Fictional Voices? Strange Voices? Unnatural Voices? 19

Fictional Voices? Strange Voices? Unnatural Voices? 19

Henrik Skov Nielsen

(Aarhus)

Fictional Voices? Strange Voices? Unnatural Voices?[1]

Introduction

This article is a small contribution to the current research concerned with unnatural narratives and unnatural narratology[2]. Some general ideas behind the unnatural approach have been described in earlier articles by members of the group on unnatural narratology.[3] It is an ongoing discussion, however, how to determine what we mean when we talk about unnatural narratology and to define exactly what unnatural narratives might be. I wish here to ask some of these questions with a specific view to strange fictional voices, and also to say a few words about the background against which the unnatural is posited, i.e. the natural, and to ask, in a rather down to earth manner, what difference it makes if one treats all narratives, including fictional ones, as if they were real-life instances of narrating.

The argument will go from the general in the form of a short presentation of parts of the relevant landscape of narrative theory and some of its urgent questions to some specific challenges to common sense understandings of narratives and fictional voices. These challenges are posited by such peculiar narrative forms as first person, present tense narration, you-narration, and paraleptic first person narration. I wish to ask in each case what might be the relationship between the specific strangeness of these cases and the general conditions of fictional narratives. Next I will propose a brief reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” which seems to me an especially interesting and challenging unnatural narrative that leaves almost all real world parameters behind. It presents the reader to voices that are strange in that they conflate text and paratext, here and there, then and now, I and you.

Finally, I will ask what consequences, if any, these peculiar forms and narratives have for our understanding of fictional narratives in general

What’s so unnatural about unnatural narratives anyway?

First of all: Why talk about unnatural narratives or unnatural narratology at all? Is it not the case that there is something unnatural in the sense of artificial about any and all kinds of storytelling? When we fashion stories in real life interactions we do so in incredibly complex ways. We use all kinds of techniques and tricks to suit them for our different purposes including exaggerating, fictionalizing, telling backwards, leaving out & filling in details, telling in another’s voice, using free indirect discourse etc. etc. As soon as new tricks are invented for one genre or purpose, they seem to be stolen and transferred to other genres and situations, frequently including transfers between fictional and non-fictional genres (cp. Meir Sternberg’s “Proteus-principle” (Sternberg 1982) and (Phelan 2005:68).

Or the other way round—coming from the opposite assumption to a very similar conclusion: Is it not the case that all narratives, including the most experimental novels and anti-mimetic post-modern narratives are all rock bottom natural? In the long history of human beings, the imaginative powers have always resulted in narratives that did and does not only depict the existing but explore the virtual, the strange, the unlikely, and the impossible? Isn’t the anti-mimetic impulse a very natural human impulse? And isn’t it the case that many of the “transgressive” techniques celebrated by high brow theorists are often employed in even the most low brow every-day communicative situations?

Thus, we should not lose sight of the complexity also of non-fictional narratives and we should be careful to not posit firm dichotomies between natural and unnatural narratives when in fact the relation is one of dynamic exchange and continuity[4]. I therefore willingly admit that I feel uneasy about assuming that certain kinds of narratives are natural, and doubly so by assuming that others are unnatural. It is not per se a distinction I wish to invest in myself.

Even so—and I guess that at this point most readers will have felt a “but” coming—I think there are at least two reasons to talk—for the momentary lack of a better term—about unnatural narratives. The first one is that some theoretical assumptions associated with the (explicit or implicit) view that all narratives are (or are genetically linked to) natural narratives have gained tremendous influence over the last years, and that I believe that these theories tend to miss important aspects about important narratives. The second reason is closely connected and consists in the fact that even if it may be true that all narratives are natural from a certain view point and/or all are unnatural from another point of view, then it does not follow from this that all narratives are alike and operate in accordance with exactly the same rules and principles.

By natural narratives, then, I here simply refer to narratives that have been designated as such by influential narrative theorists. The term “natural” has been most prominently applied to narrative theory by Monika Fludernik in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. Here, she describes the term as follows:

Natural narrative is a term that has come to define “naturally occurring” storytelling […] What will be called natural narrative in this book includes, mainly, spontaneous conversational storytelling […].[5]

The point here, then, is not to discuss whether conversational narratives are more natural than, say, literary or visual narratives. Rather I wish to just acknowledge the fact that the opinion and the term exist and have been extremely influential, and to examine some of the consequences (many of which I believe are actually more or less incongruent with Fludernik’s theories) it has had.

In two closely related articles (“Against Narrative” and “Against ‘against’ Narrative”) Pekka Tammi delivers a sober and thought-provoking criticism of easy assumptions that narratives are everywhere and a natural part of what we all do all the time. Tammi argues that these assumptions have led to an oversight of the differences between different kinds of narration and to a privileging of the natural. In the latter article, Tammi describes his enterprise in terms of “strangeness”:

[…] strangeness is indeed what the present paper is all about: strangeness, that is, in opposition to the natural—the strangeness of narrative fiction as well as the strangeness (in some instances) of narrative theory itself. (Tammi 2008, 37)

Tammi goes on to say about the privileging of the natural:

Narratives, it is said, are everywhere in our lives. Consequently, adherents of the post-classical approach have often tended to opt for the applicability of natural, real-life parameters for all varieties of narrative presentation, literary and non-literary, fictional and non-fictional alike. […] the broad definition may also result in a somewhat diluted or, frankly, wishy-washy view of distinctively literary fiction. (Tammi 2008, 37-38)

