Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

Abstract

Brian Richardson’s Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts gathers nine previously published essays (and a pedagogical appendix), several of which have been substantially augmented for the book version. For those unfamiliar with Richardson’s previous work, the book offers a comprehensive overview of the theoretical positions developed over the past twenty-plus years in his more specifically focused books and articles; for those who have followed his work more closely, the book serves as a convenient précis and update on those positions. The nine concepts he addresses are “central” in slightly different contexts: Chapters 1, 2, and 9 review aspects of the complex interrelations between actual and implied authors and readers, a topic that has been hotly debated in mainstream narratology for the past sixty years, while others attain their central importance within the more recent subfield of unnatural narratology, of which Richardson has been one of the foundational theorists.Chapter 1, “The Rebirth of the Author,” begins with a historical overview of the various approaches criticism has taken to the analysis of the author’s significance for the interpretation of a given text. The early progression runs more or less steadily from a strong interest in the author’s biography and opinions to a complete dismissal by some formalists, and presumably all poststructuralists, of the author’s importance for literary studies, famously exemplified by Roland Barthes’ insistence on “the death of the author” (as Richardson notes, these latter stances were often exaggerated to better fit the theoretical paradigms held by their proponents). More recently, theorists from a variety of orientations have argued for the importance of the author: many feminist critics, for example, would argue that the experiences of a given author in a given sociocultural milieu constitute crucial context for the full understanding of a text. Taking a pragmatic view of the various relationships between authors and texts, Richardson enumerates cases in which authors can serve valuable functions as informants about or critics of their own works (i.e., James Joyce’s schemas for the interpretation of Ulysses). He ends by considering the ways in which the author of a work can merge with its narrator, notably in certain hybrid texts of Vladimir Nabokov’s which can be read as fusions of fiction and autobiography, for which he suggests the label “urfiction” (14).Richardson turns in Chapter 2 to the concept of the implied author, one of the more durable of the ongoing debates within the field of narrative theory. Per his usual manner, he surveys the history of the debate, always in an even-handed manner that the various debaters (among them myself) would accept as fair, and tests the various critical positions against a range of unusual limit cases well-designed to highlight key areas of dispute. He then proposes to extend or modify the concepts under discussion to better accommodate these outliers, in this case by extending the application of the implied author to nonfiction texts and by making a case for interpreting certain texts as having multiple implied authors. One of the strengths of all of Richardson’s work lies in his copious bag of strange and challenging examples drawn from all periods of literature, including relatively neglected genres like drama, film, and journalism. He and the other theorists associated with the unnatural narratology school have long served as a sort of Baker Street Irregulars, hunting down unusual cases in the narrative to broaden the palette of our collective repertoire. For me, as for many others interested in the topic, the implied author is by definition a single agent, and none of Richardson’s examples (mostly cases in which a work has multiple historical authors) persuade me that there can ever be more than one implied author in a text. Nevertheless, his examples and analyses remain well worth consideration even when one does not accept his conclusions.Chapter 3 shifts the focus from long-standing debates about relatively traditional issues of narrative theory toward a survey of the basic theses that have become central for the burgeoning field of unnatural narratology. In Richardson’s own definition, “the unnatural consists of events, characters, settings, or acts of narration that are anti-mimetic” (33). As spacious as this definition might appear, he excludes several categories admitted by other theorists, including most science fiction, allegories, and nonmimetic narratives that include magical or supernatural elements. Richardson argues that the primarily mimetic bias of classical narrative theory has led to a neglect of these unnatural elements: none of the standard models specifically discuss second-person narrative, for example, which is frequently characterized by unnatural elements. Rather than frame his examples as refutations or rejections of previous theories, however, he offers them as opportunities to suggest supplements to the existing models. One subtype of unnatural narrative earns its own chapter, as Chapter 4, “The Poetics of Lists and the Boundaries of Narrative,” explores the history and functions of lists, especially lists of names, from the catalog of ships in the Iliad and the catalog of kings in Paradise Lost through a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century