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Theory and Interpretation of Narrative James Phelan, Peter J

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Theory and Interpretation of Narrative James Phelan, Peter J THEORY AND INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, and Robyn Warhol, Series Editors All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. UNNATURAL NARRATIVE Theory, History, and Practice BRIAN RICHARDSON THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBus All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Copyright © 2015 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Richardson, Brian, 1953– Unnatural narrative : theory, history, and practice / Brian Richardson. pages cm. — (Theory and interpretation of narrative) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1279-0 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9384-3 (cd-rom) 1. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. PN212.R49 2015 808'.036—dc23 2014044399 Cover design by Thao Thai Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Nation- al Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. To my brother, Alan All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Preface xiii PART I: THEORY 1 A Theory of Unnatural Narratives: Definitions, Paradigms, Problems 3 2 The Limitations of Conventional Narrative Theory 28 PART II: APPLICATION 3 A Poetics of Unnatural Stories: Fabula, Syuzhet, and Sequence 51 4 Contesting the Boundary of Fictionality in Contemporary Narrative 67 PART III: HISTORY 5 Toward a History of Unnatural Narratives 91 6 Unnatural Narratives in the Twentieth Century 121 PART IV: IDEOLOGY 7 Oppositional Literature and Unnatural Poetics 143 CONCLUSION Methodology and the Unnatural: Antimimesis and Narrative Theory 163 Works Cited 173 Index 189 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS HAVE BENEFITTED from many rich, thoughtful, and occasionally heated discussions on the subject of unnatu- I ral narratives with a number of theorists: Porter Abbott, Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Marco Caracciolo, Hilary Dannen- berg, Amy Elias, Monika Fludernik, David Herman, Uri Mar- golin, Gunther Martens, Ansgar Nünning, Alan Palmer, Sylvie Patron, Ellen Peel, Gerald Prince, Alan Richardson, Catherine Romagnolo, Marie-Laure Ryan, Eyal Segal, Roy Sommer, Meir Sternberg, Nancy Stewart, and Werner Wolf; I thank them all very much for helping me clarify, refine, extend, and rework my ideas and the terms to express them. I also thank those who have discussed my work with me at the annual International Narrative and European Narratology Network conferences. I am especially grateful to Monika Fludernik and the FRIAS institute at the University of Freiburg; to Luc Herman, Bart Vervaeck, Lars Bernaerts, and the Center for the Study of Post- modernism in Ghent; Henrik Skov Nielsen, Stefan Iversen and the members of the Narrative Research Lab, and Per Stounbjerg of the Center for Fictionality Studies at Aarhus University; Brian McHale, James Phelan, and Robyn Warhol of Project Narrative at The Ohio State University; Maria Mäkelä, Pekka Tammi, and their colleagues at the University of Tampere; John ix All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. x • Acknowledgments Pier, Philippe Roussin, and the members of “Narratologies contempo- raines” seminar of Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CRAL); and Richard Walsh and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies in York, UK. Being able to present and discuss my work in these venues with these theorists has been invaluable. I am grateful to Nancy Stewart for editorial advice. I thank my depart- ment chairs, Kent Cartwright and William Cohen, for their generous intellectual and material support of my work. I greatly appreciate a fel- lowship from the Institute of Aesthetics and Communication at Aarhus University and a RASA grant provided by the University of Maryland’s College of Arts and Humanities that enabled me to complete this volume. I offer a special homage to editors Sandy Crooms and Malcolm Litchfield and to the magnificent staff at The Ohio State University Press, in particu- lar managing editor Tara Cyphers; every aspect of working with them has been a great pleasure. I am grateful for many helpful suggestions from the anonymous reader for the Ohio State University Press and to series editors James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz for their characteristically superb comments, sug- gestions, and editing. I especially wish to thank two colleagues who have been central to the development of unnatural narrative theory: Jan Alber, the principal organizer of the first conference on unnatural narratology, who read and discussed earlier versions of several chapters of this work. I am greatly indebted to his astute comments, theoretical acuity, personal generosity, and wonderful collegiality. I also thank Henrik Skov Nielsen for careful readings of two chapters and many helpful discussions of my work, often in Aarhus. I express my gratitude to both, brilliant scholars and wonderful collaborators, whose superb work, intellectual insight, and personal friendships have been extraordinarily helpful. Finally, I thank the following presses for allowing me to reprint mate- rial, earlier versions of which appeared in their pages: de Gruyter for pages from “Unnatural Voices in Ulysses: Joyce’s Postmodern Modes of Narra- tion” in Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction, edited by Per Krogh Hansen, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Rolf Reitan that are included in chapter 6 and for “What Is Unnatural Narrative Theory?” from Unnatu- ral Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, edited by Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze; some of this material now appears in chapters 1, 2, and the con- clusion. I thank the University of Nebraska Press for the right to reprint several paragraphs from Storyworlds in chapter 4, Modern Philology for the section on Macbeth in chapter 5, the University of Texas Press for material All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Acknowledgments • xi in chapter 7 from the essay “U.S. Ethnic and Postcolonial Fiction: Toward a Collectivist Poetics,” in Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Nar- rative Theory, edited by Frederick Aldama, and Peter Lang SA for pages in the conclusion from my article, “Narrative Theory, Methodology, and the Unusual Text” that appeared in Théorie, analyse, interpretation des récits, edited by Sylvie Patron, Berlin, 2011, pages 57–71. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. PREFACE NNATURAL N A R R AT I V E has several goals: to provide a full elucidation of the theory of unnatural narratives, U to trace the history of unnatural narratives from antiq- uity to the present, to provide some analyses of unnatural texts, and to address a number of pressing theoretical questions, such as the question of fictionality that authors of unnatural works repeatedly foreground. In doing so, I hope to provide a substan- tial adjustment to narrative theory as it is currently practiced by adding a significantly new perspective to the basic model that is currently used. Since the 1960s, narrative innovation has proceeded at an astounding pace, and narrative theory has been slow to fully conceptualize these innovations and integrate them into existing theoretical models. Unnatural narrative theory has focused on these texts, expanding theoretical models to incorpo- rate these practices, and looking back into the history of narra- tive to find significant antecedents of these strategies. As it turns out, they are everywhere. This book has four parts and seven chapters. I begin with two theoretical chapters, and move on to two applications of the theory. The first chapter provides several basic definitions—of unnatural narrative as well as other central concepts in the book such as mimetic and antimimetic narratives. It discusses degrees xiii All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. xiv • Preface of unnaturalness in various texts and notes the range of unnatural narra- tives in Western literary history, classical Asian drama, folktales, and popu- lar culture. I differentiate the unnatural from superficially similar forms, including science fiction, supernatural works, fantastic tales, allegory, and highly stylized texts. I go on to discuss some compelling borderline cases and deal with the question of the possible relative or changing status of the unnatural over time or across cultures. In addition, this chapter argues against rival conceptions of the unnatural, in particular the important work of Jan Alber. At the end, I offer a short account of some pertinent anticipa- tions of unnatural narrative theory in the history of critical theory. The econds chapter examines several widespread concepts of narrative theory and points out how they are transgressed by unnatural fictions. The areas I investigate are story, sequence, narration, character, space, episte-
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