Alber - 2016 - Unnatural Narrative

Unnatural Narrative
Se ries Editors
Frontiers of Jesse E. Matz, Kenyon College
Narrative David Herman, Durham University
Unnatural
Narrative
Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
Jan Alber
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

© 2016 by the Board of Regents of the University
of Nebraska
Acknowledgments for the use of copyrighted

material appear on pages vii–viii, which constitute
an extension of the copyright page.
All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alber, Jan, 1973–
Unnatural narrative: impossible worlds in fiction
and drama / Jan Alber.
pages cm. — (Frontiers of narrative)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8032-7868-4 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8032-8669-6 (epub)
isbn 978-0-8032-8670-2 (mobi)
isbn 978-0-8032-8671-9 (pdf )
1. Narration (Rhetoric) 2. Uncanny, The
(Psychoanalysis), in literature. 3. Fiction—History
and criticism. 4. Drama—History and criticism.
5. Postmodernism (Literature). I. Title.
pn3383.n35a53 2016
808.3—dc23
2015019954
Set in Minion by Westchester Publishing Services

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 149
5 Antimimetic Spaces 185
Conclusion 215
Notes 233
Bibliography 257
Index 295
Acknowledgments
This book includes parts of the following studies, which have previ-
ously appeared in journals, collections, handbooks, or encyclopedias:
“Postmodernist Impossibilities, the Creation of New Cognitive

Frames, and Attempts at Interpretation.” In Beyond Classical
Narration: Unnatural and Transmedial Narrative and Narratology,
edited by Jan Alber and Per Krogh Hansen, 261–80. Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2014.
“Unnatural Narrative.” In The Living Handbook of Narratol-
ogy, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg
Schönert, 887–95. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014.
“Unnatural Narrative Theory: The Systematic Study of Anti-
Mimeticism.” Literature Compass 10.5 (2013): 449–60. © 2013
by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
“Unnatural Narratology and the Retrogressive Temporality in
Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow.” In New Approaches to Narrative:
Cognition, Culture, History, edited by Vera Nünning, 43–56.
Trier: wvt, 2013.
“Unnatural Narratology: Developments and Perspectives.”
Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 63.1 (2013): 69–84.
“Unnatural Spaces and Narrative Worlds.” In A Poetics of Unnatural
Narrative, edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian
Richardson, 45–66. Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2013.
“Pre-Postmodernist Manifestations of the Unnatural: Instances
of Expanded Consciousness in ‘Omniscient’ Narration and
vii
Reflector-Mode Narratives.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Ameri-
kanistik 61.2 (2013): 137–53.
“Reading Unnatural Narratives.” Anglistik: International Journal
of English Studies 24.2 (2013): 135–50.
With Alice Bell. “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratol-
ogy.” Journal of Narrative Theory 42.2 (2012): 166–92.
“The Diachronic Development of Unnaturalness: A New View
on Genre.” In Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology,
edited by Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze, 41–67. Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2011.
With Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richard-
son. “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond
Mimetic Models.” Narrative 18.2 (2010): 113–36.
“Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them.” Story-
worlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 1 (2009): 79–96.
“Unnatural Narratives.” In The Literary Encyclopedia. September
21, 2009. Online.
I want to thank the editors and publishers concerned for granting per-
mission for these works to appear in the present volume.
I am also grateful to Marguerite Boyles, Kimberly Giambattisto,
David Herman, Jesse Matz, Kristen Elias Rowley, Sabrina Stellrecht,
the two readers, and everyone else at the University of Nebraska Press
for all their help and hard work on the manuscript.
Furthermore, I would like to thank Monika Fludernik (University
of Freiburg), David Herman (Ohio State University), Brian Richardson
(University of Maryland), and Christian Moraru (uncg), who have all
helped me during the completion of this (unnatural) project. Monika
Fludernik has provided me with invaluable comments on both the
theoretical aspects and the corpus of this study. I admire her intellectual
vigor as well as her immense knowledge of English literature, and I also
want to thank her for the continuous trust that she has placed in me and
my work over many years. I want to express my thanks to David Herman
for extremely enlightening discussions of my reading strategies as well
viii Acknowledgments
as the question of how the unnatural relates to other concepts. He is
a very precise thinker, and I have learned a great deal from him. I
would like to thank Brian Richardson for constantly highlighting the
antimimetic potential of narratives and also for mentioning numer-
ous unnatural texts to me. I greatly value his continuous interest in the
“deviant” and “nonconformist” as well as his impressive knowledge of
examples. Last but not least, I want to express my thanks to Christian
Moraru for persistently reminding me of potentially problematic con-
notations of the term unnatural and also for making sure that this
study is based on a pragmatic rather than a blind universality.
I am also indebted to numerous other scholars either because they
have read parts of this manuscript or because they have discussed my
ideas with me. Specifically I would like to thank Porter Abbott, Anita
Albertsen, Frederick Aldama, Maximilian Alders, Risa Applegarth,
Ridvan Askin, Christoph Bartsch, Alice Bell, Frauke Bode, Renate
Brosch, Marco Caracciolo, Ben Clarke, Stephan Conermann, Jennifer
Feather, Marina Grishakova, Per Krogh Hansen, Tony Harrison,
Rüdiger Heinze, Noelle Hewetson, Stefan Iversen, Irene Kacandes,
Markus Kuhn, Karin Kukkonen, Maria Mäkelä, Andreas Mahler, Amit
Marcus, Matías Martínez, Brian McHale, Jan- Christoph Meister,
Henrik Skov Nielsen, Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning, Greta Olson,
André Otto, Ruth Page, Alan Palmer, Ellen Peel, Bo Petterson, Jim
Phelan, Jack Pier, Caroline Pirlet, Merja Polvinen, Catherine Romagnolo,
Marie-Laure Ryan, Roy Sommer, Nancy Stewart, Pekka Tammi, Jan-Noël
Thon, Jeff Thoss, Amy Vines, Robyn Warhol, and Werner Wolf.
This study also owes its existence to the financial support that I have
received. I thank the German Research Foundation (dfg) for granting
me a research fellowship (“Forschungsstipendium”) which allowed me
to spend a year at Ohio State University doing work on the unnatu-
ral under the auspices of Project Narrative between September 2007
and September 2008. In this connection I want to express my thanks
to David Herman, Jim Phelan, Brian McHale, and Frederick Aldama
for their hospitality and the creation of a most stimulating academic
environment. My project has benefited immensely from that year at
Acknowledgments ix
Ohio State University. In addition I am indebted to the School of Lan-
guage and Literature of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
(frias) for providing Rüdiger Heinze and me with the financial means
to organize a conference on unnatural narratives in November 2008. I
thank the British Academy for awarding Alice Bell (Sheffield Hallam
University) and me a small research grant (sg 100637), which gave
me the opportunity to work with Alice Bell on unnatural narratology
and metaleptic jumps in November 2010. Finally, I am indebted to the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for granting me a Feodor Lynen
Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, which enabled me to spend a
year at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the Uni-
versity of Maryland at College Park between April 2011 and April 2012
to continue my research on the unnatural. In this connection I would
also like to thank my hosts, Christian Moraru and Brian Richardson,
for their hospitality and the stimulating discussions of my project.
I want to thank the Deutscher Anglistenverband (the Association
of German University Teachers of English) for awarding me a prize
(the Habilitationspreis) for the best Habilitation in English studies in
Germany between March 2011 and March 2013 (for the manuscript
“Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama” on
which this book is based).
I also want to express my thanks to the following friends and col-
leagues at the English Department of the University of Freiburg for
ensuring a friendly atmosphere as well as a superb work environ-
ment: Nicole Bancher, Dorothee Birke, Katharina Böhm, Michael
Butter, Susanne Coker, Susanne Düsterberg, Gert Fehlner, Johannes
Fehrle, Kerstin Fest, Sebastian Finger, Theresa Hamilton, Benjamin
Kohlmann, Hanna Kubowitz, Stefanie Lethbridge, Luise Lohmann,
Miriam Nandi, Greta Olson, Ulrike Piker, Caroline Pirlet, Rebecca
Reichl, Golnaz Shams, and Eva von Contzen.
I want to thank my friends Axel, Christof, Dieter, Henner, Irmi,
Jutta, Kathi, Katrin, Lara, Matthias, Miriam, Neumi, Susanne, Thomas,
Uli, Ursula, and Valeska for consistently reminding me of things that
x Acknowledgments
one can do in the actual world and also for making sure that I did not
lose my mind while working on this project.
This manuscript is dedicated to my two families to whom I owe the
largest debt of gratitude. Anja, the love of my life, and her son, Quirin,
are the greatest companions one could wish for. Without them I would
not have completed this project. I would also like to thank my brother,
Jörg, his partner, Pinelopi, their daughter, Zoe, and my father for being
there and supporting me. I wish my mother could have witnessed the
completion of this manuscript. She died on September 18, 2010, after
having fought cancer for seven years. I owe so much to her, and I will
never forget her as long as I live.
Acknowledgments xi
Unnatural Narrative
Part 1 Concepts of the Unnatural
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 prin-
ciples that clearly transcend the parameters of the real world.
In this study I show that, throughout literary history, the story-
worlds 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 unnaturalness—nor to the question of how readers can make sense
of them.
To illustrate the ways in which the unnatural may deviate from real-
world 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
The first-person narrator of Philip Roth’s (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 catastro-
phe,” 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 charac-

ters (rather than narrators). One of the figures in Harold Pinter’s (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. I’m writing to you from the grave. A quick word for old time’s
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
Churchill’s ([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 Carter’s ([1972] 1985) The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
Hoffman, for example, Dr. Hoffman causes internal desires to materi-
alize 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
4 Concepts of the Unnatural

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. (18–19)
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 particu-
lar.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 Saunders’s ([1893] 1920) children’s 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 Lewis’s ([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 Map’s (1983) twelfth-century De Nugis Curia-
lium (Courtiers’ Trifles), for instance, the Briton king Herla spends time
with a pygmy. When he leaves the pygmy’s world, he realizes that he
Introduction 5
has actually spent “two hundred years” there, while in his own experi-
ence the lapse of time seems to have encompassed “but three days” (31).
Unnatural spaces also exist in earlier narratives, such as Jonathan Swift’s
([1726] 2003) satirical Gulliver’s 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 unnatu-
ralness 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 taxon-
omy: 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 differen-
tial 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

conventions (such as the children’s book, the Gothic novel, the magi-
cal 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 nar-
ratives? 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 star-
tling 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 possibili-
ties” (Zunshine 2008, 69). Unnatural scenarios and events primarily
concern the question of “what it is like” (Herman 2009, 14) to experi-
ence 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 interpre-
tive 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 conven-
tionalized 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 unnatu-
ral 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, 1–11), 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 7
questions of being that consistently challenge the existence of their rep-
resented 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 his-
tory 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 confront-
ing 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 defi-
nitely not a brand-new phenomenon; rather postmodernism can be
described in terms of the concentration and radicalization of modes
of the unnatural—modes 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

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 Zunshine’s (2008, 164) argument that “cognitive uncertainty . . .
flexes and trains our categorization process.” I spell out different cog-
nitive mechanisms that help us make sense of the various kinds of
unnaturalness that exist.
Moreover I try to unearth the history of the postmodernist rebel-
lion 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 narra-
tives, 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 cog-
nitive 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 purpose—a 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 reconceptual-
ize 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 9
at all the completely innovative and wholly unprecedented explosion
of antimimeticism that certain critics consider it to be.6 Rather post-
modernist 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 children’s 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 science-
fiction 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 narra-
tives, 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 litera-
ture is to see it as a reaction to literary modernism (McHale 1987, 3–25;
1992a, 19–37). Ihab Hassan (1987, 87, 91–92), for instance, points out that
“the word postmodernism . . . evokes what it wishes to surpass or sup-
press,” namely “modernism itself,” and he presents a list of oppositions
to illustrate crucial differences between modernism and postmodern-
ism. John Barth (1984, 62–76, 193–206) distinguishes between what
he calls “the literature of exhaustion”—especially the work of Samuel
Beckett—and “the literature of replenishment.” He argues that the aes-
thetics 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

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, speculat-
ing that the magic in Lewis Carroll’s children’s 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 Dickens’s (1866) “The Signal-Man,” the
supernatural becomes absorbed by realism. In paranormal texts impos-
sibilities 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 phe-
nomena 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 real-
ist option in the human world itself. What Traill calls the paranormal
mode is virtually identical with the unnatural in postmodernist nar-
ratives insofar as in both cases, represented impossibilities cannot be
explained through supernatural interventions; rather we have to look
for other explanations.
Brian McHale (1992a, 229–39; 1992b), Andrew M. Butler (2003),
Veronica Hollinger (2005), and Elana Gomel (2010) look at the reciprocal
Introduction 11
relationship between postmodernism and science fiction. McHale
(1992a, 247) argues that “both science fiction and mainstream post-
modernist 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 materi-
als” (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 fea-
ture 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 ground-
work 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 postmodern-
ism 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

speculations of science-fiction novels, what is odd or strange in the
case of the unnatural in postmodernism is the manifestation of phys-
ically, logically, or humanly impossible elements within otherwise
realist frameworks. Hence one might argue that what postmodern-
ist 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 narratives—and this merging of encyclopedias cre-
ates the estranging effects of many of the self-reflexive metafictions of
postmodernism.10
In a nutshell I aim to reconceptualize postmodernism as an inter-
textual endeavor that is connected to the history of literature through
manifestations of the unnatural. At the same time, postmodernist nar-
ratives 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 impor-
tant 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 category—or
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 differ-
ent 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 13
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 Mäkelä, 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 in the
context of unnatural narratology. These differences include (1) how
I define the term unnatural; (2) my use of cognitive approaches to
narrative; (3) my emphasis on the need to interpret, and not just cat-
alog, 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 sce-
narios and events (regardless of whether we find them estranging or
not). In Richardson’s (2015) usage, on the other hand, the “unnatural”
correlates with innovative antimimetic qualities and Viktor Shklovsky’s
notion of defamiliarization. Richardson defines unnatural narratives as
follows: “An unnatural narrative is one that contains significant anti-
mimetic 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 fic-
tion, 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 fea-
tures 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 Richardson’s approach, I have a narrower notion

of the unnatural. I restrict the use of the term unnatural to representa-
tions 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 Iversen’s (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 storyworld—clashes that defy easy explanations” (Alber, Iversen,
et al. 2013, 103; see also Iversen 2013). Another problem I have with
Iversen’s 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 Iversen’s definition cap-
tures only a very limited number of narrative texts, such as Franz
Kafka’s (1915) Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) or mashup novels
like Seth Grahame-Smith’s (2009) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and
Adam Bertocci’s (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 Samsa’s transfor-
mation into an insect or the presence of zombies in a realist storyworld).
The many metalepses in Japser Fforde’s 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 cogni-
tive 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
Introduction 15
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, 70–71), 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 Midnight’s 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 some-
thing that the story-teller appears just to have thought of, then it
comes back to the main thrust of the narrative. . . . So it’s 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 circum-
stances 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, actual-
izable, 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 Mäkelä (2013a) advocates a wide notion of the unnatural.
From her perspective the term unnatural is virtually identical with

the literary or fictional: “We don’t have to resort to avant-garde litera-
ture to notice that the unnaturalness—or the peculiarly literary type
of cognitive challenge—is always already there in textual representa-
tions 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 unnatural-
ness. Mäkelä 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 repre-
sent the unnatural, that is, physical, logical, or human impossibilities.
2. Cognitive approaches to narrative: Many unnatural narratolo-
gists 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 character’s 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 illu-
minate 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 monumen-
talize the unnatural by leaving it completely outside the bounds of the
comprehensible. In other words, I refuse to see the unnatural as some-
thing 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 17
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 nar-
ratives, 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 poly-
semy 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). Simi-
larly H. Porter Abbott proposes that some literary texts force readers
to abandon efforts at interpretation and to instead “rest in that pecu-
liar combination of anxiety and wonder” (2008b, 448) or remain “in a
state of bafflement” (2009, 132),14 while Mäkelä (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 read-
ing 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 Nielsen’s 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-à-vis narratives that
feature unnatural elements. Represented impossibilities say something
about us and the world we live in, and I attempt to determine the

potential points of the unnatural. As Ansgar Nünning (2003, 243–44)
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 func-
tions (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 inter-
ested 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 prop-
erties 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. Further-
more my approach is designed to accept and discuss the fundamental
unnaturalness of certain phenomena and to then address their poten-
tial 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 move-
ments 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
Introduction 19
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
I make in this study is that this claim is correct but there are also lim-
its 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 nar-
ratology 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,
I would not equate my notion of the unnatural with his concept of defa-
miliarization). Already in 1921 he used the term ostranenie to highlight
fiction’s 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 nar-
rative texts.17 While McHale lists a substantial number of metafictional

strategies, all of which are designed to foreground the inventedness
of the narrative discourse, Wolf’s study provides an exhaustive dis-
cussion 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 impossibil-
ities in earlier narratives (such as epics, certain romances, beast fables,
eighteenth-century circulation novels and other satires, omniscient
narration, modernist novels, children’s stories, fantasy narratives, and
science fiction). This study combines these analyses of impossibilities
in established genres by providing a bird’s-eye view, or perhaps rather
an archaeology, of the unnatural in English literature.18
Moreover this study responds to poststructuralist critiques of nar-
ratology for logocentrism and for displaying a “geometrical imaginary”
(Currie 2011; Gibson 1996). Rather than completely deconstructing
narratology’s 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 Gibson’s 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 Gibson’s 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 develop-
ment 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
Introduction 21
physical, logical, or human impossibilities in order to be integrated into
my corpus. My discussion of these older (or more traditional) narra-
tives 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 Todorov’s discussion of hesitation as a response to the genuine
fantastic and Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht’s 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 non-
postmodernist narratives. The chapters in part 2 detail the unnatural
phenomena with which I am concerned even as I show how those phe-
nomena 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 conventional-
ized unnatural of postmodernism and the already conventionalized
unnatural in historical genres), while also shedding new light on post-
modernism by demonstrating how this type of writing relates back to
certain established genres.

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 conven-
tionalized 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 crown-
ing (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 exists—but it is one that
has hitherto been neglected.
Introduction 23
1 Theorizing the Unnatural
1.1. The Unnatural: A Definition

As I already stated in the introduction, in my usage the term unnatural
denotes physically, logically, and humanly impossible scenarios and
events. That is to say, the represented scenarios and events have to
be impossible given the known laws governing the physical world,
accepted principles of logic (such as the principle of noncontradic-
tion), or standard anthropomorphic limitations of knowledge and
ability. The retrogressive temporality in Martin Amis’s (1992) Time’s
Arrow, for example, is physically impossible because in the real world
time moves forward (rather than backward).1 The coexistence of mutu-
ally exclusive storylines, as in Robert Coover’s (1969) short story “The
Babysitter,” on the other hand, is logically impossible; in this narrative
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, violating the principle of noncon-
tradiction. Saleem Sinai, the telepathic first-person narrator in Salman
Rushdie’s (1981) novel Midnight’s Children, has humanly impossible
abilities: he can literally hear the thoughts of other characters, which
is also impossible in the real world.
My threefold model of unnaturalness integrates and supersedes
Lubomír Doležel’s (1998, 115, 165) distinction between physical and
logical impossibilities by including human impossibilities as well. The
humanly impossible plays a crucial role with regard to instances of
telepathy; it is difficult to explain exactly which physical law is violated
in such cases, but it is easy to see that the ability to literally read the
mind of someone else constitutes a superhuman or humanly impossible
25
power. Also in contrast to Doležel, who argues that logical impossi-
bilities cancel “the entire world-making project” (165), I analyze and
interpret logically impossible worlds.
1.2. The Natural and the Unnatural

Since “the very concept of transgression presupposes an acknowledge-
ment of boundaries or limits” (Cohen 1988, 16), any definition of the
unnatural must specify its relationship to the “natural.” In this study I
measure the unnatural against the foil of “natural,” that is, real-world
cognitive parameters that are derived from our bodily existence in
the world. In my usage the term natural denotes very basic forms of
knowledge about time, space, and other human beings (Fludernik 1996,
2003a). This real-world knowledge is not found “as a loose assembly of
individual bits of information, but is stored in meaningful structures”
(Schneider 2001, 611), namely in cognitive frames and scripts.
Natural (or real-world) frames and scripts comprise the following
kind of information:2 in the actual world humans can tell stories,
whereas corpses and objects do not speak; human beings do not sud-
denly transform into somebody else; time moves forward (rather than
backward); and (unless there is an earthquake or a tornado) the spaces
we inhabit do not suddenly change their shape.3
To highlight the difference between the real and our perception of
the real, Paul Watzlawick (1976, 140–41) distinguishes between what
he calls “first-” and “second-order reality”: “The first has to do with
the purely physical, objectively discernible properties of things and
is intimately linked with correct sensory perception, with questions
of so-called common sense or with objective, repeatable, scientific
verification. The second aspect is the attribution of meaning and
value to these things and is based on communication.” Though I
agree with Watzlawick’s argument that we never enjoy a transparent
relation to things as they really are (142), I argue that second-order
reality can “fit” first-order reality (see also Ludwig 1999, 197): cognitive
frames and scripts may correspond with basic features of the empiri-
cal world around us. In the context of his picture theory of language,

Wittgenstein ([1922] 1955, 43) points out that “the picture agrees with
reality or fails to agree; it is correct or incorrect, true or false.” Natural
frames and scripts do not provide immediate access to reality as it is or
to things-in-themselves; rather these parameters “fit” basic features of
the empirical world concerning time, space, and other human beings:
language can be consistent with the facts.
Furthermore I conceive of these real-world parameters as hypoth-
eses that have not yet been falsified, that is, refuted by experience, in
the sense of Popper ([1934] 1959, 41, 53–54). For example, once we have
the technological means to do so, it might be possible to travel to the
future (see also Hawking and Mlodinow 2005, 105). However, as long as
nobody has experienced such a journey through time (or read a cred-
ible report about it), I accept the idea that time travel is impossible as
a valid hypothesis that has not yet been refuted.
Moreover the natural closely correlates with the realist, which, in
my usage, is not restricted to literary realism but more generally refers
to a narrative “which appears to provide an accurate, objective, and
confident description or authentic impression of reality” (Palmer 2005,
491). Like Monika Fludernik (1996, 37), I use the term realism to denote
the “mimetic evocation of reality,” and this representational process is
based on natural frames and scripts; realist texts in the sense in which
I use the term reproduce real-world parameters because they are about
human beings who go through experiences that could also happen to us
in the real world. Literary realism, on the other hand, is based on natural
cognitive parameters—it focuses on recognizably human characters
in settings that could exist in the actual world—but it obviously also
involves a wide variety of (artificial) conventions (such as the compul-
sory tying up of loose ends in death or marriage or the eschewing of
representations of sexuality and bodily functions).4
It might be helpful to briefly relate the unnatural to the two con-
ceptions of mimesis as they were developed by Plato and Aristotle. In
book 10 of Plato’s (1970, 431, 595a) Republic, Socrates equates mimetic
art with “the art of imitation” (see also 439, 600c, 443, 601b); accord-
ing to Socrates, art merely reproduces empirical reality and is illusory
Theorizing the Unnatural 27

because it does not take us to the transcendental World of Ideas, where
we can allegedly grasp the essence of all entities. By contrast, in his
Poetics Aristotle (1995, 33–37, 1448a–b) equates mimesis with the process
of representation, projection, or simulation. For him “mimesis coin-
cides with artistic representation as such: epic poetry, drama, the art
of dithyrambs, of flute and lyre, painting, choreography, and religious
poetry are all mimetic” (Schaeffer and Vultur 2005, 309).
The unnatural is only antimimetic in the sense of Plato because it
does not primarily try to imitate or reproduce the world as we know
it; rather it involves the representation of scenarios or events that are
physically, logically, or humanly impossible. However, the unnatural
is mimetic in the sense of Aristotle because impossibilities can be rep-
resented in the world of fiction. The natural and the unnatural are
therefore two slightly different manifestations of Aristotle’s mimesis
(see also Petterson 2012); they both involve processes of simulation
and thus what P. N. Johnson-Laird (1983, 10–12) calls the construction
of “mental models,” that is, mental representations of states of affairs
evoked by narratives. In the case of natural mental models, the repre-
sented can in principle exist or happen in the real world, whereas in
the case of unnatural mental models, the represented cannot exist or
happen in the real world.
From the perspective of representation, the natural (which is based
on the laws and principles of the real world) and the unnatural (which
deals with the impossible) can be found on a continuum; they are not
diametrically opposed to one another. For me the unnatural is on an
equal footing with the natural because both involve forms of repre-
sentation. It is not the case that the physically, logically, or humanly
impossible is in any sense superior to the realist. Yet in narrative studies
the natural has so far received more critical attention than the unnatu-
ral. I find unnatural forms of representation to be more challenging
than natural ones.
The narratives that I discuss are combinations of natural and unnat-
ural elements, and they typically contain only one or two unnatural
scenarios or events. Purely unnatural narratives might exist, but I think

that no reader would be able to make sense of them. Along the same
lines, Teresa Bridgeman (2007, 63) argues that we as readers “continue
to require spatio-temporal hooks on which to hang our interpretations.
If these are not consistently provided or their uncertainty is highlighted
in a given narrative, we experience disorientation and a degree of
unease as an essential part of our engagement with that narrative.”
What kind of information, then, does the unnatural provide? Sämi
Ludwig (1999, 190) argues that representations of the impossible (i.e.,
what I call the unnatural) are “digital rather than analogic.” That is to
say, they offer particular types of information, namely “processed infor-
mation (‘meaning’) rather than mimesis of the outside (‘imitation’).”
Furthermore “there is no direct or proportional ‘likeness’ involved:
Depending on whether they are more important or less important to
human beings, elements and experiences of outside space and time
are allotted larger or smaller presence on such a customized map. This
kind of representation, then, must be seen as the careful recording of
useful information, which is based on one’s needs and one’s experience
with the environment; it reflects the purposeful negotiation of space
and time by living people” (190). Even though the unnatural does not
consistently imitate the outside world, the representation of impos-
sibilities addresses certain intellectual needs, and the way it does so is
one of the objects of this study.
1.3. Impossibilities in Narrative Texts

Brian Richardson (2000, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2011) has shown that many
novels, short stories, and plays contain impossibilities, and Ruth Ronen
(1994, 51) also acknowledges the fact that many fictional worlds are
“non-actualizable.” Nevertheless, according to her, “impossible fictional
world[s]” can be depicted: they are “already out there in the ontic sphere
of fictional existence” (56). That is to say, the unnatural can be imagined
and represented even though it cannot be lived or experienced in the
actual world.
The existence of physical and human impossibilities in narrative
texts is relatively uncontested (see also Ryan 2012). Doležel (1998, 115)

argues that physically impossible worlds are “fictional worlds that vio-
late the laws of the actual world.” The house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s
(2000) novel House of Leaves, for instance, is physically impossible
because it constantly alters its internal layout, while the telepathic first-
person narrator in Rushdie’s (1981) Midnight’s Children transcends
standard limitations of human knowledge (see Culler 2004; Royle 1990,
2003a, 2003b).
On the other hand, some critics have doubts concerning the rep-
resentation of logical impossibilities in fictional worlds. Jan Erik
Antonsen (2009, 128) believes that the logically impossible can nei-
ther be imagined nor represented (see also Eco 1990, 76–77; Klauk and
Köppe 2013). By contrast I argue that a narrative can contain logical
impossibilities—if (and only if ) a storyworld is represented in which
two logically incompatible statements are true at the same time. In his
short story “Sylvan’s Box,” the logician Graham Priest (1997) presents
his readers with a logically impossible object: a box that is empty
and full at the same time. The first-person narrator describes this
box as follows: “At first, I thought it must be a trick of the light, but
more careful inspection certified that it was no illusion. The box was
absolutely empty, but also had something in it. Fixed to its base was
a small figurine, carved of wood, Chinese influence, Southeast Asian
maybe. . . . The experience was one of occupied emptiness . . . . The box
was really empty and occupied at the same time. The sense of touch con-
firmed this” (575–76, my italics). Here we are confronted with a box that
is—actually and objectively—empty and full at the same time. Since
p and non-p are simultaneously true, the box in Priest’s short story
violates the principle of noncontradiction.
In 1699 Leibniz (1969, 513) imposed a restriction on possible worlds
by arguing that “possible things are those which do not imply a contra-
diction.” This statement influenced the ways theorists and critics have
since thought about alternative possible worlds. The most common
view in possible-worlds theory associates possibility with logical laws:
“Every world that respects the principles of non-contradiction and the
excluded middle is a pw” (Ryan 2005b, 446). From this perspective

worlds that include or imply contradictions are unthinkable or empty.
Indeed the standard view in logic is that if a single contradiction enters
a system of propositions, anything can be inferred, and it becomes
impossible to construct a world out of these propositions.
However, Marie-Laure Ryan (2006b, 671n28) has recently shown that
this view is too rigid in the case of fiction because readers of literary
narratives do not treat logical inconsistencies as an excuse for giving
up the attempt to make inferences: “If contradictions are limited to
certain areas—to what [might be called] the holes in a Swiss cheese—
then it remains possible to make stable inferences for the other areas
and to construct a world.” Ronen (1994, 55) elaborates on the notion of
logical impossibility as follows: “Although logically inconsistent states
of affairs are not restricted to specific literary periods or genres, with
postmodernism, impossibilities, in the logical sense, have become a
central poetic device, which shows that contradictions in themselves
do not collapse the coherence of a fictional world” (see also Ashline
1995; Littlewood and Stockwell 1996; Stefanescu 2008). In this context
Priest (1997, 580) argues that “there are, in some undeniable sense,
logically impossible situations or worlds. . . . In particular, a [logically]
impossible world/situation is (partially) characterized by information
that contains a logical falsehood but that is closed under an appropri-
ate inference relation.” Doležel (1998, 165) is also willing to entertain
the idea of logically impossible worlds; however, he argues that the
writing of impossible worlds in the strict logical sense is, “semanti-
cally, a step backward in fiction making; it voids the transformation of
nonexistent possibles into fictional entities and thus cancels the entire
world-making project.”
My own position parallels that of Ryan, Ronen, and Priest and there-
fore goes beyond the thesis Umberto Eco (1990) presents in The Limits
of Interpretation. Eco points out that logically impossible worlds can
be “mentioned” because “language can name nonexistent and incon-
ceivable entities,” and he argues that we can draw nothing from them
but “the pleasure of our logical and perceptual defeat” (76–77). In con-
trast to Eco, who simply gives up the interpretative process, I outline

reading strategies that help us make sense of various different kinds
of impossibility. For me all propositions representing events or states
of affairs (including unnatural ones) are the result of somebody’s sub-
jective experience or imagination. In other words, all representations
somehow reflect human motivation, which is part of their very texture.
Like Ronen, therefore, I refuse to view logical impossibilities in fictional
worlds as violations of possible-worlds semantics. Rather I see them
as a “domain for exercising . . . creative powers” (Ronen 1994, 57) that
we as readers are invited to make sense of.
Most of my examples of unnaturalness concern the level of the story
and deliberately jeopardize the reconstruction of the narrated world.
An example is Amis’s (1992) Time’s Arrow, where time moves backward at
the story level. In some of my examples, however, the unnatural also
concerns the level of the narrative discourse. In you-narratives such
as Jay McInerney’s (1984) Bright Lights, Big City, the narrative voice
addresses the protagonist as “you” and tells him the story of his life. In
the real world, on the other hand, we cannot tell our addressees com-
prehensive versions of stories that happened to them (rather than us).
Both of these scenarios deviate from real-world frames and urge us to
stretch our sense-making strategies to the limits of human cognition.
1.4. The Unnatural as a Signpost of Fictionality

All types of fiction (regardless of whether they are based on natural or
on unnatural mental models) are imaginary, that is, invented. While
many literary texts operate on the basis of real-world cognitive para-
meters and would thus at least in theory be actualizable, the unnatural
radicalizes the fictional through the representation of impossibilities
that are nonactualizable. Unnatural scenarios and events therefore con-
stitute particularly radical forms of fiction; among other things, this
study tries to determine what is at stake when narratives represent, and
we as recipients try to come to terms with, impossibilities of various
kinds. The unnatural might thus shed some new light on the idea of
the distinctiveness of fiction, that is, the question of how fiction differs
from other discursive modes.

