What Really Is Unnatural Narratology?

We are always happy to clarify our work, discuss our ideas, explain our concepts further, and, for that matter, rethink our terms, arguments, and positions. This is the job of any intellectual, and it is especially important when one is developing a new conceptual paradigm. Hence, we would like to thank David Herman, the editor of Storyworlds, for giving us the opportunity to write a response to Tobias Klauk and Tillman Köppe’s “Reassessing Unnatural Narratology: Problems and Prospects.” Their piece is very polemical, but we still welcome the opportunity to set the record straight about what unnatural narratology does—and does not—aim to achieve.¹ We recognize that we are advancing some often difficult, unusual, or unprecedented ideas that, due to their novelty, are liable to legitimate misinterpretation. Therefore, in our response, we will do our best to (re)state our positions in the clearest possible terms.

Definitions

It is understandable that Klauk and Köppe would have some problems with our basic definitions and some of their applications. The key issue is that each of us has a slightly different conception of the unnatural, even though in practice our applications are complementary and involve significant areas of overlap. In our 2010 article we decided to craft a general definition that each of us could substantially subscribe to; in other words, we decided to be broad and inclusive, rather than narrow and overly restrictive, in outlining our approach.

Here, then, are our actual definitions: for Brian Richardson, an unnatural text is a narrative that contains a number of significant anti-mimetic events. Richardson posits a spectrum of different modes of representation in fiction and differentiates among mimetic, non-mimetic, and anti-mimetic modes. For him, only the third mode is properly unnatural. A mimetic fiction will attempt to correspond to experiences in the world; a non-mimetic text (such as a fairy tale) will follow non-realistic conventions; and an anti-mimetic narrative contains events that are clearly and strikingly impossible in the real world. Thus, in a mimetic text, a horse can easily carry a human rider for twenty miles on a good day with decent roads; in a non-mimetic text a flying horse can carry a prince across the countryside; and in an anti-mimetic text like Aristophanes’ Peace, the protagonist, who wishes to speak with the gods, is transported by a giant dung beetle up to the heavens in a parody of Euripides’ Bellerophon—even as he urges that the audience refrain from passing gas so as not to misdirect his mount.²

Jan Alber, by contrast, restricts the use of the term “unnatural” to physically, logically, or humanly impossible scenarios and events. That is to say, the represented scenarios or events have to be impossible according to the known laws governing the physical world, accepted principles of logic (such as the principle of non-contradiction), or standard human limitations of knowledge or ability. The speaking breast in Philip Roth’s The Breast (1972), for instance, is physically impossible because in the real world, breasts do not speak, that is, produce lexemes. Meanwhile, the coexistence of mutually exclusive story lines, as in Robert Coover’s short story “The Babysitter” (1969), is logically impossible: in the represented storyworld, the contradictory sentences “Mr. Tucker went home to have sex with the babysitter” and “Mr. Tucker did not go home to have sex with the babysitter” are true at the same time, and these truth conditions violate the principle of non-contradiction. Finally, Saleem Sinai, the telepathic first-person narrator in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981), transcends standard human limitations when it comes to knowledge and ability because he can hear the thoughts of other characters, which is impossible in the real world. Moreover, Alber distinguishes between the unnatural in postmodernist narratives—a mode of unnaturalness that still strikes us as disorienting or defamiliarizing—and conventionalized instances of the unnatural in earlier narratives (such as the speaking animal in the beast fable or time travel in science fiction...