Reading Unnaturally: A Response to Ellen Peel

Abstract

Reading Unnaturally: A Response to Ellen Peel Jan Alber (bio) and Brian Richardson (bio) WE ARE GRATEFUL TO ELLEN PEEL for making a number of important points about the role of different cultural beliefs, the question of the status of impossibility in fictional worlds, and the reader of unnatural narratives. We especially appreciate the thoroughness of her scholarship and her impressive ability to keep pace in this quickly developing field. There is, however, one term, one association, and one concept that we want from the outset to distance ourselves from. We object to the term “strange” to describe the texts we work with. The term is much too general as well as being too vague. Our preferred terms are the much more clearly delimited “impossible” (Alber) and “antimimetic” (Richardson): there is a universe of texts that are strange in one way or another, but only a small proportion of them are impossible or antimimetic. We are also very wary of simple oppositions between Western and non-Western cultures and beliefs. We suggest that the binary opposition such a distinction demarcates does not do justice to the hybrid nature of cross-cultural contact, and this is especially true of indigenous authors who publish narratives that feature minority beliefs. [End Page 102] We suggest it is generally more useful to identify the often complex negotiations that animate works where indigenous beliefs are presented to multiple audiences, some of whom do not share those beliefs. The work of an author like Leslie Marmon Silko is especially adept at producing respect for Laguna Pueblo beliefs due to their emotional power, cultural efficacy, and metaphorical resonance, without insisting that they are literally true as well (see Richardson, Unlikely 142–43). A Western/non-Western binary opposition is inadequate to comprehend such works. Another area in which we disagree is the concept of the supernatural. We have both discussed this elsewhere and thus will not repeat our arguments here, but simply note that supernatural claims are frequently mocked by antimimetic writers like Shakespeare, Joyce, and Rushdie (see Richardson, Unnatural 10–11, 15–16 and Alber 11, 40–41, 95, 106–7, 220–22, 228–30). Peel’s comments on the reader of unnatural fiction are very lucid, helpful, and generative. This is the most vigorously debated area of unnatural narrative theory and arguably that which most invites additional exploration. Since the two of us have different responses to Peel’s specific proposals, we will shift from speaking together to speaking individually. Brian Richardson: I am pleased to accept her revision of my position, namely that impossible means perceived as impossible by the authorial audience. This is, I feel, an important step toward the extension and clarification of unnatural narrative theory, and I thank her for this important contribution. At the same time, I would point out that in many instances, all audiences will generally agree on the status of numerous impossible acts and events, as the flagrancy of such representations enhances their unnaturalness. Thus, few would disagree that it is impossible for a bad storm to blow a ship to the moon, as occurs in Lucian’s A True Story (see Richardson, Unnatural 96–98). Concerning conventionalization, however, I am content to retain my revised position, that the fact that a practice has become conventionalized does not alter its status as unnatural. Jan Alber: I do not accept the concept of the authorial audience and therefore have substantial problems with Peel’s redefinition. She sees “unnatural texts” as “texts that feature elements experienced as strikingly impossible or antimimetic by their authorial audiences” (Peel 77; emphasis in original). In other words, “unnaturalness requires an authorial audience that experiences a textual element as unnatural” (ibid.; emphasis original). Although this redefinition sounds very plausible to me, I wonder exactly how actual readers can determine if the authorial audience considers a text to be unnatural or not. Peel explains that the authorial audience experiences the text “in the way intended by the author” (76). However, neither Peel nor other representatives of the rhetorical theory of narrative present us with a convincing methodology that would somehow enable us to discern the worldview that the author and the authorial audience share. There...