variations. While Richardson concludes that lists remain beyond the boundary of narrative, they often mimic narratives and undergo different degrees of “narrativization” (60) under the gravitational pull of their narrative context.Richardson broadens his field of inquiry considerably in the fifth chapter, “Linearity and Its Discontents,” in which he dismisses the frequently made claim that certain narrative forms carry some inherently political or ideological valence. The two major topics addressed are the supposed contrast between texts with linear and nonlinear chronologies and texts with third-person and first-person narrators (to which he adds a brief history of the use of second-person narration). The party line on these matters has long been that linearity and third-person narration are inherently ideologically conservative or reactionary, and that nonlinear sequencing and first-person narration are in themselves progressive or liberatory. Richardson surveys numerous exceptions to these clichés, showing how they oversimplify complex issues and ignore the full range of narrative techniques in play. As he summarizes the case, “The facile association of a narrative form with a political position, especially by inexperienced or overzealous instructors, should be discouraged, as should all other kinds of reductionism” (71).In Chapter 6, “Towards a Narratology of Drama,” Richardson shifts from more or less central concepts to a notably peripheral one, providing an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame to demonstrate the utility of narratology for the study of drama. While film has attracted a good deal of attention, drama remains a genre largely neglected within the discipline of narrative theory. The seventh chapter, “Fiction versus Factuality,” continues the discussion of drama by focusing on the representation of historical characters in plays, and then moves on to examples from fiction and television. Always pragmatic, Richardson is much more interested in exploring and crossing boundaries than in drawing them, and he considers a range of complex ontological, aesthetic, mimetic, and even psychological factors that create explicit or implicit challenges to the fictional/nonfictional distinction. Chapter 8, “The Paradoxes of Literary Realism,” picks up more or less where Chapter 7 left off: having considered fictional works that include historical characters, places, and events, he takes up the more general question of literary realism, of fictional works that attempt to represent the real world. As Richardson notes, the majority of narrative theorists, especially for the past seventy-five years, have dismissed realism’s traditional status as an accurate depiction of reality as just one more literary convention with no special status as a representation of the truth of human experience. As usual, he eschews both poles of the debate and maps out a more nuanced middle ground: “literary realism should be viewed not as a mirror, and not as a delusion, but as a synecdoche, a model that attempts to reconstruct in an abbreviated but not inaccurate manner the world that we inhabit” (99). These models may be validated or invalidated according to their correspondence to historical facts and may vary widely as to their adequacy and effectiveness, thus allowing us to evaluate and differentiate among a broad range of realisms rather than simply throw them all into a single pile.Richardson closes by flipping the coin of his opening chapters on real and implied authors in Chapter 9, “Multiple Implied Readers and Actual Audiences,” and revisits many of the same issues from the other end of the standard model of narrative communication. He opens by conceding that “In narrative theory and literary analysis, it is regularly assumed that a text has a single implied author and a single implied reader” (111). Like most narratologists, I do make that assumption, and, as stipulated above in my discussion of his chapter on implied authors, none of his examples of multiple implied readers cause me to question that model. He enumerates several works written for or susceptible of being read differently by different audiences (children vs adults, naïve vs sophisticated, or Black vs White, or gay vs straight readers, etc.), but none of these issues are relevant to the concept of the implied reader, who is well aware of all of those readings and perfectly able to comprehend all of them. Richardson’s examples are only relevant to the analysis of historical readers and authors. Nevertheless, as with his chapter on the implied author, one may reject his conclusions yet still be rewarded by his survey of unusual and interesting narrative situations and contexts. He wraps the book up with a summative conclusion and two appendices, one pedagogical, in which he suggests some approaches to teaching narrative theory to undergraduates, using such target texts as To the Lighthouse, “Araby,” “The Dead,” and “The Secret Room,” and a briefer appendix defining key terms.In sum, Richardson concisely encapsulates a selection of highlights from the full range of his earlier books and articles, successfully addressing multiple audiences (actual, not implied!) with a book that can be profitably studied by both veterans and novices, and read as both a summation and an introduction, not just for his own work, but also for the recent history of narrative theory.