THEORY AND INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE THE FOR OF PLOT POETICS A James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, and Katra Byram, Series Editors TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY TWENTY-FIRST “Brian Richardson’s ever-expanding knowledge of world historical li terature—ancient and contemporary, arcane and canonical—allows him, seemingly without effort, to put things in a fresh light—a rare pleasure in academic prose.” —H. PORTER ABBOTT A POETICS OF Story, in the largest sense of the term, is arguably the single most important aspect of narrative. But with the proliferation of antimimetic writing, traditional narrative theory has been inadequate for conceptualizing and theorizing a vast body of innovative narratives. In A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives, Brian Richardson proposes a new, expansive model PLOT for understanding story and plot, including beginnings, endings, temporality, and FOR THE unusual narrative progressions. While he focuses on late modernist, postmodern, and contemporary narratives, the study also includes many earlier works, unruly narratives theorizing spanning from Aristophanes and Shakespeare through James Joyce and Virginia TWENTY-FIRST Woolf to Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter. By exploring fundamental questions about narrative, Richardson provides a CENTURY detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive theory that includes neglected categories of storytelling and significantly enhances our treatment of traditional areas of analysis. Ultimately, this book promises to transform and expand the study of story and plot. theorizing unruly narratives RICHARDSON BRIAN RICHARDSON is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice (OSU Press, 2015). COVER DESIGN: Laurence J. Nozik COVER IMAGE: Shutterstock, Inc. The Ohio State University Press Columbus OHIO BRIAN STATE ohiostatepress.org PRESS RICHARDSON A POETICS OF PLOT FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY THEORY AND INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, and Katra Byram, Series Editors A POETICS OF PLOT FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY THEORIZING UNRULY NARRATIVES BRIAN RICHARDSON THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2019 by Th e Ohio State University. Th is edition licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at catalog.loc.gov. Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Th e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. To Claudine, for everything CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION Mimetic and Antimimetic Narrative Dynamics 1 CHAPTER 1 Narrative, the Nonnarrative, and the Unnarratable 13 CHAPTER 2 Modeling Narrative Beginnings 37 CHAPTER 3 Narrative Middles I: Plot, Probability, and Tellability 59 CHAPTER 4 Narrative Middles II: Non-Plot-Based Narrative Progressions 83 CHAPTER 5 The Varieties of Narrative Time 99 CHAPTER 6 Adventures of the Book: Fabricating Fabula and Syuzhet 127 CHAPTER 7 Narrative Endings: Fixed, Unfixed, Illusory, and Unnatural 149 CONCLUSION Narrative Theory and the Poetics of Story and Plot 169 Works Cited 175 Index 191 PREFACE STATED MOST SIMPLY, this book is intended to offer a comprehensive account of story and plot that is able to include the achievements and chal- lenges of postmodern and other experimental poetics. Most existing accounts of story and plot do a good job of accounting for more realistic kinds of nar- rative progression, but they are often unable to manage the many innovative treatments of emplotment, endings, temporality, and story construction that have been developed by contemporary authors. In addition to these more familiar aspects of narrative theory, this book also takes up the intimately related but comparatively understudied topics of narrative beginnings, nar- rative sequencing, and non-plot-based narrative progressions. Examining these aspects of recent works often allows us to excavate similar practices that occurred earlier in the history of narrative fiction and drama—stretching back to the ancient Greeks—as what seem to be distinctively postmodern narrative strategies often turn out to be recent manifestations of narrative constructions with a much older pedigree. The primary purpose of this book is thus to examine, extend, and supple- ment existing narrative theory to enable it to do justice to the profusion of postmodern and avant-garde texts that currently elude many existing formu- lations. In most chapters, I will begin with a brief discussion of recent critical accounts, after which I will often make the case for one position or another. After discussing some salient examples, I will outline how existing theoretical ix x • PREFACE formulations can be modified to better model a greater range of texts, both pre- and postmodern. Depending on the subject, some chapters will be con- cerned primarily with postmodern examples; others, with relatively few. Each chapter will have a slightly different relation to the existing body of