Unnatural Narrative

Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama

Jan Alber

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Part 1. Concepts of the Unnatural

Introduction: The Range of the Impossible 3
1 Theorizing the Unnatural

25

Part 2. Unnatural Narrative Features

2 Impossible Narrators and Storytelling Scenarios 61
3 Antirealist Figures: Paper People Gone Wild 104
4 Unnatural Temporalities
5 Antimimetic Spaces

149

185

Conclusion 215
Notes

233

Bibliography

257

Index 295

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Introduction
The Range of the Impossible

One of the most interesting things about fictional narratives is that

they not only reproduce the empirical world around us; they also often
contain nonactualizable elements that would simply be impossible in
the real world. Ruth Ronen (1994, 45) writes that fiction can construct
impossible objects and other objects that clearly diverge from their
counterparts in the actual world. Mark Currie (2007, 85) goes one step
further by arguing that the impossible object, and even the impossible
world, is of course the very possibility of fiction. Indeed many fictional
narratives confront us with bizarre worlds that are governed by principles that clearly transcend the parameters of the real world.
In this study I show that, throughout literary history, the storyworlds of novels, short stories, and plays teem with unnatural (i.e.,
physically, logically, or humanly impossible) scenarios and events that
challenge our real-world knowledge.1 The unnatural (or impossible) in
such narratives is measured against the foil of natural (real-world)
cognitive frames and scripts that have to do with natural laws, logical
principles, and standard human limitations of knowledge and ability.
Even though the unnatural proliferates in literary texts from various
periods, narrative theory has not yet done justice to these many cases
of unnaturalnessnor to the question of how readers can make sense
of them.
To illustrate the ways in which the unnatural may deviate from realworld frames and scripts, I begin by presenting four striking examples
of impossibility that concern the narrative parameters of the narrator,
the character, time, and space.
3

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Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
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The first-person narrator of Philip Roths (1972) novel The Breast, for
instance, is Professor Kepesh, who has miraculously transformed into
a female breast. He describes his current state as follows:
I am a breast. A phenomenon that has been variously described to
me as a massive hormonal influx, an endocrinopathic catastrophe, and/or a hermaphroditic explosion of chromosomes took
place within my body between midnight and four a.m. on February
18, 1971, and converted me into a mammary gland disconnected
from any human form, a mammary gland such as could only
appear, one would have thought, in a dream or a Dali painting....
I am said to be of a spongy consistency, weighing in at one hundred
and fifty-five pounds... and measuring, still, six feet in length. (12)
Other postmodernist narratives confront us with unnatural characters (rather than narrators). One of the figures in Harold Pinters (1981)
radio play Family Voices, for example, is a letter-writing corpse and thus
alive and dead at the same time. The dead father describes his situation
in a letter to his son, who is still alive, as follows: I am dead. As dead as a
doornail. Im writing to you from the grave. A quick word for old times
sake. Just to keep in touch. An old hullo out of the dark. A last kiss
from Dad (294). Still other postmodernist narratives deconstruct our
real-world knowledge about time and temporal progression. In Caryl
Churchills ([1979] 1985) play Cloud Nine, for instance, the characters age
more slowly than the society that surrounds them. Even though about
one hundred years of standard chronology pass between Acts I and II,
for the characters, it is only twenty-five years later (243). There are
also postmodernist narratives that present us with impossible spaces.
In Angela Carters ([1972] 1985) The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
Hoffman, for example, Dr. Hoffman causes internal desires to materialize as entities in the storyworld, and, as a consequence, the setting
becomes rather fluid:
Cloud palaces erected themselves then silently toppled to reveal
for a moment the familiar warehouse beneath them until they
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Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
Jan Alber

were replaced by some fresh audacity. A group of chanting pillars

exploded in the middle of a mantra and lo! they were once again
street lamps until, with night, they changed to silent flowers. Giant
heads in helmets of conquistadors sailed up like sad, painted kites
over the giggling chimney pots. Hardly anything remained the
same for more than one second and the city was no longer the
conscious production of humanity; it had become the arbitrary
realm of dream. (1819)
All of these examples are unnatural because they defy our real-world
knowledge and suggestively violate some sort of important conceptual
boundary (Zunshine 2008, 19). In the actual world breasts do not talk,
writing corpses do not exist, the flow of time cannot be slowed down,
and settings do not suddenly change their shapes. I am interested in
the purpose or point of these unnatural phenomena in fiction, that is,
in the question of what these impossibilities might mean to the readers.
The unnatural proliferates in postmodernist narratives in particular.2 However, the scope of the unnatural is not limited to these types of
literature; many older narratives represent impossibilities as well. The
narrator of Marshall Saunderss ([1893] 1920) childrens novel Beautiful
Joe: An Autobiography, for instance, is a dog that speaks to a human
interlocutor. The novel opens as follows: I am an old dog now, and
writing, or rather getting a friend to write, the story of my life (1).
Unnatural characters proliferate in many earlier genres, such as the
Gothic novel. In Matthew Lewiss ([1796] 1998) The Monk: A Romance,
for example, Don Raymond encounters a ghost, which he describes as
follows: I beheld before me an animated corpse. Her countenance was
long and haggard; her cheeks and lips were bloodless; the paleness of
death was spread over her features; and her eye-balls, fixed steadfastly
upon me, were lustreless and hollow (140, my italics).
Various pre-postmodernist narratives also tamper with the natural
flow of time. In Walter Maps (1983) twelfth-century De Nugis Curialium (Courtiers Trifles), for instance, the Briton king Herla spends time
with a pygmy. When he leaves the pygmys world, he realizes that he
Introduction