Fludernik, on her part, is often very alert to transgressions of and experiments with real-life parameters. She is also a very attentive reader of fiction exploring non-natural occurring storytelling situations:

Rather than privileging naturally occurring storytelling situations, Natural Narratology, by contrast, attempts to show how in the historical development of narratorial forms natural base frames are again and again being extended. […] [O]nce an originally non-natural storytelling situation has become widely disseminated in fictional texts, it acquires a second-level “naturalness”[6] from habituality, creating a cognitive frame […] which readers subconsciously deploy in their textual processing. Even more paradoxically, fiction as a genre comes to represent precisely those impossible naturalized forms and to create readerly expectations along those lines (Fludernik 2003, 255)

While it is instructive to see explicitly stressed that there exists such a thing as “originally non-natural storytelling situation”, the question is whether the reader will always try to naturalize anything—and if so, if it can always be done successfully.

This connects back to the overarching argument in Tammi: That there is a price to pay for the anchoring of narrative understanding in real-life experience:

And now we also see—which is evidently what I have been driving at all along – that such a theory comes with a cost. For what happens when this way of narrativizing texts does not work out just like that? (Tammi 2008, 40)

It is from this point of view that I wish to briefly examine some specific narrative forms as they occur in fictional narratives in order to ask in each case how they differ from real-life instances of narrating and what this tells us about fictional narratives in general. The four subjects that I touch upon in the next sections are first person, present tense narration, you-narration, paraleptic first person narration, and the distinction between narrated I and narrating I. Each of them could surely deserve an article or even a book of their own, and fortunately some of them are treated more thoroughly elsewhere in this volume,[7] but my specific aim in the context of this article is not to engage in an exhaustive investigation of each. Rather, I want to point out how they all cue the reader to interpret in ways that differs from the interpretation of real world acts of narration, like these of conversational storytelling.

First Person, present tense narration

In chapter 6 of The Distinction of Fiction Cohn describes a “mounting trend in modernist first-person fiction to cast a distinctively narrative (not monologic) discourse in the present tense from first to last” (1999, 97). Cohn rejects both the historical present and the interior monologue as satisfactory explanations of the phenomenon, and takes as her main example a passage from Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), containing the words that form the title of her chapter 6, “I doze and wake.” Cohn comments on this as follows:

But the introspective instance that most strongly resists the interior monologue reading is no doubt the one that reads: “I doze and wake, drifting from one formless dream to another.” Here semantic incongruence combines with the formal feature that most forcefully counteracts the impression of an unrolling mental quotation in this passage as a whole: the pace of its discourse is not consistently synchronized with the pace of the events it conveys […]. (Cohn, 103)

In short: In real life you can’t truthfully report that you sleep while you sleep. But in fiction examples abound where there is a flagrant incongruity between what is narrated and the act of narration itself. But incongruity between doing and telling needs not be that obvious for it to exist. Take, for example, the following straightforward example from Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama:

“See you, baby.” I hand her a French tulip I just happen to be holding and start pulling away from the curb.

“Oh Victor,” she calls out, handing Scooter the French tulip. “I got the job! I got the contract.”

“Great, baby. I gotta run. What job you crazy chick?”

“Guess?.”

“Matsuda? Gap?” I grin, limousines honking behind me. “Baby, listen, see you tomorrow night.”

“No. Guess?.”

“Baby, I already did. You're mind-tripping me.”[8]

The example is fairly typical and representative for the thousands of first person narratives resulting from the trend that Cohn identified and which was indeed mounting when Cohn wrote her book. It is not immediately apparent that there is something strange about the voice here in Ellis. But notice how there is in fact a clear difference between two levels of words and the ways in which they can and cannot be ascribed to a character narrator. There is clearly a character who starts out by saying “See you, baby.” These words are situated in a communicative situation and uttered by the character (Victor) to a female acquaintance. But at no point is there a narrator situated anywhere before, during or after the events, who says: “I hand her a French tulip.” No communicative situation seems imaginable in which a narrator will narrate these words to a narratee. And never will Victor say, think, or mumble to himself or anyone else “I hand her a French tulip”. There is no context and no occasion for telling them. The techniques used in the quote dissociate the words from the narrator’s account. The present tense here is clearly not the historical present or simply an interior monologue, but rather corresponds to what Cohn calls “fictional present,” (1999, 106). The words of the narrative in Glamorama are unnatural in the sense that they are not modelled on natural narrative, i. e., everyday conversational storytelling.

It may be that no great harm is done in saying that “Victor is the narrator in Glamorama”, it might be seen an economical, albeit imprecise alternative to “Victor is the person referred to by the pronoun “I” in this homodiegetic narrative”. Importantly, however, we are led astray if we take full consequence of imposing real world narrative situations on the narrative and begin to wonder when and to whom and for what reasons Victor would narrate the story—whether or not we imagine him doing this simultaneously with being so busy doing the things described.

For several reasons the technique used in Glamorama is not stream of consciousness (among these: it includes dialogue, and it does not appear to represent thoughts going through Victor’s head). Nonetheless, it is possible to extend an argument pertaining to stream of consciousness to the use of first person present tense narration here. Phelan’s famous definition of narrative goes:

First, narrative itself can be fruitfully understood as a rhetorical act: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened. (Phelan 2005, 18)