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  • Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable by H. Porter Abbott
  • Daniel Chertoff
H. Porter Abbott, Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2013. x + 178 pp.

H. Porter Abbott’s new book deals with the unknowable and unspeakable in literature, arguing that readers should try to overcome their urge to resolve ambiguities and uncertainties in literary texts: there are gaps that cannot be filled, minds that cannot be known, and ideas that will remain beyond our grasp. Even though “we are so constructed that simply to know of a gap is to try to fill it” (113), Abbot believes that “intentionally induced states of unknowing” (20) should be an integral part of the reading experience.

In the first of the book’s three parts, Abbott introduces what he calls the “cognitive sublime” as a response to the unimaginable unknown. The discussion begins with theological matters — in particular, the influence of apophatic philosophy on Samuel Beckett whose obscure style impedes a narrativizing response and promotes the experience of unknowability. In so far as the self can be considered “a narrative construct” (40) readers have a stake in this process with respect to the conceptualization of their own selves. Abbott illustrates his points by contrasting pairs of literary works. In Part One he compares J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Drowned Giant” with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” in order to help the reader appreciate the differences between the communication among the characters and the text-reader relationship. Similarly, his discussion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods illustrates his thoughts on untold events in Part Three.

Part Two, “Inexpressible States,” examines narrative syntax and “neural sport,” using concepts developed in neuroscience. It defines the idea of the “cognitive sublime” introduced in the first part — “textually induced experiences of non-comprehension that occur when the mind is directed toward an unimaginable unknown” — and argues that these experiences arouse “a state of unknowing that is available to us not only in our experience of certain texts but also in our condition as human beings” (65). The word “sublime” is loaded and, in the mind of the informed reader, activates the long heritage of the sublime stretching from Longinus through Burke to Kant. But there are also situations where the unknowable is entirely fabricated, as “a form of ‘neural sport’ — a deliberate jamming of our mental circuitry whereby we are cut adrift from deeply embedded ways of knowing and enter states of syntactical and narrative impossibility that abide only in our transaction with the text” (65). Abbott illustrates [End Page 175] these arguments with contrasting selections from Gertrude Stein and the films of Michael Haneke.

A particularly engaging chapter discusses garden-path sentences, sentences which give the reader a direct experience of some of the effects under discussion. Because “we understand a sentence incrementally, that is, word by word, rather than exclusively as a whole” (67), garden-path sentences take an effort to decipher. Examples include: “Fat people eat accumulates” or “The old man the boat,” both of which require strategically placed commas for interpretation. These sentences provide some sense of the difficulty in keeping different interpretations in mind simultaneously. Surprisingly, Abbott does not mention Joseph Frank’s seminal 1945 essay “The Spatial Form in Modern Literature” which discusses techniques used by Elliot, Pound, and Joyce to break temporal sequence and transcend time. While Frank describes the process of relocating the action from the temporal to the spatial, Abbott’s argument is that challenges, such as garden-path sentences and narratives, relocate “the action from the fictional actual world of the text to the mind of its beholder. It becomes a drama of cognition and at the same time a much more intimate transaction between creator and audience” (82). For Abbott it is not “what art is about” but “what it cognitively is” (82). He illustrates this with an insightful analysis of a line by Beckett.

Part III, “Egregious Gaps,” discusses narrative gaps that cannot be filled. Abbott describes the ways in which theories of gaps are supported by...

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