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has actually spent two hundred years there, while in his own experience the lapse of time seems to have encompassed but three days (31).
Unnatural spaces also exist in earlier narratives, such as Jonathan Swifts
([1726] 2003) satirical Gullivers Travels. In book 3 Lemuel Gulliver
observes the flying island of Laputa, which he describes as an Island
in the Air, inhabited by Men, who were able... to raise, sink, or put it
into a Progressive Motion, as they pleased (146).
These earlier narratives represent impossible narrators, characters,
temporalities, and settings that are similar to my examples of unnaturalness in postmodernism insofar as they also flout our knowledge
about how things in the actual world tend to work. In this study I
posit a historically constant notion of the unnatural: to my mind, the
world we inhabit is dominated by physical laws, logical principles, and
anthropomorphic limitations that are permanent and stable. I thus
assume that phenomena such as speaking animals, animated corpses,
coexisting time flows, and flying islands were as impossible in the past
as they are today. Similarly Monika Fludernik (2003a, 258) argues that
the cognitive parameters by which authors and readers cognize the
world in terms of fundamental processes of human being in the world
are relatively constant; changes are likely to be minimal. For me the
unnatural is a concept or, better, a narrative mode that persists across
different epochs, in different manifestations.
Furthermore the impossibilities in the narratives just mentioned
are tied up with the conventions of literary genres. A literary genre is
constituted by an operative principle or shared convention (Todorov
1973, 3) and can be seen as a matter of discrimination and taxonomy: of organising things into recognizable classes (Frow 2006, 51).
My four examples of the unnatural in postmodernism (the speaking
breast in The Breast, the writing corpse in Family Voices, the differential temporality in Cloud Nine, and the shape-shifting setting in The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman) are estranging instances
of anti-illusionism or metafiction that draw attention to the fictionality
of fiction.3 The second group of examples, on the other hand, contain
conventionalized impossibilities that are parts of familiar generic
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Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
Jan Alber

conventions (such as the childrens book, the Gothic novel, the magical narrative, and the satirical novel) and do not strike us as being
disconcerting or estranging. These types of muted metafiction evoke
the following two questions: How are the estranging examples of the
unnatural in postmodernism related to the familiar ones in older narratives? How and why have certain instances of the unnatural become
conventionalized, that is, turned into basic cognitive categories?
This study has three major goals. First, I want to document the startling and persistent presence of the unnatural in British and American
literary history from the Old English epic to postmodernism. As I
will show, the unnatural has an unexpected story potential: violations
of ontological expectations seem to be ripe with narrative possibilities (Zunshine 2008, 69). Unnatural scenarios and events primarily
concern the question of what it is like (Herman 2009, 14) to experience the transcending of physical laws, logical principles, or standard
human limitations of knowledge and ability, and such experiences are
restricted to the world of fiction. Second, despite obvious interpretive difficulties, I address the question of how readers can make sense
of the unnatural. In other words, I am interested in the question of
what readers can do when real-world parameters and explanations fail.
Third, I compare the impossibilities in postmodernist narratives, which
constitute forms of anti-illusionism or metafiction, with the conventionalized impossibilities in non-postmodernist narratives to illustrate
which modes of unnaturalness exist across time.4 In this context I also
address the question of how these conventionalizations of the unnatural have come about.
This study has a major focus on the unnatural in postmodernism.
While most critics define postmodernist narratives as being meta fictional
or self-reflexive, I foreground the central role of representations of the
impossible in postmodernism. Patricia Waugh (1984, 111), for instance,
defines postmodernist texts as being metafictional; they are fictional
texts that self-reflexively foreground their fictionality. Similarly Brian
McHale (1987, 10) argues that the dominant of postmodernist fiction is
ontological. According to him, postmodernist narratives foreground
Introduction