The idea that fiction is by and large independent of referential con-
cerns is of course not new. According to Dorrit Cohn (1999, 9), the first
work to conceptualize fiction as nonreferential narrative was Aristotle’s
Poetics. The Roman poet Horace (2011, 106) also seems to have had
the nonreferentiality of fiction in mind when he stated that “painters
and poets have always enjoyed an equal license to dare anything they
wish” (“pictoribus atque poetis quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa
potestas”). In the sixteenth century Sir Philip Sidney ([1595] 2001,
348–49) drew important distinctions between sentences that are true,
sentences that are false, and sentences that are fictional: “Now for the
poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to
lie is to affirm that to be true which is false. . . . But the poet (as I said
before) never affirmeth. The poet never maketh any circles about your
imagination to conjure you to believe for true what he writes. . . . And
therefore, though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth
them not for true, he lieth not.” In contrast to descriptive statements,
fiction is nonreferential—it does not try to make statements about the
actual world that can be verified or falsified. In the words of Jean-Marie
Schaeffer (2010, 185), fiction brackets the question “of the referential
value and of the ontological status of the representations it induces”;
as Kendall L. Walton (1990, 35) puts it, fictional worlds make certain
propositions fictional; for example, “it is fictional that there is a society
of six-inch-tall people called Lilliputians [in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels],
and also that a certain Gregor Samsa was transformed into an insect
[in Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’].” As Walton illustrates, the propositions
that are made fictional may also move beyond real-world possibilities
and involve the unnatural. “Biographies, textbooks, and newspaper
articles,” on the other hand, do not “serve as props in a game of make-
believe. They are used to claim truth for certain propositions rather
than to make propositions fictional” (70).
Like Walton, Cohn (1999, 13) argues that a fictional work “creates
the world to which it refers by referring to it.” Her study is driven by
the idea that “fictional narrative is unique in its potential for crafting a
self-enclosed universe ruled by formal patterns that are ruled out in all

other orders of discourse” (vii). Cohn identifies “signposts of fictional-
ity” that highlight “the differential nature of fictional narrative” (109).
From my vantage point, the unnatural is an index of fictionality in
Cohn’s sense: if a text contains unnatural scenarios or events, at least
these scenarios and events will be fictional.
But is the unnatural really confined to the world of fiction? Could
one not argue that the unnatural also figures prominently in new sci-
entific theories? Indeed many claims by physicists are reminiscent of
the unnatural. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, for example,
argue that “it is possible to travel to the future” (2005, 105) and that
the universe actually consists of numerous subuniverses “with many
different sets of physical laws” (2010, 136). In contrast to fictional sto-
ryworlds, scientific theories are hypotheses that make predictions that
can be tested by observation. If they are not falsified (like Hawking’s
earlier theory that before the big bang, time moved backward), such
theories may ultimately lead to a new understanding of what is possible
in the real world. But to influence our natural cognition of the world,
that is, the cognitive parameters that we use to make sense of the world
around us, we will have to experience (or read a credible report of ) a
journey into the future or see a universe with different sets of physical
laws, and I think it might still take some time before this is technically
possible—if it is possible at all.
1.5. Narrativehood and the Unnatural

In this section I address the question of why I treat novels, short stories,
and plays as narratives. I then move on to the relationship between the
unnatural and narrativehood, that is, the quality that makes a narra-
tive a narrative. More specifically I deal with the question of how much
unnaturalness a text can display while still remaining a narrative.
Let me address these questions on the basis of the distinction
between narrativehood and narrativity. For David Herman (2002,
90–91) the term narrativehood has to do with “what makes readers and
listeners deem stories to be stories” and “is a binary predicate: either
something is or is not a story.” Narrativity, on the other hand, is “a scalar

predicate: a story can be more or less prototypically story-like.” The
novels, short stories, and plays discussed in this study are narratives,
but they are not prototypical ones and usually involve what one might
call “weakened narrativity.” In the words of Brian McHale (2001, 162),
they “evoke narrative coherence while at the same time withhold-
ing commitment to it.” In order to clarify this claim, let me provide a
definition of the term narrative.
Herman (2009, 14) defines narratives by singling out four impor-
tant features. From this perspective, a prototypical narrative can be
characterized as:
(i) A representation that is situated in—must be interpreted in

light of—a specific discourse context or occasion of telling.
(ii) The representation, furthermore, cues interpreters to draw
inferences about a structured time-course of particularized
events.
(iii) In turn, these events are such that they introduce some sort
of disruption or disequilibrium into a storyworld involving
human or human-like agents, whether that world is presented
as actual or fictional, realistic or fantastic, remembered or
dreamed, etc.
(iv) The representation also conveys the experience of living
through this storyworld-in-flux, highlighting the pressure
of events on real or imagined consciousness affected by the
occurrences at issue. Thus . . . it can be argued that narrative is
centrally concerned with qualia, a term used by philosophers
of mind to refer to the sense of “what it is like” for someone or
something to have a particular experience.
To paraphrase: narratives centrally concern the question of what it is

like for a narrator or characters to undergo certain experiences within
the temporal and spatial frames of a storyworld.
Novels and short stories are usually considered to be narrative in
this sense, but what about the narrativehood of plays? Plays typically
differ from novels and short stories in that they lack a narrator figure.

However, like Herman, Ryan (2005a, 2) argues that “the occurrence of
the speech act of telling a story by an agent called a narrator” is not a
necessary condition of narrativehood. Furthermore, Ansgar Nünning
and Roy Sommer (2008, 338–39) distinguish between what they call
the “diegetic narrativity” of novels and short stories, which creates
“the illusion of a teller, a personalized voice serving as narrator,” and
what they call the “mimetic narrativity” of drama, which foregrounds
the storyworld and its characters. In other words, plays are narrative
because they represent worlds that are populated by characters who
undergo certain experiences.
Let me turn to the relationship between narrativehood and the
unnatural. The narratives discussed in this study all deconstruct
parameters such as the narrator (which is an optional ingredient of
narrative), the characters, time, or space. However, they typically undo
only one of these parameters at a time, while the other parameters
usually remain untouched. This presence of one unnatural parameter
at a time seems to suggest that if too many narrative features were
deconstructed simultaneously, readers might potentially lose interest
because they would consider the degree of cognitive disorientation to
be too high.
Furthermore, from my perspective unnatural scenarios and events
do not involve a purely antinarrative stance. As I will show, the unnatu-
ral primarily concerns the question of “what it is like” for humans
(characters, narrators, or readers) to experience the transcending of
physical laws, logical principles, and standard anthropomorphic limita-
tions of knowledge and ability. Even though unnatural scenarios and
events contradict real-world parameters, we can still recuperate them
in terms of what one might call second-order “experientiality,” that
is, “the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience’ ” (Fludernik
1996, 12). Hence Herman’s ingredient (iv), the question of “what it is
like,” remains in force in all narratives, regardless of how unnatural
they are. At the end of the day, all examples of unnaturalness can be
read as saying something about us and the world we live in. This focus
on human interest is essential because without it, we would probably

not be interested in such literary texts (and we would not even con-
sider them to be narratives in the first place). Since the examples that I
discuss clearly make statements about human concerns, they can still
be read as narratives.
In the words of Lisa Zunshine (2008, 158), represented impossibilities
have a hitherto neglected narrative potential because they “open up new
conceptual spaces” that “make possible, and perhaps even necessary,
narratives that explore such spaces.” For me the unnatural addresses
one fundamental aspect of our being in the world: the lack of order
and meaning and the difficulties of coming to terms with this lack.
Since the unnatural involves what H. Porter Abbott (2009, 132) calls
“the revelation of an inescapable condition of unknowing,” it reminds
us of the fact that we are never fully in control of things: represented
impossibilities challenge the search for order and meaning in a radical
way. At the same time, however, it is of course our human predicament
not just to stare into this abyss but also to try to come to terms with
it. Bernard Harrison (1991, 6) argues that fictional literature in general
“has the dangerous power to move and change us. It is an art of lim-
its: the knowledge it offers is knowledge of limits and of limitations:
ours. . . . One can come to perceive the limits of one’s own standpoint
only by crossing them.” From my perspective the unnatural plays a
crucial role with regard to this process.
1.6. The Cultural and Historical Variability of the Unnatural

In this section I turn to the fascinating question of whether the unnatu-
ral is culturally and historically variable. Is it not quite obviously the
case that certain cultures (such as religious, spiritual, mystic, or “tradi-
tional” communities) and historical periods (such as those of the Middle
Ages or the Renaissance) have a very different notion of the “natural”
and thus consider different scenarios and events to be impossible and
hence unnatural?
Let me begin by addressing the cultural variability of the unnatural.
To be sure, cultures exist that do not believe in natural laws, logical
principles, or standard human limitations of knowledge and ability.

Therefore I should emphasize that in this study I assume the position of
a contemporary and neurotypical reader who has a rationalist-scientific
and empirically minded worldview. From the perspective of such a
reader, it makes perfect sense to measure the fictional narratives of
different literary periods against the foil of our real-world knowledge
and to address the question of why literary texts so frequently disregard
or transcend it. For me physically, logically, or humanly impossible
scenarios or events are possible in our imagination, in the world of
fiction, but not in the actual world, and this fact obviously turns them
into rather interesting phenomena that deserve investigation.5
On the other hand, if readers are convinced that, say, corpses can
in fact speak or that people can actually transform into other enti-
ties, or that in reality events can happen and not happen at the same
time, they will consider such scenarios to be perfectly natural and
no additional explanation will be required. Such readers would then
presumably focus on different aspects of the literary text, and I would
not claim that my approach is in any sense better. I would only claim
that my rationalist-scientific approach is more commonsensical, at least
given what counts as “common sense” in my general frame of reference.
In other words, this study, which treats impossibilities in fiction as
special manifestations of our imagination, will take on a very different
coloration for readers who are not invested in the understandings of
real-world parameters on which my argument rests.
In his study In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of
Religion, Scott Atran (2002, 4, my italics) investigates “religion’s mate-
rial, emotional, and cognitive commitments to factually impossible
worlds.” The claim that “people who live in ‘traditional’ cultures—
where magic, myth, and religion are interdependent and socially
prominent—live in conceptual worlds that are profoundly and incom-
mensurably different from our own world” is “mistaken in light of
the following facts”:
1. There is considerable recurrence of symbolic content across

historically isolated cultures (e.g., incorporeal spirits, immortal

beings, monstrous species hybrids, metamorphosis and rein-
carnation, animated substances, etc.).
2. This recurrence owes chiefly to universal cognitive mechanisms
that process cultural input (information) in ways that are
variously triggered but subsequently unaffected by the nature
of that input (e.g., spirits and immortals are not mindless, and
so have memories, beliefs, desires, sufferings, etc.).
3. These universal mechanisms are the very same core set of
cognitive modules that are responsible for the sorts of
factual, commonsense beliefs about the everyday world that
are intuitively obvious to everyone (folkmechanics, folkbiology,
folkpsychology, etc.). (84)
My own study—of fictional narratives rather than religious texts—is

informed by Atran’s monograph; I also look at the cognitive mech-
anisms and motivations behind the representation of factually
impossible worlds. The measuring of literary texts against the foil of our
real-world knowledge is of course not meant to discredit any worldview,
belief system, or culture. Rather I am interested in determining the
different functionalities and functions of the unnatural in literary texts.
What about the historical variability of the unnatural? Ryan (2006a,
55), for example, points out that “there is only one actual world,” while
Peter Stockwell (1996, 4) argues that “the reality out there might be
stable, for all we humans know,” even though “our idea of the reality
is continually being revised or overthrown.” Fludernik (2003a, 258)
addresses the question of whether real-world parameters might have
changed over time; she argues that the “cognitive parameters by which
authors and readers cognize the world in terms of fundamental pro-
cesses of human being in the world” are relatively constant and that
“changes are likely to be minimal.” Fludernik assumes that our embodi-
ment, that is, our physical being in the world, which evokes all the
parameters of a real-life schema of existence that has to be situated in
a specific time and space frame, has not changed fundamentally in the
course of history (even though cultural notions of our being in the world

obviously have). According to her, this general notion of embodiment
constitutes a cognitive constant that “can be neither male nor female,
eighteenth-century or contemporary” (262). Embodiedness simply
involves “basic cognitive concepts and frames . . . which we access in
order to explain everyday human reality” (Fludernik 2010, 14–15).
Following this argument, I posit a historically constant notion of the
unnatural that contradicts real-life schemata of existence. I assume that
speaking animals, talking corpses, differential temporalities, and trans-
forming castles were as impossible in the past as they are today. I also
discuss instances of magic and the supernatural as (conventionalized)
examples of the unnatural, even though some people in the Middle
Ages (and also in the centuries that followed) believed that magic and
supernatural creatures or events actually exist in the real world.6 Robert
Bartlett (2008, 33) points out that during the Renaissance “tens of thou-
sands of women and men were executed by the courts for copulating
with demons, eating babies, and flying to midnight orgies.” On the
other hand, Bartlett also mentions the medieval inquisitor Stephen
of Bourbon, who, in 1250, argued that people who believe in magic
must mistake their imaginations for reality. For him “it was ridiculous
to believe that people could pass through walls and doors by magic”
(90–91). This quotation illustrates that even during the Middle Ages
certain individuals were able to separate the real and the imagined.
In this context Richard Kieckhefer (2000, 1) writes, “Magic represents
a particularly interesting crossroads between fiction and reality. The
fictional literature of medieval Europe sometimes reflected the reali-
ties of medieval life, sometimes distorted them, sometimes provided
escapist release from them, and sometimes held up ideals for reality
to imitate. When this literature featured sorcerers, fairies, and other
workers of magic, it may not have been meant or taken as totally realis-
tic.” Kieckhefer thus suggests that even during the Middle Ages, many
readers followed a rational impetus and considered the supernatural
to be an imaginary phenomenon that serves certain functions in the
fictional narratives in which it occurs. Nevertheless, as we all know,

purely imaginative ideas can easily “leave the fictional mode and cross
the threshold of actuality” (Pavel 1986, 60). This crossing of boundaries
did not happen only during the so-called dark Middle Ages; one only
has to look at the practices of religions, churches, and sects in today’s
world (see Atran 2002).7
My readings rely upon the following argument: from the perspective
of a contemporary and rationalist reader, magic and other supernatural
occurrences were as impossible in the past as they are today. Interest-
ingly the medievalist Barbara Kline (1995, 107) uses a close reading of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to demonstrate “that the juxtaposition
of the realistic and the magical disturbs not only the modern reader but
the characters within the poem and perhaps the medieval reader as
well. . . . Contrary to many modern views, it is evident that the merg-
ing of the ‘real’ world and Faerie [i.e., the realm of the supernatural]
was not simply accepted with an arched brow and childlike wonder
in the Middle Ages.” Kline here proposes that even though literary
representations of magic proliferate, the belief in the supernatural
was perhaps less prevalent in the Middle Ages than we sometimes
like to think.
The approach of the eighteenth-century critic Joseph Addison to
the supernatural is also strikingly similar to my own take on magic.
In his “Pleasures of the Imagination,” he talks about “the fairy way of
writing,” that is, “a kind of writing, wherein the poet quite loses sight of
nature, and entertains his reader’s imagination with . . . such persons
as have . . . no existence but what he bestows on them” (1712, 605–6, my
italics). He explains the reader’s reactions as follows: we “look upon the
representation as altogether impossible,” but “we do not care for seeing
through the falsehood, and willingly give ourselves up to so agreeable
an imposture” (606, my italics).
In any case, literary history teems with manifestations of the
unnatural, and these modes always involve physical, logical, or human
impossibilities, that is, phenomena that cannot be actualized in the real
world. I am primarily interested in what they might mean.8

1.7. Impossibilities and the Process of Conventionalization
In this study the term unnatural comprises two types of impossibilities.
First, it denotes impossible elements that have not yet been convention-
alized, that is, turned into basic cognitive categories, and therefore still
strike us as odd and disconcerting. Second, it also refers to impossi-
bilities that have already been conventionalized and have thus become
familiar conventions for narrative representation.
The unnatural elements of postmodernism belong in the first cat-
egory. They have not yet been conventionalized and still strike us as
defamiliarizing in Viktor Shklovsky’s ([1921] 1965, 12) sense. However,
the estranging does not automatically involve the unnatural. For
instance, Tolstoy’s representation of “the idea of flogging” in terms of
the “lash[ing] about on the naked buttocks” (13) is defamiliarizing, but
it has nothing to do with the unnatural in the sense in which I use the
term. The instances of the unnatural in postmodernism are also a sub-
category of Werner Wolf’s (1993) anti-illusionism, which overlaps with
Patricia Waugh’s (1984, 1–11) notion of metafiction as fiction that reflects
upon its status as fiction. Wolf presents a comprehensive description
of anti-illusionist techniques that covers all illusion-breaking writing,
not just the specific kind of anti-illusionism practiced in postmodernist
texts. All instances of the unnatural that have not yet been conven-
tionalized are illusion-breaking (or metafictional), but not all instances
of anti-illusionism (or metafiction) are automatically unnatural. For
example, the scrambled chronology in Sterne’s (1759–67) The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman or the disrupted syntax in
Beckett’s (1966) short prose work “Ping” may be anti-illusionist or meta-
fictional (because these textual features constrain the process of world
construction and thus foreground the artificiality of the text), but these
characteristics are certainly not unnatural.
The term unnatural also refers to impossible scenarios or events
that have already been conventionalized. Such impossibilities no longer
strike us as being strange; we can easily accept them as parts of the
storyworld. Through repeated exposure to the unnatural, recipients

typically readjust their frames of reading and accept impossible sce-
narios or events as options in the world of fiction. I am talking about
an intraliterary process whereby physical, logical, or human impos-
sibilities become a bona fide concern in the domain of literature. Such
instances of the unnatural have already become an aspect of generic
conventions, or what Doležel (1998, 177) calls an “encyclopedia,” that
is, “shared communal knowledge.”
Examples of unnatural elements that have already been conventional-
ized include the speaking animals in beast fables and children’s stories;
the use of magic in heroic epics, certain romances (such as Breton lais
and romances that deal with “the matter of Britain”), Gothic novels,
and more recent fantasy literature; the speaking objects that narrate the
circulation novels of the eighteenth century and other satirical exag-
gerations that merge with the unnatural (as in the works by Swift and
Twain, for instance); the omnimentality of the omniscient narrator in
much realist fiction; the impossible renderings of character interiority
(through free indirect discourse, psychonarration, or direct thought) in
modernist fiction; and the many represented impossibilities in science
fiction. Such instances of the unnatural no longer strike us as being
anti-illusionist (or metafictional) in Wolf’s sense. Rather they might be
seen as “muted” forms of metafiction that have been transformed into
elements of the overall aesthetic illusion tied to a specific genre.
In comparison with older narratives, postmodernist texts acquire
their specificity through the concentration and radicalization of unnatu-
ralness. However, the unnatural scenarios and events of postmodernism
are not brand-new phenomena; they have been anticipated in various
ways. Many earlier types of literature represent scenarios or events that
are impossible in the real world, and this enduring feature of stories is,
at least partly, what makes fictional narratives so fascinating.
1.8. Restoring the Cognitive Balance:

How to Make Sense of the Unnatural
In his essay “Balance: Mind-Grasping Activity,” Victor Smetacek (2002,
481) writes, “Balance is so central to every activity, both of the body

and the mind, that it is simply taken for granted. It is imbalance (dis-
turbance, perturbation) that captures attention, be it fear of falling,
the mental struggle to balance an equation, or the moral urge to right
an injustice.” Analogously the constant interplay between balance and
imbalance makes the study of narrative interesting. Some readers might
prefer the captivating state of imbalance over the secure (but potentially
boring) state of balance, but most humans presumably have an impulse
toward restoring balance. The unnatural scenarios and events of post-
modernism closely correlate with imbalance because they lead us into
a state of cognitive disorientation we can enjoy—or we can (more or
less desperately) try to restore the cognitive balance by trying to find
potential explanations for these phenomena.
Many theoreticians have dealt with the question of how readers
process fictional worlds. Cognitive narratologists and possible-worlds
theorists such as Monika Fludernik, Manfred Jahn, David Herman, and
Marie-Laure Ryan, for example, argue that narrative comprehension is
based on a core set of real-world cognitive frames and scripts. Ryan’s
(1991, 51) principle of minimal departure predicts that “we project upon
[fictional] worlds everything we know about reality, and . . . make only
the adjustments dictated by the text.” She argues that readers alter their
realist expectations only if a narrative explicitly tells them to do so.
In contrast to Ryan, Thomas Pavel (1975) suggests that readers do
not consistently apply the principle of minimal departure. He argues
that readers do not necessarily look at impossibilities in literary texts
from the perspective of the real world; instead they abandon the actual
world and adopt the ontological perspective of the narrative (174–75).
In other words, when we are confronted with radical techniques of
fragmentation, illogical sequencing, and other oddities, we follow a
different principle by anticipating “a maximal departure” from the real
world so that “mimetic principles are supplemented with antimimetic
expectations” (Pavel 1986, 93). But what exactly does that mean, and
how does the mind try to cope with such narratives?
In this study I discuss reading strategies that encompass and extend
the principles of minimal and maximal departure and illustrate what

one can do or how one might approach the unnatural. According to
Jonathan Culler (1975, 134), readers attempt to recuperate inexplicable
elements of a text by taking recourse to familiar patterns: “The strange,
the formal, the fictional must be recuperated or naturalized, brought
within our ken, if we do not want to remain gaping before monu-
mental inscriptions.” Fludernik (1996, 34) extends Culler’s notion of
naturalization and argues that through the process of “narrativiza-
tion,” which is “a reading strategy that naturalizes texts by recourse
to narrative schemata,” readers make use of cognitive parameters to
grasp textual inconsistencies and oddities. Among these frames are
the pretextual real-life schemata of experience and intentionality, the
macrotextual schemata of narrative mediation, and generic criteria and
narratological concepts (43–46).
Like Culler and Fludernik, I discuss strategies that readers use to
make strange narratives more readable. In contrast to them, however,
I focus specifically on literary texts that confront us with impossi-
ble scenarios or events and, at least at first glance, defy the process
of meaning-making. Fludernik (2003a, 256) argues that in cases
of extremely recalcitrant texts, “we stop short and start to take the
non-natural make-up [i.e., the unnatural] seriously.” I show that the
unnatural always involves the creation of impossible blends (such as
the unborn narrator or retrogressive temporality). We have to con-
siderably stretch preexisting cognitive frames and scripts beyond
real-world possibilities to reconstruct impossible scenarios or events.
Indeed “readers have to be ready to modify, supplement, or even dis-
card the actual world encyclopedia” (Doležel 1998, 181). At the same
time, in many instances, the authors of literary fiction have already
reworked our encyclopedias. In the course of literary history, modes
of the unnatural have become conventionalized in new cognitive cat-
egories that include, for example, the speaking animal in beast fables
or time travel in science fiction.
Before explaining the reading strategies that I consider to be pro-
ductive for engagements with the unnatural, let me clarify the most
important assumptions on which these navigational tools are based. One

very basic reading frame that I use in my analyses is the assumption
that no matter how odd the textual surface structure of a narrative, it is
always part of a purposeful and meaningful communicative act. In short,
I assume that “somebody is trying to express something”—whatever
this “something” might be. In this context Mary Louise Pratt (1977,
170) argues that “the literary pre-paration and pre-selection processes
are designed to eliminate failures which result from carelessness
or lack of skill. The more selection and revision processes we know a
work has gone through, the less likely we will be to attribute apparent
inconsistencies and inappropriatenesses to random and unintentional
error.” In other words, for Pratt the four maxims (of quality, quantity,
relevance, and manner) of the Gricean cooperative principle remain in
force even in the most disorienting literary text. Like Pratt, I assume
that certain motivations and intentions have played a role in the pro-
duction of unnatural phenomena, and I form hypotheses about them.
In connection with this frame I also apply the schema of humane-
ness to the texts: I assume that even the strangest text is somehow about
humans and/or human concerns as well as the world we live in (see
also Herman 2002; Ludwig 1999; Peirce 1955). For me the unnatural is
a specific manifestation of what Fludernik (1996, 11) calls “experien-
tiality,” “the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience.’ ” This
assumption closely correlates with what Stein Haugom Olsen (1987,
67) calls the “ ‘human interest’ question,” the well-known argument
that fiction focuses on “mortal life: how to understand it and how to
live it” (Nagel 1979, ix). Interestingly John Barth (1984, 236) comments
on the relationship between fiction and life as follows: “Not only is all
fiction about fiction, but all fiction about fiction is in fact fiction about
life. Some of us understood that all along.”
All of the narratives I discuss represent storyworlds in Herman’s
(2005, 570) sense—although certain segments of these worlds are
unnatural. Even the postmodernist examples I analyze evoke story-
worlds in his sense. If there were a plethora of postmodernist narratives
that, like Joyce’s ([1939] 1976) Finnegans Wake, Raymond Federman’s
(1971) Double or Nothing, Caryl Churchill’s (1994) play The Skriker, or

some of Christine Brooke-Rose’s novels, no longer represent any world
at all and instead engage in free-floating language games, disembodied
from speaker, context, and reference, my cognitive stance would have
to give way to a different, perhaps more aesthetic stance. Bran Nicol
(2009), for example, argues in favor of such an approach. He writes that
postmodernist fiction “is not a mirror-reflection of the world but a com-
bination of words on a page that we must make sense of by relating them
to other texts, not the external world” (16, my italics). McHale (1987, 151),
on the other hand, states that the postmodernist narrative still “projects
a world, however partial or incoherent.” Indeed in most (almost all) types
of postmodernist fiction we can discern worldly elements, that is, spatial
and temporal coordinates as well as characters to whom something hap-
pens. Since most postmodernist narratives still represent storyworlds
and do not constitute purely abstract forms of discourse, écriture, or
hermetic kinds of writing that move toward the condition of poetry,
my world-based approach might contribute to an understanding of the
phenomenon of postmodernism.
The reading strategies that I see as particularly relevant for engage-
ments with the unnatural relate to both our real-world knowledge
(acquired through our physical being in the world) and our literary
knowledge (acquired through our exposure to narrative literature), and
these types of knowledge are stored in cognitive frames and scripts.
Similarly Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2002, 125) distinguishes between
what she calls reality models, which help explain “elements by refer-
ences to some concept (or structure) which governs our perception of
the world,” and literary models, which “make elements intelligible by
reference to specifically literary exigencies or institutions.”9 The follow-
ing reading strategies (see also Ryan 2006b; Yacobi 1981) may be used
by recipients to make sense of impossible scenarios or events:10
1. The blending of frames

