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

Acknowledging that there is no unifying conception of what may constitute an “unnatural” fictional text, element, or technique, Brian Richardson does not present an exhaustive discussion of all the developments in the field of unnatural 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 fiction and supplemented by an extensive list of “unnatural” narratives. Although unnatural 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 highly 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 Köppe, 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 unnatural narrative theory as outlined in the Target Essay both in the sense that it is 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 unnatural 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 unnatural narratology and classical narratology.

The term “unnatural” is 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 mimetic narratives, but the distinction between the three is unclear and often seems to collapse: “mimetic” comes to mean “realist,” which in turn means modeled on nonfictional narratives (401). Let us consider the various definitions in the Target Essay: unnatural narrative theory, according to Richardson, “is the theory of fictional narratives that defy the conventions of nonfictional narrative and fiction that closely resembles nonfiction” as well as “fiction that displays its own fictionality” (385). Moreover, so-called unnatural 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 “unnatural” is 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 narratives 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 “unnatural” as a term could lie in limiting it to one type of narrative text or technique, separating discussions of innovative forms from “unnatural” content and positioning it against the notion of “natural narratives.” According to Monika Fludernik’s cognitive approach, all written fictional narratives are, in some sense, “naturally non-occurring discourse types and modes” (Towards 16) that develop natural storytelling parameters. Richardson explicitly distances his concept of “unnatural” from its seemingly derivational source, “natural” narrative (398). However, if “unnatural” does not bear any relation to “natural,” why is the former term retained? Why not substitute it with “anti-mimetic,” for which the Target Essay argues?

These questions gain force when one...