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Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
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questions of being that consistently challenge the existence of their represented worlds. Linda Hutcheon (1988, 26, 129) has a slightly different
focus: she sees the defining feature of postmodernism in the playfully
parodic transformation of tradition through mocking references to
earlier texts or styles. For Hutcheon historiographic metafiction is the
most important manifestation of postmodernism. The unnatural relates
to metafiction in a rather complex manner: while all instances of the
not yet conventionalized unnatural (such as the speaking breast in The
Breast) are metafictional (because they strike us as being defamiliarizing
and thus draw attention to the fictionality of fiction), not all instances
of metafiction are automatically unnatural.5 Also the conventionalized
examples of unnaturalness (such as the speaking animal in the beast
fable) lie beyond the scope of metafiction.
In contrast to other critics, I look at postmodernism from a vantage
point that, among other things, opens up a new perspective on the history of postmodernist narratives. I define the postmodernist project in
terms of the systematic undermining of our natural cognition of the
world. In other words, postmodernist narratives are full of physically,
logically, or humanly impossible scenarios and events that relate to the
narrator, characters, time, or space. Postmodernist texts deconstruct
the traditionally human narrator and the anthropomorphic character
as well as our real-world understanding of time and space by confronting us with impossible narrators or storytelling scenarios, antirealist
characters, unnatural temporalities, and antimimetic spaces. However,
the unnatural was clearly not invented by postmodernism and is definitely not a brand-new phenomenon; rather postmodernism can be
described in terms of the concentration and radicalization of modes
of the unnaturalmodes for which there are numerous antecedents
in literary history.
In addition I demonstrate that the reading strategies I outline in
chapter 2 may generate provisional explanations that illustrate how
readers can make sense of the unnatural. The ultimate goal behind
my readings and interpretations is to show that physical, logical, and
human impossibilities are not completely alien to our sense-making
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Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
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practices. We can in fact productively engage with the impossible; even

though the unnatural urges us to deal with impossibilities, it does not
paralyze our interpretive faculties. In this context I also move beyond
Lisa Zunshines (2008, 164) argument that cognitive uncertainty...
flexes and trains our categorization process. I spell out different cognitive mechanisms that help us make sense of the various kinds of
unnaturalness that exist.
Moreover I try to unearth the history of the postmodernist rebellion against our natural cognition of the world. In doing so I seek to
qualify the stereotypical argument about the antimimetic extravagance
of postmodernism (see, e.g., Benhabib 1996; Currie 2011, 2; Federman
1975a; Lyotard 1997). By looking back at non-postmodernist narratives,
I show that impossibilities have always played a crucial role in literary
history. The unnatural figures prominently in postmodernist narratives, but the impossible scenarios and events of postmodernism were
anticipated by earlier narratives, through which certain modes of the
unnatural have been conventionalized, that is, turned into basic cognitive frames. In this connection I also show that the unnatural is a
hitherto neglected driving force behind the development of new literary
genres. In a surprising number of cases, new generic configurations
develop as unnatural elements become conventionalized, and once
they have been turned into literary conventions, they can be used for
a different purposea process that typically leads to the creation of
further genres.
On the one hand, my focus on the central role of the unnatural
in postmodernism immediately evokes the question of whether
there are other modes of the unnatural that postmodernist narratives
are connected with, and my investigation of literary history reveals
the unnatural to be a significant driving force behind the creation of
new genres. On the other hand, my analysis of the development of the
unnatural in non-postmodernist narratives allows me to reconceptualize postmodernism as an intertextual endeavor that consistently uses
impossibilities that have already been conventionalized in well-known
generic contexts. Thus, from my perspective, postmodernism is not
Introduction

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Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
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at all the completely innovative and wholly unprecedented explosion

of antimimeticism that certain critics consider it to be.6 Rather postmodernist narratives recruit from conventionalized impossibilities
associated with historical genres such as the beast fable, the heroic
epic, certain types of romance, the eighteenth-century circulation novel
and other satires, the omniscient narration in many realist texts, the
Gothic novel, the childrens story, the stream-of-consciousness novel,
the ghost play, the more recent fantasy narrative, and the science-fiction
novel.7 This process may either take place along the diachronic axis
(as in the case of the epic or the beast fable, for instance), or at the
synchronic level (as in the case of more recent fantasy and sciencefiction narratives, many of which were published during the heyday
of postmodernism). While the former process can be described as a
form of harking back, the relationship among postmodernist narratives, more recent fantasy texts, and science-fiction novels is one that
involves reciprocity and mutual borrowings.
The standard way of relating postmodernism to other types of literature is to see it as a reaction to literary modernism (McHale 1987, 325;
1992a, 1937). Ihab Hassan (1987, 87, 9192), for instance, points out that
the word postmodernism... evokes what it wishes to surpass or suppress, namely modernism itself, and he presents a list of oppositions
to illustrate crucial differences between modernism and postmodernism. John Barth (1984, 6276, 193206) distinguishes between what
he calls the literature of exhaustionespecially the work of Samuel
Beckettand the literature of replenishment. He argues that the aesthetics of modernism reached a point of exhaustion (he speaks of the
used-upness of certain forms [64]) and that literature was in a way
replenished by the self-reflexive playfulness of postmodernism (206).
Other critics, however, see connections between postmodernism
and certain historical genres, and I build on their work in this study.
Harold John Blackham (1985, 177), for instance, sees the Aesopian beast
fable as one of the most important sources of postmodernism; he claims
that the Aesopic use of animals is the primal and simplest form of
[the] freedom of representation. Marjorie Perloff (1985, 176), on the
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Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
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other hand, connects postmodernism with the performative, playful

