Unnatural Narrative Theory

Brian Richardson

Style, Volume 50, Number 4, 2016, pp. 385-405 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sty.2016.0023

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Forum

Unnatural Narrative Theory

Brian Richardson
University of Maryland

ABSTRACT: The article explains and outlines the basic aspects of unnatural narrative,
identifying central strategies and effects of the unnatural. It differentiates unnatural
or antimimetic elements from mimetic and nonmimetic ones and notes the differing
effects that unnatural elements can have on a given narrative. It notes some limitations
of existing narratological theory and offers methods for transcending those limitations.
After tracing out the history and development of key concepts and terms and explain-
ing the basic model of unnatural narrative theory, this target essay goes on to provide
an overview of the history, genres, and ideological associations of unnatural narratives
themselves, clarify some common misunderstandings, and point out some differing con-
ceptions among unnatural narratologists. It then discusses the major contributions of
unnatural narrative studies, notes current advances in the field, and speculates on future
developments.
Keywords: antimimetic, cognitive narratology, fabula, fictional minds, fictional
worlds, fictionality, interpretation, narration, reader, second-person narration, story,
structuralism, temporality, unnatural narrative, “we” narration

Unnatural narrative theory is the theory of fictional narratives that defy

the conventions of nonfictional narratives and of fiction that closely
resembles nonfiction. It theorizes fiction that displays its own fictionality,
and focuses on works that break (or only partly enter into) the mimetic
illusion. Paradigmatic examples of unnatural narratives include Samuel
Beckett’s The Unnamable and many of his later texts, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s
La Jalousie (and other works that employ this kind of construction), Italo
Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Angela Carter’s The Infernal
Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic

Style, Vol. 50, No. 4, 2016. Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
386 Style

Verses. For a pithy example of the unnatural in a single phrase, one may go
to Christine Brooke-Rose’s line in Thru: “Whoever you invented invented
you too” (53). Shlomith Rimmon–Kenan comments on that line—and
the narrative as a whole—in the following terms: “The novel repeatedly
reverses the hierarchy [of narrative levels], transforming a narrated object
into a narrating agent and vice versa. The very distinction between out-
side and inside, container and contained, narrating subject and narrated
object, higher and lower level collapses” (94). For an example centered
on events, we may adduce the following passage from Mark Leyner in
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist: “He’s got a car bomb. He puts the keys
in the ignition and turns it—the car blows up. He gets out. He opens the
hood and makes a cursory inspection. He closes the hood and gets back
in. He turns the key in the ignition. The car blows up. He gets out and
slams the door shut disgustedly” (59). Here, an impossible sequence of
events is depicted.
Unnatural fiction is different not only from mimetic fiction but also
from what I call nonmimetic or nonnatural fiction. Nonmimetic narratives
include conventional fairy tales, animal fables, ghost stories, and other
kinds of fiction that invoke magical or supernatural elements. Such narra-
tives employ consistent storyworlds and obey established generic conven-
tions or, in some cases, merely add a single supernatural component to an
otherwise naturalistic world. By contrast, unnatural texts do not attempt to
extend the boundaries of the mimetic, but rather play with the very conven-
tions of mimesis.1

EXIG EN CY

In most models of narrative theory, both ancient and modern, there has
been little consideration of or space for highly imaginative, experimental,
antirealistic, impossible, or parodic figures and events. Instead, we generally
find a pronounced inclination or even a strong bias in favor of mimetic or
realistic concepts; often, fictional characters, events, and settings are ana-
lyzed in the same terms or perspectives that are normally used for actual
persons, events, and settings.2 In many types of narrative theory, the model
or default type of narrative was and still is a more or less mimetic one.3 This
is even largely true of structuralist narratology, despite its scientific posture
and desire to transcend humanism, as Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck have
 Forum 387

thoroughly established (41–101, esp. 63–65, 69–70, 82–86, 101). To be sure,

there have been a number of exceptional theorists who have attempted to
go well beyond the parameters of the mimetic, including Viktor Shklovsky,
Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Ricardou, Christine Brooke-Rose, David Hayman,
Leonard Orr, Brian McHale, J. Hillis Miller, and Werner Wolf (see Richardson,
Unnatural Narrative 23–27). The fact remains, however, that most current
narratological accounts continue to employ substantially or exclusively
mimetic models.
Thus, on the subject of narrative time, nearly all general works of nar-
rative theory or narratological handbooks employ and limit themselves to
Genette’s categories of order, duration, and frequency. The category of order
contrasts the sequence of events presented in the text (récit, sjužet) with the
sequence of events we can derive from the text and place into a chrono-
logical order (histoire, fabula). These are real-world categories; there is no
trouble applying these concepts to most every nonfictional narrative or to
fictional works that maintain a consistent, mimetic time scheme and fixed
storyworld. But there are numerous other possibilities that have appeared in
literature for centuries that create several kinds of impossible, variable, or
unknowable chronologies.
These include unending fabulas, which extend infinitely, as in Nabokov’s
“The Circle” or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and dual or multiple fabulas, which
result in mutually inconsistent story lines and which can be found in the
works of Shakespeare and in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando and Caryl Churchill’s
Cloud Nine (in this play, twenty-five years pass for the characters while, at the
same time, a century passes for the rest of the world). Contradictory fabulas
do not allow a single story line to be derived from the text (Robbe-Grillet’s
La Jalousie; Anna Kavan’s Ice), while narratives with antinomic chronologies
invert the direction of time and move forward into the past (Amis’s Time’s
Arrow). Still other narratives have erased or “denarrated” events, such as
“Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining” (Richardson, Unnatural
Voices 87–91). Any comprehensive account of fabulas or narrative tem-
porality needs to include additional concepts to describe the practices of
unnatural narratives. Similar problems appear in several other areas where
unnatural and impossible forms are employed, including the theory of nar-
ration, narrative space, fictional worlds, characterization, and reading.4 In
short, a near exclusive focus on mimetic works and mimetic concepts has left
no theoretical space available for the many innovative, impossible, parodic,
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or contradictory events and figures that permeate contemporary literature.

