Hybridity Denaturalized: Response to Brian Richardson’s Essay on Unnatural Narrative Theory

Abstract

In Brian Richardson's essay, narratology appears as a feast of the artifice, a celebration of playfulness, aesthetic pleasure, and a wonder-producing effect of fiction (21)--all things endearing to a Nabokov scholar like myself. However, while using Richardson's very helpful examples and interpretations in my teaching (for instance, his analyses of we and multiperson narration), my students and I often detect more sophisticated concerns and functions beyond the complex forms of narration he is working on, such as problematizing essentialist conceptions of subjectivity, challenging various types of totalizing thought and language, manifesting tensions between the group and individual thinking, revealing silenced voices, introducing a sense of otherness and dialogue, and dispelling the illusion of perfect communication or universal truth as a common-sense or ideological construct. Why, then, call these complex sophisticated forms unnatural or antimimetic? Aren't they natural, from a certain perspective? Isn't fiction able to imitate, or, rather, to render and translate into its own medium (verbal, visual, or other) not only actions and thoughts of human characters in imaginary worlds but also authors' and readers' cognitive and existential concerns, aporias, and enigmas that are often hard to solve or not solvable in principle--not unlike the salesman Gregor Samsa's existential trouble of being split between the human and the bug's Umwelt (Grishakova, Beyond)? Aren't, for instance, complex forms of temporality, in a sense, more natural than simple, linear, and unidirectional ones, such as the progress model of time? Francisco Varela, in his work on specious pointed out that the Husserlian idea of complex time (past and future inherent in the mobile horizon of the present) has a neural basis. A smooth synthesis of three aspects of temporality is sometimes disturbed by internal or external factors and transforms into temporal patterns with the prevalence of past, present, or future. One may say that the complexity of neural time stemming from the multidirectional and multileveled reciprocal activation in various brain regions is biologically and neurologically more natural as compared with more recent linear or sequential models (Varela; see also Armstrong 20). In his analysis of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Genette notes that multiple time syntheses occur below and above the surface of chronology--from simple contingency of events unified through discourse sequentiality or syllepsis (temporal, spatial, thematic kinship) to different types of embedding, supralinear connection, and perspectivization (Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay 85). Chronology seems to be a marginal case among a large number of sequencing opportunities. The binary oppositions of natural and unnatural, mimetic and antimimetic may seem not entirely new to a literary scholar. They might be traced back to the Formalist distinction between and (natural, practical) language--the former as a systematic creative deformation of the latter, according to Shklovsky. Not unlike Formalism, which discovered a deviant artistic (poetic) language use in the huge mass of written and oral texts, the antimimetic or postmodernist narrative theory has attempted to separate the deviant centrifugal narrative tendencies from the natural or standard discourse. However, from the Formalist point of view, the whole poetic language (the poetic function extending also to prose fiction and, in the long run, to film and painting), rather than its certain forms or varieties, appears to be a creative deformation of the everyday language. That is why Shklovsky calls Tristram Shandy the most typical novel in world literature--by laying bare fictional conventions, the novel reveals their strangeness, which inheres in every work of fiction but is overtly displayed only in some and dies out while becoming conventional and moving to the periphery of literature. …