mode of eighteenth-century ironists. Examples include Jonathan Swift
as well as the many circulation novels that are narrated by speaking
objects such as coins, banknotes, slippers, and even an atom (see also
Bellamy 1998; Blackwell 2007b; Flint 1998; Link 1980).8 Indeed satirical
critique is often arealistic (Booker and Thomas 2009, 5) and involves
exaggerations, distortions, or caricatures that merge with the unnatural
(see also Stableford 2009, 358).
Gabriele Schwab (1994, 177) points to a different connection between
postmodernist and earlier experiments with representation, speculating that the magic in Lewis Carrolls childrens stories may mark the
beginning of those far-reaching challenges to our cultural notions of
mimesis and representation which culminate in what we have come
to call the simulacrum of postmodernism. More generally Nancy H.
Traill (1996, 17) identifies a connection between the supernatural, that
is, extranatural forces that belong to the divine sphere or the world of
magic, and the unnatural in postmodernism through what she calls
the paranormal mode.9 Traill shows that in nineteenth-century
narratives such as Charles Dickenss (1866) The Signal-Man, the
supernatural becomes absorbed by realism. In paranormal texts impossibilities happen without there being a supernatural explanation for
them: The opposition [supernatural vs. natural] loses its force because
we find that the word supernatural is merely a label for strange phenomena latent within the natural domain. Clairvoyance, telepathy,
and precognition, for instance, are taken to be as physically possible as
any commonplace human ability (Traill 1996, 17). In the paranormal
mode the supernatural realm disappears because it has become a realist option in the human world itself. What Traill calls the paranormal
mode is virtually identical with the unnatural in postmodernist narratives insofar as in both cases, represented impossibilities cannot be
explained through supernatural interventions; rather we have to look
for other explanations.
Brian McHale (1992a, 22939; 1992b), Andrew M. Butler (2003),
Veronica Hollinger (2005), and Elana Gomel (2010) look at the reciprocal
Introduction

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relationship between postmodernism and science fiction. McHale

(1992a, 247) argues that both science fiction and mainstream postmodernist fiction possess repertoires of strategies and motifs designed
to raise and explore ontological issues. He points out that there has
been a tendency for postmodernist writing to absorb motifs and topoi
from science fiction writing, mining science fiction for its raw materials (1987, 65), and that science fiction tends to literalize or actualize
what occurs in postmodernist fiction as metaphor (1992b, 150).
In this study I show that impossibilities have been an important
ingredient of many types of literature; modes of the unnatural feature in many different narratives throughout literary history. Focusing
on the history of English literature, I demonstrate that antimimeticism
spans the development of English literature from its beginnings in
the Old English epic to the anti-illusionist types of unnaturalness in
postmodernism. Since physical laws, logical principles, and standard
anthropomorphic limitations of knowledge and ability are universal
qualities, my study deals with more than a specifically English notion
of unnaturalness. Among other things, my corpus has to do with my
profession: as an English studies person, I am primarily familiar with
examples of English literature. In addition I conceive of this as a pilot
study. My aim is to model diachronic and synchronic approaches to the
unnatural in one literary tradition with a view to laying the groundwork for further, analogous investigations of other literary traditions.
Presumably literature as such involves the unnatural in one way or
another. For me fictional literature is interesting and special because
it can represent the unnatural.
As far as the relationship between the unnatural in postmodernism and impossibilities in non-postmodernist narratives is concerned,
I try to explain the estranging effects of the former by arguing that
postmodernist fiction transfers to otherwise realist contexts impossible
scenarios or events that are common in certain well-known literary
genres, creating self-reflexive blends between realist and unnatural
modes. In contrast to the magical worlds of Breton lais and romances
about King Arthur, the exaggerated worlds of satires, or the futurist
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Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
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speculations of science-fiction novels, what is odd or strange in the