2. Generification (evoking generic conventions from literary
history)
3. Subjectification (reading as internal states)

4. Foregrounding the thematic
5. Reading allegorically
6. Satirization and parody
7. Positing a transcendental realm
8. Do it yourself (using the text as a construction kit to build our
own stories)
9. The Zen way of reading
1. The blending of frames: When we are confronted with unnatural

scenarios or events, our task as readers becomes a Sisyphean one.
We have to conduct seemingly impossible mapping operations to
orient ourselves within storyworlds that refuse to be organized by real-
world parameters only. In such cases we are urged to blend preexisting
frames and create what Mark Turner (1996, 60) calls “impossible
blend[s]” to adequately reconstruct the unnatural elements of the
storyworld.
According to Roger Schank and Robert Abelson (1977, 37), a script
(or frame) comprises “specific knowledge to interpret and participate in
events we have been through many times” and can be used as a point of
reference to help us master new situations. Such cognitive parameters
are “dynamic” knowledge structures that “must be able to change as a
result of new experiences” (Schank 1986, 7, my italics). Similarly Marvin
Minsky (1979, 1) points out that “when one encounters a new situation
(or makes a substantial change in one’s view of a problem), one selects
from memory a structure called a frame. This is a remembered frame-
work to be adapted by changing details as necessary.” Doležel (1998, 181)
argues that literary texts often urge us to change our thinking, which is
largely based on our real-world knowledge, and create new frames: “In
order to reconstruct and interpret a fictional world, the reader has to
reorient his cognitive stance to agree with the world’s encyclopedia. In
other words, knowledge of the fictional encyclopedia is absolutely nec-
essary for the reader to comprehend a fictional world. The actual-world
encyclopedia might be useful, but it is by no means universally sufficient;

for many fictional worlds it is misleading, it provides not comprehension
but misreading” (my italics).11
For instance, when readers are confronted with impossibilities, they
may generate new frames by blending preexisting schemata. Turner
(2003, 117) explains the process of blending by pointing out that “cog-
nitively modern human beings have a remarkable, species-defining
ability to pluck forbidden mental fruit—that is, to activate two conflict-
ing mental structures . . . [such as tree and person] and to blend them
creatively into a new mental structure [such as speaking tree].” As an
example, Turner mentions the character of Bertran de Born in Dante’s
fourteenth-century allegory Inferno. This character is “a talking and
reasoning human being who carries his detached but articulate head
in his hand like a lantern.” Turner (1996, 62, 61) argues that “this is an
impossible blending, in which a talking human being has an unnatu-
rally divided body” (my italics).
Mante S. Nieuwland and Jos J. A. van Berkum (2006) have shown
that subjects try to make sense of unnatural entities (such as an amo-
rous peanut or a crying yacht) through the blending of frames. They
report that the subjects needed “to construct and gradually update their
situation model of the story to the point that they project human char-
acteristics onto inanimate objects. This process of projecting human
properties (behavior, emotions, appearance) onto an inanimate object
comes close to what has been called ‘conceptual blending,’ the ability
to assemble new and vital relations from diverse scenarios” (1109). The
process of blending, which opens up new conceptual spaces, plays a
crucial role in all cases in which we try to make sense of the unnatu-
ral. Since unnatural scenarios and events are by definition physically,
logically, or humanly impossible, they always urge us to create new
frames by recombining, extending, or otherwise altering preexisting
cognitive parameters.
2. Generification (evoking generic conventions from literary
history): In some cases the represented unnatural scenario or event has
already been conventionalized and turned into a perceptual frame. In

other words, the process of blending has already taken place, and we
have converted the unnatural into a basic cognitive category that is
part of certain generic conventions. In such narratives the unnatu-
ral no longer strikes us as being strange or unusual. We can simply
account for the unnatural element by identifying it as belonging to a
particular literary genre, that is, a suitable discourse context within
which the anomaly can be embedded. For example, we know that
animals can speak in beast fables; we also know that magic exists in
epics, certain romances, Gothic novels, and later fantasy narratives;
we know that we can read the minds of the characters in modernist
fiction; we know that time travel is possible in science-fiction narra-
tives; and so forth.
In their experiment Nieuwland and van Berkum (2006, 1109) found
that subjects typically process impossible entities (such as an amorous
peanut) by seeing them “as actual ‘cartoon-like entities’ (i.e., a peanut
that walks and talks like a human, having emotions and possibly even
arms, legs and a face).” Hence, they assume that “the acceptability of
a crying yacht or amorous peanut is not merely induced by repeated
specific instances of such unusual feature combinations, but some-
how also—perhaps even critically—by the literary genre . . . that such
instances suggest” (1109). That is to say, the evocation of a particular
genre (such as the cartoon), that is, the construction of a supportive
context, helps us come to terms with represented impossibilities.12
In the context of this reading strategy I am also interested in the
question of how conventionalizations of unnatural scenarios and events
have come about. As I will show, it is typically the interaction between
various cognitive mechanisms and/or human needs that leads to the
converting of impossibilities into new frames and thus forms of literary
knowledge. Also we are currently in the process of conventionalizing
postmodernism. At one point readers will no longer be shocked or
surprised by the specific uses of the unnatural in postmodernist nar-
ratives, or, alternatively, they will know that postmodernist fiction is
a type of fiction that tends to explicitly foreground the impossibilities
of the scenarios and events it represents.13

3. Subjectification (reading as internal states): Some impossible ele-
ments can simply be explained as parts of internal states (of characters
or narrators) such as dreams, fantasies, visions, or hallucinations. This
reading strategy is the only one that actually naturalizes the unnatural
insofar as it reveals the ostensibly impossible to be something entirely
natural, namely nothing but an element of somebody’s interiority.14
For example, one can explain the retrogressive temporality in Amis’s
(1992) Time’s Arrow by ascribing it to the central protagonist’s wish to
turn back the clock and undo the moral chaos of his life, including his
participation in the Holocaust.15
4. Foregrounding the thematic: Other examples of unnaturalness
become more readable when we look at them from a thematic angle
and see them as exemplifications of themes rather than mimetically
motivated occurrences. I follow the definition of theme as “a specific
representational component that recurs several times in the [narra-
tive], in different variations—our quest for the theme or themes of a
story is always a quest for something that is not unique to this specific
work. . . . A theme is . . . the principle (or locus) of a possible grouping
of texts. It is one principle among many since we often group together
texts considered to have a common theme, which are importantly and
significantly different in many other respects” (Brinker 1995, 33). The
telepathic powers of Saleem Sinai in Rushdie’s (1981) Midnight’s Chil-
dren, for example, serve a specific thematic purpose: they highlight the
opportunity for mutual understanding among different ethnicities,
religions, and local communities in postcolonial India after indepen-
dence from the British colonizers.
With regard to narrative components, James Phelan (1996, 29) dis-
tinguishes between mimetic, thematic, and synthetic elements. He
explains these three components as follows: “Responses to the mimetic
component involve an audience’s interest in the characters as possible
people and in the narrative world as like our own. Responses to the
thematic component involve an interest in the ideational function of
the characters and in the cultural, philosophical, or ethical issues being
addressed by the narrative. Responses to the synthetic component

involve an audience’s interest in and attention to the characters and to
the larger narrative as artificial constructs” (2005, 20).
In many cases one can link the synthetic (of which the unnatural is
a subcategory) back to the mimetic by foregrounding the thematic. In
other words, by identifying a specific theme we can explain the unnat-
ural so that it communicates something meaningful to us (see also
Phelan 1996, 29; 2005, 15). Also since “anything written in meaning-
ful language has a theme” (Tomashevsky [1921] 1965, 63), this reading
strategy plays a crucial role in all of my readings or interpretations.16
5. Reading allegorically: Readers may also see impossible elements
as parts of abstract allegories that say something about Everyman or
Everywoman, that is, the human condition, or the world in general
(as opposed to particular individuals). Allegory is a figurative mode of
representation that tries to convey a certain idea rather than represent
a coherent storyworld. David Mikics (2007, 8) points out that, depend-
ing on one’s perspective, one might either argue that “allegories turn
abstract concepts or features into characters” or that allegories “trans-
form people and places into conceptual entities.” The basic cognitive
move of this reading strategy is to see unnatural scenarios or events as
representing abstract ideas or concepts.
In Sarah Kane’s (2001) play Cleansed, for instance, the character
Grace transforms into her beloved brother Graham. We can make sense
of this metamorphosis by reading it in the context of an allegory on
the merits and dangers of love. Grace’s transformation can be read as
highlighting one of the potential dangers of love, namely the danger
of losing oneself in the relationship with the loved one.17
6. Satirization and parody: Narratives may also use unnatural
scenarios or events to satirize, mock, or ridicule certain psychologi-
cal predispositions or states of affairs. The most important feature of
satire is critique through exaggeration, distortion, or caricature, and
“grotesque images” of humiliation or ridicule (Mikics 2007, 271), which
serve a didactic point, often merge with the unnatural. Parody is a
subcategory of satire that involves the mocking recontextualization of
a prior text or style by a later one.

Roth’s The Breast (1972), for example, confronts us with a slightly
obsessive professor of literature who has transformed into a female
breast. In his lectures before the metamorphosis, this professor used to
teach the unnatural transformations in the works of Gogol and Kafka
while at the same time insisting that fiction influences our lives. This
professor has literally become an example of what he used to teach,
and the novel uses this unnatural transformation to ridicule him for
taking fiction too seriously.
At this point one might wonder about the relationship between
allegorical and satirical readings, on the one hand, and the idea of
evoking generic conventions from literary history, on the other. For me
a distinction can be drawn between general modes (such as allegory
and satire) and proper literary genres (such as the beast fable or the
modernist novel). In principle one could try reading any text allegori-
cally or satirically, and therefore separate reading strategies are based
on the concepts of allegory and satire.18
7. Positing a transcendental realm: Readers can explain some pro-
jected impossibilities by assuming that they are part of a transcendental
setting (such as heaven, purgatory, or hell).19 Beckett’s ([1963] 1990) play
Play, for example, confronts us with a circular temporality: at the end of
the play the story returns to its beginning and continues indefinitely. Play
thus suggests that its three characters (m, w1, and w2), who are trapped in
urns while a light consistently forces them to talk about their past lives,
are caught in an endless temporal loop. A very common way of explaining
this unnatural temporality is to argue that the play is set in a tran-
scendental realm, a kind of purgatory without purification, in which the
three characters are doomed to relive the events of their past lives, which
involve a love triangle, in a continuous cycle as a form of punishment.
8. Do it yourself: Ryan (2006b, 671) has shown that we can explain
the logically incompatible storylines of some narratives by assuming
that “the contradictory passages in the text are offered to the readers
as material for creating their own stories.” In such cases the narrative
serves as a construction kit or collage that invites free play with its
elements. Coover’s (1969) short story “The Babysitter,” for instance,

confronts us with various logical impossibilities. One might argue that
this narrative uses mutually incompatible storylines to make us aware
of suppressed possibilities and allows us to choose the ones that, for
whatever reason, we prefer.20
This reading strategy closely correlates with Roland Barthes’s ([1968]
2001, 1470) ideas about “the birth of the reader,” which must be “at the
cost of the death of the Author.” Barthes argues that “to give a text an
Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final sig-
nified, to close the writing. . . . When the Author has been found, the
text is ‘explained’—victory to the critic” (1469). In stories such as “The
Babysitter,” on the other hand, the author cannot be found; the author
is absent and does not guide the reader at all. Hence readers have to
make up their own minds and construct their own stories.
9. The Zen way of reading: Acknowledging this strategy as a pos-
sible interpretive orientation is a way of ensuring that attempts to make
sense of the unnatural do not destroy more than they create, or perhaps
even become “an act of Gleichschaltung” in which “the diversity of
fictional worlds is reduced to the uniform structure of the complete,
Carnapian world” (Doležel 1998, 171). Hence as a radical alternative to
my more or less intrepid moves of sense-making, all of which follow the
human urge to create significance, I mention the Zen way of reading.
The Zen way of reading presupposes an attentive and stoic reader
who repudiates the earlier explanations and simultaneously accepts
both the strangeness of unnatural scenarios and the feelings of dis-
comfort, fear, worry, and panic that they might evoke in her or him. In
this context what Keats calls “Negative Capability” can be resorted to
as a way of thinking about the attitudes that many unnatural phenom-
ena invite us to adopt: the state of being in “uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason” (Forman
1935, 72). Alternatively this way of reading can also assume the shape
of a pleasurable response. I am thinking of an aesthetic reaction that
does not entail any kind of cognitive discomfort but rather sheer joy at
the freedom from natural possibility. Since we know that fiction is safe,

we enter into it voluntarily, knowing that we need not risk anything by
doing so. We often simply take pleasure from the impossible as such.21
These reading strategies cut across Doležel’s (1998, 165, 160) distinction
between “world construction” and “meaning production” because the
cognitive reconstruction of storyworlds always already involves a pro-
cess of interpretation. Nevertheless the first two strategies correlate
with cognitive processes that are closer to the pole of reconstruction or
world-making, whereas the others are closer to the pole of interpreta-
tion or meaning-making. Also 1 and 2 involve more or less automatic
cognitive processes, while the other strategies entail more conscious
or reflexive moves.
The mental operations of these reading strategies should not be con-
ceived in terms of a chronological before-after sequence, whereby one
would first try out strategy 1, for example, and then move if necessary to
another strategy. Rather these cognitive mechanisms are layered on top
of each other simultaneously during the reading process. They are not
intrinsically connected with specific examples but constitute options
that readers may try out when they are confronted with unnatural
scenarios. As I will show, one can approach the same unnatural phe-
nomenon using several navigational tools. Also these strategies may
occasionally overlap in actual readings or interpretations. I imagine
that the reader’s choices are determined by the question of which com-
bination leads to the most coherent interpretation of the unnatural
element and the narrative within which it occurs. Generally speaking,
these reading strategies lead to provisional explanations that illustrate
that the unnatural is not completely alien to our thinking.22
In my analyses I will try to operate on the basis of a double vision
involving the Zen way of reading and the other reading strategies. Since
I deal with narratives that were designed to impede (though perhaps not
completely defeat) the interpretive moves with which the navigational
tools 1 to 8 correlate, I first foreground and try to savor the funda-
mental unnaturalness of the represented phenomena before I offer

interpretations to provisionally make sense of them. That is to say, I
resort to the explanatory power of these reading strategies in the full
awareness that they are only that: strategies. They will never fully or
finally capture the true essence of the unnatural.
The distinction between the first eight reading strategies and the Zen
way of reading is informed by Tzvetan Todorov’s (1973) discussion of
hesitation as a readerly response to the fantastic. What Todorov calls
“the genuine fantastic” (as in Henry James’s [1898] The Turn of the
Screw) urges the reader to oscillate or hesitate between two different
reactions: a realist and a supernatural explanation of the represented
phenomenon. For example, we never learn whether the governess in
The Turn of the Screw experienced delusional episodes or actual ghosts.
In the first case “the laws of reality remain intact,” while in the second
case “new laws of nature must be entertained” to account for what
is represented (Todorov 1973, 41). For Todorov the fantastic “is that
hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature,
confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25). We simply do not
know how to respond to what we are confronted with and thus oscil-
late between the two described options. To my mind the unnatural
provokes a similar kind of hesitation or oscillation between speechless
fascination and the urge to comprehend. When we are confronted with
the unnatural, we have to cope with the fact that something impossible
and thus unexplainable is happening in the narrative at hand (one
might call this the pole of acceptance). At the same time, we stick to
our real-world knowledge and try (more or less desperately) to make
sense of the impossible (one might call this the pole of explanation).23
The distinction between different types of navigational tools that
concern the poles of explanation and acceptance also relates to what
Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004) calls an oscillation (and sometimes
interference) between “meaning effects” and “presence effects.” Accord-
ing to Gumbrecht, there is “nothing wrong with meaning production,
meaning relations, and the metaphysical paradigm” (6). He is opposed
only to the complete dominance of meaning-related questions. For him
an overdose of meaning might potentially diminish the moments of

presence. Gumbrecht highlights that “any form of human communica-
tion, through its material elements, will ‘touch’ the bodies of the persons
who are communicating”; this is what he calls “presence effects” (17).
Presence effects correlate with the idea of being quiet for a moment
to savor the force of the represented phenomenon. Gumbrecht points
out that “Zen masters teach their disciples to resist the temptation of
thinking the transition of the unshaped from nothingness into . . . the
‘everyday world’ ” (150). Furthermore “the tension/oscillation between
presence effects and meaning effects endows the object of aesthetic expe-
rience with a component of provocative instability and unrest” (108).
Even though my analyses are ultimately driven by the idea of
meaning production, that is, the human urge to explain (or create sig-
nificance), they simultaneously address the bodily presence effects of
the unnatural. By accepting the unnatural as an objective constituent
of the represented world, my readings try to do justice to the provoca-
tive instability of the narrative within which they occur. In the words
of Bernard Harrison (1991, 6–8), I first “allow [my] imagination . . . to
be led” by the text’s unnatural segments—I “trust and move with the
text”—before then moving on to the process of interpretation.

Part 2 Unnatural Narrative Features
2 Impossible Narrators and Storytelling Scenarios
2.1. Introduction
This chapter looks at unnatural experiments with the traditional
human narrator as a first investigation into the petite histoire that
unites postmodernist and other types of narrative. The individual
sections first look at impossible narrators and storytelling scenarios
in postmodernist fiction, then discuss the same unnatural features in
beast fables, eighteenth-century circulation novels, children’s fiction,
the omniscient narration of many realist novels, and the modernist
stream-of-consciousness novel.
At the most general level the narrator can be defined as “the agent
or, in less anthropomorphic terms, the agency or ‘instance’ that tells or
transmits everything—the existents, states, and events—in a narrative
to a narratee” (Phelan and Booth 2005, 388). Brian Richardson (2006, 3)
describes the unnatural narrators and voices of postmodernism in a
systematic way, thus drawing our attention to the different “kinds of
posthuman narrators that have appeared in the last several decades.”
This chapter extends Richardson’s research by presenting ways of com-
ing to terms with the represented impossibilities and also by showing
how the postmodernist examples hark back to the unnatural narrators
or storytelling scenarios in older narratives, where certain impossibili-
ties have been transformed into generic conventions that we are now
familiar with.
All of the phenomena discussed in this chapter can be classified
as “posthuman ‘amalgams’ ” (Clarke 2008, 5) or “conceptual hybrids”
(Zunshine 2008, 141). They “create and explore various nodes of con-
ceptual impossibility” (154) insofar as they belong to two distinct
61
conceptual domains at the same time. More specifically these nar-
rators and storytelling scenarios use categories such as human and
animal (the animal narrator), human and body part (the speaking
breast), and human and object (the talking object), or they combine
human and superhuman features (the telepathic first-person nar-
rator, the voice in you-narratives, the omniscient narrator, and the
reflector-mode narratives of literary modernism). Generally speak-
ing, the unnatural narrators and storytelling scenarios analyzed here
transcend categorical boundaries; it is impossible to associate them
with one category only.
2.2. Talking Animals

In many narratives animals become impossibly positioned as fully
articulate narrators. Lisa Zunshine (2008, 133) argues that “because it
is not ‘in the nature’ of animals to engage in activities that we associate
with human beings [such as telling a story], the image of such an ani-
mal remains perennially attention-catching.” In order to come to terms
with animal narrators, we have to activate and combine two preexist-
ing frames to create a new one. We are urged to blend our real-world
knowledge about human narrators with our knowledge of animals to
picture a physically impossible scenario in which an animal serves as
the narrator of a story.
The first-person narrator of Robert Olen Butler’s (1996) postmod-
ernist short story “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot,” for
example, is a yellow-nape Amazon parrot who turns out to be the
reincarnation of a jealous American husband.1 The narrating parrot is
simultaneously beast and intentional agent with sophisticated mental
capacities. Butler’s narrator has the body of an animal but speaks like
a human being.
However, we can also detect a certain degree of “animalness” in
the narrator’s discourse. While the narrator’s thoughts are recogniz-
ably human, his emotions are linked to traits of a parrot’s behavior.
For instance, when he is bought by his former wife in a pet store in
Houston, the narrator’s feelings are described as follows: “Her touch
62 Unnatural Narrative Features

makes my tail flare. I feel the stretch and rustle of me back there. I bend
my head to her and she whispers, ‘Pretty bird.’ . . . Her fingertips move
through my feathers and she seems to know about birds. She knows
that to pet a bird you don’t smooth his feathers down, you ruffle them”
(Butler 1996, 72). In contrast to the narrator’s thoughts at the level of the
narrative discourse, his utterances in the storyworld are constrained
by a parrot’s mental and linguistic capacities: “I never can quite say as
much as I know. . . . I know many words, for a parrot. . . . I talk pretty
well, but none of my words are adequate” (71, 72, 77).
When the parrot is bought by his ex-wife, he returns to his house
in a large cage. The narrator remembers his former life and gradually
begins to realize that his current situation as a parrot bears numerous
resemblances to his existence as a jealous husband. For example, as a
human being, the narrator was incapable of confronting his wife with
her extramarital affairs. At one point he tried to spy out the house
of one of her many lovers but fell from his perch and died (and was
inexplicably transformed into a parrot). As a parrot the narrator is
also incapable of talking to his ex-wife: she has a new lover, “a guy that
looked like a meat packer, big in the chest and thick with hair” (Butler
1996, 72), and the only thing the narrator can do is to “attack that dan-
gly toy [in my cage] as if it was the guy’s balls, but it does no good. It
never did any good in the other life either, the thrashing around I did
by myself ” (73). The parrot tells us that when he gets “this restlessness
back in [his] tail, a burning trashing feeling,” “it’s like all the times
when [he] was sure there was a man naked with [his] wife” (73). As a
husband the narrator remained silent when he was jealous and, instead
of talking to his wife, preferred to lock himself up in the bathroom
(74)—like a bird in a cage.
At one point the narrator muses about his current existence as a
parrot in the following self-reflexive way:
I know I’m different now. I’m a bird. Except I’m not. That’s what’s
confusing. It’s like those times when she would tell me she loved
me and I actually believed her and maybe it was true and we clung
Impossible Narrators 63
to each other in bed and at times like that I was different. I was the
man in her life. I was whole with her. Except even at that moment,
holding her sweetly, there was this other creature inside me who
knew a lot more about it and couldn’t quite put all the evidence
together to speak. (Butler 1996, 75)
“Jealous Husband” is an extremely funny short story that illustrates

that the husband has (in a figurative sense) turned himself into some
kind of caged parrot through his lack of determination: “When we held
each other, . . . I entered as a chick into her wet sky of a body, and all
that I wished was to sit on her shoulder and fluff my feathers and lay my
head against her cheek, my neck exposed to her hand” (Butler 1996, 76,
my italics). That is to say, following reading strategy 6 (satirization and
parody), the parrot narrator serves the purpose of ridiculing the hus-
band’s behavior (and in particular his inability to tackle his problems
by confronting his wife). The narrator’s two ontological states have the
following features in common: total dependency, the complete fixation
on somebody else, a sense of imprisonment, feelings of inadequacy,
and a low self-esteem. Furthermore the parrot narrator highlights that
jealousy, that is, the desire to possess one’s beloved completely, entails
a ridiculous compulsion to repeat in the manner of a parrot: one may
compulsively repeat once happy times or the former image of oneself,
or one may obsessively rave or thrash around in the locked bathroom
(to no avail).
The animal narrator of “Jealous Husband” serves a variety of pur-
poses: the short story focuses on the experiences of a nonhuman
animal, but it also uses the parrot to mock human folly (namely the
husband’s passivity and/or ineffectiveness). Further, Butler’s narrative
radically deconstructs the distinction between human and avian
elements: it connects the parrot’s world with the jealous husband’s
world, thus representing the relationship between animal and human
experiences in terms of continuity rather than discontinuity.2
Postmodernist narratives such as “Jealous Husband” or Julian
Barnes’s (1989) “The Stowaway” did not invent speaking animals.

Numerous earlier versions exist in beast fables, circulation novels of
the eighteenth century, and children’s stories, where talking animals
have become a literary convention. A beast fable is “an example of
human faults, decoratively presented through talking animals, who are
animals in their context but human in speech and action; no contrast
is effected between them and our world, or ourselves” (Finlayson 2005,
497). Since Aesop’s beast fables already contain animals that talk and
ridicule human faults, Harold John Blackham (1985, 177) argues that
“the Aesopic use of animals is the primal and simplest form of [the]
freedom of representation.” Readers must have come to accept talking
animals as possibilities in the world of fiction at a relatively early stage
in the development of fictional narrative. The formation of the beast
fable as a genre closely correlates with the conventionalization of the
talking animal, that is, the converting of the speaking animal into a
cognitive frame. Today it is standard literary knowledge that animals
can talk in beast fables.
“The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” from Chaucer’s (2005) fourteenth-century
Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous medieval beast fables. It
features three speaking animals that are also embedded narrators:
Chauntecleer (a polygamous cock), Pertelote (one of his seven hens),
and a nameless fox. In this beast fable the cock and the fox are flattered
into singing or talking, which has rather negative consequences in
both cases. The sly and deceptive fox describes his alleged intentions to
Chauntecleer as follows:
But trewely, the cause of my cominge

Was oonly for to herkne how that ye singe.
For trewely, ye have as mirye a stevene
As any aungel hath that is in hevene. (615, ll. 3289–92)3
Chauntecleer thus begins to sing, closes his eyes, and is grabbed by

the fox: “And daun Russell the fox stirte up atones, And by the gar-
gat hente Chauntecleer” (616, ll. 3334–35). However, during the course
of the story, the cock learns from the fox. Chauntecleer manages to
save himself by imitating the fox’s stratagem: he advises the fox to
demonstrate his superiority by insulting his pursuers, and as soon as
he opens his mouth, Chauntecleer escapes to a tree (619, ll. 3407–16).
One might argue that the cock and the fox represent human beings
who are ridiculed because they are easily fooled through flattery—or
simply talk too much.
According to John Finlayson (2005, 497), the tale satirizes “man’s . . .
grandiose conception of his own importance.” In particular during
the dream debate with Pertelote, Chauntecleer wants to appear clever,
educated, and, above all, superior to this hen. But he is much less clever
than he thinks. For example, when he talks about the fox in his dream,
he is in a position to describe the animal but not to correctly name
it (Chaucer 1979, 602, ll. 2899–2902). At a later point Chauntecleer
states pompously, “In principo, Mulier est hominis confusio” (610,
ll. 3163–64), which means, “In principle, woman is man’s confusion.”
However, he mistranslates the line as “Womman is mannes joye and al
his blis” (611, l. 3166). The ending of the tale might have been different
if he had grasped the line’s actual meaning. Hence one can read “The
Nun’s Priest’s Tale” as a satire that uses Chauntecleer as a stand-in for
men who are ridiculed for their rhetorical verbosity and for being so
full of themselves that they live in a state of self-delusion. Chaucer’s
tale critiques certain men by conjuring up a self-satisfied cock who is
so convinced by his own grandiloquence that he does not realize his
own limitations.
Once the speaking animal had established itself as a possibility in
the genre of the beast fable, it could be used for new purposes. One
important new theme in the eighteenth century was cruelty against
animals. While beast fables use speaking animals to process moral
issues of the human world, the talking animals in later narratives “con-
vey lessons about animals in the real world, what they are like, and how
we should behave towards them” (Cosslett 2006, 39). Examples of such
animal narrators can be found in circulation novels, “an odd subgenre of
the novel, a type of prose fiction in which inanimate objects (coins, waist-
coats, pins, corkscrews, coaches) or animals (dogs, fleas, cats, ponies)
serve as the central characters” (Blackwell 2007a, 10). These objects

or animals usually pass from hand to hand as they circulate through
society’s segments. In this section I limit myself to circulation novels
that are narrated by animals (my next section addresses circulation
novels narrated by objects).
The first-person narrator of the anonymous “The Adventures of a
Cat” (1774) is Mopsey, a cat that experiences different owners. This
narrator critiques society’s avarice and greed. For example, we learn
about Jemmy Contact, one of the cat’s owners, that “the blackness of
[his] heart . . . ill agreed with the gold chain which hung dangling at his
breast” (460). This narrative comments on the commodification of ani-
mals in eighteenth-century society: when Lady Harriot buys a diamond
necklace, she suddenly insists “upon having that charming Cat into the
bargain” (394). Like inanimate objects, animals can be bought and
disposed of again. Mopsey also tells us how he “became an unhappy
spectator of the cruelty and inhumanity of those two-legged monsters
who stile themselves the Lords of the Creation: This was no other than
witnessing the death of four of my brothers and sisters, who were
all wantonly immerged into cold water, while their cries only served
as sport to the barbarous authors of their misery” (393).
This focus on human cruelty toward animals is actually a constant
topic in eighteenth-century circulation novels. For instance, the speak-
ing mouse in Dorothy Kilner’s ([1783] 1851) The Life and Perambulations
of a Mouse has to witness how a boy tortures and kills his brother Soft-
down. The mouse’s sibling “squeaked as loud as his little throat would
let him” while the narrator sees how the boy “hold[s] him down upon
the hearth” and then, “without remorse, he crushed him beneath his
foot” (40). Later on a different boy swings Brighteyes, another brother
of the narrator, “by the tail over [a] cat’s mouth” (48). Charles’s father
interrupts him and instructs him as follows: “What right, I desire to
know, have you to torment any living creature? If it is only because you
are larger, and so have it in your power, I beg you will consider, how
you would like, that either myself, or some great giant, as much larger
than you as you are bigger than the mouse, should hurt and torment
you?” (48). At the end the novel explicitly addresses its readers, asking
them to refrain from such horrific types of behavior: “Shun all those
vice and follies, the practice of which renders children so contemptible
and wicked” (124).
Like some of the circulation novels of the eighteenth century, later
children’s stories use animal narrators to speak about the lives of
animals in a hostile world dominated by thoughtless humans. Mike
Cadden (2005, 59) argues that narratives written for children typically
exhibit “greater simplicity in all areas of narrative structure,” and he
points out that “animal characters or toy objects (such as dolls) per-
sonified as human” usually serve “as a code” for children’s literature.
Such anthropomorphic representations seek “to appeal to children
through fantasy” (59). Interestingly children’s fiction developed during
the eighteenth century in response to Aesopian beast fables (Colombat
1994, 38–39) and circulation novels with animal narrators (Bellamy 2007,
131–32). As Tess Cosslett (2006, 149) has shown, children’s stories usually
contain “the religious appeal to the idea of ‘fellow creatures,’ and the
rhetorical device of reversing roles, translating animal pain into the
equivalent human pain.” 4
The first-person narrator of Anne Sewell’s ([1877] 1945) novel Black
Beauty is a horse. The novel consistently foregrounds the narrator’s
animal instincts. At one point Squire Gordon and the coachman John
Manly want Black Beauty to cross a damaged bridge, but he refuses to
move: “The moment my feet touched the first part of the bridge I felt
sure there was something wrong. I dared not go forward and I made a
dead stop. . . . I knew very well that the bridge was not safe” (53). Fur-
thermore Black Beauty exposes the suffering of animals under certain
masters: “To be punished and abused when I was doing my very best
was so hard it took the heart out of me” (221–22). When the animal
narrator is confronted with townspeople who never had a horse of their
own, he begins to realize that his true value for humans is an economic
one: “They always seemed to think that a horse was something like a
steam-engine, only smaller. At any rate, they think that if only they
pay for it, a horse is bound to go just as far, and just as fast, and with
just as heavy a load as they please” (129). Indeed some humans equate