This situation has resulted in a partial, incomplete narrative theory.
Historically, it is easy to see how this situation may have come about.
Modern narrative theory, from Henry James and the Russian Formalists
to Czech and French structuralism and German narrative theory (Stanzel,
Hamburger, and others) and even including some Chicago School theory
(especially that of Wayne Booth), was written in the shadow of the great nar-
rative experiments of literary modernism, which offered new deployments
of first-person narration, unreliability, emplotment, narrative sequencing,
temporality, growing divergences between fabula and sjužet, open endings,
the implied reader, and other narrative strategies. But the conceptual appa-
ratuses developed to encompass modernist poetics were inadequate for
postmodernism, or, for that matter, the more antirealist experiments of the
modernists themselves. Classical narrative theory was able to circumscribe
Proust, Mrs Dalloway, The Sound and the Fury, and the first half of Ulysses,
but had little or nothing to say about the impossible chronology of Orlando,
the unusual narration of The Waves, the seemingly telepathic knowledge in
As I Lay Dying, or the deconstruction of narrative voice in the second half of
Ulysses. Still less could it deal with the more radical experiments of Beckett,
the nouveau roman, magical realism, écriture féminine, and postmodernism.
To appreciate the importance of how thoroughly one’s horizons of expec-
tations are informed by the choice of texts one selects as models, one need
only imagine how different narratology would have been had Genette used
Beckett’s trilogy rather than Proust’s Recherche as his tutor text. Literature
continues to evolve, and new forms of innovative work have arisen, many of
them developing or inventing original ways to violate mimetic conventions.
It was inevitable that a new theory would emerge. My goal and that of my
colleagues has been to expand the conceptual apparatus of narrative theory
so it could encompass antimimetic practices, and thereby be more inclusive,
more comprehensive, and more accurate.
Despite many excellent critical studies of a large number of experimental
works, the old mimeticism seems to be making a comeback in some circles.
Recently, this bias has been made additionally problematic by certain the-
orists, such as David Herman, who apply the results of cognitive science to
works of fiction without addressing key differences that only fictional prac-
tices can produce. This retrogressive neo-mimeticism is unfortunate; at its
worst, it threatens to ignore or undo many of the achievements of narrative
 Forum 389

theory during the last quarter century. Nevertheless, it has not failed to
engender a very productive series of debates that are helping to clarify the
distinctive difference of fictional narratives.

DEFINITIONS

Each theorist of unnatural narratives tends to define the field slightly differ-
ently; nevertheless, these definitions largely cover similar areas and ranges,
and all of us tend to agree on which texts constitute paradigmatic cases and
which are borderline instances. To reiterate, for myself the unnatural consists
of events, characters, settings, or acts of narration that are antimimetic, that is,
elements that defy the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, the prac-
tices of realism or other poetics that model themselves on nonfictional nar-
ratives, and that transcend the conventions of existing, established genres.
More specifically, I locate unnatural elements in the fictional storyworld
and in the narrative discourse. In the storyworld, unnatural elements may be
present as events, figures, settings, and frames. There are also cases in which
the discourse alters the storyworld. Prominent examples include verbal
textual generators, where words or other alphabetical patterns produce the
resulting text, as in the beginning of Robbe-Grillet’s Dans la labyrinthe (see
my “Beyond the Poetics of Plot” and Unnatural Narrative 58–59). Another is
“denarration,” in which the text negates or “erases” the events it had instanti-
ated in the fictional world.
In addition to these instances, we find unnatural discourse in many
­second-person, first-person plural, and multi-person forms of narration. In
an unnatural second-person narrative, the “you” is employed in different
ways than it is in standard discourse, where it may be used as an apostrophe,
to provide instructions, to indicate a narrator is speaking directly to a narra-
tee (Camus’s La Chute), or to indicate that a character is speaking to him- or
herself. Unnatural forms do not normally occur in the actual world, but only
appear in works of fiction (or the rare work of nonfiction that employs tech-
niques derived from experimental fiction). Standard second-person fiction,
in which the central character is depicted as “you,” is one example: “Now
you hesitated, weighing the invitation. Sooner or later you would break up
with him, you knew. But not yet, not while you were still so poor, so lov-
erless, so lonely” (McCarthy 163). Reducible to neither first- nor third-per-
son narration but rather oscillating between the two forms, second-person
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texts problematize or conflate the standard narratological categories of ­

homo- and heterodiegetic narration. There is no place for them to be
­situated in the narrative models set forth by Franz Stanzel, Gérard Genette,
Dorrit Cohn, or Mieke Bal; each has categories limited to first-, third-person,
and figural narration, or homo- and heterodiegetic narration, but not for
cases that subvert or elude those categories. As Monika Fludernik has writ-
ten: “second-person fiction destroys the easy assumption of the traditional
dichotomous structures which the standard narratological models have pro-
posed, especially the distinction between homo- and heterodiegetic narra-
tive (Genette) or that of the identity or nonidentity of the realms of existence
between narrator and characters (Stanzel)” (Towards 226).
Hypothetical second-person works of fiction are unnatural in a different
way: they typically start as a manual or set of instructions. Instead of simply
containing steps for the completion of a project that may be performed, this
discourse is transformed into a representation of events that are assumed
to have already occurred, as in Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help: “Be glad you know
these things [. . .] Apply to law school. From here on in, many things can
happen. But the main one will be this: you decide not to go to law school
after all” (125). This transforms the traditional fabula, as actions presented
as hypothetical future possibilities nevertheless become actualized as events
that have occurred in the past.
There are comparable problems for traditional theories when one treats
texts that alternate between first- and third-person narration (Fay Weldon’s
The Cloning of Joanna May) or first-, second-, and third-person narration
when describing the same individual (Nuruddin Farah’s Maps). Many spec-
imens of “we” narration also conflate the boundary between homo- and
heterodiegetic narration when they violate normal possibilities of what
one individual can safely predicate of other minds, as in the numerically
and generationally shifting “we” of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” or, more
emphatically, Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic:

