How Unnatural Does It Get?

Abstract

* Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 20x5.197 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1279-0. * Alber, Jan. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2016. 294 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8032-7868-4. Unnatural has become one of the most prominent recent developments in narrative theory. It started around the year 2000 with the work of Brian Richardson, who collected his explorations of narratives in his 2006 study Unnatural Voices. The approach quickly attracted a group of young scholars, focusing on unusual fictional texts and questioning the usual narratological concepts. Among them were Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Maria Makela, and Henrik Skov Nielsen. The term unnatural obviously alluded to Monika Fludernik's narratology (1996). Fludernik was inspired by Jonathan Culler's idea of naturalization, stressing the ways in which readers try to turn alienating texts into something they can understand. Richardson, on the other hand, took his cue from postmodernist fiction and poststructuralist theories, stressing the irreducibility of the alien and the exceptional. Culler's is a strategy that turns the peculiar and the unknown into the known. It depends upon and literary supposedly present in readers' heads (138). These models range from general cultural patterns of signification, such as intentionality, to specific literary knowledge of periods and genres. The application of the models normalizes the abnormal: 'Naturalization' emphasizes the fact that the strange or deviant is brought within a discursive order and thus made to seem (137). Fludernik elaborates on and updates Culler's study of these models via cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis. From William Labov she borrows the term narrative--oral, everyday stories people tell each other. Fludernik develops Culler's concept of models into her concept of frames; she uses the term experientiality to describe the central process of normalization (as soon as a reader recognizes a center of experience in a narrative, he or she can come to grips with the text); and she replaces the term with narrativation. Although Fludernik's basic idea is that people tend to normalize the abnormal, she does realize that some texts cannot be fully normalized. such as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake remain unreadable (Towards 293). They result in collapse: When narrativization breaks down, whether incipiently or in full measure, it does so where the consciousness factor can no longer be utilized to tide over radical inconsistency, and this happens first and foremost where overall textual coherence or micro-level linguistic coherence (and cohesion) are at risk. (317) The preference for consistency and narrativization that seems to underlie formulations like these is precisely what Richardson's rejects. Simply put, he sees the process of naturalization as a form of reductionism, which smooths over the problematic aspects of narrative texts and which reformulates the new into something old. In this way, the complex, literary, and disruptive nature of the narrative is disregarded. Unnatural narratology, on the other hand, holds this complex nature in high regard and wants to respect it in its interpretation. The fundamental differences between the two narratological views were formulated clearly in a joint 2010 essay by Alber et al. They claimed that natural and classical are guilty of mimetic reductionism (Unnatural Narratives 115) as they reduce the sophistication of literary narrative to everyday storytelling. The theorists point to three levels of literary unnaturalness (116): storyworlds (in which impossible things happen), minds (e.g., a character that knows he is being narrated by someone else, or an omniscient character), and acts of narration (e. …