animals with machines, and the use of a speaking animal counteracts
these mechanical perceptions of animals.
The animal narrators in postmodernist narratives (such as “Jealous
Husband” and “The Stowaway”) were anticipated by the speaking
animals in earlier genres. Although “it is an impossibility” (Colombat 1994,
43) in the real world, animals can speak in certain fictional narratives.
The unnatural scenario of the talking animal has been conventional-
ized and converted into a cognitive frame that we are now familiar with
(reading strategy 2). In this context Umberto Eco (1990, 76) argues that
we can imagine speaking animals “by flexibly readjusting the experi-
ence of the world [we] live in: it is sufficient to imagine that animals can
have humanlike phonatory organs and a more complex brain structure.”
The fable, for instance, differs from “other literary forms” because “it
relates incidents in the lives of animals [that] speak and act like human
beings” (Clark 1975, 113–14).
If animals can speak, then it makes sense for them to foreground
certain topics or themes. They may refer to us and mock our faults
(which happens in beast fables); they can expose the sometimes bru-
tal ways we treat them (as happens in some circulation novels and
children’s stories); or they can conceptualize the relationship between
humans and nonhuman animals in terms of continuity (which happens
in postmodernist narratives). In the course of literary history, narrative
interest gradually moved away from the idea of using animal narrators
for purely human concerns toward the actual experience of animals, and
from there to the notion of a reciprocal relationship between humans
and animals. This process involves varying degrees of “animalness,” that
is, different blends between the two input spaces (features of humans
and features of animals): input space 1 may predominate; input space
2 may predominate; or the two input spaces may coexist in a state of
equilibrium.
Beast fables are satires in which animals provide an actantial infra-
structure to mock human faults. Such narratives are examples of what
David Herman (2011b, 167, 170) calls “anthropomorphic projection”:
they focus on humans and thus run “the risk of flattening out, or even
voiding, the phenomenological specificity of nonhuman encounters
with the world.” Humans are usually represented in terms of one spe-
cific feature that we associate with animals, and this feature is then
typically ridiculed. Otherwise the animals in beast fables are com-
pletely human.5 In this context the idea that somebody can be ridiculed
by exaggeration (reading strategy 6) has contributed to the converting
of the speaking animal into a constitutive ingredient of the beast fable.
Today we know that beast fables use animals to mock human faults.
In some circulation novels and nineteenth-century children’s stories,
the animal narrators target human cruelty against animals. Such
narratives centrally address “the theme of kindness to animals”
(Colombat 1994, 41). In contrast to the speaking animals in the beast
fable, these animal narrators correlate with a higher degree of “animal-
ness.” These speaking animals are human only insofar as they are able
to produce lexemes and tell stories; otherwise these narratives actually
concentrate on “the lived, phenomenal worlds of nonhuman animals
themselves” (Herman 2011b, 167). Circulation novels and children’s sto-
ries invite us to imaginatively assume the position of animals and share
their suffering.
Postmodernist narratives such as “Jealous Husband” and “The
Stowaway,” finally, correlate with a high degree of “animalness” and
fuse these different uses of speaking animals in older narratives. Like
beast fables, they use animal narrators to highlight human folly (such
as feelings of jealousy or arrogance). Like some circulation novels
and children’s stories, they focus on the world of nonhuman animals
(the world of a caged parrot or that of a woodworm on Noah’s ark).
But compared to these earlier narratives, postmodernism goes a step
further: it involves the radical deconstruction of the binary oppo-
sition human versus nonhuman animal. Postmodernist narratives
foreground the continuity between the human world and the animal
world (whether by comparing the world of a caged parrot with that of
a jealous husband or by linking the fate of a woodworm with the fate
of Noah). Through playful intertextuality postmodernist narratives
relate back to the well-known generic conventions of beast fables and

children’s stories to create a new configuration, namely a speaking
animal that unites the functions of this impossible blend in traditional
genres but also moves beyond them. Like the interdisciplinary forma-
tion of critical animal studies, postmodernist narratives see “human/
animal relations as a problem for historical, sociological, and cultural
analysis” and contest “assumptions of mentalistic and moral difference”
(Benston 2009, 548) between humans and animals. Both postmodernist
fiction and this new critical paradigm accentuate that many similarities
exist between the two species, and they foreground and reflect upon
these parallels (see also Derrida 2002). In this context Kari Weil (2012,
xvi) states that the “significance of a new perspective on animals as well
as humans is undeniable.” What Weil has in mind here is “a thinking
that happens through recognition and acknowledgment of the animals
we are and with whom we share our world” (xvi). Postmodernist narra-
tives likewise accentuate that there is no stable boundary line between
humans and animals.
2.3. Speaking Body Parts and Object Narrators

Unnatural narratives are sometimes narrated not by animals but by
other entities that, in the world of everyday experience, do not tell
stories. Voices can also emanate from other impossible places. Like
“Jealous Husband” and “The Stowaway,” such narratives by nonhuman
narrators offer critical perspectives on human dealings. As already
mentioned, the first-person narrator of Roth’s (1972) postmodernist
novel The Breast is Kepesh, a professor who has miraculously trans-
formed into a huge female breast.6 This narrator explains to us what
it is like to be half human, half breast. Kepesh insists that “he” is still
human, “but not that human” (21). Indeed, as a mammary gland, the
narrator can still talk and listen to others, and “he” still has his former
mind (apart from the fact that he has become extremely emotional so
that “he” has to “sob uncontrollably” [18] again and again). However,
Kepesh has obviously lost his human body (including all extremities)
and can no longer see. We also learn that the breast in general and its
nipple in particular are very sensitive to touch; the narrator describes
this sensation in terms of “that exquisite sense of imminence that pre-
cedes a perfect ejaculation” (17). Furthermore we get a sense of the
narrator’s feelings of claustrophobia inside “his” “body”: “It’s hideous
in here. I want to quit, I want to go crazy, to go spinning off, ranting
and wild, but I can’t. I sob. I scream. I touch bottom. I lay there on that
bottom!” (22).
Kepesh wishes to provide an explanation for his physically impos-
sible state: “what does it mean? how has it come to pass?
and why? in the entire history of the human race, why
david alan kepesh?” (Roth 1972, 23). During the course of the
novel the narrator discusses numerous explanations, but they are all
refuted.7 As Kai Mikkonen (1999, 20) observes, the narrator rejects all
explanations “except for the theory that fiction has caused his change.”
Indeed at one point Kepesh argues that his metamorphosis has to do
with fiction or, more specifically, his European literature course, in
which he taught “the unnatural transformations” (Roth 1972, 59, my
italics) in Gogol’s “The Nose” and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” as well as
the strange worlds of Swift’s satirical Gulliver’s Travels (1726, amended
1735). In “The Nose,” Major Kovalyov’s nose goes for a walk; in Kafka’s
story, Gregor Samsa is transformed into an insect; and in Gulliver’s
Travels, Gulliver sees the giant breast of a nurse during his journey
to Brobdingnag. Roth’s novel inverts “the synecdochial dynamic in
Gogol’s text” (Mikkonen 1999, 26): while Kovalyov’s nose turns into
a man and back into a nose, Kepesh turns into a breast, that is, a part
of the human body. At the same time, The Breast shares with Kafka’s
narrative the transformation of one entity into a categorically different
entity, and both Gulliver’s Travels and The Breast contain breasts that
are six feet long.
Since the modus operandi of The Breast is clearly intertextual, it can
be seen as a postmodernist rewrite (Moraru 2005, 145) of its precursors.
At the same time, The Breast is a metafictional novel that uses Kepesh’s
metamorphosis to reflect upon the consequences of fiction. Throughout
the novel the narrator is convinced that fiction influences our lives,
and toward the end, “he” urges us “to proceed with our education”

(Roth 1972, 78). Since this advice is followed by Rilke’s (1908) poem
“Archaic Torso of Apollo,” he evidently refers to our specifically literary
education. However, the novel also suggests that Kepesh takes fiction
too seriously. Indeed the narrator points out that in contrast to other
professors, he used to teach Gogol, Kafka, and Swift with “much [maybe
too much] conviction” (55). Christian Moraru (2005, 148) points out that
Kepesh has “changed into the topic of his well-attended lectures.”
The novel thus accentuates that “one cannot rule out the possibility that
some day we might transform into what we teach” (146). In other words,
following reading strategy 6 (satirization and parody), one might argue
that The Breast uses Kepesh’s transformation into a female breast to
jokingly mock a slightly obsessive professor of literature for over-
valuing the importance of fiction and for literally following the advice
at the end of Rilke’s poem: “You must change your life” (Roth 1972, 78).
Kepesh has changed “his” life in a fundamental way but, unfortunately,
to no avail. Fiction has effectively destroyed the life of this professor.
The Breast is a paradoxical form of metafiction: it is fiction that self-
reflexively warns us of the potential dangers of fiction.
Marjorie Perloff (1985, 176) once suggested that there might be a
link between postmodernism and the “performative, playful mode
of eighteenth-century ironists”; among other things, this connection
involves nonhuman narrators. In a sense both postmodernist narra-
tives and eighteenth-century circulation novels present us with critical
(nonhuman) perspectives on human practices. However, the unnatural
narrators in the respective centuries also need to be contextualized
because they obviously address radically different questions. While The
Breast uses its nonhuman narrator in a metafictional manner to ponder
the possible effects of fiction, eighteenth-century circulation novels
are told by object narrators that critique the development of capitalism
at the time.
Examples of eighteenth-century object narrators are coins (Charles
Gildon’s [1709] The Golden Spy, Charles Johnstone’s [(1760–64) 1794]
Chrysal; or the Adventures of a Guinea, and Helenus Scott’s [1782] The
Adventures of a Rupee), a sofa (Claud Crébillon’s [1742] The Sopha, a
Moral Tale), slippers (the anonymous The History and Adventures of a
Lady’s Slippers and Shoes [1754]), a building (the anonymous Memoirs of
the Shakespear’s [sic] Head in Covent Garden [1755]), a coat (the anony-
mous [1760] The Adventures of a Black Coat), an atom (Smollett’s [(1769)
1989] The History and Adventures of an Atom), a banknote (Thomas
Bridges’s [1770] The Adventures of a Bank-note), a corkscrew (the anony-
mous The Adventures of a Cork-Screw [1775]), a coach (Dorothy Kilner’s
[1781] The Adventures of a Hackney Coach), a watch (the anonymous
Adventures of a Watch [1788], pins (the anonymous Adventures of a
Pin [1790] and the anonymous History of a Pin, as Related by Itself
[1798]), and an ostrich feather (the anonymous Adventures of an Ostrich
Feather of Quality [1812]), among many others.
These humorous novels have object narrators that circulate through
society and invite us to conjure up what it might be like to be a
commodity—such as a coin, a banknote, or a corkscrew. Christopher
Flint (1998, 212) argues that “the eighteenth-century speaking object is
almost always a product of manufacture rather than a part of nature,
and its satiric vision of the world arises from its particular experience of
human commerce.” Indeed these narratives are satires that offer a criti-
cal perspective on the development of capitalism and the circulation of
objects in the public sphere: “What they have in common is the use of
a plot that focuses on the way that an object passes through a diverse
range of hands. The protagonist can be sold, lost, found, given, and
exchanged and thus come in contact with very different social groups”
(Bellamy 2007, 118). The object narrators of eighteenth-century circula-
tion novels move freely among society’s diverse classes and ranks; they
do not respect the boundaries of eighteenth-century Britain.
Despite the great popularity of circulation novels at the time, the
circulation novel has meanwhile “languished in critical purgatory.
Chrysal has dropped from even the most eccentric list of the period’s
canonical works, as have its literary counterparts” (Blackwell 2007a,
11). Yet circulation novels are important in the context of this study.
Their object narrators are precursors of the nonhuman narrators of
postmodernism. The unnaturalness of these speaking objects involves

mental models that differ from those of the otherwise predominantly
realist novels of the eighteenth century.8 In contrast to the celebrations
of the bourgeoisie and its mercantile values in the novels by Defoe,
circulation novels are critical of capitalism and the development
of commerce and trade.
Since the narrators of such object narratives are blends of inanimate
commodities and human beings, I begin by addressing the question of
how much “thingness” there is to these narrating entities. These narra-
tors always exist as objects in the storyworld. For example, the deictic
signals at the beginning of Kilner’s (1781, 1) The Adventures of a Hack-
ney Coach suggest the shape of the coach narrator: “This is the most
fashionable Coach on the stand, says a pretty young lady, stepping into
me” (my italics). Similarly Scott’s (1782, 1, 7) The Adventures of a Rupee
begins as the rupee is still a lump of gold “in the mountains of Thibet”;
later the liquidized narrator is “poured into a mould” and transformed
into a “rupee.” The plots of circulation novels are structured by the
transactions that shape the “journeys” of their object narrators. New
chapters typically begin at the point at which these objects are passed
from one owner to the next. In The Adventures of a Cork-Screw, for
instance, the transition from chapter 2 to chapter 3 is marked by the
following words: “As I have entered into a new service, it would not be
consistent to introduce my new governor, otherwise than at the begin-
ning of a new chapter” (1775, 34).
Moreover the object narrators typically know that they have some-
how developed a consciousness or mind. For example, the narrator
of The Adventures of a Cork-Screw describes itself as a “spirit diffused
through every part of a cork-screw” (Anonymous 1775, 5). They are fre-
quently aware of their ability to think and speak, but we usually do not
learn where this unnatural talent comes from. The narrator of Bridges’s
(1770, vol. 1: 3) The Adventures of a Bank-note, for instance, reflects upon
its physically impossible power as follows: “The inquisitive world may
perhaps be curious enough to enquire, why I alone, amongst so many
thousands of bank-notes, came to be possessed of such uncommon
talents.” While most speaking objects have no access to the thoughts
and feelings of their owners and give us externally focalized renderings
of what happens to them, the speaking coin in Johnstone’s ([1760–64]
1794, vol. 1: 110) Chrysal; or the Adventures of a Guinea is even able to
“see the depravity of human nature, when stripped of disguise and
ornament.” Chrysal explains, “Besides that intuitive knowledge com-
mon to all spirits, we of superior orders, who animate this universal
monarch Gold, have also a power of entering into the hearts of the
immediate possessors of our bodies” (17).
One of the most important features of such circulation novels is that
we are presented with views of a fragmented society as the narrators
pass from hand to hand. For instance, in The Adventures of a Rupee,
the rupee encounters many different societal ranks, from a “common
sailor” to a “young princess” (Scott 1782, 92–93, 223–40). Apart from
the desire to exchange money, the diverse owners of the rupee do not
have anything in common; they lack moral ties that could bind them
together as a community. Chrysal; or the Adventures of a Guinea fore-
grounds the corrupt state of the novel’s society by having its narrator
exchanged through transactions that involve bribery (Johnstone’s
[1760–64] 1794, vol. 1: 130; vol. 2: 194; vol. 4: 129), corruption (vol. 3: 34),
and prostitution (vol. 1: 118, 158; vol. 2: 43; vol. 3: 227). The narrator of
The Adventures of a Watch shows that in eighteenth-century Britain,
one’s social identity is almost exclusively determined by one’s posses-
sions: “A man who possesses ten thousand pounds a year cannot be a
fool; for everyone laughs at his jokes, feels his affronts, and sympathises
with his—gold” (Anonymous 1788, 185). At one point the narrator of
The Adventures of a Bank-note happily exclaims, “Who would not be a
banknote to have such a quick succession of adventures and acquain-
tance?” (Bridges 1770, vol. 2: 25). However, the immoral state of society
in this novel renders the banknote’s statement ironic.
For Liz Bellamy (2007, 132) the speaking objects in circulation nov-
els “provide a satirical vision of the atomized and mercenary nature
of society within a commercial state.” They mock the fact that the
developing capitalist system and its commercial values have come to
define all relationships in eighteenth-century Britain. Furthermore the

commercialization of all human interaction involves a loss of moral
principles. At one point the black coat in The Adventures of a Black Coat
(1760, 4) states, “When I contemplate the . . . vile schemes I have been
obliged to countenance in those whose sole merit and reputation arose
from my close attachment to them, my very threads blush at the indig-
nity.” Similarly the narrator of Chrysal; or the Adventures of a Guinea
argues, “When the mighty spirit of a large mass of gold takes possession
of the human heart, it influences all its actions, and over powers, or
banishes, the weaker impulse of those immaterial, unessential notions
called Virtues” (Johnstone [1760–64] 1794, vol. 1: 17).
From this perspective the unnatural object narrators suggest that
“the soul of this society is invested in its commodities” (Douglas 2007,
153). Objects become so important in eighteenth-century Britain that
they are endowed with lives or minds of their own. Conversely, if all
relationships are commercial transactions, these speaking objects
illustrate that all members of society potentially face the danger of
becoming commodities themselves; for example, in The Adventures
of a Cork-Screw, Lucy Lightairs, the daughter of a wealthy merchant,
prostitutes herself and thus becomes “at different times the property
of the peer, the squire, the tradesman and others” (Anonymous 1775,
76, my italics). In any case the speaking objects are blends that fuse
humans and inanimate objects to satirize certain problems of the
capitalist system at the time. More to the point, they critique the com-
modity fetishism of the eighteenth century and the potential loss of
human qualities through the predominance of economic transactions.
Jonathan Lamb (2011, 201) writes that “in all these stories the thing con-
tributes directly to the moral benefit of humanity, functioning either
as an emblem, a lesson, or a reproach.”
Flint (1998, 219) argues that these inanimate narrators highlight
“the dismantling effects of human commerce.” However, his read-
ing is more specific because he interprets these object narratives as
allegories of authorial objectification: “The appearance of speaking
objects in eighteenth-century fiction is linked to authorial concerns
about the circulation of books in the public sphere” (212). Indeed, in
these circulation novels speaking objects typically serve as the puta-
tive authors of the tales we read. They usually dictate their stories to
human interlocutors who write down what they say but do not author
the texts they write. For example, in The Golden Spy the human inter-
locutor tells us how he “learn’d many Secrets of Policy, and Love” from
the “Conversation” of “some Pieces of coin’d Gold that Fortune had
thrown into [his] Hands” (Gildon 1709, 2). Similarly in The History and
Adventures of an Atom, an atom that lodges in “a chink or crevice” in
the “pericranium,” that is, the membrane surrounding the skull, of one
Nathaniel Peacock urges him to “take up [his] pen . . . and write what
[it] shall unfold” (Smollett [1769] 1989, 5–6). This extremely unnatural
constellation, in which a speaking atom dictates words to a human
interlocutor, serves to explicitly alienate these human agents from the
texts that are produced.
Circulation novels establish further connections between their non-
human narrators and the idea of authorship. For example, on the title
page of The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes, the
novel’s narrators maintain that they are better authors than some of
their human counterparts:
So common now are Authors grown,

That ev’ry Scribler in the Town,
Thinks he can give Delight.
If writers then are got so vain,
To think they pleasure when they pain,
No wonder Slippers write. Anon.
Similarly in The Adventures of a Bank-note, the banknote speaks as the

tale’s author and compares its right to speak with that of Dr. Samuel
Johnson: “The author thinks he has as great a title to coin words as
the great Doctor anybody; and whether he takes his degree or not,
he declares he will do it whenever he pleases” (Bridges 1770, vol. 2: 42,
my italics).
From this vantage point one can read the unnatural object narrators
of the eighteenth century as allegorical figures that represent authors

and comment on the alienation from their works in the context of the
developing market economy.9 Eighteenth-century object narratives
highlight that the commercialized circulation of books in the public
sphere may turn authors into commodities so that inanimate objects
sometimes become better storytellers than their human counterparts.
As Flint (1998, 221) writes, these narratives “are, among other things,
parables of textual and authorial objectification; the storyteller is not
only transformed into an inanimate form but also compelled by a sys-
tem of ownership to describe the experience of others, usually at the
expense of internal or personal reflection.” Eighteenth-century circula-
tion novels use speaking objects to make us aware of the fact that the
principles of commerce and trade may gradually displace or perhaps
even eliminate human qualities—in particular, those of authors.10
The nonhuman narrators of postmodernist fiction (such as the breast
in The Breast, the tree in Ursula K. Le Guin’s [1975] “Direction of the
Road,” or the house in Helen Oyeyemi’s [2009] White Is for Witching)
were anticipated by the speaking objects in circulation novels insofar
as the earlier narratives also present us with impossible narrators
that involve blends of humans and nonhuman entities. The talking
objects of the eighteenth century are unprecedented in the history of
literature and constitute a significantly novel mode of unnaturalness.
Furthermore the nonhuman narrators of both postmodernism and
the eighteenth century are human only insofar as they are able to tell
stories; generally speaking we can observe a high degree of “breast-
ness,” “treeness,” or, more generally, “thingness” in all of these cases.
In a sense the functions of these impossible speakers converge. Both
postmodernist narratives and earlier object narratives critique human
behavior by simulating a nonhuman perspective. They both reveal the
problematic ways in which certain human beings relate to their envi-
ronment or deal with others. Nevertheless these unnatural phenomena
also have to be seen in the historical context in which they were written.
While circulation novels are critical comments on the developing capi-
talist system and the commodity fetishism of the time, postmodernist
narratives self-reflexively comment on the potential destructiveness of
fictional narrative (The Breast) or reveal the human disregard of nature
(“Direction of the Road”)—a problem that people did not really focus
on in the eighteenth century.
The conventionalization of the speaking object and the development
of the circulation novel as a genre correlate with the development of
capitalism as described by Ian Watt (1957) in The Rise of the Novel. On
the one hand, these speaking objects can be explained as satires of the
commodity fetishism of the eighteenth century (reading strategy 6):
they are objects endowed with minds that critique the overvaluation
of worldly things at the time. On the other hand, speaking objects
can be seen as allegorical figures (reading strategy 5) that critique the
commodification of authors in the public sphere. In the eighteenth cen-
tury the question of literary ownership was hotly debated, and object
narratives might thus criticize the ways the market economy reifies
authors. As in the case of the speaking animal, the conventionalization
of the speaking object has been fostered by specific thematic interests
(reading strategy 4) but also the principles of satire (which involves
critique through exaggeration [reading strategy 6]) and allegory (where
narrative details represent different entities [reading strategy 5]).11 In a
nutshell the formation of the circulation novel as a literary genre that
we can now use in the context of reading strategy 2 closely correlates
with the development of the cognitive frame of the speaking object.
2.4. Telepathy and Other Impossible Instances of Mind Reading

The telepathic first-person narrator is another unnatural phenomenon
that can be found in postmodernist fiction.12 Some narrative theo-
rists argue that homodiegetic narrators are always bound by human
limitations and that they cannot transcend this anthropomorphic
frame. Dorrit Cohn (1990, 790), for one, argues that first-person
narrators are “presented as human beings with human limitations,
including the inability to perceive what goes on in the minds of their
fellow beings, to perceive what others perceive.” The homodiegetic
narrator is thus a figure “whose fictional ‘reality’ determines (and is
determined by) his imitation of real-world discourse” (790). Monika

Fludernik (2001, 621) goes one step further by stating, “It is not possible
to have zero focalization in combination with homodiegetic narrative.
Such a combination constitutes an infringement on real-life para-
meters, since the first-person narrator, as a person endowed with no
magic powers, is precisely limited to his or her knowledge and percep-
tion, and, except by infringement of these natural parameters, cannot
move from one locality to the next or from one temporal point to the
other, much less from one character’s mind to another’s” (my italics).
It is true that in most cases of homodiegetic narration the narrator
is subject to real-world constraints and does not know what others
think or feel, yet this does not mean that a first-person narrator who
can literally read other people’s minds does not (or cannot) exist. Fic-
tional narratives can easily infringe on natural cognitive parameters
and endow a first-person narrator with the unnatural powers that are
necessary to read the minds of others. As a matter of fact, character-
narrators exist who know significantly more than they could if they
were “normal” human beings living under real-world constraints, and
such narrators are unnatural because it is humanly impossible to possess
the knowledge that they possess.
What have other narratologists said about narratives that are told by
such unnatural first-person narrators? Gérard Genette (1988, 121) clas-
sifies them as forms of homodiegetic narration with zero focalization,
but he does not present any convincing examples. Henrik Skov Nielsen
(2004, 2013) and Rüdiger Heinze (2008), on the other hand, discuss a
wide range of examples of this unnatural mode of homodiegetic narra-
tion. While Nielsen explains this mode in terms of the impersonal voice
of fiction, Heinze reads them as violations of mimetic epistemology.
Following the work of Nicholas Royle (1990, 2003a, 2003b), Jonathan
Culler (2004, 29) refers to such cases as forms of “telepathic transmis-
sion,” and this is the approach that I adopt in what follows.
Rushdie’s (1981) novel Midnight’s Children, for example, confronts
us with a first-person narrator whose consciousness is significantly
expanded because the speaker knows more than he could if he were
a “standard” anthropomorphic being.13 This humanly impossible
narrator is called Saleem Sinai, and he is talking to Padma, his wife-to-be.
Sinai presents us with very detailed information about his “grandparents”
(Dr. Aadam Aziz and Naseem Aziz/Reverend Mother), his “parents”
(Ahmed Sinai and Amina Sinai), and his own birth (115–16). Abdulrazak
Gurnah (2007, 95) points out that Sinai “is born in the ninth chapter, 116
pages after his narrative began, so he had been absent from everything
he earlier described in such dramatic detail.” Indeed since the exhaus-
tive stories he tells us in book 1 cover the period between 1915 and 1947,
and all take place before (or partly even during) his birth, they are far
too detailed to be credible. In other words, these stories significantly
transcend the knowledge Sinai could have acquired about this period
by talking to others.
Defoe’s (1722) Moll Flanders also contains detailed accounts of scenes
that the first-person narrator has not witnessed, while Sterne’s (1759–67)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman starts with two
chapters that are set before the protagonist-narrator’s birth (and dur-
ing his mother’s labor). “Telepathy” does not account for the narrative
technique in these novels, but it is appropriate to Rushdie’s (1981) novel
because there it is thematized. As a nine-year old boy Sinai realizes that
his head is full of voices: “I heard, at first, a headful of gabbling tongues,
like an untuned radio; and with lips sealed by maternal command,
I was unable to ask for comfort” (161). Rushdie’s first-person narrator
functions like a radio receiver and can actually hear the thoughts of
others: “I was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up;
I could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will, switch
off my newly-discovered inner ear” (162). According to Royle (2003a,
105), “the telepathic . . . accedes to a new level of explicitness” in Mid-
night’s Children. What is more, Sinai even explicitly reflects upon what
he calls “the mental peculiarity” (Rushdie 1981, 167) of his “miracle-
laden omniscience” (149).14 He knows that telepathy is possible only
in the world of fiction and comments on it as follows: “My voices, far
from being sacred, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous,
as dust. Telepathy, then; the kind of thing you’re always reading about
in the sensational magazines . . . . It was telepathy; but also more than

telepathy. . . . Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called
teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within
my head” (166–67, my italics).15
Like the other midnight children, Sinai is born on India’s arrival at
independence from Britain, that is, during the first hour of August 15,
1947 (Rushdie 1981, 192). All of these children are endowed with magic
(or unnatural) powers: one of them (a boy from Kerala) can travel to
different parts of the country by stepping into a mirror; a Goanese girl
can multiply fish; another one is a werewolf; a boy from the watersheds
of the Vindhyas can change his size at will; yet another one of these
children can alter his (or her) sex by jumping into the water; the words
of a girl at Budge-Budge can literally inflict physical wounds; and the
face of a boy from the Gir forest can take on any features he chooses (195,
222). Saleem Sinai soon founds the “Midnight Children’s Conference”
(203) when he discovers that he cannot only broadcast his own messages
but can also “act as a sort of national network, so that by opening [his]
transformed mind to all the children [he] could turn it into a kind of
forum in which they could talk to one another, through [him]” (221).
Since the birth of these unnatural creatures coincides with India’s
independence the children’s supernatural powers seem to serve a
specific thematic purpose, namely as an opportunity for mutual under-
standing among different ethnicities, religions, and local communities
in the postcolonial age (reading strategy 4). All Rushdie’s midnight
children are hybrid in the sense of Homi K. Bhabha’s (1994) use of
the term; they closely correlate with what he calls the “Third Space.”
Bhabha argues that an “interstitial passage between fixed identifica-
tions opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains
difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (5). The “Third
Space,” “the in-between space . . . , makes it possible to begin envisaging
national, anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people’ ” (38–39).
Sinai describes the hybrid Midnight Children’s Conference in terms
of “the very essence of multiplicity” (Rushdie 1981, 223),16 and at one
point he even states explicitly that they speak from Bhabha’s Third
Space: “We . . . must be a third principle, we must be the force which
drives between the horns of the dilemma; for only by being other, by
being new, can we fulfil the promise of our birth” (248, my italics).
The midnight children, who are half human, half superhuman, thus
deconstruct the binarism of colonialist thinking that used to dominate
colonial India. This deconstruction serves a political purpose: it points
toward a better postcolonial future that transcends hierarchies because
it is based on the reciprocity between self and other.
Despite the high hopes concerning a form of common understand-
ing, the Midnight Children’s Conference remains but a moment of
miraculous potentiality. Later in the novel the group is threatened by
“fantasies of power” (Rushdie 1981, 223) from both inside and outside.
Sinai himself admits that he “was not immune to the lure of leader-
ship” (222), and we learn that the group “finally fell apart on the day the
Chinese armies came down over the Himalayas to humiliate the Indian
fauj” (247). Power relations gradually begin to destroy this platform
of common understanding, and Midnight’s Children ends with a pes-
simistic outlook due to the persistence of hierarchies and domination.
You-narratives present us with another fairly recent storytelling sce-
nario that is unnatural because it involves impossible mind-reading
abilities. In such narratives the “you” refers to a protagonist whose mind
is depicted in great detail by a covert narrative voice.17 You-narratives
exist only in the world of fiction; they are impossible in nonfictional
discourse because we cannot tell our addressees in great detail what they
experience, think, and feel. Helmut Bonheim (1983, 76–77) comments
on the unnaturalness of you-narratives in similar fashion: “If one tells
a story to a particular person who was on the scene of action himself,
the reader will naturally ask why the ‘you’ needs to be told what he
already knows. . . . Where the ‘you’ is the chief character whose actions
are described, it is difficult to find a believable motive for supplying
him with information which would be familiar to him.”
Fludernik (1994b, 460) describes you-narratives in the following
words: “Second-person fiction, which appears to be a prima facie fic-
tional, nonnatural form of story-telling, enhances the options already
available to conversational narrative and extends the boundaries of the