On the boat we were mostly virgins [. . .] At night we dreamed of our husbands. We

dreamed of new wooden sandals and endless bolts of indigo silk and of living, one
day, in a house with a chimney. We dreamed we were lovely and tall [. . .] On the boat
we had no idea we would dream of our daughter every night until the day we died,
and that in our dreams she would always be three as she was when we last saw her.
(3, 4–5, 12)
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We can also find still more daring and unlikely uses of “we narration” in
Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Nathalie Sarraute’s Tu ne t’aime pas (You
Don’t Love Yourself ).5
At this point I would like to add an additional category of unnatural nar-
rative to those I have just delineated, and that is “unnatural construction.” I
will use this term to designate texts constructed to be processed in surpris-
ing and unexpected ways, particularly those that invert or defy conventional
reading practices. An obvious case in point is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy, with its black and marbled pages, “misplaced” dedication, wildly
extended digressions, and so forth. Recent examples include B. S. Johnson’s
“novel in a box,” The Unfortunates, which comes in randomly arranged,
unbound segments, which readers are invited to assemble in whatever order
they prefer. Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal moves backward in time, as nearly
every scene depicted represents events from an earlier portion of the story,
thus inverting standard dramatic presentation. Carol Shields’s Happenstance
is a novel in two parts that were inverted before being bound together; each
part is thus physically upside down in relation to the other. There are no
instructions for using the volume; nor is the sequence of represented events
in the story a possible guide since each part covers the same time period as
the other. The reader must determine exactly how to process the book.6 In
each of these last three works, the events themselves are entirely mimetic,
even rather typical, and would qualify as unremarkable realism had they
been presented in a conventional manner. What is unusual is their man-
ner of presentation, which utterly transforms the experience of reading (or
watching) them. “Unnatural construction” is an admittedly elastic term and
one that different scholars will doubtless apply somewhat differently, and it
designates strategies that can, admittedly, rapidly become conventionalized.
Nevertheless, it seems to me to be an integral component of the experience
of processing unnatural narratives.

H ISTORY AND TER M INOLOG Y

Since the terms I have used to describe my work have evolved over the years,
it will be useful to clarify them here. My first article on what may be called
unnatural narrative theory avant la lettre appeared in 1987; in it I critiqued
existing theories of narrative time and their needlessly limiting mimetic
biases and identified a number of examples from drama with impossible
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temporalities that could not be contained within existing models (“Time is

Out of Joint”). In 2000, in an article in Narrative, I extended my analyses
to narrative time in works of fiction, offered a considerably expanded the-
oretical framework, and applied my conceptions to narration and frames
(“Narrative Poetics”); I called the texts I discussed “postmodern” or “antimi-
metic.” In the same year in a special issue of Style on “Concepts of Narrative,”
I tried to draw attention to a number of narrative theorists who were taking
seriously the challenges to existing models of narratology posed by post-
modern authors; I called their work “postmodern narrative theory” (“Recent
Concepts” 169). In 2006, I outlined a theory of what I called “antimimetic”
narrative practice in Unnatural Voices.
By this time, several younger scholars were independently doing import-
ant work on unnatural narratives; these included Jan Alber, Henrik Skov
Nielsen, Maria Mäkelä, Stefan Iversen, Rüdiger Heinze, and, to a degree,
Marina Grishakova; these are the theorists who transformed the concepts into
an extensive, growing, dynamic field of research and theory. Other narrative
theorists, such as Monika Fludernik, Marie-Laure Ryan, and James Phelan,
were increasingly addressing some of the theoretical issues posed by unnat-
ural or postmodern texts. The name “unnatural” was being adopted by sym-
pathetic scholars to describe their own work and started to catch on. In 2008,
at the International Society for the Study of Narrative conference in Austin,
Texas, Alber, Nielsen, Iversen, and I put together the first panel explicitly des-
ignated “unnatural narrative theory”; the papers presented there formed the
basis of an article outlining our collective positions that appeared in the jour-
nal Narrative in 2010. The first conference devoted to the subject, organized
by Alber and Heinze, took place at the University of Freiburg in November
2009. Since then, many other colleagues have explored a wide range of narra-
tological topics under the “unnatural” rubric, and a website complete with a
“Dictionary of Unnatural Narratology” has been established.
The term “unnatural” of course carries with it its own accumulation of
ideological baggage. Many of us consider our work to be a radical extension
of and addition to that performed by Monika Fludernik in her Towards a
“Natural” Narratology (1996), where she follows out the paradigm of conver-
sational natural narratives to its limits. We go on to theorize narratives that
cannot be contained within the model of nonfictional natural narratives. My
preferred definition leaves out any reference to natural narratives, since my
central, defining categories, mimetic and antimimetic figures and events,
 Forum 393

are both found in natural narratives: conversational, nonfictional natural

­narratives are mimetic, while tall tales and the more extreme kind of skaz
can be antimimetic (Richardson, Unnatural Narrative 22–23). I also tend to
avoid debates over “naturalization” as they are not that helpful for me in
articulating and clarifying my own position. Other unnatural narratologists,
such as Nielsen, have different perspectives on these subjects.
For each of us, the word “unnatural” has no extranarrative connotations
but is merely a narratological term derived from sociolinguistics. We have no
position concerning any cultural practices, individual actions, or sexual pref-
erences commonly designated as unnatural by society; we use the term in a
different, limited sense. Having said this, we also note that some feminists
who utilize unnatural narrative theory, such as Catherine Romagnolo, prefer
to play on both of these meanings in their analyses of works that employ
unnatural narrative strategies (i.e., antimimetic) to depict situations that
society has designated “unnatural” (i.e., morally transgressive).