case of the unnatural in postmodernism is the manifestation of physically, logically, or humanly impossible elements within otherwise
realist frameworks. Hence one might argue that what postmodernist narratives do is to blend our actual-world encyclopedia with the
encyclopedias of certain well-known genres by using the impossible
narrators, characters, times, or spaces of the latter in the context of
otherwise realist narrativesand this merging of encyclopedias creates the estranging effects of many of the self-reflexive metafictions of
postmodernism.10
In a nutshell I aim to reconceptualize postmodernism as an intertextual endeavor that is connected to the history of literature through
manifestations of the unnatural. At the same time, postmodernist narratives fuse conventionalized impossibilities from earlier texts with
realist contexts, thus creating the estranging effects and feelings of
disorientation that are so typical of postmodernism. And it is important to note that these effects crucially depend upon our real-world
knowledge, without which they could not be felt.
Other critics conceptualize postmodernism differently. The essays
in Postmodernism across the Ages (Readings and Schaber 1993), for
example, consider postmodernism to be an atemporal mode or way
of thinking that surfaces in different periods. Umberto Eco (1983, 66)
puts forward the same view: I believe that postmodernism is not a
trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather an ideal categoryor
better still, a Kunstwollen, a way of operating. We could say that every
period has its own postmodernism, just as every period would have
its own mannerism. By contrast, I do not define postmodernism but
rather the unnatural, that is, the representation of impossibilities, as
an ideal category or atemporal way of operating that leads to different modes during the course of literary history. Postmodernism is
just one specific manifestation of the unnatural; it is a style or type
of writing that correlates with a high degree of unnaturalness and, in
addition, relates back to already conventionalized impossibilities in
established genres.
Introduction

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This study is a contribution to the field of unnatural narratology,11

