What Are Unnatural Narratives? What Are Unnatural Elements?

What Are Unnatural Narratives? What Are Unnatural Elements? Dan Shen (bio) The research on unnatural narrative theory as represented by Brian Richardson’s work over the past two or three decades has greatly expanded the scope of narrative studies, covering various phenomena neglected in previous investigations of narrative poetics. The works by Richardson and other scholars have devoted much space to explaining and defining what is unnatural. However, the picture is still not that clear. This article tries to [End Page 483] help clarify the issue by revealing the difference between the unnatural in Shakespeare/realist fiction and postmodernist fiction and by classifying different kinds of unnatural elements that break mimetic conventions without breaking the mimetic illusion. shakespeare, realism versus postmodernism In Unnatural Narrative (henceforth UN), Richardson observes that “the key criterion [for the unnatural] will always be the breaking of the mimetic illusion, in whatever form that may take” (93). Since different theorists have come up with different definitions of the unnatural, Richardson says in the Target Essay (henceforth TE): “In our practice, we often find it most useful to point to paradigmatic instances of the unnatural” (394). Here are two such cases offered in the TE: (1) “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining” (387); (2) “He’s got a car bomb. He puts the keys in the ignition and turns it—the car blows up. He gets out. He opens the hood and makes a cursory inspection. He closes the hood and gets back in. He turns the key in the ignition. The car blows up. He gets out and slams the door shut disgustedly” (Leyner 59). Significantly, the works by writers in the realist tradition, like Cervantes through Fielding and on through Austen and Trollope, preclude such impossible fictional events, which totally violate our understanding of the world. Such events can only appear in avant-garde, experimental fiction, like post-modernism, with essentially different conventions and licenses. In discussing unreliable narration, Tamar Yacobi observes that “the genetic mechanism relegates fictive oddities and inconsistencies to the production of the text; above all, where unresolved otherwise, they are blamed on the (e.g., wavering, negligent, or ideologically fanatic) author. [. . .] Just consider ‘one inconsistency [that] seems like a slip on Tolstoy’s part: in chap. 14, Pozdnysheva is said to have borne six children, while elsewhere it is five’ [Isenberg 167n29]” (111). Such mismatched narration is likely to be taken as a purposefully “unnatural” technique in postmodernist fiction, but tends to be regarded as a careless “slip” when found in a realist text.1 Similarly, no matter whether it is Fielding or Austen or Trollope, had he or she penned “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining,” we would not be in a position to take it as the unnatural technique of “denarration,” but have to treat it as a puzzling slip in an essentially realist narrative. Realist [End Page 484] fiction does enjoy certain licenses to break the mimetic illusion occasionally, such as a dramatized hetero-extradiegetic narrator’s entering the storyworld or such a narrator’s referring to his/her own narrating power. But usually these occasional elements are not significant enough to subvert the mimetic nature of the whole narrative. Then how about Shakespeare? In UN, Richardson defines Shakespeare as “one of the greatest fabricators of unnatural places, events, and sequences in the history of literature before postmodernism” (102). But we would not expect to find instances like “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining” in Shakespeare. In the first place, it is impossible to enact such denarration on the stage (if the two sentences concerned are enacted, they would be taken as being sequential: it first rains, then the rain stops). Secondly and more importantly, Shakespeare’s drama still aims at maintaining the mimetic illusion. One example of the unnatural chosen by Richardson is “the play with time” in Hamlet (UN 103–4). When Hamlet sees the ghost just after midnight, he asks, “What art thou that usurp’st this time of night?” (quoted in Richardson, UN 104). A few minutes later “the dawn starts to break and the ghost leaves, as the time of night does indeed seem...