Permanent Defamiliarization as Rhetorical Device; or, How to Let Puppymonkeybaby into Unnatural Narratology

Abstract

Permanent Defamiliarization as Rhetorical Device; or, How to Let Puppymonkeybaby into Unnatural Narratology Stefan Iversen (bio) Brian Richardson’s work on the unnatural, spanning more than ten years, presents and refines two insights that continue to strike me as original and important. The first is the observation that what Richardson calls “anti-mimetic tendencies” are an integral part of (not only modern) literary narratives. The second is the idea that most of the dominant unified theories of narrative have been hindered in dealing adequately with these tendencies, due to their implicit or explicit reliance on models of storytelling derived from the way in which nonfictional narratives typically function. The following suggestions should be situated in the context of this broad appreciation of the general thrust behind Richardson’s contribution to narrative theory. What I want to suggest is that rather than talking about the unnatural narrative as a certain type of fictional narrative, an autonomous innovative or experimental text, we might consider talking pragmatically about the unnatural as a rhetorical device, defined in relation to existing processes of sense-making, rather than in relation to existing texts or poetics. While inspired by, and in most instances compatible [End Page 455] with, Richardson’s position, the approach suggested is motivated by an attempt to address a concern raised by the observation that the idea of the unnatural as antimimetic is based on what I find to be a debatable distinction between fiction and nonfiction. A pragmatic, rhetorical approach might be considered better designed for addressing not only the different functions of unnatural devices but also the many cases where such devices appear locally in otherwise traditional types of narratives, or appear outside of generic fiction, be it in poetry, in everyday communication, or in rhetorical discourse, such as advertisements. An example of the last is the advertisement featuring “Puppymonkeybaby,” a video spot aired in 2016 to promote the soft drink Mountain Dew Kickstart. The main protagonist of the short narrative is a CGI-generated, photorealistic, and fully animated hybrid creature with the head of a dog, the torso of a monkey, and the legs of a human baby. I establish my thesis through a short discussion of one of the main premises underlying Richardson’s definition of unnatural narratives, followed by a rereading of one of the most canonical, systematic attempts to address strangeness in semiosis, the concept of defamiliarization1 as presented by Shklovsky in “Art as Device.”2 Richardson defines unnatural narratives as those that “defy the conventions of nonfiction narratives and of fiction that closely resembles nonfiction” (“Unnatural” 1). This definition is “based on a significant distinction between fiction and nonfiction” (13). The idea of the antimimetic as that which defies the mimetic or nonfictive makes sense only when one relies on a fundamental “affirmation of the fiction/nonfiction boundary” (13). Under what logic does this boundary function? According to Richardson, the boundary between fiction and nonfiction is policed with reference to what he calls “the pragmatic theory of fictionality” (13) and “the standard conception of fictionality” (13). However, what this standard, pragmatic conception might entail remains a bit vague. Two understandings of the difference between fiction and nonfiction to which Richardson does not subscribe are clearly presented: he does not believe that fiction is recognizable through “distinctive syntactic components” (13), and he does not subscribe to the “more recent [theory of fictionality] offered by Nielsen, Walsh, and Phelan” (13n7). One may see these as two ends of a spectrum of ideas concerning how to distinguish imaginary from non-imaginary discourse. At the one end, we find what Herman would call an exceptionalist [End Page 456] position,3 which states that fiction is ontologically and/or formally distinct from nonfiction, and essentially operates with two mega-genres, one where everything is fictional and another where nothing is fictional. At the other end, we find the idea that fictionality, construed as the invitation to maximize the relevance of a particular discourse unit by understanding it as invented, is a quality often, but not only or necessarily, tied to generic fiction. With respect to this pragmatic position (Nielsen et al.), it makes sense to discuss fictionality outside of generic fiction...