Volume 3, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Experimental Literature and Narrative Theory / Guest Editor: Brian Richardson

Perturbatory narration is a new transmedial narratological concept conceived in order to analyze how innovative experimental fictional texts irritate the reader or spectator by transgressing or annulating the rules of the common narrative system. We distinguish three ludic narrative techniques which are sometimes even mutually exclusive, but nevertheless frequently combined in literary and filmic fiction. Perturbatory narration serves to model and systematize a narrative principle which combines devices of these three strategies, in particular of unreliable narration, paradoxical narration and puzzling narration. The dynamic interplay of these devices is illustrated with two short stories by Julio Cortázar, “Continuidad de los parques”/“The continuity of parks” (1964) and “Graffiti” (1980) and the filmic adaptation Furia (1999) of the latter.

David Markson’s Reader’s block (1996) consists of 193 pages of quotations, anecdotes, names, and fragments. The book bears the paratext “A novel,” and the work has indeed been read as a narrative whole, in which “an aging author [...] contemplates the writing of a novel.” By being out of ordinary and therefore worth of telling, the anecdotes or curiosities seemingly fulfill the requirements of a “natural” narrative as defined by Monika Fludernik (1996). However, a mass of such mini-narratives, mixed with even more fragmentary texts, seems to defy narrativity (and tellability). In my reading, the ostensive block to narrativity also functions as its very building block. Thanks to polysemy, block can relate to a block of a city, of stone at a gravesite, of text on a printed page, and of index cards. The seemingly dispersed fragments begin to gravitate around these semantic blocks and yield discrete but intertwining narrative lines. The very text claiming to deal with blockages performatively, as a finished book, testifies to the opposite: the mass of texts and plans proves that the ability to work on writing is not lost. Blocks that obstruct also construct, and the demediated novelistic medium still mediates as a form and repurposed content.

Slow TV programs are long, uninterrupted broadcasts of relatively mundane activities, focusing on topics ranging from train rides along the coast of Norway to the chopping, stacking, and burning of firewood. This article argues that slow TV problematizes the standard conception of narrativity, especially in terms of a conceptual narrative/non-narrative boundary. Moving away from the idea of narrative-as-concept, I argue for an understanding of narrativity more sensitive to readers’ actual experience and a further nuanced understanding of the range of weak-narrativity texts. A text deemed conceptually “non-narrative” by theorists can still be experienced as narrative by readers and/or viewers, supplementing given texts or programs with personal experiences to effectively narrativize the non-narrative; narrative, I argue, is better thought of as a state that is achieved, rather than a concept that exists within a text. The article ultimately suggests a gradient of weak narrativity in order to consider new forms of experimental narrativity without collapsing its different types.

Drömfakulteten (2006) is an experimental novel by the Swedish writer Sara Stridsberg portraying the life of political activist and writer Valerie Solanas. I read Drömfakulteten as a “literary fantasy” where the forms, the themes, and the atmosphere are foregrounded rather than the biography of Solanas, and suggest that it can be viewed as a deliberate work of art filled with affordances for the reader. Central to my analysis is the recurring idea of “fucking up” as a way of disobeying social, political, and literary (narrative) norms. In relation to narratology, I take on the novel with a Difference approach to fiction, guided by notions from Sylvie Patron, Lars-Åke Skalin, and Richard Walsh. In this approach, fiction is seen as functioning differently in a qualitative sense compared to natural narrative. The Difference approach leads to a reading that lies close to the intuitions of reviewers and highlights the strong literary potential of the novel.

Narrative experimentation has seen many forms, but among the most radical strategies might be the complete absence of text. Printed text is largely determined through its physical presence on the page, it defines itself by where it is, and the performance of the present text determines the flow of narrative time. Silences and absences are usually created semantically, with a present text telling about an absence. Only rarely do texts stage emptiness through the actual absence of text. But when they do, they considerably expand the narrative range of expression of the printed page. In this paper I will look at the narratology of the empty page by analyzing and comparing a number of texts that stage or emphasize the actual absence of text from the page. There are some narrative texts that use their medial form as text printed on a page and bound in a codex not only to narrate absences, but also to stage them outside of the text proper, or rather, through the actual absence of text leading the recipient’s awareness to the page as a frame of reference that potentially carries semantic value. I will contrast different techniques of “framing absence” in texts by David Mitchell ( number9dream ), Jonathan Safran Foer ( Tree of codes ), B. S. Johnson ( House mother normal ) and Mark Z. Danielewski ( House of leaves ). These examples will show how literary texts can use their own mediality and materiality to reflect on the general relation between all three.