and it owes a great deal to Brian Richardson, Henrik Skov Nielsen,
Stefan Iversen, Maria Mkel, and other scholars working in this
domain, whose work I value very much. However, this study also
differs from some of the approaches that are being put forward inthe
context of unnatural narratology. These differences include (1) how
Idefine the term unnatural; (2) my use of cognitive approaches to
narrative; (3) my emphasis on the need to interpret, and not just catalog, unnatural literature; and (4) my development of a diachronic
perspective on the unnatural.
1. Defining the term unnatural: This study restricts the use of the
term unnatural to physically, logically, and humanly impossible scenarios and events (regardless of whether we find them estranging or
not). In Richardsons (2015) usage, on the other hand, the unnatural
correlates with innovative antimimetic qualities and Viktor Shklovskys
notion of defamiliarization. Richardson defines unnatural narratives as
follows: An unnatural narrative is one that contains significant antimimetic events, characters, settings, or frames. By antimimetic, I mean
representations that contravene the presuppositions of nonfictional
narratives, violate mimetic conventions and the practices of realism,
and defy the conventions of existing, established genres (2015, 3).
He also distinguishes between the antimimetic (that is, the properly
unnatural) and the nonmimetic (in fairy tales, beast fables, science fiction, and so forth), which, for him, is not unnatural. For Richardson,
the difference between the antimimetic and the nonmimetic has to do
with the degree of unexpectedness that the text produces, whether
surprise, shock, or the wry smile that acknowledges that a different,
playful kind of representation is at work (5). To my mind, Richardson
puts too much emphasis on the potential effects of the unnatural on the
reader. My own definition of the unnatural is based on textual features rather than readerly effects. Richardson (2002, 57; 2006, 5) himself
notes that he discusses odd, unusual, and anomalous phenomena
as well as strictly speaking impossible ones. From one perspective,
in comparison with Richardsons approach, I have a narrower notion
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Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
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of the unnatural. I restrict the use of the term unnatural to representations of the impossible and do not deal with the merely odd, strange, or
unusual. From another perspective, however, I have a wider notion of
the unnatural. Since Richardson bases his definition of the unnatural
on the innovative and defamiliarizing, he excludes conventionalized
instances of the unnatural, which by contrast I discuss at great length
in this study.
Stefan Iversens (2013) definition also leaves out the unnatural in
well-known genres. He ties the notion of the unnatural to narratives
that present the reader with clashes between the rules governing a
storyworld and scenarios or events producing or taking place inside
this storyworldclashes that defy easy explanations (Alber, Iversen,
et al. 2013, 103; see also Iversen 2013). Another problem I have with
Iversens definition (in addition to the exclusion of conventionalized
instances of the unnatural) is that he restricts his definition to narratives
that posit a mimetic world and then intentionally break the rules
(Kilgore 2014, 636n5). From my vantage point Iversens definition captures only a very limited number of narrative texts, such as Franz
Kafkas (1915) Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) or mashup novels
like Seth Grahame-Smiths (2009) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and
Adam Bertoccis (2010) Two Gentlemen of Lebowski: A Most Excellent
Comedie and Tragical Romance. These three narratives present their
readers with rather obvious clashes between the rules of the represented
worlds and certain surprising events (such as Gregor Samsas transformation into an insect or the presence of zombies in a realist storyworld).
The many metalepses in Japser Ffordes postmodernist novels about
Thursday Next, on the other hand, would not qualify as being unnatural
because there is no clash between the rules of the storyworld and these
jumps: metalepses are clearly possible in the represented world and they
happen all the time. In contrast to Iversen, who advocates a text-internal
perspective and focuses on clashes within storyworlds, I follow cognitive narratologists and possible-worlds theorists who argue that we
approach narrative fiction on the basis of our real-world knowledge. I
measure the unnatural against the foil of cognitive frames and scripts
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derived from our being in the world and define the unnatural in terms
of physical, logical, and human impossibilities.
Another definition of the unnatural is provided by Henrik Skov
Nielsen (2010, 279; see also 2013, 7071), who argues that the unnatural
deviates from the paradigm of natural, i.e., oral narratives, that is,
spontaneously occurring everyday storytelling as described by William
Labov (1972). From my perspective this way of defining the unnatural
slightly distorts the actual makeup of oral narratives. As discourse
analysts such as Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps (2001) have shown, oral
narratives are far less conventional than is still often assumed. Salman
Rushdie (1985, 7) also points out that his novel Midnights Children
(1981) is based on the model of oral narrative because it is
not linear. An oral narrative does not go from the beginning to
the middle to the end of the story. It goes in great swoops, it goes
in spirals or loops, it every so often reiterates something that
happened earlier to remind you, and then takes you off again,
sometimes summarizes itself, it frequently digresses off into something that the story-teller appears just to have thought of, then it
comes back to the main thrust of the narrative.... So its a very
bizarre and pyrotechnical shape.
Furthermore oral narratives can also contain impossible scenarios or
events. Richard Bauman (2005, 582), for example, analyzes tall tales,
that is, oral narratives of personal experience, in which the circumstances of the narrated event are stretched by degrees to the point that
they challenge or exceed the limits of credibility (my italics). I would
therefore not draw a distinction between natural (oral) narratives and
unnatural (written) ones. In contrast to Nielsen, I distinguish between
natural (or real-world) segments that are, at least in principle, actualizable, and unnatural segments that involve impossibilities that are
non-actualizable (Ronen 1994, 51), and these segments can occur in
both oral (or natural) and written narratives.12
Maria Mkel (2013a) advocates a wide notion of the unnatural.
From her perspective the term unnatural is virtually identical with
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the literary or fictional: We dont have to resort to avant-garde literature to notice that the unnaturalnessor the peculiarly literary type
of cognitive challengeis always already there in textual representations of consciousness (133). This definition too is not one that I can
easily agree with because it replaces the concept of literariness (which
involves artificiality and constructedness) with the idea of unnaturalness. Mkel is right in arguing that realist fiction, which is primarily
modeled on natural cognitive parameters, involves a certain degree of
literariness, artificiality, or constructedness. However, these qualities
are not unnatural per se. For me the unnatural is a subcategory of (but
not identical with) the fictional. Fictional texts can be based on the
natural and reproduce real-world parameters, but they may also represent the unnatural, that is, physical, logical, or human impossibilities.
2. Cognitive approaches to narrative: Many unnatural narratologists are opposed to exploring the unnatural from the vantage point
of cognitive narratology. Richardson, Nielsen, and Iversen are wary
of a cognitive approach to the unnatural, especially insofar as such
an approach tends to explain unnatural narratives through ordinary
cognition or familiar experiences. Richardson, for example, argues
that cognitive theorists often seek to explain away unusual features
of antimimetic texts by finding some unusual cognitive condition that
could account for a characters otherwise inexplicable behavior (2015,
167). This study, on the other hand, proposes that ideas from cognitive
narratology, frame theory, and possible-worlds theory may help illuminate the considerable and often unsettling interpretive difficulties
posed by unnatural elements. While Richardson, Nielsen, and Iversen
are suspicious of normalizing or domesticating the unnatural through
the application of cognitive parameters, I am careful not to monumentalize the unnatural by leaving it completely outside the bounds of the
comprehensible. In other words, I refuse to see the unnatural as something transcendental that we poor mortals cannot even begin to make
sense of. Represented impossibilities are created by human authors and
should therefore be approached from the vantage point of our (human)
world.13 Furthermore a cognitive perspective makes sense because there
Introduction

