture, even without digital assistance, was doing its work, digesting Beckett, and here we were, my student and I, enjoying a moment of this rapid and complex process. I doubt Beckett ever smiled when he wrote, but there was probably something like a wry internal smile when he hit upon this combination of words, since humor was an indis- pensable element of his “divergent intelligence.”1 His multi-layered astringent wit was a kind of soil out of which his work grew, giving it a combination of intensity and depth and wisdom and (dare I say it?) beauty that has rarely been matched. By contrast, my student and I were enjoying a joke: the comic 1. I found this apt concept in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, where he contrasts it with the “convergent intelligence” ordinarily measured by standard IQ tests. Unlike convergent intel- ligence, there is no measuring divergent intelligence since there can be no right answers were one to test for it. The more powerful it is, the more surprising its results. 1 2 | INTRODUCTION absurdity of two things that don’t go together, framed by wonderment at the strange doings of this strange man (Did he really say that?). As such, our exchange was an instance of the process of culling, recombin- ing, and disseminating “memes,” or cultural bits, that Richard Dawkins con- troversially proposed as analogous in their working to genes (Dawkins 1989: 192ff). In American culture, in addition to its memetic life as a lame joke, “fail better” has also been commonly appropriated as a way of saying “keep trying, never give up,” with the adjunct “learn from your failures and eventually you will succeed.”2 Among literary scholars, it has at times been parsed to mean that the success of Beckett’s art requires failing by the customary standards of artistic success. And, as literary history, this idea does apply to Beckett as modernist, if not to its function in Worstward Ho. “Failing,” interpreted as a vigorous and continually evolving refusal to meet the expectations of the artis- tic marketplace is one of the hallmarks of modernist achievement.3 Much has been written about what Beckett meant when he said that “to be an artist is to fail as no other dare fail” (Beckett 1983: 145). And as failure is one of the commonest tropes in his oeuvre, much more will continue to be written on the subject. But commentary rarely probes the actual experience of something like “fail better,” especially when it’s put back in context. In Worst- ward Ho, written when he was seventy-seven, Beckett produced an extended valedictory fanfare in which failure is the dominating motif. It is a rich, rhyth- mic, complex work of art in which words are made to circle an absent center. This is my take on the work and, as such, it provides me with an opening note in this prelude to a book about the art of not knowing. Read in this spirit, the oxymoronic combination of “fail” plus “better” is felt as a momentary neural jamming in an art where words are constantly being abnormalized by their syntax. For this art to work, then, the reader must set aside, on the one hand, the self-sufficiency and distraction of the joke; and on the other, the joke’s opposite, that is, the explanatory attitude. In the experience of reading the actual text, Worstward Ho, these normalizing frames of mind get in the way. 2. Paula M. Krebs draws explicitly on the authority of the name behind the phrase: “I had a colleague who had a poster in his dining room with Samuel Beckett’s ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ We may tell ourselves that, but we don’t tell our stu- dents. Maybe we should post it in our classrooms, not our dining rooms” (Krebs 2012). Krebs’s appropriation was echoed by the actor Peter Dinklage in his 2012 commencement address at Bennington College: “Don’t bother telling the world you are ready. Show It. Do it. What did Beckett say? ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’” (Pérez-Peña 2012). 3. The multiple ways in which culture can recursively normalize intentional artistic failure has been especially problematic for Beckett, given his spectacular cultural success. After Godot, this meant working against cultural standards of success to which his own work had contrib- uted. INTRODUCTION | 3 They obscure the full force of “fail” in combination with the force of “better.” This is what must be felt. So, I go get the text and open it up: Worsening words whose unknown. Whence unknown. At all costs unknown. Now for to say as worst they may only they only they.
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