Introduction: Non/Narrative

This special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory represents a window onto a pressing, longstanding, and to me familiar conversation among writers and artists on the question of non/narrative. As a writer who has been engaged for several decades with the question of language that resists narration in relation to the presumed centrality of narrative in literary texts, the media, the social imagination, and the political sphere, I wanted to gauge the extent of current critical thinking on the subject of non/ narrative. Given the indeterminacy of what we might call non/narrative, and the dearth of previous critical writing on the subject, the essays of poet-theorists, fiction writers, and literary critics presented here take up markedly diverse approaches to the problem of non/narrative. Even so readers will recognize common theoretical strands among the essays: the narrative of late capitalism, the history of the avant-garde, and the gendering of narrative.

Non/Narrative is an intervention into theories of narrative insofar as these tend to diminish or ignore the function of nonnarrative language in literary works. When taken together, the essays illuminate why it is important to study innovative texts that resist narrative, reinvent the structures of narration, and/or perform theoretical evaluations of systems of narration within the created world of their own design. The essayists in this volume engage their literary objects as themselves theoretical works that variously employ, illuminate, and intervene in discourses related to cognitive and narratological theories of authorship, periodization, the master narrative of late capitalism, the gendered subject and formal innovation, and the role of literary narrative in politically marginal communities.

The theoretical work of the socially engaged non/narrative text stems from its production of a crisis of understanding. Works that shift between genres disturb categorical frames, foregrounding language such that narrative seems to disappear. They radically break rules of story-telling to stage a necessary disruption of asymmetrical power relations, the limits of knowledge, psychological and social operations of recognition and mis-recognition, the complex connections between private experience and larger social forces, and the cooperative construction of meaning. The radical formalism identified with nonnarrrative is thus not a "mere formalism" within the sphere of the politically and aesthetically radical work. It is a strategy of intervention.

The rubric non/narrative, and particularly the slash between non and narrative, arose not out of narrative theories but in discussions among writers and artists in the mid 1980s. First used in a special issue of Poetics Journal (no. 5, 1985), the term addressed innovative postmodernist strategies that reshaped, redistributed, undermined, or abandoned narrative. The journal editors called for theoretical and creative essays that would, together, complicate debates about narrative or indicate the "status" of narrative in participating authors' work. In their introduction to the forthcoming print/digital anthology and archive of Poetics Journal (Wesleyan University Press), Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten return to the language of the period, describing narrative in terms of the most negatively compelling "givens" for postmodernist avant-garde writers and artists:

Narrative was suspect—it was the horizon of official meaning and interpretation, the real prison house to which we have been confined by history. An open field of meaning offered a way out of the confinements of narrative and closure, and nonnarrative writing strategies became vehicles of choice.

In their special issue, the editors chose to resist creating a simple binary between narrative and non/narrative practice, representing a spectrum of positions by new narrativists, poets, and artists. Implicated in the tricky slash between the prefix non and narrative are several questions a narrative theory would ask of the nonnarrative practice. "Does nonnarrative writing depend on a (underlying, suppressed, denied) framework of narrative?" and "What of the social and historical narratives the writer is in when s/he writes nonnarrative work?" The well established but seldom remarked narrative of the avant-garde writer breaking with tradition does not account for the specific interventions of radical form. What was needed was a less conventional and assumed view of artistic intervention that would invite readers to take narrative and nonnarrative equally seriously. The early Non...