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  • Playful, Experimental, and Unnamable Fiction: Unnatural Narrative and Its Allies
  • Lars Bernaerts (bio)

In its new synthesis of the key discussions, Brian Richardson’s essay reminds us of the important achievements of unnatural narrative theory over the years. The theory has enriched the general theory and interpretation of narrative through a welcome critical evaluation of mimeticism in narrative studies, illuminating readings, and the introduction of a challenging literary corpus. A valuable paradox lies at the heart of unnatural narrative theory and its ambition in the sense that it attempts to describe the indescribable. As a narrative theory, it aims to discern and describe aspects of narrative in a more or less internally coherent and systematic fashion in order to improve our understanding of the broad range of narrative practice. The idea of range is vital here. Without the complement of unnatural narratology, Richardson emphasizes, narrative theory runs the risk of excluding a number of highly significant literary practices (techniques, traditions, individual works). The exclusion does not only lie in scholarly neglect as such (e.g., of a device such as hypothetical second-person narrative) but also in reductive reinterpretation. Subsumed under the latter are readerly acts [End Page 441] of naturalization (a concept Richardson himself considers as unhelpful) or “mechanisms of integration” in Tamar Yacobi’s terms (“Authorial Rhetoric”). Someone who reduces the strangeness of Samuel Beckett’s “Not I” to an expression of psychological trauma, for example, would not do justice to its unnatural dimension.

As a theorist of the unnatural, Richardson seeks—almost by definition— to categorize what cannot be categorized, to systematically describe what resists and rejects systematic description, or, to allude to the theory’s core example: it names what wishes to remain unnamable and what, to a certain extent, cannot be named. At least in part, the unnatural is exciting, amusing, and meaningful because it escapes easy labeling. As a corollary, it is mainly described in terms of what it is not. Thus, in the essay as well as in this branch of narratology in general, negative terms abound: antimimetic, anti-realistic, unusual, unnatural, impossible, and so on. There are many ideas in the essay that elicit further reflection and endorsement from my own perspective and there are some points on which I disagree, but for the remainder of my response, I wish to expand on this issue of negative description and on possible alternatives. The broader question is: How can we further unnatural narrative theory by deploying related frameworks and discriminating the unnatural from related concepts? In my view, the concepts of negativity, play, and experiment, which are present but dormant in the theory, are appropriate lenses for understanding epistemological and ideological aspects of the unnatural.

The negative description of unnatural works is a strength but can also become a pitfall of unnatural narratology. On the one hand, it is a strength because in that way Richardson acknowledges the negative potential of unnatural narratives. To a great extent, the power and appeal of the unnatural lie in its gestures of resistance and rejection. Although there is an obvious correlation and a perceived connection with ideology, there is no one-to-one relationship between unnatural narrative techniques and “radical politics,” as Richardson explains. Still, the ideology of individual unnatural narratives is worth considering, especially from the vantage point of their “negativity.” The negative description itself, which is abundant in unnatural narratology, can then become a conceptual springboard for further reflection upon the ideology and the epistemology of unnatural narratives. To explain what I mean by this, I refer to Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory. In Adorno’s view, true art operates through negativity. In resisting familiar models of reality [End Page 442] (which for Adorno are deceptive because they conceal skewed socioeconomic relations), art becomes radically critical and it can produce insights that would otherwise remain hidden. The former is the ideological, the latter the epistemological dimension of negativity, which are both directly relevant for the study of unnatural narratives. In many cases, unnatural devices or texts follow a similar logic or can be usefully interpreted that way. To my mind, it is not trivial that Adorno and Richardson share the paradigmatic examples of Beckett...

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