TH E MODEL

In a mimetic or a nonmimetic world, a narrative audience believes that

Rastignac lives in Paris and that there are functioning magic mirrors in
the world of Snow White. But an antimimetic or unnatural fiction requires
a partial belief in the fictional world and also sabotages that belief. When
we encounter contradictory versions of events that are both present in the
storyworld (and thus not reducible to differing perceptions by characters),
we are forced to abandon the normal beliefs of the narrative audience. Peter
Rabinowitz states that one way to determine the characteristics of the narra-
tive audience is to ask, “What sort of reader would I have to pretend to be—
what would I have to know and believe—if I wanted to take this work of fiction
as real?” (96). Many unnatural worlds, however, do not allow themselves to be
taken as real. The authorial audience then becomes melded with the narra-
tive audience; we wonder what the (authorial) purpose is of the disruption
of the storyworld. For similar reasons, we can no longer depend on what
Marie-Laure Ryan calls the “principle of minimal departure”: such a principle
presupposes a relatively stable fictional world (Possible Worlds 48–60). With
unnatural fiction, we should expect a pattern of repeated departures; intrigu-
ingly, these often trace out their own particular trajectories. It also follows that
the experience of immersion in a storyworld is compromised.
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The paradigm I have proposed insists on a dual, interactive model of

­ imesis and antimimesis, though in my writings I have generally empha-
m
sized the missing antimimetic practices and the absent theory of those
practices. Postmodernism, with its endlessly inventive construction of
­antirealistic and impossible worlds and events, has forced the concep-
tual/methodological issue: either we have a seriously incomplete, primar-
ily mimetic theory, or we develop new concepts to embrace the unnatural
­narrative practices of postmodernism and other experimental and avant-
garde texts. It is increasingly evident that to comprehend unnatural works,
we need a second, additional poetics. Thus, I do not offer an alternative par-
adigm so much as another, complementary one. In most areas, we do not
need to reject existing models but rather to supplement them with a more
comprehensive one that can embrace both mimetic and antimimetic narra-
tive practices. By definition, a mimetic model cannot comprehend antimi-
metic works that violate the rules of mimetic representation. A complete
narrative theory requires a binocular vision and a dialectical poetics, which
are able to address the fictional aspects of the fictions. Unnatural narratol-
ogy is the capacious paradigm that supplies the missing parts, the missing
theory, the missing vision.
One issue immediately presents itself to anyone attempting to define the
unnatural: how exactly it should be delimited? On the one hand, no one
wants to play the enforcer, definitively determining just what is and what
is not unnatural. On the other hand, no one wants a concept so vague or
elastic that any odd, unusual, strange, or unexpected text can be tossed into
it. This situation partly explains the proliferation of distinct definitions and
concepts of the unnatural that are differently formulated even though they
largely circumscribe most of the same cluster of texts. Unnatural narrative
theorists are happy to let the narrative studies community ultimately deter-
mine the most effective account as it establishes its preference for one con-
ception over the others. In our practice, we often find it most useful to point
to paradigmatic instances of the unnatural. We also acknowledge the fluid
nature of the limits of the unnatural: no matter what definition is employed,
there will always be disagreement about borderline cases.
A good guide in these matters can be found in Stefan Iversen’s discussion of
the subject. As a test case, he uses three hypothetical versions of a story about
a man who wakes and finds himself transformed into a giant bug but still in
possession of a human mind. He then offers three possible endings. In the first,
 Forum 395

the story concludes by revealing that all the events happened in a dream. The
second scenario postulates a kindly scientist who, having turned into a giant
insect superhero, goes on to hunt down villains. The third possibility keeps the
man situated in a possible world that resembles our own and who keeps trying,
to the best of his new physical abilities and limitations, to act in accordance
with what is expected of him as the human he no longer is. Iverson explains:

These three examples are alike in that they all present the reader with combinations
of physical and mental attributes that are impossible in my world, but they differ
because they prompt rather different readings. As I see it, the mind in the first case
is naturalized by the fact that the transformation takes place in a dream, in the sense
that it doesn’t really happen. A slightly different logic can be applied to case two.
Here, the transformed mind is unnatural in the sense that it is impossible in a real-
world scenario but the mind may be conventionalized with the help of my knowl-
edge of the genre in which it appears: in certain action hero comic books fragile
but brilliant scientists are known to transform into raging beasts. In the third case,
however, I am unable to naturalize or conventionalize the consciousness resulting
from the physically impossible metamorphosis. This monstrous irregularity cannot
be eliminated in the name of sense-making with the aid of text-external cues such as
knowledge of how actual minds typically work (“this happens all the time to Central
European salespeople”), knowledge of genre or literary conventions (“this type of
text is easily resolved with recourse to an allegorical reading”), or text-internal cues.
(“Unnatural Minds” 96–97)

