“Unnatural” or “Fictional”?: A Partial Critique of Unnatural Narrative Theory and Its Discontents

Abstract

Acknowledging that there no unifying conception of what may constitute an fictional text, element, or technique, Brian Richardson does not present an exhaustive discussion of all the developments in the field of narratology but rather exemplifies his own understanding of the category of the unnatural, refined by a typological model of mimetic, non-mimetic, and anti-mimetic and supplemented by an extensive list of narratives. Although narratology provides a welcome corrective to classical narratological models and corpora, challenging the applicability of existing models and expanding the horizons of postclassical narratologies, it remains a contested approach that arguably suffers from a lack of terminological precision, conceptual clarity, and theoretical rigor. Since limitations of space preclude the possibility of revisiting all debates and issues here, we would like to direct readers to the detailed critique by Klauk and Koppe, which the unnaturalists' response, What Really Is Unnatural Narratology? in Alber et al., does not actually refute, as well as to the stimulating exchange between Fludernik (How Natural), whose sophisticated arguments we endorse, and Alber et al. (What Is Unnatural?). Our response offers a partial critique of narrative theory as outlined in the Target Essay both in the sense that it anything but comprehensive and in the sense that we have a general liking for any attempt to enrich narrative theory but are not fully convinced that narratology achieves this aim. We shall concentrate on three problematic points: the definition of the term itself; the term anti-mimetic, employed as an alternative to unnatural; and the relationship between narratology and classical narratology. The term used to cover so much ground that it arguably fails to function as an analytical concept. In his attempt to delimit unnatural, Richardson pits it against nonfictional narratives, realist fictional narratives, and what he calls narratives, but the distinction between the three unclear and often seems to collapse: mimetic comes to mean realist, which in turn means modeled on nonfictional (401). Let us consider the various definitions in the Target Essay: narrative theory, according to Richardson, is the theory of fictional that defy the conventions of nonfictional narrative and that closely resembles nonfiction as well as fiction that displays its own fictionality (385). Moreover, so-called texts are said to play with the very conventions of mimesis (386) and to transcend the conventions of existing, established genres (389). These definitions rely on two key qualities: experimentation with form and fictionality. This begs the question of whether the umbrella term meant to designate all avant-garde, or experimental, fiction, or even literary innovation in general, or a more clearly delimited corpus of narratives. Furthermore, neither the wide range of adjectives that are more or less used synonymously with the central term unnatural, such as unnatural or postmodern (392), highly imaginative, experimental, anti-realistic, impossible, or parodic (386), and innovative, impossible, parodic, or contradictory (387), nor the equally wide range of fictional that are adduced as typical examples of unnatural narratives (cf. e.g., 1-2, 15-16) serves to enhance the unbiased reader's confidence in the terminological precision or conceptual clarity of the approach. The inflationary use of the term also leads to unfortunate formulations such as unnatural narratologists (393) and unnatural authors (396). A way of streamlining as a term could lie in limiting it to one type of narrative text or technique, separating discussions of innovative forms from content and positioning it against the notion of natural narratives. …