nonrealistically possible in emphatic ways.” In other words, second-
person narratives radicalize tendencies inherent in language and widen
the scope of what is possible in the world of fiction by moving beyond
standard human limitations.
Jay McInerney’s (1984) Bright Lights, Big City, for instance, confronts
its readers with a disorienting situation in which the “you” refers to the
story’s unnamed protagonist. The novel, which is set in New York City
during the 1980s, begins as follows: “You are not the kind of guy who
would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you
are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although
the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved
head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might
come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more
Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not” (1).18 This passage
immerses us in the protagonist’s concatenation of thoughts and impres-
sions. While the novel’s narrative discourse is clearly unnatural because
of the voice’s access to the consciousness of the “you,” the storyworld
functions according to real-world parameters. The novel repeatedly
stresses that, as in the actual world, its characters have no insight into
the minds of others.
For example, the unnamed protagonist has no idea why Amanda,
his former girlfriend, has decided to leave him: “You looked at Amanda
every day for almost three years and you don’t have the ghost of a clue
what was going on in her mind. She showed all the vital signs and made
all the right noises. She said she loved you” (McInerney 1984, 123, my
italics). Earlier the protagonist gets sacked by the prestigious magazine
he works for, and his coworkers wonder whether this could also hap-
pen to them: “They’re trying to imagine themselves in your shoes, but
it would be a tough thing to do. Last night Vicky was talking about the
ineffability of inner experience. . . . She said that certain facts are acces-
sible only from one point of view—the point of view of the creature who
experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever
wear are our own. Meg can’t imagine what it’s like for you to be you, she
can only imagine herself being you” (101, my italics).
Such passages, which occur within an unnatural you-narrative,
have a metafictional function: they reflect upon the possibilities of fic-
tion. More specifically they serve to highlight an important difference
between the real world, where we can imagine—but never literally
read—somebody else’s mind, and the world of fiction, where we can
easily look into somebody else’s consciousness, as Bright Lights, Big
City illustrates. Theoretically most of the novel’s sentences could be
transferred into the first person (in which case we would simply be
confronted with the protagonist’s interior monologue) or the third
person (in which case we would have a third-person reflector-mode
narrative or what Genette calls heterodiegetic narration with internal
focalization). However, it is noteworthy that the narrative sticks to the
second person. The “you” constitutes an element of instability, defamil-
iarization, and cognitive disorientation that draws attention to itself.
Richardson (2006, 23–24) notes a crucial scene in which the unnamed
protagonist reads a form letter by an insurance company to his former
girlfriend Amanda: “Let’s face it—in your business, your face is your
greatest asset. Modeling is an exciting and rewarding career. In all
likelihood, you have many years of earning ahead of you. But where
would you be in the event of a disfiguring accident?” (McInerney 1984,
37). For Richardson (2006, 24) the purpose of the you-form is to critique
the advertising industry’s obsession with the “you” (as in “Wouldn’t you
really rather have a Buick?”).
Bright Lights, Big City and its second-person form can thus be read
as a critique of marketing strategies through which companies try to
convince us in subtle ways to buy what they want to sell. This hypothesis
is corroborated by another embedded text that uses the you-form: “You
are the stuff of which consumer profiles—American Dream: Educated
Middle-Class Model—are made. When you’re staying at the Plaza with
your beautiful wife, doesn’t it make sense to order the best Scotch that
money can buy before you go to the theater in your private limousine?”
(McInerney 1984, 151). Matt DelConte (2003, 205) argues that “the novel
exposes that in the 80s free choice was illusory. Second-person nar-
ration exemplifies this cultural climate, for it manifests in narrative

technique the notion that someone or something outside of yourself
dictates your thoughts and actions.”
By extension I believe that the novel invites us to be critical of all
voices or ideologies that try to manipulate our thoughts or tell us what
to do. The narrative structure, which involves numerous voices that talk
to the protagonist about his thoughts and feelings, serves a thematic
purpose (reading strategy 4): Bright Lights, Big City is directed against
all manifestations of heteronomy. In this context the rather passive,
impotent, and, notably, unnamed protagonist functions as some kind
of antihero who is incapable of controlling the voices inside him. He
has neither any power over his being addressed as “you,” nor is he able
to “stop” the “treacherous voices” of the “Bolivians” (McInerney 1984, 8),
which tell him to take more cocaine. We also learn that inside of him
a “clownish alter ego” exists, “over whom [he has] no control” (131), and
that he is “a republic of voices” (6). Throughout the novel the protagonist
is manipulated by voices that tell him what to do, and he never man-
ages to reach a state of self-determination.19 Furthermore he is rather
isolated and does not speak to his friends, a fact that makes the voices
inside him even more powerful: “Your soul is as disheveled as your
apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don’t want to invite
anyone inside” (32).
The protagonist is a product or victim of the consumer culture of
the United States of the 1980s, where the culture industry and other
voices dictate existences from outside, and the novel is highly critical
of such forms of heteronomy. It is only toward the end of the novel
that things might begin to change. At the end the protagonist experi-
ences a spiritual rebirth. The novel’s final line is “You will have to learn
everything all over again” (McInerney 1984, 238). At this point he might
potentially transcend the state of heteronomy and begin to develop a
voice of his own.
Impossible instances of mind reading do not occur only in the
postmodernist cases I have just discussed but also in the traditional
omniscient narration of the realist novel in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries and the (third-person) reflector-mode narratives
of literary modernism.20 In both cases human consciousness gets
expanded to such a degree that the third-person narrator literally
knows the thoughts and feelings of other characters, and this accurate
knowledge of what goes on in “other” minds is humanly impossible.
Furthermore these conventional instances (reading strategy 2) of
omnimentality or mind-reading anticipate postmodernist modes
of unnaturalness such as the telepathic first-person narrator (as in
Midnight’s Children), second-person fiction (such as Bright Lights, Big
City), and unnatural we-narratives (as in Ayi Kwei Armah’s [1973] Two
Thousand Seasons).
As Käte Hamburger (1973, 83) writes in The Logic of Literature,
fictional literature is interesting and special because it can portray
consciousness, particularly the consciousness of “somebody else” from
the inside: “Epic fiction is the sole epistemological instance where the
I-originarity (or subjectivity) of a third-person qua third-person can be
portrayed.” Indeed narrative fiction is the only mode of discourse that
allows us to get accurate inside views of “other” minds. In this con-
text Cohn (1990, 785) states that “the minds of imaginary figures can
be known in ways that those of real persons cannot.” In reference to
omniscient narration and reflector-mode narratives, she speaks of “the
unnatural presentation of the inner life found in third-person fiction”
and the “unnatural power” of third-person narrators “to see into their
characters’ inner lives” (1999, 16n54, 106, my italics).21 Like Cohn, Marie-
Laure Ryan (1991, 67) highlights what she calls “the supernatural ability”
of third-person narrators “of reading into foreign minds” (my italics). In
what follows I first discuss the unnaturalness of the omniscient narra-
tion of realist fiction and then move on to the reflector-mode narratives
of literary modernism. As I see it, the modernist use of reflector-mode
or “figural” narration radicalizes unnatural tendencies inherent in
the omniscient narrator of the realist novel.
What exactly is omniscient narration? For Franz K. Stanzel (1984)
omniscience is tied to the authorial narrative situation. The authorial
narrator can make “use of his privilege of omniscience,” that is, the
panoramic or external perspective on the fictional world, and “has at

his disposal unlimited insight into the thoughts and feelings of the
characters” (114–26).22 Genette, on the other hand, equates omniscience
with “zero focalization,” that is, cases in which “the narrator . . . says
more than any of the characters knows” (1980, 189), or, more specifi-
cally, “extradiegetic heterodiegetic narration with zero focalization”
(1988, 128). For Genette the omniscient narrator exists in a different
fictional world than the characters do, and, in contrast to instances of
internal or external focalization, the point of view we are confronted
with is restricted neither to inside views nor to outside views. Let me
illustrate the unnaturalness of the omniscient narrator’s omnimentality
by looking at three examples from canonical texts.
Before the central protagonist of Henry Fielding’s (1749) novel Tom
Jones has sexual intercourse with Molly Seagrim, the authorial narra-
tor describes Tom’s thoughts about and feelings for Sophia: “In this
scene, so sweetly accommodated to love, he meditated on his dear
Sophia. While his wanton fancy roved unbounded over all her beau-
ties, and his lively imagination painted the charming maid in various
ravishing forms, his warm heart melted with tenderness; and at length,
throwing himself on the ground, by the side of a gently murmuring
brook, he broke forth into the following ejaculation” (Fielding [1749]
1974, 210, my italics). While a real-world observer present at this scene
would certainly be able to infer from Tom’s gestures and his facial
expression that he is happy (or perhaps even sexually aroused), this
human witness would clearly not be able to infer that his “wanton
fancy” is roving “unbounded” over Sophia’s “beauties” and that he
imagines her “in various ravishing forms,” while his heart melts with
“tenderness.”
My second example is taken from William Thackeray’s (1848) novel
Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, where Amelia Sedley thinks about
her recent marriage to George Osborne, and the omniscient narrator
renders her interiority as follows:
There were but nine days past since Amelia had left that little
cottage and home—and yet how far off time seemed since she had
bidden it farewell. What a gulf lay between her and that past life.
She could look back to it from her present standing-place, and
contemplate, almost as another being, the young unmarried girl
absorbed in her love, having no eyes but for one special object,
receiving parental affection if not ungratefully, at least indifferently,
and as if it were her due—her whole heart and thoughts bent on the
accomplishment of one desire. The review of those days, so lately
gone yet so far away, touched her with shame; and the aspect of the
kind parents filled her with tender remorse. Was the prize gained—
the heaven of life—and the winner still doubtful and unsatisfied?
(Thackeray [1848] 2001, 296–97, my italics)
Again, a human observer of Amelia would presumably be able to infer

from her looks that she is “doubtful” and somewhat “unsatisfied.” How-
ever, he or she would clearly not be able to see that Amelia experiences
some kind of split between the time before and the time after her wed-
ding. Nor would this observer be able to infer from observation that
she wonders whether she might have been too determined to marry
George Osborne at that time and that she is experiencing feelings of
both “shame” and “tender remorse.”
In my third example, which is taken from George Eliot’s (1874) novel
Middlemarch, the authorial narrator illustrates the thoughts and feel-
ings of Rosamond Vincy and Tertius Lydgate:
Rosamond thought that no one could be more in love than she was;
and Lydgate thought that after all his wild mistakes and absurd
credulity, he had found perfect womanhood—felt as if already
breathed upon by exquisite wedded affection such as would be
bestowed by an accomplished creature who venerated his high
musings and momentous labours and would never interfere with
them; who would create order in the home and accounts with still
magic, yet keep her fingers ready to touch the lute and transform
life into romance at any moment; who was instructed to the true
womanly limit and not a hair’s-breadth beyond—docile, therefore,
and ready to carry out behests which came from beyond that limit.

It was plainer now than ever that his notion of remaining much
longer a bachelor had been a mistake: marriage would not be an
obstruction but a furtherance. (Eliot [1874] 1986, 344, my italics)
Unbeknownst to Rosamond (but not to the narrator), Lydgate here

creates his own private fantasy of Rosamond’s perfect “womanly” char-
acter traits. In contrast to her, who is present at the scene but cannot
read Lydgate’s mind, the authorial narrator knows exactly what Lydgate
thinks and feels (and also how mistaken he is about Rosamond).
Rosamond is also totally mistaken about Lydgate, and this is again
something that the narrator knows but Lydgate does not. For example,
the narrator tells us that she “was entirely occupied not exactly with
Tertius Lydgate as he was in himself, but with his relation to her” (163).
Alan Palmer’s (2010a; 2010b, 65–104) analyses of Middlemarch have
a slightly different focus. He shows how the inhabitants of the town
of Middlemarch (usually successfully) attribute motives and states of
mind to one another, thus forming what he calls an “intermental unit”
or “social mind.” However, Palmer (2010b, 101) also shows that even
though Lydgate and Rosamond are interested in one another, “they
are completely wrong about each other.” This observation suggests
that, as in the real world, the characters’ mind-reading activities in
Middlemarch, a realist narrative based on natural parameters, can go
wrong. On the other hand, there is not a single instance in which the
omniscient narrator is mistaken about the minds of the characters,
and this is so because, in contrast to the characters, the narrator has
superhuman qualities.
Theoreticians such as Richard Walsh (2007), Gregory Currie (2010),
and Paul Dawson (2014) argue that novels like Tom Jones and Middle-
march are not narrated by omniscient narrators but by their authors,
who of course know what the characters think or feel because they
have invented them.23 From this perspective the alleged unnatural-
ness of omniscient narration disappears. Walsh (2007, 84), for example,
suggests eradicating extra- and heterodiegetic narrators in narrative
fiction: “Extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrators (that is, ‘impersonal’
and ‘authorial’ narrators), who cannot be represented without thereby
being rendered homodiegetic or intradiegetic, are in no way distin-
guishable from authors” (see also Currie 2010, 69). Similarly Dawson
argues that omniscience is best defined as a rhetorical performance
of narrative authority that invokes and projects a historically specific
figure of authorship. For him omniscient narration is the voice of the
author that exists alongside other authorial statements in the public
sphere, both of which contribute to the author’s cultural authority.
From my perspective the omniscient narrator is not identical with
the author. The former is fictional, while the latter is not, and we can
never know for sure whether the worldview of the omniscient narrator
(expressed in authorial asides and other statements) is identical with
the author’s world view (see also Stanzel 1984, 13). The author—as the
omnipotent inventor and creator of the fictional world—exists outside
of this world, while the omniscient narrator is one of several elements of
the fiction constructed by the author. With regard to omniscient nar-
ration, Meir Sternberg (1978, 255) argues that “the author interposes
another figure between himself and the reader, namely the narrator—
the person or persona that actually does the telling.” Like unreliable
narration, omniscient narration is a technique the author may or may
not employ. In addition the author (as the inventor) chooses paratex-
tual elements like titles and epigraphs, and he or she determines how
much space to allow the fictional constructs, that is, the characters
and narrators.
My view on omniscient narration is in fact compatible with the
one advocated by rhetorical theorists of narrative such as Wayne C.
Booth and James Phelan. They speak of the “implied author” rather
than the “actual author” because the former term “recognizes that the
same actual author can employ different versions of himself in different
narrative communications” (Phelan 2011, 68–69). In contrast to Walsh
and Dawson, the rhetorical approach conceptualizes the implied author
as being “outside the text,” while the omniscient narrator is simply
“one of the various resources that the implied author has at his or her
disposal” (68). Booth (1983, 160) points out that “there are many kinds

of privilege, and very few ‘omniscient’ narrators are allowed to know
or show as much as their authors know.”24 The omniscient narrator is a
fictional agent, and this agent has conventional abilities that are similar
to the ones telepathic first-person narrators and the narrative voices in
you-narratives possess: he knows the minds of other characters.
So what exactly is unnatural about these examples of omniscient
narration? I am only interested here in the omniscient narrator’s omni-
mentality, that is, his or her mind-reading abilities, and not so much in
the other superhuman privileges that this narrator typically possesses
(such as the insight into past and future or the ability to be at different
locations at the same time; see Rimmon-Kenan 2002, 96; Sternberg
2007). Culler (2004, 26–28) refers to this omnimentality in terms of
“the reporting of innermost thoughts and feelings, such as are usually
inaccessible to human observers”; omniscient narration involves “inside
knowledge of others that empirical individuals cannot attain,” so that
these narratives contain “things that no one could know—internal states
of others.” Sternberg (1978, 256) argues, more generally, that “the all-
knowing narrator is, and often presents himself openly, as an artistic
figure with superhuman powers.” Among these powers, Sternberg lists
this narrator’s “godlike privileges of unhampered vision, penetration
to the innermost recesses of his agents’ minds, free movement in time
and space, and knowledge of past and future” (257).
From my vantage point the omniscient narrator’s most important
power is the (humanly impossible) ability to penetrate the minds of
the characters and correctly report all their “secret activities,” which is
“something none of us can do in daily life” (Sternberg 1978, 282). Flud-
ernik (2001, 624) points out that “the omniscient narrator function in
fiction is . . . already a non-natural extension of the real-life schema of
historical narration.” She characterizes omniscience as “transcending
real-life parameters of storytelling” and thus speaks of the “impossible
possibility of authorial discourse” (1996, 275, 167).
Royle (2003a, 98–99) dislikes the term omniscience because through
its use “the force of what is strange or ‘unnatural’ . . . is at once norma-
tivized”; he prefers the term telepathy, which “calls for a quite different
kind of critical storytelling than that promoted by the religious, pan-
optical delusion of omniscience” (my italics). Culler (2004, 23, 32) also
feels that the term telepathy has the advantage of highlighting “estrange-
ment” and is thus “better attuned to the strange effects of literature.”25
However, the omniscient narrator is not only capable of omnimentality;
he typically possesses numerous other superhuman privileges as well
(see Sternberg 2007). I agree with Dawson’s (2009, 145) argument that
we may have “to continue using the term omniscience” because it “is
embedded in our critical lexicon.” Indeed I retain the term omniscience
for authorial narrative and reserve the term telepathic for the post-
modernist manifestation of the first-person narrator that can read or
hear the thoughts of others (as in Midnight’s Children). These two types
of narrative are linked because they both involve unnatural mind-
reading activities: the latter explicitly thematizes and literalizes the
conventional omnimentality of the former.
Traditional omniscient narrators do not usually thematize or reflect
upon their impossible mind-reading abilities. However, there are excep-
tions to the rule. As Richardson (2011, 27) has shown, the narrator of
Gogol’s “The Overcoat” is a self-reflexive omniscient narrator, who
points out that “there is no way to creep into a man’s soul and find out
what he thinks—an activity that the narrator has been performing all
along.” Most omniscient narrators simply take this kind of omnimen-
tality for granted; its fundamental unnaturalness is not usually spelled
out or commented on in realist novels.
Generally speaking the realist novel was a reaction to the romance
and the representation of supernatural entities.26 The narrator of Tom
Jones, for example, argues that every realist writer of fiction should
keep his story “within the bounds of possibility” and “likewise within
the bounds of probability” (Fielding [1749] 1974, 321, 323). For instance,
he dislikes “elves and fairies, and other such mummery” (322). How-
ever, the omnimentality of the omniscient narrator deviates from
these standards of probability and possibility: the authorial narrator’s
mind-reading abilities are not only improbable but also impossible;

they involve superhuman qualities and hence unnatural models
of representation.
Through these unnatural mental models the omniscience of much
realist fiction is connected with the supernatural entities of the earlier
romance tradition, in which magic figures prominently. For example,
one might argue that with regard to his omnimentality, the omniscient
narrator functions like Merlin in Sir Thomas Malory’s ([1485] 1983) prose
romance Le Morte Darthur. As a wizard, Merlin is of course capable of
reading the minds of other characters, such as Sir Ulfius. The following
passage gives readers a sense of his telepathic qualities: “Merlyn asked
Vlfius whome he sought, and he said he had lytyl ado to telle hym.
Well, saide Merlyn, I knowe whome thou sekest, for thou sekest Merlyn.
Therefore seke no ferther, for I am he” (34.I.1.15–18, my italics).
The idea of an all-seeing powerful God was still prevalent in the
eighteenth century. For Sternberg (2007, 687, 684) the omniscient nar-
rator’s “high epistemic privilege” is ultimately derived “from God’s
most suitable image as all-knower.” Randall Stevenson (2005, 317) also
argues that such a narrator was “appropriate in an age more attached
to the idea of an omniscient God” than we are today. However, the
model of divine omniscience is not so important in the context of my
analysis.27 Instead it is crucial to note that the omniscient narrator
correlates with the idea that humans would like to play God. Authorial
narrators are typically personalized ones, overt speakers whom we can
usually reconstruct as human beings with moral and sometimes even
moralist views. Hence I feel that the specifically human desire to know
what others think or feel is the ultimate basis of the literary convention
of omniscient narration.
There is also a close link between the unnaturalness of omniscient
narration and the impossibilities of the modernist novel. The third-
person reflector-mode narratives of literary modernism radicalize the
unnatural tendencies of omniscient narration and take the impossible
representation of consciousness one step further. Fludernik (1996,
167) comments, “The real break with natural parameters occurs in the
invention of preponderantly figural narrative, of internal focalization,
where narratorial knowledge can no longer be anchored in the pieties
of received morality and serves to replicate well-proven psychological
insights relying on everyday experiences and guesswork.”
What, then, is a reflector-mode narrative? Stanzel’s (1984) figural
narrative situation is dominated by the consciousness of a reflector-
character who thinks, feels, and perceives but does not speak to the
reader as a narrator. Rather the reader perceives the action through the
eyes of this reflector, and this veiled mediacy produces what Stanzel
calls “the illusion of immediacy” (141). Genette (1988, 128), on the other
hand, describes such a constellation in terms of heterodiegetic narra-
tion with internal focalization.
Reflector-mode narratives radicalize the unnatural tendencies of
omniscient narration because instances of mind reading become more
and more prevalent and typically dominate the narrative as a whole.
Once we have been inside people’s minds (as in omniscient narration),
the chatty and intrusive authorial narrator becomes dispensable as
a teller because he or she no longer has to overtly mediate what the
characters think or feel; this narrator can easily get replaced by a covert
narrative medium that allows us to look into the mind of one (or several)
reflector-character(s). In other words, “fiction at one point discovers
that it can not only present another’s mind by conjecture and a little bit
of invention (by a stretching of the imagination, so to speak), but can
present consciousness extensively as if reading people’s minds” (Flud-
ernik 1996, 48).
Modernist novels typically provide us with extensive access to the
thoughts and feelings of reflector-characters such as Lambert Strether
in Henry James’s (1903) The Ambassadors or Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s
(1916) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. My suggestion is that the
conventionalization of (humanly impossible) insights into the minds
of characters began with the omniscient narration of the eighteenth
century and was continued with the stream-of-consciousness novels
of the twentieth century. Even though contemporary readers found
novels such as Ulysses ([1922] 1984) to be deeply disconcerting, today

narrative techniques such as psychonarration, free indirect discourse,
or direct thought (i.e., strategies of mind reading that do not exist as
such in the real world) no longer strike us as strange; rather we can
easily accept them as parts of modernist novels.
The following passage from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for
example, renders the thoughts and feelings of Septimus Warren Smith,
a shell-shocked World War I veteran:
Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such
revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one
kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited.
He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped
Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing
its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there
is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices pro-
longed and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life
beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death. There
was his hand; there the dead. White things were assembling behind
the railings opposite. But he dared not look. Evans was behind the
railings! “What are you saying?” said Rezia suddenly, sitting down
by him. Interrupted again! She was always interrupting. (Woolf
[1925] 2000, 21, my italics)
This passage uses psychonarration (“a sparrow perched . . . , how there

is no death”), free indirect discourse (“she was always interrupting”),
and direct thought (“men must not cut down trees”; “there is a God”;
“change the world”; “no one kills from hatred”; “make it known”) to
render the character’s interiority. A human observer (such as Rezia, his
wife) would perhaps be able to infer that Septimus is preoccupied and
maybe scared, but this witness would certainly not be able to infer his
thoughts and “revelations” about trees, God, the world, and hatred,
that he thinks that the birds sing to him in Greek, or that he sees the
dead Evans.
When Septimus experienced the death of Evans, his commanding
officer during World War I, he must have lost his ability to feel and
consequently retreated into a private world of paralysis (Henke 1981,
15). He shows signs of posttraumatic stress disorder and suffers from
hallucinations: the birds appear to sing to him “in Greek,” and the
dead Evans seems to approach him from “behind the railings.” He
is no longer able to clearly distinguish between himself and his sur-
roundings. For example, he experiences an “ecstatic connection with
nature” (Crater 2000, 194), which is why he thinks that “men must not
cut down trees.” In addition he feels that he has a mission (“change
the world”), and, throughout the novel, he tries to convince everyone
of the necessity of universal love. Finally, he seems to talk to himself
until Rezia, whom he experiences as a nuisance, finally interrupts him
(“what are you saying?”).
Such passages allow us as readers to experience private or secret
thoughts, feelings, and psychological problems we do not normally have
access to. Through the character of Septimus, Woolf’s novel presents
us with a convincing portrait of posttraumatic breakdown. The nar-
rative also illustrates how the demands of patriarchy may drive a man
into madness and ultimately into suicide. In the words of Theresa L.
Crater (2000, 193), Septimus “is a failed hero. He has followed the pre-
scription for becoming a real man, and the results are disastrous.” We
are invited to sympathize with Septimus and perhaps even to under-
stand his reasons for killing himself. In other words, Mrs. Dalloway
provides us with access to the thoughts and feelings of this character
in an attempt to incorporate otherness and to elucidate psychological
processes and problems.
In some modernist novels it is not only the case that the covert
narrative voice can read the minds of the characters; the characters
can occasionally also access the minds of others in ways that exceed
real-world possibilities. For example, as C. H. Peake (1977) has shown,
the “Circe” episode in Ulysses contains the talisman “nebrakada femi-
ninum” (Joyce [1922] 1984, 521), which Stephen reads in an esoteric
book in the “Wandering Rocks” episode but never mentions to anyone
else. Later both Leopold Bloom and his daydream version of his wife
refer to this unusual phrase as well (“Nebrakada!” [1205]; “Nebrakada!