narrative theory. The first chapter, on narrative, confines itself largely to exist- ing conceptions, which I feel are mostly adequate, and argues in favor of one of the well-established definitions of narrative. I do try to extend this concep- tion in a few ways and propose the category of the “quasi narrative,” but for the most part I am satisfied with most items in the existing narratological toolbox for this subject. The chapter on non-plot-based forms of narrative sequencing, however, covers important material that narrative theory has not incorpo- rated. Thus I am required to assemble a set of new concepts, categories, and terms; the chapter is much more in dialogue with the work of particular crit- ics and specialized literary historians than it is with narrative theorists. Other chapters have still other relations to current narratological accounts: my work on beginnings refers to the very few studies of the subject that we have, while my discussion of endings draws on and attempts to extend the work of D. A. Miller and J. Hillis Miller and argues against theorists like Peter Brooks and Tzvetan Todorov. At the same time, I include discussions of several kinds of unnatural closure that have largely been neglected in narratological circles. As is perhaps only appropriate for a volume on this subject, I have designed the book so that it can be read in different sequences: I have made the chapters largely independent so that each can be read in isolation from the others; readers are thus free to determine the order of their encounter with the text. Since some works by a few authors (Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Ana Castillo) present interesting questions in several areas—beginnings, sequenc- ing, time, and endings—they are mentioned in several chapters. I hope that any repeated statements of distinctive features of the texts will not excessively annoy a linear reader who moves from the first page to the last, even as this framework strives to give the hopscotching reader more possibilities for dif- ferent kinds of engagement. It will no doubt be useful for me to situate this book in relation to my other work in narrative theory. My first book, Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative, is primarily about fictional worlds; its empha- sis is on characters’ interpretations of the kind of universe they inhabit and the laws—supernatural, naturalistic, chance, or metafictional—that govern its causal setting. My next monograph, Unnatural Voices, explored and analyzed a large range of unusual and impossible narrators and acts of narration. This present book moves on to the stories themselves, how they are fabricated and how they unfold, and thus presents another base or pillar in an interconnected PREFACE • xi account of fictional worlds, narration, and story. In the jointly authored vol- ume Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Current Debates, David Herman, James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (together), Robyn Warhol, and I each provide a condensed overview of our positions on several subjects: authors and narrators, story and temporality, narrative space, characters, readers and reception, and narrative and aesthetic value. I have also put together a volume that elucidates the general theory and outlines the history of what I call anti- mimetic or unnatural narratives: Unnatural Narrative: History, Theory, and Practice. My future work will engage with the theory of character. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I HAVE WORKED on this book over many years, and several people have pro- vided valuable assistance over that time. Those who have been particularly helpful in reading pages and discussing ideas include Porter Abbott, Lars Bernaerts, Shang Biwu, Bohumil Fořt, Melba Cuddy-Keane, David Herman, Luc Herman, Emma Kafalenos, Suzanne Keen, Brian McHale, Sylvie Patron, Ellen Peel, John Pier, Gerald Prince, David Richter, Catherine Romagnolo, Philippe Roussin, Eyal Segal, Dan Shen, Roy Sommer, Leona Toker, Bart Ver- vaeck, Robyn Warhol, and Katherine Weese. Special thanks go out to unnatu- ral narrative theorists and fellow travelers Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Maria Mäkela, and Henrik Skov Nielsen, who have done so much to help me clarify and extend my thinking on these matters. I wish to offer particular thanks to Jim Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, who have provided long hours of engaged, helpful, and often frankly brilliant editing, and whose comments, suggestions, and concerns have clearly made this a superior book. I thank the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Study (FRIAS), University of Freiburg, Germany, for a fellowship that allowed me to work on this book during the spring of 2017. The research leading to the completion of this book was also funded by the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme. I am very grateful for a RASA grant from the Univer- sity of Maryland’s College of Arts and Humanities which also helped enable me to finish the volume.