Yes, But: A Response to Brian Richardson Peter J. Rabinowitz (bio) Brian Richardson’s devotion to unnatural narratology is both illuminating and infectious. As a result, my conversations with him (both our real conversations and the imagined conversations I have after reading something he’s written) tend to last long into the night, leaving me with a list of books I’m eager to read, as well as a salutary reminder that my own theoretical practice is probably too firmly grounded in mimetic texts. He consistently points to things I’ve too readily taken for granted as well. “Unnatural Narrative Theory,” for instance, has made me nervous about my use of the word “real.” At the same time, I’m always left with a “yes, but” feeling—not so much a clear disagreement (although Brian and I have our share of those, too), but a series of questions that inevitably generate further conversation. Brian ends his essay with a parable. So let me begin where he leaves off by introducing, in that spirit of continuing conversation, a very short unnatural narrative epitomizing many of the qualities found in the works that he enlists to support his cause in “Unnatural Narrative Theory.” Straddling the fiction/nonfiction divide, my chosen text is a tale without a title and without any specified characters. It also lacks a clear story order, since, operating under a radical and arbitrary restriction (an Oulipo influence?), it dispenses with verbs entirely, and hence offers no signals of past, present, or future. The absence of verbs also, of course, makes it impossible to tell whether the narration is first or second or third person, or whether it’s singular or plural. Yet for all its resistance to narrative norms, it remains a moral tale that offers two lessons, each of which raises important questions about Brian’s argument. The story is a sign—not in the structuralist sense of “sign,” but in the old-fashioned commercial sense. It stands outside a store in Windsor, Maine. At the top is a permanent section that reads: [End Page 425] Hussey’s “MAINE’S LARGEST” General Store Below that there is a changeable letter section that, in my experience, no one has ever changed—except, perhaps, to straighten out the letters when they slip out of alignment: GUNS WEDDING GOWNS COLD BEER It’s the bottom section that contains the story—clearly, a cautionary narrative about a shotgun wedding (what could be better for a store called “Hussey’s”?), although one fraught with ambiguity due to the equivocal chronology. Is the “cold beer” in the last line something served at the wedding reception (in which case we have an upbeat story with no “beginning,” the chronology moving from middle to end) or is that final line a flashback to the cause of the other events (in which the tone of the ending is less celebratory)? There’s no way to know. In either case, though, as I’ve suggested, it’s a moral tale—in fact, it’s a moral tale on several levels. For my purposes here, I’ll skip over the possible lessons in the storyworld centering on the wages of sin, and concentrate instead at the caveats directed, on the meta level, at narrative theorists like us. The first lesson emerges when we read the sign as a narrative. What’s involved in that act? After all, it’s not “clearly” a narrative about a shotgun wedding. In fact, it’s not clearly a narrative at all. I usually pass this sign in a car full of friends—and most of them see it simply as a list. It has become a narrative for me because I’ve decided to read it that way, which reaffirms the basic maxim that reading is always reading as. Qualities like narrativity, fictionality, and unnaturalness are all the result of processes between readers and texts—that is, they depend fundamentally on choices made by readers. This may seem to be more or less the same argument Stanley Fish makes in his famous essay “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” where he describes how one of his classes was able to...