It is evident that my notion of the unnatural is based on a significant

distinction between fiction and nonfiction: specifically, the antimimetic
performs that which is impossible in nonfiction. Unlike realist works that
are successful as such insofar as they mimic nonfictional accounts, unnat-
ural narratives can only exist in fiction, and are clearly intended to be fic-
tional (unlike, for example, many supernatural stories). This leads to our
general affirmation of the fiction/nonfiction boundary, though we readily
acknowledge areas where that boundary is vague, shifting, obscure, or par-
tially permeable. My preferred formulation of the difference of fiction is the
pragmatic theory of fictionality; as Genette and others have observed, most
of the allegedly distinctive syntactic components of narrative fiction can be
and occasionally are found in works of nonfiction.7 It is also the case that
authors of unnatural narratives frequently, if not characteristically, enjoy
396 Style

probing or violating the fundamental boundaries and oppositions that must

be maintained in nonfiction and mimetic fiction, and these include the
fiction/nonfiction divide—the very opposition that makes the other viola-
tions possible. This practice results in what might be called the “paradox
of unnatural fictionality.” Unnatural authors thus must be expected to
­challenge that boundary, even as they must usually be unable to breach it
(see Richardson, Unnatural Narrative 67–88). It also suggests that fiction-
ality can be indicated by the represented events in the fabula: if we read a
­­narrative in which the direction of time is reversed and it moves forward into
the past, as in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, we know we are reading fiction.
One of the reasons that a narrative theory modeled on mimetic narratives
will necessarily fail to be applicable to a large number of fictional narratives is
precisely that many works of fiction delight in violating the rules that ­govern
mimetic fiction. We may even identify this as a basic principle of the poetics
of fiction: whenever there is a fixed convention, invariant p ­ ractice, or vener-
ated order, irreverent authors will come along and violate these norms. If the
critical consensus demands playwrights observe the “unity of time,” authors
like Shakespeare and the Romantics are certain to transgress and parody
them. The same is true of mimetic practices and pretenses, much to the dissat-
isfaction of Henry James and other nineteenth- and early ­twentieth-century
apologists of a seamless mimeticism. We may call this the “Loki Principle,”
a complement to Meir Sternberg’s useful concept, the “Proteus Principle.”
Narrative theory needs to be able to account for distinctively (and exclusively)
fictional play, especially as such play is often not without its own patterns.

H ISTORY, GENRES , AND IDEOLO GY OF U NNAT URAL

NARRATIVES

Postmodern fiction is a primary source of unnatural narratives, but unnat-

ural works can be found in many other periods and genres. I identify the
unnatural in Aristophanic comedy, Menippean satires, the more playful and
parodic kinds of Greek and Roman fictional narratives (see also de Jong on
this subject), metaleptic prologues in ancient Sanskrit dramas, and numer-
ous medieval and Renaissance texts, especially those of Shakespeare, who
is a great font of unnatural practices and techniques and even inverts time
and cause in Macbeth (Richardson, Unnatural Narrative 102–19). We find
compelling examples in eighteenth-century fiction, including “it” narratives
 Forum 397

that tell the story of a banknote, a vehicle, or an atom. Romantic fiction and
drama are also great sources of unnatural narratives, especially in works that
develop and extend Shandean techniques. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck,
and Goethe all generously employed antimimetic strategies. Nineteenth-
century British and American fiction provides numerous examples of the
unnatural, from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey to the illusion-breaking
asides in Thackeray, Trollope, and others; we similarly find late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century Brazilian and Spanish specimens in the fiction
of Machado de Assis and Miguel de Unamuno.
Jan Alber has meticulously traced a wide range of unnatural strategies
in the history of English literature from about 1200 to the present. The
works he discusses include the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood,”
medieval fairy tales, eighteenth-century “it” narratives, early Gothic nov-
els, and nineteenth-century paranormal fiction (“Diachronic,” Unnatural
Narrative). Maria Mäkelä identifies unnatural elements in eighteenth- and
­nineteenth-century realist fiction (“Realism”). In addition to works of lit-
erature, unnatural techniques have been employed in a large number of
folktales and folk dramas as well as in works of popular culture. The latter
include Edward Lear’s nonsense verse, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Gilbert
and Sullivan musicals, Looney Tunes cartoons, Bob Hope-Bing Crosby
“Road” movies, Monty Python films, MTV productions, many comics, some
graphic novels, and numerous television commercials. Karin Kukkonin and
Sonja Klimek have assembled an important anthology that investigates met-
alepsis in popular culture. Unnatural narratives are everywhere.
Concerning ideological issues, many perceive a strong relationship
between radical politics and radical narrative forms. Ever since Aristophanes,
numerous authors who opposed what they felt were retrograde state policies
employed parody, satire, and unnatural narrative scenes to underscore their
positions. In the years following World War I, again in the 1960s and 1970s,
and continuing on to the present day, many creative writers who struggled
against oppressive political institutions, social regulations, and official dis-
course tried to invent original, alternative literary forms within which to
create their own independent literary realms. The Black Arts Movement,
écriture féminine, and the extensive tradition of revolutionary playwrights
employing the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt are only the most visible man-
ifestations of the desire to express a radical political vision through the use
of unnatural narrative techniques. To be sure, there is no inherent political
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implication of any narrative form; nevertheless, there can be powerful

psychological associations between a poetics praised by conservatives and the
politics they espouse. It is also the case that dictators (quite ­understandably)
do not like ambiguity, relativism, contradictions, or u ­nresolved, open
­endings in narratives. Nietzsche saliently observes: “Objection, evasion,
happy distrust, pleasure in mockery are signs of health: everything uncondi-
tional belongs in the realm of pathology” (85).

