Volume 4, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Unnatural Narratives: Theories and Practices / Guest Editor: Brian Richardson

Interest in literary fiction and literary theory from other academic fields and professional practices of storytelling has often been limited to what we could call an Aristotelian narrative approach, with its emphasis on coherence and closure. In this paper, I critically assess interdisciplinary applications of narratological theory as being too limited. After all, literature also offers an alternative narrative tradition, that of, anti-mimetic or ‘unnatural’ narratives. This tradition could enrich what is referred to in this paper as ‘applied narratology’: the transfer of narratological methods and findings to professional practices of narrative. When faced with the confusion of border experiences (Bühler), the institutionalised exclusion of otherness or traumatic experiences, we can greatly benefit from unnatural narrative, which exemplifies how coherence and closure can become oppressive. I also explore the example of The Long Awaited , a novel by Dutch-Moroccan author Abdelkader Benali, which together with The Tin Drum by Günter Grass and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie forms the minor literary tradition of ‘the tragic picaro’, a specific type of unnatural narrative. It is argued that such literary narrative experiments may offer interesting models for interdisciplinary applications of narratological theory.

Chevillard’s novel L’Auteur et moi (2012) touches on a problem which is paradigmatic for contemporary French prose (and perhaps “postmodern” literature in general), namely the problem of literary authenticity. Are the “unnatural” dimensions of this novel – especially its persistent irony, its playful rejection of generic norms and its attacks on the interpretative authority of its readers – playful but futile devices which lack any authentic narrative concern? Or do they represent a topical and authentic answer to the challenges of an “exhausted” genre? The present paper elaborates on this question by analysing, on the one hand, the “unnatural” (and simultaneously highly comical) devices of the novel in detail. This analysis is centred, firstly, on Chevillard’s multifaceted parody on the conventions of both narrative and non-narrative (argumentative, lyrical, scientific) discourse and, secondly, on the ways in which the novel provokes and challenges professional readers – both by the subversive use of literary-theoretical categories (author; narrator; implied author) and by the anticipation and depreciation of its own hermeneutic reception. On the other hand, this paper interprets Chevillard’s novel as the expression of an authentic literary effort which manifests itself not in the narrative contents, but in the novel’s “unnatural” composition, which offers three exits from the generic impasse with which the present-day French novel struggles.

For a century, the disorienting effects of second-person narration have seemed peculiarly well suited to representing the experiential confusions and political contradictions of inhabiting a female body in times of national crisis. This essay examines such effects in Edna O’Brien’s A pagan place and Jennifer Egan’s “Black box,” very different narratives that similarly exploit the deictic and ontological uncertainties of second-person address. Second person in O’Brien’s novel participates in its depiction of a sexually naïve rural Irish girl confronting the conflicting pressures of enforced chastity and reproductive futurism in the name of the Irish State. Emphasis is placed on the narrative’s unusual use of past-tense second-person narration and its intriguing overlap with O’Brien’s nonfictional writings. In Egan’s story, the protean and multivocal second person suggests a sinister fusion of individual and governmental agency, effected through the protagonist’s cybernetically-enhanced body. The result is a deceptively simple critique of post-9/11 American foreign policy as an extension of paternalism and patriarchy in the domestic sphere. The patterns investigated in this paper shed light on other recent uses of the second person in other experimental narratives concerned with identity, self-formation among disenfranchised individuals, and resistance to political and cultural oppression.

This essay looks at two recent Asian American texts written in the first-person plural – namely Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic (2011) and Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea (2014). Its main goal is to show that the ambiguities and tensions here generated by we narration prove particularly apt when it comes to calling into question essentialist views concerning the anatomy of community-building. But my contention is that these two we texts are particularly interesting at a theoretical level, too, in that they help us challenge the orthodoxies of traditional narrative theory – among which Gérard Genette’s all-too-rigid distinction between the homo- and heterodiegetic levels in a text, or the generalized assumption, which has been notably challenged by Mieke Bal, that every act of story-telling is necessarily indebted to ‘a’ narrator, and a narrator of anthropomorphic standards at that.

This article considers the “narrating-I” in African American fiction, reexamining its significance for narratological and sociopolitical theorizations of literature. First-person narratives can normally be understood as autodiegetic, in which the narrators present their experiences from their own perspectives at the expense of access to the viewpoints of other characters. However, African American narratives sometimes present their readers with first-person narrators who are seemingly more omniscient. Able to slip across the boundaries that demarcate their experience from that of others, these narrators can adopt the subject positions of other characters, shifting narrative focalization in ways that would normatively be impossible. Unlike “we” narratives that rely on the first-person plural to evoke collective storytelling, these works pluralize an otherwise singular narrator into a different sort of collective multiplicity. This paper argues that this plurality and multiplicity problematize the limitations of first-person narration, and in so doing resonate with issues surrounding the sociopolitical imagining of community. Through an investigation into the innovative narrative structures of John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday , this paper thus hopes to contribute to ongoing conversations in narrative studies by reassessing its standard narrative frameworks, as well as argue for the applicability of narratology to contemporary sociopolitical thought.

The essay’s aim is to examine the relationship between perspective and nonlinear temporal structure in Attila Janisch’s 2004 film, Másnap , which is loosely based on Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur (1955). My analysis revolves around the understanding of two important narratological distinctions, that between a nonlinear presentation of events and a paradoxical plot, and that between narrative focalizalization and textual focalization. According to David Bordwell, the most widespread definition of linearity is when the successive events of A, B and C are presented in the narrative in their chronological order. Any other form of their presentation results in a nonlinear narrative. But Másnap is a special type of narrative, which highlights the limitation of such traditional dichotomies, because a consistent order of events cannot be reconstructed. Many critics tried to grasp the core of the film’s narrative by trying to put together the original timeline of events, relying on false indicators of logic and coherence, while they failed to recognize the narrative’s real rhetorical purpose in preventing a consistent and unambiguous plot to be established. The narrative’s complexity lies in the fact that both assumptions – that it depicts a subjective experience of time and a storyworld with strange temporality – are necessary to explain the film’s unusual, fragmented structure and interpret its events. I point out how the film requires us to reinterpret the meanings attached to the familiar techniques of continuity editing and how it converts the practices of the early Nouveau Roman, which marginalizes traditional plot-structures, the notion of character, and conventional descriptions of objects, to interact with a subjective vision governed by a fictional mind.

This paper will examine three contemporary video games – Undertale, The magic circle and Pony Island – with an eye towards delineating the ways in which their unique storyworlds and ontological structures align with recent trends in unnatural narratology. Specifically, these games contain interstitial diegetic spaces, and empower the player to move through ‘cracks’ in the façade of the fictional world by acting as a metaphorical programmer, manipulating game files and other extradiegetic components. The metaleptic processes enabled by these actions expose aspects of the respective storyworlds which have been deliberately concealed. Consequently, the games in question literalize existing theories regarding our projection and cognitive exploration of fictional worlds, as they are singular in their capacity for experimentation and transgression of established ontological frameworks.