This paper argues that some postmodern experimental forms of plot and narrative structure can be thrown into sharper relief by delineating them with medieval narrative practices of plot development. Ali Smith’s 2014 novel How to be both offers an experimental plot that is shaped by the alterity and modernity of medieval and Renaissance art. Drawing on the technique of fresco painting, the novel narrativizes the experience of simultaneity created by recollections of the past in the present. The novel’s two narrative strands – one set in contemporary England, the other in fifteenth-century Italy – are linked in associative and cross-temporal ways and highlight individual experience. Bearing similarities to medieval episodic narratives, the novel maximizes an a-centric narrative design that capitalizes on the reader’s input in motivating the story. Subsequently, Tokyo cancelled (2005) by Rana Dasgupta is briefly discussed as another example of a postmodern novel reminiscent of medieval narrative practices: in this tale collection held together by a very loose framework, plot itself becomes the protagonist as an epitome of modern society’s loss of identity.

The conventions of narratological categories direct our expectations and interpretation as we read. But when these conventions are problematized, our interpretation becomes more theoretical, forcing us to contemplate why an author would choose to experiment with the category of, for example, narration. In Paul Auster’s City of glass (1985), we have what appears to be a heterodiegetic, omniscient narrator who is mostly, but not fully, unproblematic. By the end, however, we discover that this narrator is (also?) homodiegetic. Auster’s breaking of the rules of traditional narration by having a narrator who is both hetero- and homodiegetic not only leaves readers in a quandary as to how to interpret the text, it also makes us realize how much we rely on the narrator for meaning. I propose to analyze the novel in order to explore the rhetorical strategy of Auster’s refusal to maintain a stable narrator. This analysis will illustrate how the category of narration prompts an unexamined trust in the teller and is therefore essential for our understanding of truth and meaning in narrative. I contend, in other words, that Auster’s experimentation with the category of narration in City of glass is key to the text’s insistence on a revised understanding of truth.

Although lyric poetry is not a narrative genre in the strict sense, poems do employ narrative elements extensively. Due to the temporal condition of human existence, the temporality of living, acting and communicating, the sequence of the utterance in poems follows a temporal organization, consisting of changes of state. The lyric text can thus be conceived of as the hybrid interaction of narrative and poetic structures. Genre-specifically, narrative elements in poems tend to occur in covert or condensed forms, typically in the mental sphere. Since a narrative in order to be “tellable” requires a decisive, “eventful” turn, poems, too, tend to feature some kind of event, which constitutes their central “point”: some surprising shift in their sequential structure. Although the normal case of an event is a decisive change of state, there are also interesting examples where the non-occurrence of an (expected) event counts as eventful constituting the tellability of the story. That applies not only to narratives in fiction and drama (such as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot ) but also to lyric poetry. ‒ After expounding the transgeneric application of concepts of narrativity and eventfulness to lyric poetry this article analyzes in detail two eminent modernist poems as significant cases where the non-occurrence of an eventful change constitutes an event in its own right (and thereby the point of the text): T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Bertolt Brecht’s “Vom armen B. B.” (“Of poor B.B.”). The two poems are shown to differ significantly with respect to meaning and function of eventful uneventfulness: The absence of decisive changes is presented in The Waste Land as a deplorable failure of traditional values and forms of vital regeneration but in “Of poor B. B.” as a provocative rejection of conventional concepts and expectations.

The focus of the essay is the question how the genre of fantasy affects age narratives in terms of the representation of old age. Analyzing George McDonald’s “Little Daylight” (1864), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne” (1896) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The curious case of Benjamin Button” (1921), I will argue that the mode of the fantastic serves to open up alternative visions of time and ageing. These age fantasies serve different cultural functions, both by reinforcing contemporary age stereotypes and by envisioning possible counter-narratives of old age. On a discursive level, I will compare the problems with representing old age, its contradictions and ambiguities, to the internal oppositions of the fantastic genre.