M ISU NDERSTANDIN GS AND DE BATES

A common mistake that frequently arises is the overapplication of the term

“unnatural.” Critics who have not read much on the subject often apply the
term to all sorts of mildly unusual realist texts, standard modernist inver-
sions of linearity, certain unexpected characters or scenarios, or conventional
nonrealist works. As already noted, I try to carefully distinguish unnatural,
or antimimetic narratives from those that are simply nonmimetic, such
as conventional fairy tales, beast fables, and stories involving magic. For
me, the unnatural does not include supernatural narratives, fantasy, what
Todorov calls “marvelous” fiction, traditional science fiction, or allegories
(see Unnatural Narrative 9–12, 16). I affirm that the supernatural is very dif-
ferent from the unnatural: supernatural texts tend to be very serious about
their storyworld, while unnatural authors are openly playful. Supernatural
events can usually be placed within an otherwise naturalistic storyworld,
while unnatural works deconstruct a mimetic or naturalistic world. In a
supernatural world, a character may attempt to ascend Mount Olympus on a
flying horse; in an unnatural storyworld, a character might, like the protago-
nist of Aristophanes’s The Peace, ascend to Heaven on a giant dung beetle to
speak directly with the gods. From Aristophanes and Lucian to Shakespeare
and Cervantes to Fielding and Goethe to Joyce and Rushdie, the unnatural
has been used to critique and satirize supernatural claims.
Most works of standard science fiction are unconnected with antimimetic
fiction; the impetus for many is a keenly realist one. Ed Finn and Kathryn
Cramer, in their introduction to a recent collection of science fiction stories,
stress this collection’s realistic grounding, specifically its attempts to encour-
age science fiction writers to “conjure up grand ambitious futures” that will
inspire others “to get out there and make them real” (xxv)—not the kind of
thing one could ask of Borges or Robbe-Grillet. Similarly, Andy Weir’s novel
 Forum 399

The Martian was written by a scientist and posted online so other scientists
could contest or confirm the physical accuracy of its scenarios. Whenever
there was a mistake, the author checked the math and then rewrote the pas-
sage in question to make it conform to the laws of physics, chemistry, and
biology.8 This is an extreme case of a general principle governing most sci-
ence fiction since the time of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells: that it be (or at
least seem to be) possible. Naturally, there are writers who violate this prin-
ciple (Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Italo Calvino) and produce instead
impossible, antimimetic, postmodern science fiction.
Another frequent misunderstanding concerns the possible changing or
relative nature of the unnatural. After all, many claim, what people in the
industrialized West in the twenty-first century claim to be impossible has
been believed to be possible, even actual. Who is to judge, the argument usu-
ally continues, what is really possible or impossible? When I call an action
or event unnatural, I generally mean it is impossible according to the laws
of physics or the axioms of logic. The fundamental laws of physics have
not changed over the past several thousand years, and they are the same in
London, Tibet, Borneo, and Antarctica. That’s why they are laws of physics.
The axioms of logic are similarly universal: the law of the excluded middle
does not—and cannot—change over time or across cultures.9
Some critics try to minimize or denigrate unnatural narratives by limiting
them to merely one restricted type, like postmodernism or metafiction. Our
recent work on the history of unnatural narratives should readily dispel such
mistakes. Others take the opposite tack, arguing, for example, that unnatural
narratives are widespread in mimetic fiction, like the Victorian novel. Robyn
Warhol notes unnatural passages in Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Jane
Austin, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray and concludes
that “realist novels have been indulging in antimimetic practices for as long
as realist novels have been written” (Herman et al., Narrative Theory 213–14).
Our response is: Exactly. Unnatural or antimimetic elements can be found
in a wide range of ostensibly realist fictions, though they are often ignored
because they can be quickly subsumed within the works’ general mimetic
frame. In addition to explicitly antimimetic narratives like Diderot’s Jacques
le fatalist and Beckett’s The Unnamable, we can discover a playful unnatu-
ral trajectory within realist works running at least from Cervantes through
Fielding and on through Austen, Thackeray, and Trollope. The unnatural is
ubiquitous; it needs to be recognized as such and analyzed more widely.
400 Style

The paradigms and interpretations of cognitive narratology and u ­ nnatural

narrative theory have frequently been opposed. Stefan Iversen has provided
a bracing critique of the doctrine of “mind reading” (“Unnatural Minds,” esp.
98–104) and Maria Mäkelä has also pointed out limitations of the approaches
of many cognitivists (“Possible Minds”). David Herman has recently attacked
several unnatural-narrative theorists for affirming that “readers’ experiences
of fictional minds are different in kind from their experiences of the minds
they encounter outside the domain of narrative fiction” (Emergence of Mind
8); this subject continues to be debated (see my “Fictional Minds”). Building
on the work of Alber, Iversen, and Nielsen, I have critiqued a needlessly
mimetic insistence in possible-worlds theory when applied to fictional
universes (Unnatural Narrative 37–38). At a more general level, I have
attacked the way cognitive theory has been applied to narrative by certain
theorists while affirming the work of others (Unnatural Narrative 29–43,
165–67); for me, it is not the cognitivist approach itself that is faulty but the
unnecessarily restricted ways in which it is often applied. This is especially
true in many cognitivist accounts of literary character, which I find much
too narrow, partial, and incomplete (Herman et al., Narrative Theory 240)
A model of literary character that restricts itself to treating characters
as if they were people, “more or prototypical members of the category of
‘persons’” in the formulation of David Herman (Herman et al. 125), neces-
sarily neglects or denies those characters that defy standard concepts of
personhood, such as schematic or dehumanized figures, contradictory or
conflated entities, impossible beings, parodic types, and characters who
know that they are fictional. A new volume is currently in preparation that
will explore real and imagined oppositions between the two narratological
models (Poetics Today 39.1–2, forthcoming in 2018).
There are a few salient disagreements within the unnatural movement.
One is a difference in definitions (see Alber et al., Poetics 5–7). Another
major divergence concerns the status and function of unnatural elements.
Alber attempts to comprehend and explain unnatural features, typically by
placing them within an existing explanatory framework such as cognitive
psychology, allegory, and the like; he writes: “we apply the general schema
of human existence to [unnatural] texts: we assume that even the strang-
est text is about human concerns” (“Impossible Storyworlds” 82). While
readily acknowledging that unnatural effects may well have psychological,
ideological, aesthetic, or thematic functions, other unnatural theorists and I
 Forum 401