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Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
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is nothing beyond our cognitive architecture that we could potentially

use to engage with the unnatural.
3. The role of interpretations and close readings: Some theorists of
the unnatural have refrained from offering interpretations of literary
texts featuring unnatural elements. For instance, although Richardson
highlights many strange or disconcerting aspects of unnatural narratives, he does not devote the same attention to the question of what
the unnatural might mean or communicate to us (see, e.g., Richardson
2000, 2002, 2006, 2011, 2015). Richardson (2011, 33) seeks to respect
the polysemy of literary creations, and a crucial aspect of this polysemy can be the unnatural construction of recalcitrant texts. From his
perspective we need to recognize the anti-mimetic as such, and resist
impulses to deny its protean essence and unexpected effects (33). Similarly H. Porter Abbott proposes that some literary texts force readers
to abandon efforts at interpretation and to instead rest in that peculiar combination of anxiety and wonder (2008b, 448) or remain in a
state of bafflement (2009, 132),14 while Mkel (2013b, 145) asserts that
she would not construe the reader as a mere sense-making machine
but as someone who might just as well opt for the improbable and the
indeterminate. Nielsen (2013) offers what he calls unnaturalizing reading strategies. He writes that in unnatural narratives, the reader can
trust as authoritative and reliable what would in real life be impossible,
implausible or, at the very least, subject to doubt (92). Nielsen also
argues that the unnatural cue[s] the reader to interpret in ways that
differ from the interpretation of real-world acts of narration and of
conversational storytelling (91). I agree with Nielsens argument that
readers have to accept the fact that fictional narratives can represent
impossibilities, but I believe that he here brackets out the interesting
question of what these impossibilities mean or why narratives represent
them in the first place.15
In contrast to some unnatural narrative theorists, I try to put the
narratological toolbox to interpretative use vis--vis narratives that
feature unnatural elements. Represented impossibilities say something
about us and the world we live in, and I attempt to determine the
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Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
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potential points of the unnatural. As Ansgar Nnning (2003, 24344)

has shown, it is typical of postclassical narratology in general to use the
tools of narrative theory in order to generate interpretations. However,
even though my postclassical study of the unnatural seeks to combine
narratological analyses with interpretation, it does not offer what Meir
Sternberg (1982, 112) calls a package deal. Like Sternberg, I assume
that there is no intrinsic link between certain forms and specific functions (112). Given the variability of context, the same narrative feature
may of course serve as means to different effects (see also Yacobi 2001,
223). Therefore it is important to investigate the various functions of
represented impossibilities across literary history. Generally speaking,
my approach is informed by an increasing awareness of the cultural
embeddedness of narrative (Bal 2009, 225). Like Mieke Bal, I am interested in the functions and positions of texts of different backgrounds,
genres, and historical periods (x).
On the one hand, I seek to develop an inventory of unnatural properties in fictional narratives, but on the other hand, I deal with reading
strategies that are designed to demonstrate what one can do with or
how one might potentially approach projected impossibilities. Furthermore my approach is designed to accept and discuss the fundamental
unnaturalness of certain phenomena and to then address their potential effects. My approach thus tries to do justice to what Hans-Ulrich
Gumbrecht (2004, 108) calls the oscillation or interference between
the bodily presence effects and the mind-oriented meaning effects
of aesthetic experience (in this case the aesthetic experience of the
unnatural). While presence effects touch our bodies and evoke certain
emotional responses, meaning effects concern the rationalizing movements of the human mind.
4. Developing a diachronic perspective on the unnatural: So
far, unnatural narratologists have primarily focused on contemporary
(twentieth- and twenty-first-century) literature, that is, modernist, late
modernist, postmodernist, and avant-garde narratives, thus neglecting
the workings of the unnatural in earlier narratives.16 By contrast, my own
work has a decidedly diachronic focus that includes a comprehensive
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account of the history of the unnatural in English-language literature.

Exploring antecedents of the impossibilities found in postmodernist
narratives, I investigate the development of the unnatural beginning
with the Old English epic.
I position my study in the broader context of mind- oriented
approaches and possible-worlds theory. Cognitive theorists such as
Monika Fludernik, David Herman, Manfred Jahn, Marie-Laure Ryan,
and Lisa Zunshine argue that when we try to make sense of narrative
texts, we use more or less the same cognitive parameters that we also
use in order to make sense of the real world. One of the points that
Imake in this study is that this claim is correct but there are also limits to it, and they are constituted by what I call the unnatural: when
we are confronted with, say, a speaking breast, real-world parameters
on their own do not help in the process of coming to terms with the
represented impossibility. Rather we have to create new frames (such
as that of the speaking breast) and explore their implications. Hence
my goal is to enrich cognitive approaches to narrative by discussing
extremely challenging cases and showing how tools from cognitive narratology help make them more readable. The cognitive narratologists
and possible-worlds theorists mentioned earlier are aware of the fact
that narratives may contradict real-world parameters; I see my own
work as a continuation of their efforts to explain the cognitive processes
through which readers make sense of difficult texts.
The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky ([1921] 1965) is another
important source of inspiration (even though, as discussed previously,
Iwould not equate my notion of the unnatural with his concept of defamiliarization). Already in 1921 he used the term ostranenie to highlight
fictions ability to make strange (12), which plays an important role
in my analyses of the workings of the unnatural in postmodernism
though not in my discussion of impossibilities in earlier narratives.
Furthermore, even before the currency of the term unnatural, critics
such as Brian McHale (1987, 1992a) and Werner Wolf (1993) discussed
the range of techniques used in postmodernist and anti-illusionist narrative texts.17 While McHale lists a substantial number of metafictional
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strategies, all of which are designed to foreground the inventedness