Femininum!” [949]), and this repetition suggests that—at least—the
minds of the two men are somehow connected. Bloom refers to Canon
O’Hanlon’s cuckoo-clock (1015), which is familiar to Gerty MacDowell
(823) but not to Bloom. How can he possibly know about this clock? As
Peake (1977, 268, 269n98) states, such textual passages involve a “form
of telepathy”; “they are part of a technique that makes no pretense of
being confined to the minds, the space or the time of the characters.”
Indeed they are unnatural interpolations.
David Herman (2011a, 8–9) disagrees with the argument that “it is
only in fictional contexts that [one] can gain direct access to the sub-
jectivity of others.” I argue, however, that it is only in fictional contexts
that we can gain accurate knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of
“others,” namely the characters. This knowledge differs qualitatively
from the kind of knowledge that we can acquire in real-world contexts
because it is epistemically reliable. Nevertheless I do not accept “a bina-
rized model that makes fictional minds external and accessible and
actual minds internal and hidden” (Herman 2011a, 9). We have access
to the minds of our fellow human beings through facial expressions,
bodily positions, gestures, the tone of their voice, and so forth. However,
since we have to rely primarily on hypotheses and speculations about
their interiority, we can never know for sure whether our insights are
correct or incorrect—and this guesswork is partly what makes real-
world interactions so captivating. Others may lie and we might not
realize that they do.
I take Herman’s point that actual minds are not totally “internal
and hidden,” but they are not completely “external and accessible”
either. The minds of our fellow human beings are accessible to a certain
degree, but theories of mind and folk psychology make them less easily
accessible than the minds of fictional characters. Herman’s (2011a, 9)
“scalar or gradualist model” is more apt, but it should take into account
the grade of difference between instances of mind reading in fiction
as opposed to the real world: while the former can be fully telepathic,
the latter can be only highly empathetic. I claim that the mind-reading
activities discussed in this section, that is, the cases of psychonarration,
free indirect discourse, direct thought, and the telepathic connections
between some of the characters, transcend real-world possibilities
because they involve accurate or successful (i.e., epistemically reliable)
representations of internal states and thus go beyond the speculations
and hypotheses that we have to rely on in the actual world.
Finally I would like to note that since the storyworlds of realist and
modernist novels by and large operate according to natural parameters,
they frequently represent characters as mistaken about the inner lives
of others (see Palmer 2010b, 101–4). By contrast the omniscient narrator
or the covert narrative medium in (third-person) reflector-mode narra-
tives is by convention granted full authority over the interiority of the
characters—various characters in the case of the former and usually
one particular character in the case of the latter. The telepathic narra-
tor in Midnight’s Children and the narrative voice of Bright Lights, Big
City literalize this convention, turning it into the focalizers’ unnatural
capability of correctly knowing the minds of others.
Even though telepathic first-person narrators, second-person fiction,
and impossible we-narratives constitute specifically postmodernist
modes of unnaturalness, they were anticipated by the omnimental-
ity we find in the omniscient narration of the realist novel and the
reflector-mode narratives of literary modernism. Like the post-
modernist cases, these earlier narratives confront us with instances of
expanded consciousness. Both the omniscient narrator and the neutral
narrative medium in the figural narrative situation are conventionally
able to accurately portray the minds of the characters. Hence readers
at the time had to stretch their cognitive frames beyond real-world
possibilities and blend human and superhuman features in order to
make sense of such narratives. Telepathic first-person narrators are
similar to traditional instances of omniscience insofar as a human
figure is endowed with superhuman qualities. The result in the first case
is homodiegetic narration with zero focalization, while the result in the
second case is heterodiegetic narration with zero focalization—to bor-
row Genette’s terminology. The “we” in unnatural we-narratives such

as Two Thousand Seasons also has magic power because it has access to
minds it cannot potentially have access to. Furthermore second-person
narratives are similar to the figural narrative situation because both
kinds of texts are reflector-mode narratives that use covert voices that
have access to the minds of the characters.
Despite differences among these modes of unnaturalness, their
functions converge. Our curiosity about the hidden secrets and private
thoughts of others is the ultimate root of such impossible instances
of mind reading. We would all like to know what our fellow humans
think, in particular what they think about us, so that the illusion of
penetrating people’s minds, albeit the minds of fictional characters,
answers a certain psychological need. To imagine a third-person narra-
tor who can read the thoughts of others involves a process of blending
of human and superhuman features and is motivated by the human
urge to know what others think or feel.
Granted, only some realist novels confront us with narratorial
omniscience while others are narrated in the first person. The con-
ventionalization of impossible mind-reading activities plays a role only
in the former case. Hence the development of the realist novel as a
genre was only partly influenced by the converting of this mode of
unnaturalness into a cognitive frame. Nevertheless many realist novels
use omniscient narrators. Fludernik (2010, 16) explains the cognitive
frame of the omniscient narrator through the process of blending:
“The familiar template of the omniscient narrator frame relies on a
blend in which the human narrator persona qua ‘his’ role of creator
acquires superhuman or divine abilities.” It is then only a small step
from omniscient narration to reflector-mode narratives. Once one has
experienced instances of mind reading through the authorial narra-
tor, one can easily imagine such instances without an overt narrator.
And this “extension of our readerly privilege to experience a fictional
persona’s consciousness im-mediately . . . helps literature to extend
the range of real-world-experience towards and beyond the limits
of human cognition” (Fludernik 2001, 626). The development of the

modernist stream-of-consciousness novel as a genre can be explained
in terms of the radicalization of the unnatural features of the realist
omniscient narration.
2.5. Summary
Postmodernist narratives are connected with earlier narratives (such
as the beast fable, the eighteenth-century circulation novel, children’s
fiction, the omniscient narration of many realist novels, and the mod-
ernist stream-of-consciousness novel) through manifestations or modes
of the unnatural. Indeed, as Ralph Cohen (1988, 14) argues, the forma-
tion of a kind of text “is determined by its relation to others. If writing
were always identical, there would be no kinds and no need for . . .
distinctions about whole works.” The representation of impossibili-
ties does not only connect postmodernism with well-known generic
conventions; the unnatural is also a hitherto neglected driving force
behind the creation of new genres. Its modes have largely determined
the development of English literary history. In a surprising number of
cases the conventionalization of impossibilities leads to the creation of
new generic configurations.
The development of the genre of the beast fable written in the man-
ner of Aesop, for instance, correlates with the conventionalization of
the speaking animal: if readers had not accepted the speaking ani-
mal as a possibility in this particular type of fiction, the genre of the
beast fable would not have come into existence.28 Furthermore once an
unnatural element has been conventionalized, it can be used for a dif-
ferent purpose, which typically leads to the creation of further generic
configurations. While beast fables primarily use speaking animals as
stand-ins for humans to mock specifically human follies, some circula-
tion novels and children’s stories focus on the suffering of animals and
use talking animals to critique cruelty against animals. Such animal
narrators correlate with a much higher degree of “animalness” than
that of the speaking animals in the beast fable. While the talking ani-
mals in the beast fable are essentially humans who are represented in
terms of one specific feature that we associate with animals, the animal

narrators in some circulation novels and children’s stories are human
only insofar as they are able to tell stories; otherwise they are animals.
Similarly the development of the eighteenth-century circulation
novel as a genre closely correlates with the conventionalization of
speaking objects. The humorous genre of the circulation novel con-
cerns itself with the adventures of nonhuman protagonists (such as
coins, banknotes, slippers, coaches, corkscrews), which travel from one
owner to the next through a corrupt capitalist society to expose the
commodity fetishism and vice of eighteenth-century England.
The omniscient narrators of much realist fiction and the reflector-
mode narratives of literary modernism also involve conventionalized
types of antirealism. Like wizards and witches, the third-person nar-
rators or voices in these types of fiction are capable of omnimentality;
they have access to the minds of other characters, thus attending to
the common human desire to know what our fellow humans think or
feel. In this respect these earlier types of fiction transcend real-world
parameters—just like postmodernist narratives do.
The speaking animals, talking breasts, telepathic first-person nar-
rators, and you-narratives of postmodernism do not constitute the
completely innovative and wholly unprecedented explosion of anti-
realism that certain critics (see, e.g., Benhabib 1996; Currie 2011, 2;
Federman 1975a; Lyotard 1997) consider it to be. Rather postmodernist
narratives are embedded into the history of literature. They hark back
to unnatural scenarios and events that have already been conventional-
ized in the context of the beast fable, children’s literature, circulation
novels, omniscient and reflector-mode narratives, and, as I will show,
numerous other genres as well.

3 Antirealist Figures
Paper People Gone Wild
3.1. Characters in Fiction and Drama

This chapter deals with unnatural characters in postmodernist novels
and plays as well as their anticipations by supernatural figures (which
stand above the laws and principles of the actual world) in earlier litera-
ture, some of the creatures in eighteenth-century satire (whose features
are so extremely exaggerated that they become unnatural), and the
various impossible characters in science fiction (which have to do with
speculations about what might happen in the future). Uri Margolin
(2005, 52) defines the term character as a “storyworld participant, i.e.,
any individual or unified group” occurring in a narrative. All of the
figures I discuss are storyworld participants that display physical,
logical, or human impossibilities.
Most existing narratological models have a real-world bias inso-
far as they treat literary figures as human or human-like entities (see
Cohn 1978, 1999; Forster [1927] 1954; Hamburger 1973; Palmer 2004,
2010b; Pfister 1988). According to Mieke Bal (2009, 113), this is so
because “characters resemble people”; we therefore often “forget the
fundamental difference . . . between human beings and fabricated
figures.” At first glance Russian formalists and structuralists seem to
move beyond this purely mimetic orientation by looking at character
as a narrative function.1 However, as Luc Herman and Bart Ver-
vaeck (2005, 70) have shown, “structuralism hardly knows what to do
with . . . non-anthropomorphic characters, which proves the extent
of its remaining anthropomorphism.” Poststructuralists such as the
later Roland Barthes (1974), on the other hand, subordinate characters
104
to the artificiality of the overall discourse. Barthes argues that it is
wrong to “to take [the character] off the page in order to turn him
into a psychological character (endowed with possible motives).” For
Barthes “the discourse creates in the character its own accomplice”
(178). He thus deliberately treats characters as segments of an artificial
creation or construction.
Scholars such as Mary Doyle Springer (1978), Martin Price (1983),
Daniel Schwarz (1989), James Phelan (1989, 1996, 2005), Aleid Fokkema
(1991), Brian Richardson (1997a), and Bal (2009) acknowledge the dual
nature of literary characters as linguistic constructs and imagined
humans, and Margolin (2005, 57) argues that these two perspectives
on characters are not mutually exclusive. Phelan (1996, 29; 2005, 20),
for instance, distinguishes among the mimetic dimension (character as
person), the thematic dimension (character as an exponent of ideas), and
the synthetic dimension (character as artificial construct) and maintains
that different narratives foreground different dimensions. This chapter
seeks to continue this line of research by looking at unnatural characters
as both artificial entities and imagined human beings.
Many unnatural characters in earlier narratives rely upon similar
“impossible blend[s]” (Turner 1996, 60) as postmodernist figures do.
However, these blends often serve different purposes. In many cases the
concept of the supernatural plays a significant role (reading strategy 2).
The term supernatural denotes forces that transcend the scientifically
visible universe and either belong to the divine sphere or the world of
magic (Richardson 2005, 51; Walker 2005, 329).2 Tzvetan Todorov (1973)
distinguishes three ways narratives may negotiate the supernatural.
First, in uncanny narratives (such as the novels by Ann Radcliffe),
seemingly supernatural events get explained as dreams or fantasies; in
such cases “the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation
of the phenomena described” (41). Second, fantastic texts (like Henry
James’s The Turn of the Screw) oblige the reader “to hesitate between
a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described” (33;
see also Durst 2007). Third, in marvelous narratives (such as the novels
by Horace Walpole), we have to accept the supernatural as a given. In
Antirealist Figures 105

such cases, “new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the
phenomena” (Todorov 1973, 41, my italics). Even though I believe that,
like Todorov’s genuine fantastic, the unnatural leads to an oscillation
between speechless fascination and the human urge to comprehend,
I deal only with the third case, that is, narratives in which the super-
natural exists as an objective feature of the storyworld.
In the words of Lubomír Doležel (1998, 116), supernatural worlds are
inhabited by “physically impossible beings—gods, spirits, monsters, and
so forth. . . . They are endowed with properties and action capacities
that are denied to persons of the natural world” (my italics). Nancy H.
Traill (1996, 9) also associates supernatural creatures with the “physi-
cally impossible.” This association is of course correct, but there is also
more to supernatural characters. The supernatural is an example of the
unnatural that has already been conventionalized, that is, transformed
into a basic cognitive frame. Today we all know that supernatural
forces exist in certain genres (such as epics, some romances, Gothic
novels, and later fantasy narratives), and the concept of the supernatu-
ral allows us to explain certain unnatural characters as pertaining to
the world of the gods or magic.
Many people in medieval England (and also in the centuries that
followed) thought that magic was literally possible or that supernatural
creatures (such as witches) actually and objectively existed. Robert
Bartlett (2008, 71), for instance, discusses supernatural creatures “that
seem to have been believed in by many people in the Middle Ages
but are not by many people in the modern Western world.” In this
context Richard Kieckhefer (2000, 29) points out that while some
medieval readers “conflated fiction with fact, others did not, and even
those who did often had moral reasons for wanting to set aside the
distinction and deal with fiction as if it were fact.”
From the perspective of a contemporary reader who has a rationalist-
scientific and empirically minded worldview, supernatural creatures
were as impossible in the past as they are today. Doležel (1998, 115), for
instance, argues that supernatural worlds make the impossible pos-
sible: “What is impossible in the natural world becomes possible in

its supernatural counterpart.” At a different point he states that “the
marvelous is the highest achievement of poiesis; it comes into existence
by a joint operation of the imagination and innovation” (1990, 43). Simi-
larly Monika Fludernik (2012, 365) writes that “for us in the twenty-first
century in the West at least—the magic or fabulous coincides with
the fictional.” Nevertheless, as fictional phenomena these impossible
creatures serve important functions in the literary texts in which they
occur, and I am primarily interested in revealing these functions.
In other non-postmodernist cases the concept of the supernatural
does not help us come to terms with the impossible. Alternatively we
can explain certain unnatural characters in the context of satires, that
is, as extreme exaggerations where grotesque images serving humili-
ation or ridicule merge with the impossible, or we can make sense of
them by activating our knowledge of science-fiction narratives, which
negotiate concepts of the future. In the case of science fiction we can
explain impossibilities through technological progress or simply by
associating them with a potential future.
3.2. Blends of Humans and Animals

Since, as discussed in chapter 2, speaking animals may serve as narra-
tors of stories, characters can of course also be human and animal at
the same time. In contrast to earlier narratives, postmodernist ones typ-
ically celebrate the “animalness” of their figures, which often represent
abstract ideas or concepts. Sophie Fevvers, the protagonist of Angela
Carter’s (1986) novel Nights at the Circus, for instance, is an unsettling
unnatural creature. She is “a fabulous bird-woman,” and we are told that
her “notorious and much-debated wings” are “the source of her fame”
(15, 7). Fevvers, who is half human and half animal, has become the
major attraction of Colonel Kearney’s late nineteenth-century circus.
When she spreads her arms, “her wings spread, too, a polychromatic
unfolding fully six feet across, spread of an eagle, a condor, an albatross
fed to excess on the same diet that makes flamingoes pink” (15).3
The audiences of her shows, Jack Walser (an American journalist),
and we as readers try to make sense of this unnatural blend of a woman

and an animal. People in the audience frequently ask questions such
as “How does she do it?” or “Do you think she’s real?” (Carter 1986, 9).
Walser too, who desperately (and unsuccessfully) tries to reveal her to
be fake, is confused about the fact that she has both arms and wings:
“Wings without arms is one impossible thing; but wings with arms is
the impossible made doubly unlikely—the impossible squared” (15). He
also wonders whether she has a belly button. However, her body does not
bear “the scar of its loss” (18). Nevertheless Walser initially believes that
“whatever her wings were, her nakedness was certainly a stage illusion”
(18), but he turns out to be wrong.
Among other things, Fevvers tells Walser that she was not born like
a human being but rather “hatched out of a bloody great egg” (Carter
1986, 7). Later the journalist learns that this winged aerialiste is not a
natural flier; she had to learn it step by step: “Like Lucifer, I fell. Down,
down, down I tumbled, bang with a bump on the Persian rug below
me, flat on my face amongst those blooms and beasts that never graced
no natural forest, those creatures of dreams and abstraction not unlike
myself, Mr Walser. Then I knew I was not ready to bear on my back the
great burden of my unnaturalness” (30, my italics).
The character of Fevvers is evidently diametrically opposed to the
Victorian ideal of the woman as the angel in the house. First of all, she
presents herself as an extreme feminine spectacle that involves a high
degree of theatricality: Fevvers wears six-inch-long eyelashes (Carter
1986, 7) and her face is “thickly coated with rouge and powder” (18). She
farts in Walser’s presence (11); she is a remarkable bodily and intensely
erotic presence (17); and she has an insatiable appetite for both food and
drink (22). Furthermore, as Abigail Dennis (2008, 117) notes, Fevvers
demonstrates autonomy and a sense of self-determination: “As a winged
woman, Fevvers is unashamedly aberrant, freakish. However, she is
also a desiring subject, and a self creation who chooses the ways in
which her unnaturalness, and her appetites, are performed, thus reject-
ing the victimization that normally attends freakishness” (my italics).
Following reading strategy 5 (reading allegorically), we can make sense
of the unnatural bird-woman in Nights at the Circus by approaching

her as an abstract idea or concept. Fevvers stands for the birth of a
new form of femininity at the fin de siècle, which moves away from
the unhealthy Victorian ideal toward a spectacle of bodily presence,
eroticism, appetite, autonomy, and self-determination. Indeed at the
beginning of the novel the narrator informs us, “We are at the fag-end,
the smouldering cigar-butt, of a nineteenth century which is just about
to be ground out in the ashtray of history. It is the final, waning, sea-
son of the year of Our Lord, eighteen hundred and ninety nine. And
Fevvers has all the éclat of a new era about to take off ” (Carter 1986, 11).
Similarly Ma Nelson, who runs a whorehouse in which Fevvers spends
her childhood, argues that she is “the pure child of the century that just
now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be
bound down to the ground” (25).
While Fevvers looks forward to an age in which “all the women
will have wings, the same as I” (Carter 1986, 285), Lizzie, her adoptive
mother, is more skeptical: she thinks that “it’s going to be more com-
plicated than that” and “sees storms ahead” (286). At the end of the
novel Fevvers finally decides to marry Walser and believes that she can
turn him into an appropriate companion: “I’ll sit on him, I’ll hatch him
out, I’ll make a new man of him. I’ll make him into the New Man, in
fact, fitting mate for the New Woman, and onward we’ll march hand
in hand into the New Century” (281).4 The novel is of course not naïve
with regard to the future prospects of this potential union. “Perhaps so,
perhaps not” is Lizzie’s response; she urges Fevvers to “think twice about
turning from a freak into a woman” (283).
Fevvers represents a new form of femininity, and her unnatural
anatomy is linked to this new notion in several ways. For one thing,
the fact that the aerialiste has no belly button suggests that she was not
birthed by someone else; rather she had to create herself. On a more
abstract level this bodily feature conveys the idea that women have
to accomplish the transformation on their own—they cannot rely on
others. Furthermore the fact that Fevvers had to learn how to fly sug-
gests that women have to make an effort to get used to their new role.
To put this same point slightly differently, the new notion of femininity

will not feel natural from the beginning; it will have to be practiced.
Generally speaking, in Nights at the Circus, the unnatural acquires a
subversive potential. The novel uses the impossible character of Sophie
Fevvers in the context of a feminist agenda to counteract Victorian
patriarchal notions of femininity and to take the idea of the “New
Woman” to new lengths.
Similar blends of humans and animals proliferate in earlier narra-
tives in the shape of monstrous species hybrids. However, compared to
the postmodernist cases, they involve slightly different input spaces and
fulfill different functions. These characters either constitute a severe
threat for humans or they are used in the context of satirical critique.
In the Old English epic Beowulf (ad 8–11), the eponymous hero, a
Geat, travels to the land of the Danes to help them fight a powerful
demon called Grendel. This figure fuses features of humans and sea
animals insofar as it looks like a human being but lives in a mere.
Grendel is able to bewitch (“forsworen” [Heaney 2000, 54, l. 804]) the
weapons of his enemies. Throughout the epic Grendel is described as
a fiend from hell (“fēond on helle” [8, l. 100]) or a dark death-shadow
(“deorc dēaþ-scūa” [12, l. 160]).
When Beowulf fights Grendel inside Heorot, the mead-hall of the
Danes, the monster is fatally wounded. Beowulf rips off Grendel’s arm,
which is then nailed to the walls of Heorot as a sign of victory. Later
another beast-like creature, Grendel’s mother, attacks the mead-hall
to return the arm to the swamps. Grendel’s mother also lives under
water, and she is referred to as a monstrous hell-bride.5 Beowulf crowns
his adventures by jumping into the mere in which these monsters live.
In an underwater fight, which lasts so long that a “normal” human
being would have drowned, he kills the mother and proceeds to behead
Grendel’s corpse. After this victory in the land of the Danes, the epic
hero returns to the land of the Geats, where he becomes king. Finally
Beowulf has to fight another supernatural creature, a dragon (“draca”
[Heaney 2000, 150, l. 2211]) that wreaks havoc on the Geats by breath-
ing out fire (“glēdum spīwan” [156, l. 2312]).6 In this battle Beowulf is
fatally wounded and dies.

Readers can interpret the mythic monsters and the superhuman
powers in this narrative as pertaining to the realm of the supernatural
(reading strategy 2). In other words, we can account for the impossi-
bilities in Beowulf through the conventions of the epic, which is about
“superior beings” who “show their mettle in battles against human foes,
monsters, or powers of nature” (De Jong 2005, 139; see also Hainsworth
1991, 1–10).7 Furthermore, since Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the
dragon threaten the Danes and the Geats through their attacks, the con-
frontation between Beowulf and the monsters is coded as an allegorical
battle between “good” and “evil.” However, as Paul Goetsch (1998) has
shown, Beowulf does not set up a simple dichotomy of good and evil;
the epic also highlights similarities between the hero and his enemies.
Beowulf and his opponents (perhaps with the exception of the
dragon) have both superhuman and human qualities. For instance,
Grendel lives under water and can bewitch the weapons of his enemies,
but he can be killed by Beowulf. Beowulf can remain under water for a
humanly impossible period of time, but he dies like a “normal” human
being. Hence one gets the impression that the forces of good (“se Ælmi-
htiga” [Heaney 2000, 8, l. 92], “Drihten God” [14, l. 181], “mihtig God”
[46, l. 701]) and evil (“helle” [8, l. 101] or “Caines cynne” [8, l. 108]) operate
in the background and speak through the figures; while Beowulf is
guided by the Holy God (“hālig God” [26, l. 381]), Grendel is described
as a death-shadow (“dēaþ-scūa” [12, l. 160]), and Grendel’s mother is
referred to as a bride from hell (“āglǣc-wīf ” [88, l. 1259]).
In the fourteenth-century romance Melusine, the female character
of Melusine is half human and half serpent because her fairy mother,
Pressyne, condemned her to be transformed into a serpent each Satur-
day.8 Melusine’s half-serpent body proves that she is an ambivalent
figure that belongs to two realms at the same time. She is not only half
human and half serpent, but she also oscillates between the forces of
Christianity, which are coded as being good, and those who “obeye the
comandements of the prynces of helle” (Donaldson 1895, 315). Jonathan
F. Krell (2000, 376) locates the character of Melusine between the world
of demons and the realm of divinity, and argues that she “stresses the

plurality . . . of human nature,” while John Heath-Stubbs (2001, 76)
considers her to be “essentially a benevolent creature, compelled to
become a serpent.”
Marriage can somehow limit the power of the supernatural and
potentially even redeem Melusine from her mother’s spell: “Melusine’s
divided being . . . may only be overcome through the loving trust
of a husband who obeys the condition not to see her on Saturdays”
(Saunders 2010, 189). Despite their agreement, however, her husband,
Raymondin, eventually decides to spy on Melusine and sees her monstrous
form: “Raymondin . . . sawe melusyne within the bathe vnto her nauell,
in fourme of a woman kymbyng her heere, and fro the nauel dounward
in lyknes of a grete serpent, the tayll as grete & thykk as a barell, and so
long it was that she made it to touche oftymes, while that raymondyn
beheld her, the rouf of the chamber that was ryght hye” (Donaldson
1895, 296–97).9
From this moment on, Melusine is doomed and will never be able
to leave her “abhomynable figure” (Donaldson 1895, 319) again. “Trans-
figured lyke a serpent grete & long in XV foote of length,” she flies out
of a window, “crying so piteously & lamentably, lyke the voice of a Mer-
mayde” (320–21). The point of Melusine’s supernatural spell imposed by
her mother seems to be to test Raymondin’s truthfulness and loyalty.
He does not do what he had promised, and this betrayal of confidence
awakes the evil in Melusine, whom he calls a “fals serpente” (314).
The romance puts the blame on Raymondin: he could have saved
Melusine if he had kept his promise.
The vampires of the Gothic novel also fuse humans and animals.10
Vampires like Dracula in Bram Stoker’s ([1897] 2011, 37, 284) novel
Dracula have “sharp, canine teeth,” which they use to turn humans
into vampires, and this feature involves a blend of humans and “wild
beasts” such as wolves or bears. Vampires are supposed to induce
feelings of fear and awe, and they are typically described in terms
“explicitly borrowed from criminal anthropology, degeneration theory,
and alienism, late-Victorian sociomedical disciplines that worked to
classify and comprehend the abnormal human subject” (Hurley 2002,

192). Like other supernatural creatures, the figure of the vampire is
associated with hell—it has “the aids of necromancy [black magic]”
(Stoker ([1897] 2011, 240). However, the vampire also correlates with the
idea of sexual transgression and might potentially represent venereal
diseases. One of the three female vampires at Dracula’s castle bends over
Jonathan Harker with “deliberate voluptuousness” (43), which causes
him to experience feelings of “languorous ecstasy” (44). Similarly, once
the innocent Lucy has been transformed into a vampire, she is described
in terms of “voluptuous wantonness” (215). The following encounter
between Mina Harker and Dracula is strangely reminiscent of forced
fellatio: “He pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a
vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands
in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck
and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or
swallow some of the—Oh my God! my God! what have I done?” (289).
An entirely different pre-postmodernist fusion of human and ani-
mal features can be found in Swift’s ([1726] 2003) Menippean satire
Gulliver’s Travels.11 The unnatural blends in this narrative are not
related to the supernatural but rather have to be seen in the context
of satirical critique (reading strategy 2). In part 4 Lemuel Gulliver, the
first-person narrator, travels to the country of the Houyhnhnms, where
civilized horses (the Houyhnhnms) preside over brutish human beings
(the Yahoos). The narrative reverses what Gulliver considers to be the
usual hierarchy between humans and animals (see 221–23); it presents us
with sophisticated horses that live in clean houses as well as dirty, smelly
humans who are “observed to be the most unteachable of all Brutes” (217).
The Houyhnhnms strike Gulliver as being “orderly and rational”
as well as “acute and judicious” (Swift [1726] 2003, 209). The first two
horses he encounters confer “like Persons deliberating upon some
Affair of Weight” and use “various Gestures, not unlike those of a
Philosopher” (209). As to the Yahoos, the narrator at first considers
them to be “Animals in a Field” and points out that he “never beheld
in all [his] travels so disagreeable an Animal, nor one against which
[he] naturally conceived so strong an Antipathy” (207). At one point

they leap up a tree and begin “to discharge their Excrements on [his]
head” (208).
While Swift’s humorous narrative can be seen as a parody of con-
temporary travel narratives (such as William Dampier’s accounts
or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe) and political and cultural customs in
eighteenth-century Britain, the unnatural blends of humans and ani-
mals may be read as ridiculing human nature in general. The Yahoos
highlight the potential brutishness and beastliness of all humans, while
the Houyhnhnms are far too arrogant, self-satisfied, and even brutal in
their treatment of the Yahoos to serve as a human ideal.12
In a sense the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms are closely related
insofar as the former openly display their beastliness, while the lat-
ter become rather beastly in the way they deal with the Yahoos. The
Houyhnhnms do not care about the Yahoos and are primarily inter-
ested in turning them into “serviceable Brute[s]” (Swift [1726] 2003,
240). For instance, they try to cure a somatically represented form of
depression through hard work. When a Yahoo “retire[s] into a Corner,
to lie down and howl, and groan, and spurn away all that came near
him,” they immediately “set him to hard Work, after which he would
infallibly come to himself ” (242). At one point the General Assembly
of the Houyhnhnms even debates the question of whether the Yahoos
“should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth” (249). In this
debate the Master proposes to castrate the younger Yahoos, “which,
besides rendering them tractable and fitter for Use, would in an Age
put an end to the whole Species without destroying Life” (250).
This context allows us to read the narrator’s judgment that the
Houyhnhnms are “wise and virtuous” and “abound in all Excellen-
cies that can adorn a Rational Creature” (Swift [1726] 2003, 271) as being
ironic.13 Through the figures of the Houyhnhnms and the way they treat
the Yahoos, part 4 of Gulliver’s Travels accentuates how civilization and
barbarism may go hand in hand, and can thus be read as a critique of
the idea of human perfectibility. J. Paul Hunter (2003, 224) also argues
that “the human refusal or inability to learn anything from past experi-
ences is a central issue for Swift.”

