Unnatural Narratives and the Task of Theory Construction

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As Brian Richardson's frequent objections to previous narrative indicate (see, for example, his comments on Gerard Genette's approach to temporality), he grounds his efforts to develop narrative theory in one important principle about construction: the choice of objects of study will inevitably influence one's theoretical generalizations. In practice, Richardson typically advances a specific version of what I will call, adapting the jargon of computer science, an XIXO critique and argues for the superiority of an XYIXYO approach, his versions being MIMO (mimetic in, mimetic out) and AMMIAMMO (mimetic and anti-mimetic in, mimetic and anti-mimetic out). Richardson contends that existing narrative is flawed because it has a mimetic bias, leading it to neglect the vast corpus of works that defy the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, the practices of realism or other poetics that model themselves on nonfictional narratives, and which transcend the conventions of existing, established genres (389). By attending to this corpus, he engages in his own AMIAMO operation, which leads him to various proposals about how to revise, extend, or supplement previous (mimetic) theory. In my view, the results so far have been salutary because Richardson has succeeded in calling attention to the importance of the unnatural in the history of storytelling, because he has developed numerous insightful tools and concepts (e.g., the concept of denarration, the accounts of second-person and first-person-plural narration) for coming to terms with this corpus, and because he has developed numerous insightful analyses of individual narratives. (1) At the same time, I find that some important questions about the status of unnatural narrative and its place in the contemporary narrative landscape remain. Is it a substantially new that rivals existing ones such as feminist, cognitive, and rhetorical theory? Alternatively, is it primarily an engine for producing local insights into elements of narrative that other theories need to integrate? Something else? In the limited space I have here, I will work in devil's advocate fashion as I question the underlying methodology of Richardson's construction and pose some possible responses to this questioning. Let me start with Richardson's summary statement about his intervention into narrative theory: I do not offer an alternative paradigm so much as another, complementary one. In most areas, we do not need to reject existing models but rather to supplement them with a more comprehensive one that can embrace both mimetic and antimimetic narrative practices. By definition, a mimetic model cannot comprehend antimimetic works that violate the rules of mimetic representation. A narrative requires a binocular vision and a dialectical poetics ... Unnatural narratology is the capacious paradigm that supplies the missing parts, the missing theory, the missing vision. (394) The details of Richardson's claims here can be difficult to parse because he uses multiple, not entirely synonymous terms to describe what seems to be the same phenomenon, what I'll call accounts-of-narrative-containing-significant-generalization: paradigm, model, theory, poetics. But his overall point is clear: unnatural narrative provides the yin to existing theory's yang, allowing for the construction of a complete narrative theory--or at least one that aspires to completeness. In other words, Richardson asserts that one can build such a by combining the operations of MIMO and AMIAMO. In this way, he takes the principle that a is inevitably a reflection of its chosen objects of study and moves it to the very center of the project of construction. While the principle is sound in itself, I venture to say that making it the centerpiece of the project is the narratological equivalent of the Peter Principle: what works well at one level works far less well when elevated to a higher level. …