Natural Environments in Narrative Contexts: Cross-Pollinating Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory

Narratology has in recent years become a context-oriented, functional, interpretative, evaluative, and dynamic mode of inquiry into narratives as part of human life. At the same time, its focus has shifted from canonical literature to forms of storytelling across a variety of modes, genres, and media. Despite these recent developments, the narratological mainstream still tends to foreground fictional minds and imaginary storyworlds. In this article I suggest how engaging with ecocritical perspectives can broaden the scope of narrative inquiry, not only by suggesting the relevance of environmental issues for research on fictional and other narratives but also by highlighting the ecocritical significance of tools developed by scholars of narrative—tools that can be used to explore how cultural practices pertain to the natural ecologies with which they are interwoven.

Interestingly, in her influential book Towards a “Natural” Narratology (1996), Monika Fludernik characterizes fictional accounts of environments or ecologies as non-natural, since those accounts denaturalize what Fludernik terms the natural frames of storytelling, which rely in turn on human experientiality. Yet ecocriticism affords new perspectives on fictional as well as nonfictional ecologies; working to decenter human frames of reference, ecocritical perspectives insist on and aim to explore the interconnections between textual practices and the larger physical world. In fact, ecocriticism is often too preoccupied with the domain of nature to linger on the specific affordances that fictional narratives provide when it comes to imagining and situating oneself within suprahuman ecologies.

In this article, using Barbara Kingsolver’s 2009 novel The Lacuna as a primary case study, I outline strategies for integrating narratological and ecocritical research, with a view to promoting more cross-fertilization between these fields. In turn, in developing an approach to the novel that combines narratological and ecocritical insights, I leverage recent functional and contextualist accounts of narrative itself. Kingsolver’s novel tells a story of a young man’s adventures and experiences as he journeys from the watery worlds surrounding a coastal island in Mexico to the mass-media-filtered realities of Cold War America. As part of my inquiry into the reciprocal relationship between conceptions of nature and modes of storytelling, I will focus on the interaction of the human mind with the physical world as it is figured in Kingsolver’s novel. As I go on to discuss, the novel suggests that human beings are no more removed from nature when they experience urban cityscapes than they are wholly immersed in nature when they dive into undersea caves.¹

To capture these aspects of Kingsolver’s text, however, I must revisit some of the grounding assumptions of narrative theory itself. Narratology in its structuralist phase focused on fictional worlds as autonomous entities, thus severing their links to the pragmatics of writing and reading literature in real-world contexts. Richard Walsh, one of the foremost advocates of a pragmatic view of fiction, argues by contrast that “readers cannot be content merely to construct fictional worlds, as if this in itself were endlessly satisfying; they must also be concerned to evaluate them, to bring them into relation with the larger context or their own experience and understanding” (2007: 43). David Herman similarly draws attention to the role of narratives in the wider discursive context: “narratives do not merely evoke worlds but also intervene in a field of discourses, a range of representational strategies, a constellation of ways of seeing—and sometimes a set of competing narratives” (Herman et al. 2012: 17). Along similar lines, Meir Sternberg (2010) has objected to “objectivist paradigms” in narratology and proposed to replace such paradigms with a functionalist approach. Sternberg suggests that the prevailing humanist and anthropomorphic definitions of narrativity are too limited, and he consequently speaks of the “restrictive anthropocentric bias” in recent narrative theories (646). Sternberg further suggests that the naturalness of narrativity, “ultimately grounded in the ongoing survival value of observing, plotting, telling, foretelling, inferring event lines,” should be contrasted with Fludernik’s “natural” narratology, “where ‘nature’ is itself already culture-bound” (646). Indeed, Fludernik (1996) argues that “the natural [. . .] corresponds to the human” (19); elsewhere she...