The physically impossible creatures, the Houyhnhnms and the
Yahoos, are a crucial aspect of the novel’s satirical critique, as are the
Lilliputians, who are about six inches tall (Swift [1726] 2003, 23), and
the inhabitants of Brobdingnag, who are about seventy-two feet tall
(83). Hunter (2003, 223) says of this kind of satire, in which exaggera-
tion merges with the unnatural, “Travel turns out, in this fictional
inversion, not to produce knowledge of alterity but of home. Imagin-
ing foreignness returns one to native, English issues and ultimately
to the self.” That is to say, in contrast to Traill’s (1996, 12) claim that
“Gulliver . . . enters the supernatural domain,” the Houyhnhnms, the
Yahoos, and the other impossible creatures of Swift’s novel actually
confront Gulliver with problems of a domestic nature, moving from
the general social order progressively closer to his own body and mind.
Science-fiction narratives are also peopled by blends of humans and
animals in the shape of aliens from outer space. Like the Yahoos and
the Houyhnhnms, these unnatural fusions do not pertain to the realm
of the supernatural: aliens are extraterrestrial creatures that live some-
where in the universe. Nevertheless, like their supernatural precursors
in epics, certain romances, and Gothic novels, animal-like aliens rep-
resent evil forces that seek to extinguish humanity (see Vint 2010, 138),
and the confrontations between humans and these aliens are coded as
allegorical battles between good and evil.
Robert A. Heinlein’s ([1959] 1987) science-fiction novel Starship
Troopers is about an interstellar war between mankind and the “Bugs”
or “Pseudo-Arachnids.” These extraterrestrials look like a disconcerting
blend of human beings and insects. Juan Rico (“Johnnie”), the first-
person narrator who fights for the (human) Mobile Infantry, describes
them as follows: “The Bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t
even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a mad-
man’s conception of a giant, intelligent spider, but their organization,
psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they
are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive” (134–35).
Each bug colony consists of a queen, a brain caste, workers, and war-
riors. These aliens have advanced technologies; even the warriors are

described as being “smart, skilled, and aggressive” (Heinlein [1959] 1987,
135).14 Given the description of these aliens in terms of “ants or termites”
and the argument that “they are communal entities” that constitute “the
ultimate dictatorship of the hive” (135), they might represent the ideology
of communism, which, according to the novel, has to be fought because
it seeks to destroy humanity. In other words, the war between humans
and aliens concerns an allegorical battle between the “free world” of
Western capitalism and “evil” communists.
We can make sense of such blends of humans and animals in
science-fiction narratives by imagining that these evil creatures might
potentially exist (or be discovered) in “the far distant future” (Jones
2003, 168). That is to say, the generic conventions of science fiction play
a significant role (reading strategy 2). On the one hand, the convention-
alization of impossible creatures like Martians or other aliens has to do
with the assumption that we are confronted with futuristic projections.
On the other hand, the development of science fiction as a genre went
hand in hand with the conventionalization of such unnatural creatures.
Today such “icons . . . are the signs which announce the genre” (168).
While Sophie Fevvers is a bird-like woman with wings, the unnatu-
ral figures in other narratives fuse humans with features of sea animals,
serpents, wolves or bears, horses, sheep, and insects, and they do so
to convey radically different ideas. Postmodernist narratives such as
Nights at the Circus and Angela Carter’s ([1979] 1985) The Bloody Cham-
bers celebrate the “animalness” of their characters, which represents a
new understanding of either gender or people’s bestial sex drives. The
monstrous hybrids in earlier narratives, on the other hand, represent
a severe threat to human identity. In these cases Otherness, that is,
“whatever is radically different from me,” is equated with evil (Jameson
1981, 115). Furthermore, in contrast to figures like Grendel, Grendel’s
mother, Melusine, and Dracula, which are all associated with hell or
the devil, the animal-like aliens in science-fiction novels are no longer
supernatural, but they too represent evil forces that seek to destroy
humanity; the threat is conceptualized as being universe-immanent
rather than transcendental. Generally speaking, non-postmodernist

narratives typically present us with a confrontation between humans
and animal-like monsters, which is coded as an allegorical battle between
what is perceived as being good and what counts as evil. An exception
to this pattern can be found in Gulliver’s Travels, where humans and
animals are fused to jokingly convey the potential beastliness of humans.
Throughout literary history “animalness” connotes evil or destructive
forces, while in postmodernist fiction animal features acquire positive
connotations so that they are embraced or even celebrated.
3.3. Dead Characters

Fictional characters can be alive and dead at the same time. As a matter
of fact postmodernist narratives teem with such ghostly figures that
act even though they have already died. Harold Pinter’s (1981) Fam-
ily Voices, for example, contains a character that literally speaks and
writes from the grave (see also Richardson 2006, 110). Pinter’s radio
play confronts us with three different voices: that of a twenty-year-old
man (voice I), his mother (voice II), and his father (voice III).15
The beginning of the radio play is dominated by the voices of the
young man and his mother, and we get the impression that the voices
relate to letters they send to one another. The son has left the family
and tells his mother that he enjoys “being in this enormous city” and
that he expects “to make friends in the not too distant future” (Pinter
1981, 282). He lives with the Withers family in an urban boardinghouse
and experiences a number of bizarre (perhaps sexual) encounters with
Jane, who seems to be Mrs. Withers’s fifteen-year-old granddaughter
(286–87), a man named Riley (289, 292), and Mr. Withers (290–91). The
young man’s mother is worried that he never thinks of her: “Do you
ever think of me? Your mother? Ever? At all?” (283). She wonders “if he
remember[s] that [he has] a mother” (286).
According to Steven H. Gale (1984, 148), Family Voices develops “a
picture of a parent and a child who care for one another and who think
about one another, but who lead separate lives and never communicate
their mutual thoughts and concerns, a fairly commonplace occur-
rence.” Indeed at one point the mother tells her son that she informed

him of his father’s death but is unsure whether he has “receive[d] [her]
letter” (Pinter 1981, 284). Later she asks him the following questions:
“Where are you? Why do you never write? Nobody knows your where-
abouts” (287). She announces that “the police are looking for [him]” and
that when he is found “no mercy will be shown to [him]” (295). Hersh
Zeifman (1984, 487) argues that “what appear to be letters are simply
voiced thoughts, not written down; or if written down, not sent; or if
sent, not received; or if received, not read.”
Pinter’s radio play reaches the realm of the unnatural when the third
voice begins to speak because this voice belongs to the father who has
already died. He reflects upon his situation in the next world as follows:
“I am dead. As dead as a doornail. I’m writing to you from the grave. A
quick word for old time’s sake. Just to keep in touch. An old hullo out
of the dark. A last kiss from Dad” (Pinter 1981, 294). The dead father
seems to write a letter, but he is aware of the fact that this ghostly kiss
will never reach his son. Family Voices ends with the following words
by this speaking corpse: “I have so much to say to you. But I am quite
dead. What I have to say to you will never be said” (296).
The dead father’s final statement suggests that we should say what-
ever we wish to before we die. Otherwise it will be too late because the
ontological gap between life and death cannot be bridged. At the same
time, Pinter’s radio play highlights that the dead father and the living
son are as disconnected or alienated as mother and son (even though
they are both still alive). Family Voices thus shows that if people do not
make efforts to communicate, familial relations can be dominated by
death in a metaphorical sense. At one point the mother tells her son
that he may be as dead as her husband: “Nobody knows if you are alive
or dead” (Pinter 1981, 287).
Pinter’s radio play shows how lack of communication in families
can easily lead to alienation and separateness. For example, the mother
states explicitly that after the death of her husband, she is “alone”
(Pinter 1981, 287). However, she felt alone and isolated even when he was
still alive: “I sometimes think I have always been sitting like this, alone
by an indifferent fire, curtains closed, night, winter” (289). Furthermore

the son was so alienated from his parents that he was not even pres-
ent when his father died (287). And even though the son at first states
that he has finally “found [his] home, [his] family,” and feelings of
“happiness” (290) in the Withers household, he later complains about
his surrogate family: “The only place where I’m not highly respected
is this house. They don’t give a shit for me here. Although I’ve always
been a close relation. Of a sort. I’m a fine tenor but they never invite
me to sing. I might as well be living in the middle of the Sahara desert”
(292–93). Taken together these statements suggest that miscommunica-
tion and alienation, which lead to a form of death-in-life, are inherent
dangers of all family constellations.
Hence, following reading strategy 5 (reading allegorically), Family
Voices can be read as a bleak allegory that highlights and simultane-
ously critiques the lack of communication and mutual understanding
in families in general. The unnatural character of the dead father
becomes the paradigmatic case of family communication in this sense:
he speaks without being heard by the others (see Morrison 1983, 218).
The fact that the individual characters lack names and are represented
only as voice I, voice II, and voice III casts them as common
voices that can potentially be heard in every family. In the words of
Robert Gordon (2003, 27), they relate to “the archetypal psychological
drama of the nuclear family.” Pinter’s narrative suggests that if we want
to avoid alienation and separateness, that is, forms of metaphorical
death, we should express our thoughts and feelings to those who are
close and dear to us—before it is too late.
Pinter wrote Family Voices as a radio play, which involves a purely
acoustic performance. Such a performance, which consists of noth-
ing but voices that seem to speak from nowhere, is associated with
the father’s being dead. In addition the idea of metaphorical death (or
death-in-life) is extended to the other two characters who are repre-
sented in terms of voices that seem to speak from nowhere as well. In
other words, the medium of the radio play performance is particularly
apt to foreground the unbridgeable (partly ontological, partly com-
municational) chasms between the three characters.

There are many examples of dead characters in earlier types of fiction
as well. The fairy world in Sir Orfeo, a romance or Breton lai from the
late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, features a whole gallery of
characters that have already died. In this narrative Heurodis, the wife
of Sir Orfeo, is snatched away by fairies as she stands next to a grafted
tree (“ympe-tree”): “Ac yete amides hem ful right / The quen was oawy
y-twight, / With fairi [i.e., magic] fort y-nome” (Laskaya and Salisbury
1995, 30–31, ll. 186–93).16 After the loss of his wife, Sir Orfeo gives up his
kingdom and withdraws to the forest, where he lives in a state of pov-
erty and enchants the animal world by playing the harp. Ultimately he
recognizes his wife in a group of “sexti levedis” (34, l. 304) and follows
them. By riding through a rock (“in at a roche” [35, l. 347]), he reaches
the fairy world, where he encounters mutilated characters that had also
been snatched away by fairies.
At this point we learn that being taken by fairies is equivalent to
sudden death. In the world of the fairies the dead continue to exist;
they are “thought dede, and nare nought” (Laskaya and Salisbury 1995,
36, l. 390). Even though Sir Orfeo is still alive, he is capable of literally
entering a world in which the dead exist in a form of living death:
Sum stode without en hade,

And sum non armes nade,
And sum thurth the bodi hadde wounde,
And sum lays wode, y-bounde,
And sum armed on hors sete,
And sum astrangled as thai ete;
And sum were in water adreynt,
And sum with fire al forschreynt.
Wives ther lay on childe bedde,
Sum ded and sum awedde,
And wonder fele ther lay besides
Right as thai slepe her undertides;
Eche was thus in this warld y-nome
With fairi thider y-come. (36, ll. 391–404)17

Alan J. Fletcher (2000, 141–43) refers to this list of characters as an
“extraordinary chamber of horrors,” a “waxworks of the undead,” and
a “medley of unfortunates,” while also noting that in most cases the
reasons behind the mutilations (and hence death) remain opaque; thus
“the gallery’s contents are the casualties of a baffling universe that obvi-
ates prediction or explanation.” Sir Orfeo manages to get his (dead) wife
(and ultimately also his kingdom) back by enchanting the king of the
fairies with his harp music.
We can cope with the dead (or undead) figures in Sir Orfeo because
we know that they exist in a supernatural realm (the world of the fair-
ies), which is an important feature of Breton lais (reading strategy 2).
Furthermore Sir Orfeo suggests that “sudden death might . . . be a
faery ‘taking,’ from which the longed-for beloved, like Heurodis, might
return” (Saunders 2010, 203). Indeed this particular lai seems to argue
that true love may lead to a return of the dead to the natural world,
while the fairies appear to primarily test the love of humans (such as
Sir Orfeo’s love for his wife) and may thus represent the inexplicable
forces of chance or chaos.
The worlds of Gothic novels often feature horrifying ghosts that are
also alive and dead at the same time. In Matthew Lewis’s ([1796] 1998,
141) The Monk: A Romance, Don Raymond encounters such a ghost,
“the bleeding nun,” who has “icy fingers” and “cold lips.” This ghost
is able to speak, but it looks and feels like a corpse. Don Raymond
describes one of his encounters with her: “I beheld before me an ani-
mated 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 hol-
low” (140). Later the “Great Mogul” asks this animated corpse, “What
disturbs thy sleep? Why dost thou afflict and torture this youth? How
can rest be restored to thy unquiet spirit?” (149). She tells him that she
returns to the world of the living because she has unfinished business
on earth that has to do with her burial. The “bleeding nun” argues that
she was not buried properly: her “bones lie still unburied,” and once
they are buried, she will “trouble this world no more” (150).18

Dead characters can also be found in Gulliver’s Travels. However,
they serve different purposes than the ones in the Breton lai or the
Gothic novel. In part 3 of Swift’s satire, Lemuel Gulliver travels
to the island of Glubbdubdrib, where the Governor is miraculously
capable of reawakening the dead. The narrator thus encounters
“Spectres,” “Ghosts,” and “Spirits,” and he can even tell the Gover-
nor which dead person he would like to interact with (Swift [1726]
2003, 181–82). Hence Gulliver meets Alexander the Great, Hannibal,
Caesar, Pompey, Brutus, Homer, Aristotle, Descartes, Gassendi, and
some of the “modern Dead” (182–84). In contrast to the ghosts in
other genres, the dead characters in Gulliver’s Travels have to be seen
in the context of the novel’s satirical critique of human nature and
the idea of perfectibility (reading strategy 2). More specifically the
reawakening of the dead serves to jokingly accentuate the discrep-
ancy between the ideas of “the ancient Learned” and the depravity
of the leaders of the past “two or three hundred Years” (184), which
the narrator represents as follows: “I found how the World had been
misled by prostitute Writers, to ascribe the greatest Exploits in War to
Cowards, the Wisest Counsel to Fools, Sincerity to Flatterers, Roman
Virtue to Betrayers of their Country, Piety to Atheists, Chastity to
Sodomites, Truth to Informers” (185).
While postmodernist narratives (such as Family Voices and The
Lovely Bones [Sebold 2002]) often contain dead characters that speak
from the grave (or from heaven) but cannot be heard by anyone, earlier
narratives depict more interaction between the world of the living and
the realm of the dead. In non-postmodernist narratives the living visit
the dead (as in Sir Orfeo), and the dead also pay visits to the living (as
in The Monk and Gulliver’s Travels). Postmodernist narratives often
use dead characters to address the idea of death-in-life, that is, the
question of whether we all are perhaps, metaphorically speaking, dead.
By contrast, the speaking corpses in earlier narratives explore the phe-
nomenon of death from the perspective of the dead who return to the
world of the living. In the case of Sir Orfeo, for instance, the return of
the protagonist’s dead wife is effected by his enduring love for her, while

in other cases the dead return because they have unfinished business
or seek to right a wrong. And the dead characters in Gulliver’s Travels
serve to mock the discrepancy between the valuable ideas of the past
and the depravity of the present.
3.4. Robot-like Humans and Human-like Robots

Postmodernist narratives frequently use robot-like characters to accen-
tuate the fundamental artificiality of their figures. Caryl Churchill’s
(1997) play Blue Kettle, for example, deconstructs our real-world knowl-
edge of human beings by confronting us with robot-like characters that
gradually lose control over their utterances and cannot do anything
about it. At first the characters appear to be entirely realist, but then
“intruding” lexemes and phonemes “infect” the dialogue and the fig-
ures. Blue Kettle deals with Derek, who fools a number of old ladies
(Mrs. Plant, Mrs. Oliver, Mrs. Vane, and Miss Clarence) into believing
that he is the son they had given up for adoption. Derek’s primary
motivation is to inherit the ladies’ riches: he tells Enid, his girlfriend,
that “there’s money in it” (46), and he also informs his actual mother,
who suffers from dementia and lives in a geriatric ward, that he hopes
“to be making a lot of money” (59).
All of a sudden the play’s dialogue gets “infected” by the words
blue and kettle, which function like a computer virus that destroys the
characters and gradually “eats up” the play as a whole. In the first half
of Blue Kettle, these words are used only occasionally. For instance, at
one point Derek states, “You don’t have to blue anything up” (Churchill
1997, 43) and, later, “So shouldn’t we talk to the estate kettle?” (45, my
italics). When Mrs. Oliver and Mrs. Plant begin to realize that Derek is
trying to fool them into believing they are each his biological mother
(63–67), these words occur more and more frequently:
Derek: Blue did blue you blue meet blue other. Blue glad blue all
blue blue well. Maybe it’s time to blue a move. . . .
Mrs Oliver: You blue who is this other kettle who’s played such a
big kettle in my son’s kettle. (65, my italics)

Finally phonemes replace the words blue and kettle (as in “How bl bl bl
this was bl son?” [67]), and the play ends in a very disconcerting way as
Mrs. Plant asks, “T b k k k k l?” and Derek replies, “B.K.” (69).19
Churchill’s play confronts us with physically impossible characters
who—like malfunctioning robots—suddenly and inexplicably lose con-
trol over their language, and the storyworld is then gradually destroyed
by intruding lexemes and phonemes. The most interesting question
that the play raises is where these words and sounds come from and
why the figures are gradually being wiped out. The intrusions clearly
highlight the fact that there is something wrong with the characters:
the linguistic deviance underscores the figures’ psychological deviance.
More precisely the characters go haywire because they all have a dark
side to their personality.
Derek is a liar who pretends to be the women’s adopted son, but the
women believe him because they have indeed all given up their illegiti-
mate sons for adoption. Mrs. Plant and Mrs. Oliver have consistently
covered up this secret, while Mrs. Vane and Miss Clarence simply did
not want to deal with children. Mrs. Plant was sixteen when she became
pregnant; she told her husband “all about it” (Churchill 1997, 40) but
has never informed the rest of her family: “The longer I don’t tell them
the worse it is” (52). Mrs. Oliver has never told her husband (42) or her
children (44), while Mrs. and Mr. Vane thought that an illegitimate
child “would make [them] unhappy” (48). Miss Clarence conceived
as a student but wanted to go “to Iceland for the summer” and “didn’t
like babies” (54).
Hence one can interpret the intrusion of words and sounds as an unnat-
ural version of the Freudian return of the repressed. As George E. Gross
and Isaiah A. Rubin (2002, 90) explain, Freud referred to “repression
when he spoke of defense, the withdrawal by the ego from unacceptable
impulses or memories so that these impressions or memories would not
be available to the conscious mind.” These impressions or memories
are typically “incompatible with the ego’s integrity and ethical stan-
dards” (90). However, the repressed can resurface at any moment. In
such cases “the previously repressed material that now commands the

attention of the psyche is the content of ‘the return of the repressed’ ”
(Greer 2002, 496).
The storyworld of Blue Kettle begins to dissolve as the characters’
darker traits resurface and become more and more obvious. Derek
tries to take advantage of the old ladies, but they do not have a clean
slate either: they have all lied about or simply not cared for their ille-
gitimate offspring. Since the Freudian repressed concerns undesired
psychological predispositions, reading strategy 3 (subjectification) is
helpful here. At the same time, however, the return of the characters’
repressed impulses or memories transcends the subjective worlds of the
figures insofar as it influences the play as a whole: the returned repressed
manifests in the shape of parasitic words and sounds that exemplify the
theme of moral deviance (reading strategy 4). One might thus argue
that Churchill’s play destroys itself as it reveals that its characters are all
morally deviant. They lack empathy and are driven by sheer egotism,
which manifests as greed for money or as a total lack of responsibility.
It is lack of human features that destroys the play’s storyworld.
While postmodernist narratives have a tendency to metafictionally
reveal seemingly human characters as paper people, that is, artificial
creations, science-fiction novels typically use technological innova-
tions to infuse inanimate machines with human minds. Postmodernist
narratives foreground the artificiality of their characters (for various
reasons), whereas science-fiction novels highlight human features of
artificial creations (which immediately evokes the question of the
beneficial qualities of technological innovation as well as the question
of what it takes to be human). In this context Lisa Zunshine (2008,
19) argues, “We remain . . . perennially titillated by robots, cyborgs,
and androids because they are brought into the world with a defined
‘function’ . . . and then rebel against or outgrow that function by seem-
ing to acquire . . . human feelings and emotions.”
The first major attempt to infuse mind into matter in English
literature can be found in Mary Shelley’s ([1818] 1823) Gothic novel
Frankenstein, where Victor Frankenstein creates a galvanically ani-
mated monster out of inanimate matter.20 Frankenstein begins by

collecting “bones from charnel-houses; and disturb[s], with profane
fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame” (91). Later he
“infuse[s] a spark of being” into this collection of organic material,
which is described as a “lifeless thing” (97) and “an inanimate body”
(99), until, finally, the “dull yellow eye of the creature” (97) magically
opens. One important question that this creation, which later on turns
against its creator, evokes has to do with the limits of science: Should we
create everything that can be created, or should there be certain limits
to scientific endeavor (see Booker and Thomas 2009, 5)? This monster
also raises the question of what it ultimately takes to be human: Are we
radically different from or somewhat similar to this creature? Lawrence
Lipking (1996, 320) puts the problem thus: “Is the creature a natural
man or an unnatural monster?” (my italics).
The mind-infused machines of science fiction are analogous
instances of animated matter and serve comparable purposes. For
example, Philip K. Dick’s ([1968] 1996, 13) Do Androids Dream of Elec-
tric Sheep? confronts us with humanoid robots (called “andys”) that
look exactly like human beings and even have a will of their own. They
are capable of escaping from (29) and also of killing their human mas-
ters (32).21 These androids are artificially created biological organisms
that mimic humans perfectly and even develop minds or conscious-
nesses. The novel contains yet another mind-infused machine, namely
the telepathic “empathy box” (21), a technological device that allows
the inhabitants of the storyworld to access the minds of others in
order to literally exchange emotions, which can then be felt by some-
body else (174).
This novel shows that humans are inextricably linked with technol-
ogy. The human characters in Do Androids Dream are dependent not
only on their androids and the telepathy box but also on the “Penfield
mood organ” (Dick [1968] 1996, 5), television shows, and vidphones. In
a second step the novel focuses on the two technologies that involve
unnatural blends of humans and machines (namely the mind-infused
andys and the empathy box) to illustrate ways technology might turn
against its creators.

In the novel’s postapocalyptic world of 2021, the radiation following
“World War Terminus” has made life on Earth so difficult that many
survivors emigrate to Mars or other colony planets. In this context
the development of androids begins: “Able to function on an alien
world, the humanoid robot—strictly speaking, the organic android—
had become the mobile donkey engine of the colonization program.
Under u.n. law each emigrant automatically received possession of
an android subtype of his choice, and, by 2019, the variety of subtypes
passed all understanding, in the manner of American automobiles
of the 1960s” (Dick [1968] 1996, 16). These humanoid robots were cre-
ated to serve as substitute friends for human emigrants on the colony
planets: a tv advertisement for androids praises “the custom-tailored
humanoid robot—designed specifically for your unique needs, for
you and you alone,” and defines it as a “loyal, trouble-free companion”
(17–18, my italics). Christopher A. Sims (2009, 75) points out that these
humanoid robots are primarily “an artificial solution to the problem of
human loneliness”; the androids become “substitutes for actual human
company.” At the same time, however, these humanoid robots, and in
particular the new Nexus-6 model, can turn against humans: “The
machine, by declaring its right to live as an autonomous self, challenges
the very categories of life and selfhood and, in turn, the ontological
prerogative of its creators” (Galvan 1997, 413). That is to say, the androids
have been designed as companions but could turn into psychotic killers.
Similarly the empathy box fosters feelings of empathy but can also
lead to forms of social disintegration. The empathy box is a telepathic
technological device that allows humans to “experience . . . others”
by incorporating “the babble of their thoughts,” that is, “the noise of
their many individual existences” (Dick [1968] 1996, 22). This machine
“creates an empathetic synthesis of every human mind” (Sims 2009,
80) that is connected to the system. On the other hand, the empathy
box fixes the characters “passively before the screen” and “serves the
purpose not of social solidarity but of disintegration” (Galvan 1997, 416).
Indeed at one point Rick Deckard, who works as a bounty hunter and
kills (“retires”) androids, notes how this new technology increasingly

alienates him from Iran, his wife: as she goes “over to the empathy box,”
he becomes “conscious of her mental departure” and “his own aloneness”
(Dick [1968] 1996, 176).
Like Frankenstein, Dick’s novel addresses the limits of technologi-
cal development as well as the question of what it ultimately takes to
be human. As I have shown, the mind-infused androids and the tele-
pathic empathy box can be seen as “a means to reclaim the essence of
humanity” (Sims 2009, 67), but they notably have a “dehumanizing”
(McNamara 1997, 422) potential. The novel thus illustrates that technol-
ogy in itself is neither good nor bad but ethically neutral. Furthermore
Dick’s novel reminds us of the fact that under certain circumstances,
technology might nefariously begin, metaphorically speaking, to
develop a mind of its own and dominate human life. Do Androids
Dream argues that it should be the other way around: humans should
always be in a position to control technological developments. In this
sense one can read it as an expression of what Isaac Asimov (1976, 63)
calls “the Frankenstein complex,” which denotes “mankind’s . . . gut
fears that any artificial man they created would turn upon its creator.”
The question of what machines can do in the real world ulti-
mately depends on the attitudes and values in the context of which
we approach technology, and this is of course a human question that
demands a “social, emotional, moral reaction” (Dick [1968] 1996, 103),
which, in the actual world at least, only humans are capable of. In other
words, we have to be alert to the potential dangers of technology, and,
among other things, this entails making sure that we do not lose our
human features by turning into quasi-machines in the process. By con-
trast, in Dick’s novel Rick Deckard, the android hunter, becomes rather
inhuman because of the cold, instrumental way he deals with the human-
oid robots in the context of the “Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test” (30), an
empathy-measuring test designed to single out androids (Wheale 1991,
300). Through his job as an assassin, “Deckard has become dehuman-
ized: a killing machine” (Booker and Thomas 2009, 225).
Both postmodernist and science-fiction narratives blend features
of humans and machines. However, the fusions function slightly

differently in each case and serve different purposes: while post-
modernist texts use robot-like behavior to self-reflexively reveal the
artificiality of their characters, science-fiction novels use mind-infused
robots to accentuate that technology might potentially develop a mind
of its own and turn against its creators. In the first case a seemingly
human character turns out to be an artificial paper being, while in the
second case an artificial machine is shown to develop human features
such as a mind or a will of its own. Furthermore, like technologically
manufactured ghosts, mind-infused robots centrally address the advan-
tages and disadvantages of technological progress. Interestingly the
destruction of the characters in Blue Kettle is rather similar to the
elimination of humanoid robots in Do Androids Dream. Deckard the
bounty hunter identifies androids on the basis of an empathy test; if
they do not pass the test, he eliminates them. Similarly Churchill’s play
destroys its characters because they lack empathy for others. However,
the eliminations occur in different contexts: in Do Androids Dream
we are confronted with a technologically advanced science-fiction
world, while in Blue Kettle the characters’ artificiality is self-reflexively
revealed.
3.5. Metamorphoses and Transforming Figures

In Story Logic, David Herman (2002, 116–17) mentions “an entire tradi-
tion of narratives . . . in which the individuals and entities concerned
are more or less radically altered by transformative processes in their
respective storyworlds.” The metamorphosis of a fictional character
can be found in Sarah Kane’s (2001) play Cleansed. This bizarre and
disconcerting play is set in a university that is reminiscent of a concentra-
tion camp. Tinker, who is a sadistic torturer, conducts the most brutal
experiments with Carl (who is in love with Rod) and Grace (who is in
love with Graham).22 At one point Tinker pushes a pole into Carl’s anus
until it emerges at his right shoulder (117); he also cuts off Carl’s tongue
(118) as well as his hands (129), his feet (136), and his penis (145). These
bodily mutilations are unspeakable (and perhaps unstageable) but pre-
sumably still physically possible.

We reach the realm of the unnatural when Grace meets her dead
brother, Graham, has sexual intercourse with him (Kane 2001, 119–20),
and, after a penis transplant by Tinker, literally transforms into him
(145).23 When the stage directions inform us that Grace “looks and sounds
exactly like Graham” (149), and we learn that “Grace/Graham” (149) can
also be seen by the other characters, we have to accept the fact that char-
acters can become somebody else in the strange world of Cleansed.
Other unnatural things happen in this play as well. For example, after
Graham and Grace have had sexual intercourse, “a sunflower bursts
through the floor and grows above their heads. When it is fully grown,
Graham pulls it towards him and smells it” (120). Later “daffodils”
suddenly grow “out of the ground. They burst upwards, their yellow
covering the entire stage” (133). In contrast to the real world, sunflowers
and daffodils can grow rather quickly in the world of the play.
The unnatural elements of Cleansed (i.e., Grace’s transformation
and the sudden growing of flowers) can be read as parts of an allegory
on the merits and dangers of love (reading strategy 5). In other words,
the play suggests that love always involves the possibility of redemption
but also the possibility of destruction.24 The final image of Grace, who
has become Graham and stares into the sun (Kane 2001, 151), in a way
summarizes the play’s potential message. On the one hand, Grace,
who can be seen as Everywoman, finds tenderness and affirmation in
the unity with her beloved Graham, but on the other hand, she has
completely erased her identity through her transformation: she is no
longer Grace. Furthermore one might see Tinker as an imperfect god
who tests the love of Grace and Carl, another version of Everyman, to
its limits. While the flowers in the play symbolize the redemptive power
of love, the bodily mutilations and transformations allude to the ways
lovers destroy themselves in their desperate attempts to reach a kind
of unity or become one with their beloved. And it is this paradoxical
nature of love that the play addresses.
The writing of Cleansed was influenced by Kane’s reading of
Barthes’s (1979) A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. In an interview with
Nils Tabert, Kane reports, “There’s a point in A Lover’s Discourse when

he says the situation of a rejected lover is not unlike the situation of a
prisoner in Dachau. And when I read it I was just appalled and thought
how can he possibly suggest the pain of love is as bad as that? But then
the more I thought about it I thought actually I do know what he is
saying. It’s about the loss of self ” (qtd. in Saunders 2002, 93), Cleansed
presents us with a very complex exploration of the ambivalences of
love. Transformations and other unnatural events show how love may
lead to moments of tenderness and affirmation but also to the complete
decimation of the self.
The metamorphoses of characters in postmodernism have been
anticipated by magic-induced transformations of literary figures in
the romance, the Gothic novel, and the fantasy novel as well as by
shape-shifting aliens in science-fiction narratives. Thus in Sir Thomas
Malory’s ([1485] 1983) Le Morte Darthur, a romance about the “matter
of Britain,” both the wizard Merlin and the witch Morgan le Fay use
their magic powers to change their own shape or the shape of others.
Before Merlin foretells King Arthur’s doom, he assumes the shape of “a
child of XIIII yere of age” and, later, “the lykenes of an old man of IIII
score yere of age” (55, I.10, 4–13). Morgan le Fay too can transform herself
and her horse “by enchauntement vnto a grete marbyl stone” (106 IV.14,
12–13). Earlier Merlin transforms King Uther into the shape of Igrayne’s
husband so that he can sleep with “Igrayne in the Castel of Tyntigayll” to
engender King Arthur (34, I.2, 36–37). Corinne Saunders (2009, 210–11)
associates Merlin with white and Morgan le Fay with black magic: Mer-
lin “voices and orchestrates the workings of Christian destiny,” while
Morgan le Fay is associated with “the dark, demonic side of magic.”25
The world of this romance is “caught up in the struggle of good and evil,
which is constantly re-enacted in symbolic terms.” Furthermore “the
supernatural becomes a way of testing and shaping individual chivalric
identity in ways that go far beyond the physical” (212).26
Metamorphoses through black or white magic also occur in other
genres. For example, if he chooses to, the evil Count Dracula in Stoker’s
([1897] 2011, 242, 280) (Gothic) novel can “transform himself to wolf,” can
be a bat, and “can come as mist” or fly like a “ghost.” The supernatural

character of Beorn in J. R. R. Tolkien’s ([1937] 1966, 119, 126) fantasy
novel The Hobbit is not only capable of talking to animals; he can also
change his appearance from the form of a very large man into that of
a huge black bear (119). Beorn is a well-meaning and occasionally even
jolly character but can easily turn into a berserker in battle. He is con-
nected with nature (and thus he never eats meat), and in contrast to
Dracula’s powers, his magical power seems to be an example of white
magic (Saunders 2009, 264) because he helps the “good” characters,
Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf, reclaim the Lonely Mountain.27
Some science-fiction narratives contain characters who are shape-
shifting aliens; they can turn into humans and thereby try to gradually
extinguish humanity. Such aliens are not represented as conventional
supernatural phenomena; rather they are an aspect of the speculative
projections of science fiction. In John W. Campbell’s ([1938] 1948, 34)
novella “Who Goes There?,” scientific researchers in an Antarctic camp
discover an alien that can assume the shape and personality of every
creature it devours: “It can imitate anything—that is, become anything.”
We also learn that “it has no natural enemies, because it becomes what-
ever it wants to” (34), and it also has no will: “It doesn’t fight. I don’t think
it ever fights. It must be a peaceable thing, in its own—inimitable—
way. It never had to, because it always gained its end otherwise” (56).
The researchers then have to deal with an increasing sense of paranoia
because, theoretically, everyone at the camp could have been devoured
and replaced by the alien. Hence they are never sure whether the human
being before them is the original person or the transformed alien, and
the most pressing question in the camp becomes “Is that man next to
me an inhuman monster?” (64). The shape-shifting alien constitutes
a severe threat to the identity and sense of individuality of the crew
members. One can thus read this short story as an allegorical confron-
tation between the crew’s scientific (and rational) individualism, which
is coded as being good, and the monster’s irrational selflessness, which is
coded as being evil (see De Villo 1988, 182).28
As in postmodernist narratives, characters in earlier narratives can
turn into other entities. While postmodernist transformations reflect

upon the instability of the traditional human subject and negotiate
the potential dangers of love (Cleansed) or the posthuman condition
(Gravity’s Rainbow [Pynchon 1973]), the metamorphoses in the romance
have to do with supernatural creatures that represent the forces of good
or evil; figures are typically transformed through the workings of (wish-
fulfilling) white or (fearful) black magic. In the romance “it is intention
rather than absolute difference in kind that defines the difference between
the arts of white and black magic. The distinction, however, is compli-
cated by the fact that intention itself . . . may be misguided or go awry”
(Saunders 2009, 264). In the twentieth century, on the other hand, the
unnatural transformations of characters can no longer be explained as
effected by supernatural means (even though they are structurally simi-
lar, or perhaps even identical, to magic ones); the shape-shifting aliens in
science-fiction texts pose a severe threat to human identity because they
try to eliminate mankind.
3.6. Multiple Coexisting Versions of the Same Character