are content to appreciate unnatural elements on their own terms, simply as

violations of mimetic conventions. We don’t have a “Zen-like” approach or
undue reverence for a work’s mystery or wonder-producing power; we are
able to simply enjoy unnatural strategies as unnatural strategies. The antimi-
metic provides its own pleasures.

CONTRIBUTIONS , CU RRENT DEVELOP MENTS ,

AND   FUTU RE WOR K

The most significant contributions that unnatural narrative theory has made
so far to narrative theory appear in three main areas. The most prominent is
the study of narration.
Narration: An overview of the unnatural position on narration appears
in an essay by Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson, “Unnatural Voices.” In my
book Unnatural Voices, I provide a detailed account of several unnatural
strategies of narration, including unnatural narration in second-­person,
first-person-plural, multi-person, contradictory, and dramatic works.
­
Henrik Skov Nielsen (“Impersonal”) and Rüdiger Heinze (“Violations”)
offer ­important analyses of unnatural kinds of first-person narration, in
particular, the distinct identities of the character “I” and the narrating “I”
in some ­first-person fiction. Heinze’s piece is in dialogue with Nielsen’s;
Nielsen refines and extends his position on narration in later articles
such as “Naturalizing and Unnaturalizing Reading Strategies,” which in
turn responds to other t­heorists. James Phelan explores several types
of unnatural character ­ narration, including what he terms redundant
telling, implausibly knowledgeable narration, and crossover narration
(Living 1–30; “Implausibilities”). Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin critically
examine ­second-person narration, n ­ atural and unnatural, in interactive
fiction, and Paul Wake explores it in popular game books. Before the term
was invented, Ellen Peel and Susan S. Lanser analyzed “unnatural” feminist
strategies of narration in, respectively, ­multi-person narration (I and she)
and “they” narration in Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (Lanser 267–77).
Marina Grishakova has explored the subject of virtual narrative voice and
explores various impossible acts of narration, such as stories offered by
dead speakers, overtly fictive speakers such as Beckett’s Unnamable, and
the ­“metaleptic virtual voice” found in Nabokov’s Transparent Things. Lars
Bernaerts et al. discuss the compelling subject of animals as narrators.
402 Style

Story, Plot, and Time: My work on unnatural stories and sequences

and temporality (Unnatural Narrative 51–66; “Unusual”; “Beyond Story”)
has been complemented and extended by Alice Bell’s investigations into
unnatural storyworlds in hypertext fiction and Marina Grishakova’s work
on unnatural causality; important retheorizations of narrative temporality
from the perspective of unnatural models have been undertaken by Heinze
(“Whirligig”), Alber (“Unnatural Temporalities”), and Ryan.
Fictional Minds: Substantial discussions of the status of unnatural fic-
tional minds have been made by Stefan Iversen (“Unnatural Minds”; “States
of Exception”) and by Maria Mäkelä (“Possible Minds”; “Cycles”); in the
course of these articles, the two scholars have identified a number of prob-
lems with the widespread cognitive stance. Alber examines unnatural acts
of narration and consciousness representation in the history of literature
(“Pre-Postmodernist”).
Other Areas: In addition to the three aforementioned fields, considerable
theoretical energy has been devoted to very different approaches to the sub-
ject of reading unnatural texts; these include pieces by Alber (“Reading”),
Mäkelä (“Navigating”), Nielsen (“Naturalizing”), and myself (Unnatural
Narrative 44–47). Alber explains how we comprehend or interpret unnat-
ural scenarios; Nielsen explains and argues for “unnaturalizing” reading
strategies that resist the application of real-world limitations to narratives;
Mäkelä follows out the implications of reading Robbe-Grillet; and I argue for
reading with a dual perception, one that observes the genre or poetics that is
being violated, the other that seeks out any new patterns being created. This
subject is by no means exhausted and will certainly continue to be explored
and debated. It should also be noted that additional important work is being
done in narrative space and fictional worlds (Alber, “Unnatural Spaces”) and
character theory (Richardson in Herman et al., Narrative Theory 132–38,
238–40).
As already noted, the most recent books by Alber and myself extensively
document the sustained presence of unnatural narratives in the history of
literature, and Maria Mäkelä has compellingly discussed unnatural elements
in realist fiction (“Realism”). Though much more work remains to be done,
we are now beginning to get a good sense of the full shape of unnatural liter-
ary history. New studies of gender and ideology in unnatural narratives are
now appearing or will soon be published. Various authors are examining the
effects of the unnatural in postcolonial narratives (Laura Buchholz; Divya
 Forum 403

Dwivedi; Richardson on Rushdie in Herman et al., Narrative Theory; and

Unnatural Narrative 143–62). A forthcoming special issue of Storyworlds
(Winter 2016) will include essays on feminism and the unnatural by Ellen
Peel, Catherine Romagnolo, and Katherine Weese; Weese has also recently
published on masculinity and unnatural narrative practices in Junot Díaz.
Additional studies of US Ethnic fiction and queer narratives are also antic-
ipated. Work on emotion and affect theory is forthcoming as Dan Punday
examines the paradoxical function of emotional engagement in antimimetic
works: far from creating critical distance, many unnatural texts produce an
unexpected form of engagement.
The media analyzed by unnatural studies continue to expand. Both Alber
and I have extensively discussed unnatural elements in drama in our latest
books; Weese has written about unnatural minds in cinematic form—a sub-
ject certain to attract many more studies. Karin Kukkonen and Christopher
Kilgore have done unnatural analyses of comics and graphic fiction. Bell and
Ensslin have written on unnatural elements in hyperfiction and other digital
texts; Wake has done the same with the popular genre of gamebooks. Iversen
has even explored unnatural elements in nonfiction (“‘In flaming flames’”).
No medium seems to be devoid of unnatural components.

