Strange Creatures Can Be Animals Too: A Response to Brian Richardson

Abstract

It is always a pleasure to read anything by Brian Richardson. Not only has he read more really weird books than I have ever read, or will, but he shores up his arguments so adroitly and writes with such a friendly eye on his reader that it makes it hard to disagree with him. But disagree I must. THE TERM ITSELF My first concern is that the is itself unnatural, despite Richardson's assertion that for him and his colleagues the word is a narratological term with connotations (393). And certainly he is right when he claims that they can deploy the cleansed of any position concerning any cultural practices, individual actions, or sexual preferences commonly designated as by society (393). But unnatural is wedded to natural, which in turn is wedded to nature. This connotation is much harder to strip away. That the label narratology was prompted by Monica Fludernik's Towards a Natural Narratology makes it even more difficult to accept as devoid of extranarrative connotations. Fludernik at least put in quotation marks, a cautionary move that Richardson has not made. Yet with or without quotation marks, unnatural misleads since what it applies to is entirely natural. In Unnatural Narrative, Richardson himself inadvertendy provided support for my point when he urged narratologists to follow the example of biologists who enthusiastically enlarge their field by including unusual, extraordinary, or minority types: After all, biologists are excited by the discovery of new forms of life and are eager to extend or expand their models to include them, as recently happened during the exploration of geothermal rifts deep in the Pacific Ocean along the ridges of undersea volcanoes, which led to the discovery of hitherto unknown life-forms. Needless to say, no biologist tried to minimize or discredit them by saying they were merely anti-biological forms or demanding the discoverers admit that such entities are extremely rare. (163-64) But neither, needless to say, would any biologist call those hitherto unknown life-forms unnatural. My case is that, just as those giant tube worms in the Pacific are an instance of the natural production of unexpected biological outliers, so the emergence of radical, antimimetic texts are instances of the natural production of unexpected narrative outliers. And just as the former process goes as far back as biology itself, so the production of strange antimimetic texts, as Richardson himself notes, goes back at least as far as ancient Sanskrit dramas (396). There is more than an analogy here between biology and the production of fictions. Both, I believe, share the same sequential evolutionary structure, dependent on a necessary process of variation and mutation. As Darwin showed, what we call species are in fact moving targets of ever-changing complexity, repeatedly throwing off variant forms, slight or extreme, that, enabled by a constant bricolage with the organic equipment they already have and the affordances available in the environment, evolve on their own or go extinct. In human beings, this flexibility increased by many orders of magnitude when we acquired the capability of abstract, symbolic thought and communication. At linguistic, social, and cultural levels, this capability has allowed us to adapt not only by maintaining a necessary order but also by creating opportunities for disorder. Disorder may be destructive, and seriously so, but it also creates possibilities and often does so out of destruction. This is our nature; it is what we do. If we are equipped with a need for order, we are also equipped with what Morse Peckham called a rage for chaos. (1) We enjoy messing with things--especially in the comparative safety of fiction, where we have been messing with fictive worlds since we began making them. In other words, the production of strange, impossible, antimimetic new works of fiction is natural. …