Narratology and Taxonomy: A Response to Brian Richardson

Abstract

Narratology and Taxonomy: A Response to Brian Richardson Maria Mäkelä (bio) Unnatural foregroundings of textuality and artistic motivation have never been automatized and never will be. Unnaturalness, for me, is the cognitive flip side of the “natural” reading process, the counterforce that makes us appreciate and restore the distorted and mediated nature of fictional and textual representation. This stance associates my work—more or less loosely—with the unnaturalists. As a young doctoral student, I was impressed and inspired by Richardson’s radically antimimetic take in Unnatural Voices, and I continue to admire the fervor with which he is establishing this new paradigm, continually drawing in new texts and new people. Yet I have major reservations concerning some of the very fundamentals of Richardson’s approach, as well as with the narrative–theoretical methodology that follows from such a groundwork. Here I take up three such reservations that, in the end, all boil down to this question: what role does taxonomy play in contemporary narrative theory (and should it even play any role)? unnatural narratives or unnatural narratology? When we first engaged in the business of the unnatural during the 2007 Narrative Conference in Washington, what we had in mind was a critical, even provocative movement that would contest the homogenizing side effects of contemporary narratology—the very same “mimetic bias” to [End Page 462] which Richardson rightly draws our attention in his Target Essay. But what I particularly had in mind was a critique of the notions of reading and interpretation promoted by cognitive narratology: the perception of literature primarily through conversational story schemata; the analogies between real-life experiences and literary mediation that seemed too easy; and the tendency to construct the reader as a sense-maker who always opts for the primary, the plausible, the coherent, and the unambiguous. So for me, unnatural narratology was never about strange narratives but about the distortion of human experience that even the most realist literary narrative can create by its overly verbalized, overly structured, and overly intentional design. By “overly” I mean in relation to both conversational storytelling and our cognitive take on the real world. Furthermore, I thought that, when understood in this manner, unnaturalness would be the perfect new touchstone for the dominant cognitive paradigm. I thought that the term “unnatural” was a provocation, not a category for certain genres, texts, or narrative devices. And, behold, in recent years the narratological community has witnessed the ferreting out of ever more bizarre, nonconventional, noncommunicative, or self-eradicating texts. The theoretical provocation has turned into a taxonomic project that resembles an entomological expedition in the Amazon (see Tammi). Who will find the most exotic, unprecedented species? For this, I must blame Richardson and his passion for extensive, overwhelming lists of “unnatural narratives” and their categorization; he is the indisputable winner of this entomological contest. To be sure, new test cases for narratological analyses are welcome—I’m glad that someone moves the Austens, Jameses, and Hemingways aside for a while. Yet if we genuinely wish to contest the cognitive paradigm, we should not focus on classifying literary texts as more or less unnatural, but instead try to revolutionize our all-too-naturalized assumptions about the frames and dynamics of reading. In other words, we should do unnatural narratology instead of hunting for unnatural narratives. If we confront natural narratology merely with a new corpus, we fail to address the very fundamentals of the cognitive approach—the universalist claims about meaning-making and the overarching principle of economy, for example. In Monika Fludernik’s groundbreaking natural narratology (the original inspiration for the unnaturalist movement), there is no place for such a thing as a “natural novel.” As I have repeatedly argued elsewhere, placing the realist novel at the same end of the natural–unnatural axis with the [End Page 463] naturally occurring conversational narrative misses Fludernik’s original point, which relates to the anchoring of readerly frames in the real-life experiential schemata shared by the teller and the reader. Natural—and more generally, cognitive—narratology does not classify texts but instead hypothesizes on the reader’s dynamic narrative engagement with all kinds of texts, thus returning narratology to its...