CONCLUSION

To end this article, I will offer an invitation and a parable. The goal of any
narrative theory should be a theory of all culturally important or resonant
narratives, not a single subset, such as the Anglophone novel from 1700 to
1920 or any comparably limited grouping. It would be bad enough if unnat-
ural narratives only existed in a few countries over a couple of decades;
their occlusion would then be understandable, though still unfortunate and
unnecessary. But new forms of unnatural figures, techniques, and worlds
keep appearing—and succeeding in arresting critical attention and garner-
ing international awards. They appear prominently in traditional narrative
forms like the novel as well as in newer forms like film and graphic fiction
and contemporary digital media. As narrative theorists, it is essential that
we are able to theorize these narratives, and this is what unnatural narrative
theory promises to perform. We cannot expect fifty- or sixty-year-old models
to be able to effectively handle a new world of narrative literature without
some significant reconceptualization.
404 Style

Some years ago, I tried through interlibrary loan to obtain a copy of

Hélène Cixous’s work Partie. It is a text in two parts that, like Shields’s
Happenstance, is bound together in opposite ways, providing two inter-
secting discourses, that of Si,Je and Plusje, which might be translated “If,I”
and “I-more” (or “the More-I”). The text both depicts and creates fluctu-
ating feminist subjectivity; the material form of the book is part of this
project. The copy that I received, however, was mutilated by the university
that had bought it. Unable to imagine that its physical form was inten-
tional—in fact essential—the people who put a hard cover on the original
paperback copy assumed that its innovative design had to be the result of
a printer’s error. They then literally cut it apart and physically rearranged
it so it would look like a conventional book, even though that left two
sections that went from page 7 to page 66 (fortunately, they didn’t throw
one of them away). The binder’s blunder proves to be an all-too-apt image
for the damage done by critics and theorists who distort, disfigure, or
dismiss narratives that exceed the parameters of their formulations. It is
my hope that my work and the work of my colleagues helps bring forth a
more open, expansive, and comprehensive narrative theory.

brian richardson is the author of several books and articles on dif-

ferent aspects of narrative theory, including Unnatural Voices: Extreme
Narration in Modern and Contemporary Narrative (2006), Narrative Theory:
Core Concepts and Current Debates (with David Herman, James Phelan, Peter
Rabinowitz, and Robyn Warhol, 2012), and Unnatural Narrative: Theory,
History, and Practice (2015). He has edited or coedited books and journal
special issues on concepts of narrative, narrative beginnings, the poetics of
unnatural narrative, and other subjects. He is currently at work on a book on
narrative beginnings, middles, and endings. ([email protected])

NOTES
1. Nonmimetic genres can be transformed and antimimetic works produced if an
anti-illusionistic element is present, as in Angela Carter’s postmodern fairy tales.
2. Important exceptions to this statement include Herman and Vervaeck’s Handbook of
Narrative Analysis and much of Porter Abbott’s The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative.
3. We follow James Phelan’s account of the mimetic component of narrative, responses
to which “involve an audience’s interest in the characters as possible people and the nar-
rative world as like our own” (Living 20).
 Forum 405

4. See Richardson, Unnatural Narrative, for a general account of these limitations

(28–47) and for an overview of problems with current views of narration (33–36).
5. In the third chapter of Unnatural Voices, I discuss these issues and most of these
texts in greater detail and also note the unusual effects produced by extended narratives
that use only the pronouns “one,” “they,” or a pronoun-less, passive-voiced narration.
6. See Richardson, “Unusual,” for a more extended discussion of these and other, com-
parable texts.
7. It is no doubt evident that I am employing the standard conception of fictionality,
rather than the more recent one offered by Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh.
8. The only represented event that is impossible is the dust storm that sets the plot in
motion. This was the sole poetic license the author allowed himself.
9. For additional responses to other objections, see Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and
Richardson, “What Is Unnatural.”


Unnatural Fallacy? The Logic of Unnatural Narrative Theory
Roy Sommer
University of Wuppertal

Unnatural narrative theory, initiated by Brian Richardson in his book

Unnatural Voices (2006), has had an invigorating effect on narratological
debates on both sides of the Atlantic. The unnatural is an intriguing con-
cept that offers a fresh perspective on established narratologies, especially
those based on a cognitive framework. However, as the critical responses
to Richardson’s keynote lecture at the ENN Conference in Paris and to the
Unnatural Narrative Panel at the ISSN Conference in Manchester (both in
2013) show, many narrative theorists remain skeptical of the new approach.
It therefore seems timely to devote a special issue of Style to Richardson’s
contribution to narrative theory. In a now well-rehearsed manner, the
Target Essay seeks to establish the relevance of this new approach by argu-
ing not only that a large body of texts has hitherto been ignored by nar-
ratologists, but also that most existing narrative theories are conceptually
flawed. How exactly unnatural narrative theory intends to set things right
is only mentioned in passing: two pages refer the reader to other work both
by Richardson and others. In short, we learn less about unnatural narrative
­theory itself than about why it is needed.