of the narrative discourse, Wolfs study provides an exhaustive discussion of anti-illusionist techniques that is supposed to cover all
anti-illusionist writing, not only the specific kind of anti-illusionism in
postmodernist texts. In addition I build on prior analyses of impossibilities in earlier narratives (such as epics, certain romances, beast fables,
eighteenth-century circulation novels and other satires, omniscient
narration, modernist novels, childrens stories, fantasy narratives, and
science fiction). This study combines these analyses of impossibilities
in established genres by providing a birds-eye view, or perhaps rather
an archaeology, of the unnatural in English literature.18
Moreover this study responds to poststructuralist critiques of narratology for logocentrism and for displaying a geometrical imaginary
(Currie 2011; Gibson 1996). Rather than completely deconstructing
narratologys constitutive binary oppositions, I set up a new model
that complements classical structuralist narratology and connects with
it through a cognitive framework. Andrew Gibson (1996, 259) proposes
to register... elements of monstrous deformation and explore their
implications. My concept of the unnatural, which denotes physical,
logical, and human impossibilities, makes Gibsons rather imprecise
monstrous deformations operational, even as my reading strategies
provide concrete ways of exploring their implications. Gibson also
points out that, historically speaking, monstrous forms have stalked
through our fiction (258). The second part of this study, which presents
a history of the unnatural, extends Gibsons observation by probing the
connection between earlier and conventionalized impossibilities, on the
one hand, and the impossible in postmodernism, on the other hand.
My study comprises British and American novels, short stories, and
plays. I focus on postmodernist prose and dramatic texts because of
how the unnatural proliferates in such narratives. Furthermore, even
though my major focus is on postmodernism, I also look at the development of the unnatural from the Old English epic to the science-fiction
novel. Whatever their provenance, all the selected literary texts contain
unnatural scenarios and events. In other words, they have to represent
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physical, logical, or human impossibilities in order to be integrated into

my corpus. My discussion of these older (or more traditional) narratives is of course adapted to the unnatural issue at hand. It is not my
goal to offer comprehensive readings of these complicated and much
discussed works.
This study is structured as follows: in chapter 1 I provide definitions of
the terms unnatural and natural. I discuss the unnatural by relating
it to concepts such as realism (Alan Palmer and Monika Fludernik),
mimesis (Plato and Aristotle), mental models (P. N. Johnson-Laird),
fictionality (Dorrit Cohn and Kendall L. Walton), narrativehood and
narrativity (David Herman), ostranenie (Viktor Shklovsky), metafiction
(Patricia Waugh), and anti-illusionism (Werner Wolf ). I also propose
nine navigational tools, which are designed to generate provisional
explanations of the unnatural, and I relate these reading strategies to
Tzvetan Todorovs discussion of hesitation as a response to the genuine
fantastic and Hans-Ulrich Gumbrechts distinction between meaning
effects and presence effects.
Part 2 moves on to an extensive discussion of unnatural narrative
features, that is, impossible narrators and storytelling scenarios,
characters, temporalities, and spaces in both postmodernist and nonpostmodernist narratives. The chapters in part 2 detail the unnatural
phenomena with which I am concerned even as I show how those phenomena can be negotiated by means of the reading strategies outlined
in chapter 1. In part 2 the individual chapters begin with a discussion
of postmodernist types of unnaturalness and the reading strategies
through which we tend to deal with these works, and then analyze
occurrences of the same unnatural feature in older narratives and the
interpretations they invite. The chapters of this study offer readings of
the unnatural in different contexts (namely the not yet conventionalized unnatural of postmodernism and the already conventionalized
unnatural in historical genres), while also shedding new light on postmodernism by demonstrating how this type of writing relates back to
certain established genres.
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Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
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In the conclusion I elaborate on the larger purposes or points of

the unnatural, that is, the radicalization of the fictional through the
impossible. In addition I redescribe postmodernism on the basis of
the argument that postmodernist narratives recycle already conventionalized impossibilities from well-known genres, and I relate my
redescription to other approaches to postmodernism. I do not present
a teleological model that sees postmodernist narratives as the crowning (unnatural) achievement or end point of the history of literature.
Rather I show that different modes of the unnatural have influenced
the development of literary history in significant ways. The unnatural
is, of course, not the only driving force that existsbut it is one that
has hitherto been neglected.

Introduction

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