Response to Brian Richardson

Abstract

In his Target Essay, Brian Richardson provides a new and impressive synthesis of (his) work in unnatural theory. (1) term, like its cousin natural theory, may be unfortunate (I prefer narrative tout court). But the main point behind it is not: theory should account not only for mimetic (natural?) fiction and for what Richardson calls nonmimetic, nonnatural fiction (which includes supernatural fiction) but also for antimimetic, unnatural fiction, which rejects, defies, or plays with mimetic and nonmimetic conventions. Very sensibly, Richardson stresses that narrative theory should be a theory of all culturally important or resonant (403), Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Orlando and La Jalousie, Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. Indeed, I would go further than he does and argue that it should be a theory of all and only possible narratives, including culturally unimportant or nonresonant ones. Richardson points to numerous cases of unnatural practices and says that classical would be unable to deal with them. But at least some of his examples are not quite compelling. Classical theory provides several tools that are applicable to unending fabulas, say, or to antinomous ones. For instance, the category duration, which specifies that story time can be greater than discourse time, equal to it, or smaller than it, would help to characterize an unending fabula, one that continues eternally as in Nabokov's Circle, according to Richardson, or perhaps as in countiess tales where lived happily ever after: there, story time is much greater than discourse time. So would the category speed, which describes the relationship between the amount of time taken by the situations and events narrated and the length of the narrative: summary is the (last) featured tempo in the above examples. The category would also apply, just as it would apply to antinomic chronologies: time moving forward into the past may be implausible, unusual, surprising, unnatural, but it in no way violates the concept of order defined by Genette (Narrative Discourse: An Essay 35) and others. (2) Or take the case of we narrations, which may be unnatural but are certainly not uncommon. I read them in TripAdvisor (We felt that the place was a bit unwelcoming; thought that $45 was a great deal for this family outing); I hear them in countless songs (Those were the days my friend / We thought they'd never end); and I resort to them all the time. It is not clear that they conflate the boundary between homo- and heterodiegetic narration when they violate normal possibilities of what one individual can safely predicate of other minds (390). A homodiegetic narration is a narration the narrator of which is a character in the situations and events recounted. If that narrator is omniscient, it no doubt makes the narration implausible but it does not make it heterodiegetic. In any case, theory has long made room for the class of we narrations. When, for example, in Narrative Discourse Revisited, Genette discusses the narratee and its tu or vous designations, he writes: This gives me an opportunity to note here that it is wrong to consider persons in the singular only. There are also narratives in the second- or third-person [...]. And there are narratives in the first-person plural (134). Similarly, classic theory did consider texts that alternate between first- and third-person narration [. …