Characters in postmodernist narratives may also diverge from real-
world individuals insofar as they appear in multiple coexisting versions.
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s (1959) novel Dans le labyrinthe, for instance,
attacks the idea of the singularity of character through the elabora-
tion of numerous conflicting narrative threads. The character of Jip
‘n’ Zab in Christine Brooke-Rose’s (1986, 7) novel Xorandor suggests
a similar splitting of identities as he says, “One, it’s important to be
two,” while the character of Xor7 becomes multiple, fusing a computer
with the fictional character of Lady Macbeth whose lines it picks up
and plays back.
Such narratives can be read as allegories on postmodernist identity
constructions (reading strategy 5): they use coexisting character ver-
sions to celebrate the multiplicity of conflicting roles that the subject
can assume at different points in time in the multifaceted posthuman
world in which we live. Similarly Thomas Docherty (1991, 180) speaks
of “the multiplication of identities and the consequent fragmentation
of the phenomenological subject-position.” Martin Crimp’s (1997) play

Attempts on Her Life also urges us to accept a situation in which the
same character splits into various versions, which are, at least partly,
mutually incompatible. However, Crimp’s play does not celebrate these
coexisting versions; rather Attempts on Her Life illustrates that, despite
the seeming multiplicity or heterogeneity, all the projected scenarios
involve power relations that have to do with the globalized market
economy.
“Anne,” who is sometimes called “Anya” (Crimp 1997, 215–19), “Annie”
(225–28, 246–48), “Anny” (234–39), or “Annushka” (260), assumes
numerous identities and lives in several different locations. Among
other things, she is an old man’s lover (208–14); the inhabitant of a
valley in which “the women have been raped” and “the children . . .
disemboweled” (216) during a civil war; a naïve consumer (221–22); an
actress (223–24); a hectic traveler of the world (225–33); a car (234–39); a
nuclear physicist who speaks five languages (240); an international ter-
rorist (229, 241–44); a suicidal installation artist (249–56); a mind used
by alien life forces (262); the girl next door (263–65); and an underage
porno actress (269–77). Anne comments on herself by stating that she
is “not a real character like you get in a book or on tv” (229).
The play also alludes to the context of the globalized world by pre-
senting us with numerous settings in various different countries (Crimp
1997, 208–9, 221, 227, 230, 237, 279–80) and by having some statements in
the play translated into other languages (234–39, 269–77). There is also
an assortment of disembodied voices that construct seventeen different
versions of Anne. Following reading strategy 3 (subjectification), we can
explicate these versions as visions or options of what might have hap-
pened. These voices do not belong to any real characters with names;
rather they are represented as dashes: “A dash (—) at the beginning of
a line indicates a change of speaker” (202). Mary Luckhurst (2003, 51)
thus points out that “in addition to the complication of ‘Anne,’ Crimp’s
renunciation of the convention of characters with designated lines also
serves to destabilise attempts at interpretation.”
According to David Barnett (2008, 18), the seventeen scenarios of
Attempts on Her Life are completely unrelated: “The various Annes

that emerge are not just contradictory but seemingly entirely dif-
ferent people.” In other words, the numerous identities of Anne are
characterized by “multiplicity” and “non-integration” just like the
globalized world as described by Ulrich Beck (2000).29 One interpre-
tive option would of course be to read this dizzying diversification
of Anne along the lines of postmodernist narratives such as Dans le
labyrinthe or Xorandor, that is, as a celebration of “all the things
that anne can be” (Crimp 1997, 223–24), which involves the idea
that the multifaceted new world society finally enables us to assume
different identities that were “previously frozen” (284).
However, this seeming multifariousness actually covers up the fact
that the individual scenarios are structured in exactly the same way. The
voices always project certain ideas and fantasies onto Anne, and they
often use “the same syntactical and poetic rhythms” (Luckhurst 2003,
55) to do so. Furthermore the scenarios in the play are not presented
as liberating options; rather they all involve power and domination.
In each case the disembodied voices, which are reminiscent of an
advertising agency or a film crew and thus represent powerful societal
institutions, force Anne into a role whose plausibility is determined by
the question of whether the result would sell (as a film or an ad): they
always “need to go for the sexiest scenario” (Crimp 1997, 224). Anne is
constantly in an inferior position insofar as her identity is defined and
constructed by others.
In each scenario Anne is interpellated by the same ideology in
Althusser’s (1984) sense. For Althusser ideologies are imaginary “world
outlooks” that do not “correspond to reality” and always exist “in an
apparatus, and its practice, or practices” (36–40). Stuart Hall (1985, 106–9)
continues this line of thought, pointing out that we are usually unaware
of the workings of ideology and (wrongly) assume that we are free
subjects: “We experience ideology as if it emanates freely and spon-
taneously from within us, as if we were its free subjects, ‘working by
ourselves.’ Actually, we are spoken by and spoken for, in the ideological
discourses which await us even at our birth, into which we are born
and find our place.”

This predicament is staged in the play, where Anne is indeed spo-
ken by and spoken for by an ideological discourse. Ideology uses her
“without her . . . knowledge” (Crimp 1997, 262), just like the aliens
use the mind of Anne in scenario 13. Indeed Richardson (2007, 63)
describes the play “as an account of the ways in which subjectivity is
constructed by the discourse that surrounds it.”30 The play’s identity
constructions are dominated by the ideas and principles of the global-
ized market economy which goes hand in hand with the exploitation
of women: “With the globalisation of the markets the international
commodification of women is now a greater phenomenon than ever
before” (Luckhurst 2003, 54).
Attempts on Her Life can be read as an allegory on the objectifica-
tion of women in the globalized world (reading strategy 5). The play
critiques the subjection and exploitation of women through the global-
ized markets, and the individual scenarios are manifestations of this
tendency. To put this point slightly differently, the play uses the vari-
ous visions of Anne, which are projected by nameless representatives
of powerful institutions, to reveal the hidden uniformity behind the
promises of diversity in the age of globalization.
For example, in the episode “Pornó,” Anne is an underage second- or
third-world porn actress (“fourteen perhaps or younger still” [Crimp
1997, 269]), and her lines, presumably given to her by her producers,
systematically play down the exploitative and brutal nature of the glo-
balized porn industry:
—She’s always in control of everything that happens. . . .

—Even when it looks violent or dangerous. . . .
—Which it is not. . . .
—( faint laugh) Obviously. . . .
—Porno is building up for her the kind of security and indepen-
dence many women would envy. . . .
—Porno . . . is actually a way of taking control. (269–71)

When Anne is supposed to state that the scenario “of the drugged and
desensitised child . . . humiliated . . . and then photographed or filmed
without her knowledge . . . is a ludicrous caricature” (272), she refuses
to go on and says, “I can’t” (273). Her act of rebellion suggests that there
might be some truth to this scenario after all, though she is supposed
to reject it. However, the trivializing discourse, which promotes the
idea of the alleged harmlessness of pornography to the viewer as well
as of the ongoing sexploitation of girls and women, simply continues
as “another speaker takes over” while Anne “is revived” (273):
—Everything is provided for her needs. Including a regular

education. . . .
—By age twenty-one the best years of her life will still be ahead
of her. . . .
— . . . and she’ll have money in the bank from Porno. . . .
—Not everyone has this start in life. . . .
—Or her opportunities. (273)
The objectification of women is also accentuated in the episode “The

Camera Loves You,” in which the voices turn Anne into “a commodity,
fetishizing her as the object that fills them with all kinds of narcissistic
satisfactions” (Escoda Agustí 2005, 107–8). The entire scenario (like
all the others) is based on the idea that the final product has to be as
attractive as possible. This idea is conveyed by clichéd statements
such as the following:
—We need to feel what we’re seeing is real. . . .

—We’re talking reality. We’re talking humanity. . . .
—We need to go for the sexiest scenario. (Crimp 1997, 223)
It should come as no surprise that this permanent subjection leads to

feelings of emptiness on the part of Anne. At one point she states that
everything she values has been destroyed “in the name . . . of business
and . . . of laissez-faire”; “in the name of . . . rationalization and . . . of

enterprise”; “in the name of . . . so-called individualism and . . . of
so-called choice” (Crimp 1997, 212). Later Anne even states that she feels
“like a screen . . . where everything from the front looks real and alive,
but round the back there’s just dust and a few wires” (229).
Even the rebellion of Anne as an international terrorist gets absorbed
by the logic of the market and the question of how to sell it to a large
audience. The phrase international terrorism is followed by the trade-
mark sign (Crimp 1997, 241), just like “Fantasy Barbie,” “Fantasy Ken”
(241), “Minnie Mouse” (242), “Diet Pepsi” (243), Vogue (244), and even
“God” (242). Anne appeared twice on the cover of Vogue magazine,
“sold the film rights [of her life story] for two and a half million . . . US
dollars,” and listens obsessively to the media coverage of the “outrage”
caused by her terrorist acts (244). International terrorism is here turned
into yet another consumer product, just like the suicide installations in
scenario 11.
The objectification of Anne reaches a culmination point in the
episode “The New Anny,” in which she literally features as an object,
namely a new car that, not surprisingly, has to be presented in such a
way as to attract as many buyers as possible:
—The car twists along the Mediterranean road. . . .

—It hugs the bends between the picturesque hillside villages. . . .
—The sun gleams on the aerodynamic body. . . .
—The aerodynamic body of the new Anny. (Crimp 1997, 234)
Thus the seemingly diverse—and partly mutually exclusive—

scenarios in Attempts on Her Life all follow the same principle. In each
case the seductive end product has to sell to as many consumers as
possible, and the marketing strategy is shown to involve the subjection,
objectification, and exploitation of women. The construction of “the
sexiest scenario” (Crimp 1997, 223) goes hand in hand with the destruc-
tion of Anne, a kind of Everywoman that represents the female self in
the globalized world. This ambivalent wavering between construction
and destruction is also nicely captured in the play’s title: “attempts

on her life” implies attempts at narration and construction, but it also
suggests suicide and annihilation.
Crimp’s play looks at the darker sides of the globalized world.
It uses the unnatural to draw our attention to forms of repression
behind the alluring promises of multifariousness, individualism,
and choice. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (2002, 217)
have attempted to explain “why humanity, instead of entering a truly
human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.” They argue
that the Enlightenment, which promised liberation through reason, is
a deeply ambivalent phenomenon that ultimately reverts to bondage
and domination: “Since the beginnings of history, liberation from the
compulsions of external nature has been achieved only by introduc-
ing a power relation of second degree” (218). Along the same lines
Attempts on Her Life points to hidden forms of repression in the new
world society. The process of globalization emerges as yet another
example of the dialectic of Enlightenment that promises liberation
but results in repression.
While postmodernist narratives such as Attempts on Her Life,
Dans le labyrinthe, and Xorandor use coexisting character versions
to negotiate the complex and contradictory position of the subject in
the posthuman age, science-fiction novels often use technologically
manufactured character duplicates to discuss the advantages and dis-
advantages of technological progress.31 Such duplicates anticipate what
Docherty (1991, 180) calls “the multiplication of identities and the con-
sequent fragmentation of the phenomenological subject-position” in
postmodernist narratives.
Damon Knight’s ([1959] 1965, 6) novel A for Anything confronts us
with the invention of a “gismo,” that is, “a duplicating device ”
that “will duplicate anything— even another gismo. ”
Through this technological invention the novel’s storyworld is popu-
lated with numerous character duplicates. Similarly in Algis Budrys’s
([1960] 1977, 6) novel Rogue Moon, Dr. Edward Hawks has designed a
“matter transmitter” that can send people (and objects) to the moon.
More specifically this teleportative device disassembles the person

and “send[s] a message to a receiver telling it how to put [the person]
together again” (64). This person is “an exact duplicate of the original”
(65). In other words, the replication concerns the “body, complete with
brain cells duplicating the arrangement and electrical capacities of the
brain” (65). Two copies of the original person are created: the scan sig-
nal is sent to a receiver in Hawks’s laboratory on Earth and to another
receiver on the moon (92–93). The original person is destroyed; the
Earthbound copy is placed in a state of sensory deprivation and will
“live as though in the . . . brain [of the duplicate on the moon], and his
organic structure will record whatever sensory perception the . . . body
[on the moon] conveys to its brain” (95).
Even though these coexisting characters “are not really the same
as each other” but rather have to be seen as “equal successors of their
preduplicate stage” (Dilley 1982, 113), Stephen R. L. Clark (1995, 36) is
right in arguing that through such stories “individuals are compelled
to think of themselves as disposable instances of a type” rather than
unique beings, a frightening idea for our sense of self. Coexisting
versions of the same character counteract what Zunshine (2008, 34)
calls our tendency to essentialize individuals: “The features that (we
think) compose the ‘essence’ of each individual are not identical to the
features that (we think) compose the ‘essence’ of the natural kind to
which this individual belongs.” Science-fiction novels also address the
implications of character duplicates for our cherished idea of having
a unique identity; the doubling of characters leads to severe identity
crises or other problems.
For example, after the first test run of the teleportative device in
Rogue Moon, Al Barker, a thrill-seeker who volunteers to be transmit-
ted to the moon, finds himself in a state of shock. He complains to
Hawks about the fact that the matter transmitter “didn’t care! I was
nothing to it!” (Budrys ([1960] 1977, 100). In other words, he begins to
panic because during the test run, his identity, which he conceives of
in terms of an “essence,” that is, what one might call the “ineffable
special something” (Zunshine 2008, 24), is taken apart. In other novels
the technological innovations are critiqued from another perspective

because the duplication of characters leads to different problems. In a
for Anything the invention of the duplication device leads to a “slave
society” (Knight [1959] 1965, 24); since anything can be duplicated,
all material objects are essentially free, and the only thing of value is
human labor. In the novel’s future society of 2049 the gismos and slaves
(called “slobs”) are controlled by the wealthy elite. At the compound of
Eagles, the powerful Boss duplicates his most trusted slaves and enter-
tains himself by watching them being pushed from the top of his tall
tower (96–98). Here the duplicated individuals completely lose their
status as human beings as they become commodities for the entertain-
ment of the novel’s elite.
In other cases the existence of duplicates proves to be beneficial
because it leads the original character to a moment of self-realization
and potentially to change his life. Such narratives can be seen as prais-
ing technological innovations. In John Wyndham’s (1959) short story
“Opposite Number” Peter Ruddle, the first-person narrator, is visited
by a duplicate of himself from a parallel time stream (see also Dan-
nenberg 1998, 282; Ryan 2006b, 662–63). This character tells him, “You
see, we’re both of us Peter Ruddle, that’s what’s making it all so difficult”
(Wyndham 1959, 127, my italics). Even though the two Peter Ruddles
look exactly alike, they are still slightly different. Peter Ruddle 2 is mar-
ried to Jean, the former girlfriend of Peter Ruddle 1; in the time stream
of Peter Ruddle 1, on the other hand, the two got separated and Jean
married Freddie Tallboy (126–27), while Peter Ruddle married “that
Tenter woman” (125).
In this narrative the duplication of characters is enabled by “old
Whetstone’s machine” (Wyndham 1959, 127), and is explained by Peter
Ruddle 2 as follows:
So, here we have Peter Ruddle. An instant later, that atom of time
in which he exists is split, and so there are two Peter Ruddles,
slightly diverging. Both those time-atoms split, and there are
four Peter Ruddles. A third instant, and there are eight, then
sixteen, then thirty-two. Very shortly there are thousands of

Peter Ruddles. And because the diversion must actually occur
many, many times in a second, there is an infinite number of
Peter Ruddles, all originally similar, but all different by force of
circumstances, and all inhabiting different worlds—imperceptibly
different, or widely different; that depends chiefly on the distance
from the original point of fission. (130)
Peter Ruddle 2 then explains, “The problem ceased to be that of travel-

ling in time. . . . So the place of that problem was taken by another—was
it possible to move from one’s own branch of descent to one of the, so
to speak, cognate branches? Well, I went into that—and here we are to
show that, within certain limits, one can” (130). His visit to the world
of Peter 1 is primarily motivated by his desire to perfect this new tech-
nology that allows one to travel between alternative worlds: “Well, it
occurred to me that if I could start one of my ‘doubles’ working on this
thing, too, it might lead to a better understanding of it” (131).
Despite the quasi-scientific explanation of the existence of multiple
versions of the same character, “Opposite Number” is primarily an
invitation to consider alternatives to the status quo. The short story
suggests that Peter 2 is much happier than Peter 1, and Jean 2 consis-
tently tries to convince Peter 1 to reconnect with Jean 1: “You must go
to her, Peter. . . . I only want you to be happy—you and the other me”
(Wyndham 1959, 134). At the end we learn that the visit of Peter 2 and
Jean 2 potentially leads to the separation of Peter 1 from his wife and his
reconnecting with Jean 1 because “twenty or thirty people” (including
the wife of Peter Ruddle 1 and the husband of Jean 1) saw them “arm
in arm” and they all had “long-standing suspicions” (139). “Opposite
Number” suggests that “Peter and Jean were predestined to love each
other in all the worlds in which they exist” (Ryan 2006b, 663), and
technological innovation enables Peter 1 to experience an epiphany
that enables him to see that this is indeed so.
While postmodernist narratives often praise the multiplicity of
identities in the posthuman age or, alternatively, highlight forms of

repression behind globalization’s alluring promises of individualism
and choice, science-fiction narratives negotiate the question of what
might happen if technological advances enabled us to meet a different
version of ourselves. In addition science-fiction novels use technologi-
cally manufactured character duplicates to discuss the advantages and
disadvantages of scientific progress.
3.7. Summary
Literary history is full of unnatural figures that perturb traditional
typologies and urge us to reconsider our understanding of the
conventionally human character. The unnatural characters of post-
modernism transform the traditional human subject into an artificial
“amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-
informatic entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction
and reconstruction” (Hayles 1999, 3). In the history of literary char-
acters “posthuman modification is essentially idiosyncratic, prolific,
and promiscuous, involving a rapid and rather haphazard emergence
of new types” (Stableford 2006, 401).
Indeed the impossible characters of postmodernism lie beyond the
standard categories of “flat” versus “round” (Forster [1927] 1954, 103–4)
and “static” versus “dynamic” (Pfister 1988, 177). Such figures are either
hyperround and explode into what Molly Hite (1983, 118) calls a “poly-
morphous perversity”—even to the extent that multiple versions of the
same character exist—or they are so excessively dynamic that they can
transform into a new state of being, or sometimes even into a different
character. In the words of Steven Connor (2004, 69), these unnatural
creatures “suggest that the unordered is an exhilarating provocation
rather than a traumatizing ordeal. Rather than representing a threat
to be tamed, the multiple becomes a promise or horizon to which art
must try to live up.” Similarly Herman and Vervaeck (2005, 70) argue
that the characters in postmodernist narratives “lose many of their
human traits: they blend into one another” and “they disappear as
suddenly as they appear.”

At first glance the unnatural figures discussed in this chapter seem
to conform to Raymond Federman’s (1975b, 12–13) declarations about
the characters of surfiction:
The people of fiction . . . will . . . no longer be well-made charac-

ters who carry with them a fixed identity, a stable set of social
and psychological attributes—a name, a situation, a profes-
sion, a condition, etc. The creatures of the new fiction will be as
changeable, as unstable, as illusory, as nameless, as unnamable,
as fraudulent, as unpredictable as the discourse that makes them.
This does not mean, however, that they will be mere puppets. On
the contrary their being will be more genuine, more complex,
more true-to-life in fact, because they will not appear to be simply
what they are; they will be what they are: word-beings.
However, Federman exaggerates when he claims that such a surfiction-

ist paper being is “totally uncommitted to the affairs of the outside
world” as well as “unconcerned with the real world, but entirely com-
mitted to the fiction in which he [the character] finds himself, aware, in
fact, only of his role as fictitious being” (13). As I have shown, unnatural
characters clearly say something about us and the world we live in.
Furthermore the unnatural characters of postmodernism have
been anticipated in earlier figures that display impossibilities. These
earlier manifestations of the unnatural can be explained by generic
conventions (reading strategy 2) that have to do with the supernatural,
satirical exaggeration, or the speculative future worlds of science fic-
tion. We have already created fictional encyclopedias that allow for the
existence of certain impossibilities, and we can evoke them to explain
specific instances of the unnatural. But how have these fictional ency-
clopedias been created? I assume that the interaction between various
reading strategies and human needs has led to the conventionalization
of impossibilities and the formation of new generic conventions.
The conventionalization of the supernatural has been influenced
by the human need to somehow explain the chaos of our existence,
and one way of coping with the randomness of happenings in the real

world is to imagine supernatural forces responsible for these events. In
a sense supernatural beings function like the wheel of fortune insofar
as the chaos of our existence can be explained in terms of their actions,
intentions, and motivations. We posit a transcendental realm (reading
strategy 7), the goings-on in which are then supposed to explain what
happens in the actual (human) world. In addition we typically assume
that supernatural creatures (allegorically) represent forces of good and
evil (reading strategy 5). Today we can come to terms with certain
characters that strike us as being impossible by evoking particular
genre conventions that involve magic or the supernatural. Examples
are the conventions of the epic, certain types of romance, the Gothic
novel, and the fantasy novel.
For example, we can explain the impossible features of both the
monsters and the central protagonist in Beowulf by the conventions
of the epic, where supernatural forces concern the conflicts between
heroic warriors and their opponents. Epics typically confront us with
allegorical fights between good and evil (such as the battles between
Beowulf and his opponents), and the conventionalization of super-
natural forces in the epic has been fostered by the idea that our lives
are dominated by forces of good and evil, as well as the notion that
sometimes superhuman powers are required to fight off evil.
We can account for the unnaturalness of Melusine, the ghosts in
Sir Orfeo, and the magic-induced transformations in Le Morte Dar-
thur by evoking the conventions of Breton lais or romances that deal
with “the matter of Britain.” In such cases the supernatural also con-
cerns the allegorical struggle between good and evil, but it fulfills a
different purpose. One of the major differences between the epic and
the romance is that in the romance supernatural forces no longer try
to influence heroic battles and instead focus on private matters, such
as the central protagonist’s “dedicated pursuit of a lady’s love” or his
“courtly manners,” that is, his code of chivalry (Mikics 2007, 55). Both
Sir Orfeo and Raymondin are tested for their loyalty, chastity, and truth-
fulness by supernatural creatures. Northrop Frye ([1957] 2006, 31), who
sees romance as a mode (rather than a genre) and also as the ultimate

paradigm of all storytelling, points out that “the hero of romance
moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly
suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are
natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying
ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule
of probability once the postulates of romance have been established”
(my italics).32 In contrast to Frye, I see romance not as a mode but as a
genre. I assume the existence of different modes of the unnatural, while
certain types of romance (such as Breton lais and romances about King
Arthur) contain specific manifestations of these modes.
The major effect of the (supernatural) ghosts and vampires in the
Gothic novel is the evocation of feelings of fear and awe. In his “Preface
to the Second Edition” of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole ([1764]
1966, 21) states that (primarily through Defoe, Richardson, and Field-
ing) realist models of representation had come to dominate the writing
of novels: “The great resources of fancy have been damned up, by a
strict adherence to common life” (my italics). He therefore composed
what he calls “a new species of romance” (25) and describes the ideas
behind it: “Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate
through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more
interesting situations, he [the author of the novel] wished to conduct
the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in
short, to make them think, speak, and act, as it might be supposed mere
men and women would do in extraordinary positions” (21, my italics).
Walpole takes recourse to romance to produce new forms of litera-
ture by fusing unnatural mental models with realist ones. In a letter
to the Rev. Joseph Warton from March 16, 1765, Walpole explains this
fusion in the following words: “In fact it [The Castle of Otranto] is but
partially an imitation of ancient romances: being rather intended for
an attempt to blend the marvellous of old story with the natural of
modern novels” (in Lewis 1980, 377). Interestingly Terry Castle (2005,
678) argues that the Gothic novel was “in a manner of speaking the
first ‘postmodern’ experiment in English literary history.” Like Castle,
I see the Gothic novel as an anticipation of postmodernism: Gothic

novels and postmodernist narratives are linked through modes of
the unnatural. However, in contrast to Castle, I argue that the roots
of postmodernism stretch much further back than the late eighteenth
century.
The more recent monsters and wizards in fantasy fiction (such as the
novels by Tolkien and the Harry Potter series) can also be explained as
being “supernatural” characters (Jones 2005, 161; Traill 1996, 12–13). This
genre is full of conventionalized impossibilities that have to do with the
possibility of magic in its storyworlds. Nevertheless the deliberate viola-
tion of our real-world knowledge clearly plays an important role in this
genre. W. R. Irwin (1976, 4) characterizes fantasy fiction as being “anti-
natural” and defines it as stories “based on and controlled by an overt
violation of what is generally accepted as possibility; it is the narrative
result of transforming the condition contrary to fact into ‘fact’ itself.”
Similarly Roger C. Schlobin (1979, xxvi) sees fantasy fiction as “that
corpus in which the impossible is primary in its quantity or centrality.”
Some unnatural characters (such as the Yahoos, the Houyhnhnms,
and the reawakened dead characters in Gulliver’s Travels) are not for-
matted as supernatural (Tolkien 1966, 12) but can be explained in the
context of the conventions of the Menippean satire (deriving from the
writings of the cynic Menippus in 3 bc), which is “stylized rather than
naturalistic” and involves a combination of “fantasy and morality”
(Frye [1957] 2006, 289–90). In this case the conventionalization of the
unnatural has been influenced by the idea that one can exaggerate real-
world coordinates with a didactic purpose in mind. And in this context
reading strategy 6 (satirization and parody) is operative. Swift’s satire
ridicules the brutishness and pride of humans (through the Yahoos
and the Houyhnhnms, i.e., blends of humans and animals) as well as
the depravity of the leaders of the past two hundred years (through
the learned dead characters the narrator encounters). The use of these
impossible figures is hardly surprising since, as Mikhail Bakhtin (1984,
114) points out, the Menippean satire is “not fettered by any demands
for an external verisimilitude to life” and instead engages in the “bold
and unrestrained use of the fantastic” that leads to “extraordinary

situations.” Bakhtin discusses this type of satire in terms of its “experi-
mental fantasticality” (114).
The science-fiction novel also teems with conventionalized unnatural
characters (such as animal-like or shape-shifting aliens, mind-infused
machines, and technologically manufactured character duplicates) that
we can make sense of by assuming that they might exist through dis-
coveries or technological developments at some point in the future.
The conventionalized impossible figures in science-fiction novels
primarily have to do with futurist extrapolations that are based on
two themes: the question of extraterrestrial life forms and the con-
sequences of technological innovation (reading strategy 4). As I have
shown, like the epic and the romance, science-fiction novels are also
dominated by forces of good and evil, only these forces are no lon-
ger supernatural but rather inhere in aliens and new technologies. I
therefore believe that my reading strategy 5 (reading allegorically) has
also contributed to the conventionalization of the impossible figures
in science-fiction novels.
Frye ([1957] 2006, 46) explains the connection between supernatural
creatures and the impossible figures in science-fiction novels by writing
that the genre of science fiction can be seen as “a mode of romance with
a strong inherent tendency to myth.” I argue instead that science-fiction
novels contain modes of the unnatural that hark back to the super-
natural in the epic, certain forms of romance, and the Gothic novel.
Similarly Brian Stableford (2006, 245) points out that “science fiction
is a special case, in that its dealings with impossibility are restrained
by a real or pretended determination to feature ideas and events that,
although presently impossible in the actual world, might be possible
if circumstances were to change in the future according to a possible
pattern of development.” In his “Preface to The Scientific Romances,”
H. G. Wells ([1933] 1980, 241) also states that the science-fiction writer
should help the reader “in every possible unobtrusive way to domesti-
cate the impossible hypothesis,” that is, through scenarios and events
that could happen at some point in the future and thus make the exis-
tence of impossible figures such as aliens and rebelling robots possible.

4 Unnatural Temporalities
4.1. Time and Narrative

This chapter analyzes the ways unnatural temporalities deconstruct
our real-world knowledge about time and temporal progression and
explores how postmodernism relates back to, handles, transforms,
and radicalizes the unnatural time lines in medieval magic tales,
eighteenth-century satires, children’s literature, ghost plays, fantasy
narratives, and science-fiction novels. The insightful analyses of Brian
Richardson (1987, 2000, 2002, 2007) inform my account, but I also
build on Richardson’s work by discussing additional examples and
by developing a cognitive perspective on unnatural temporalities that
foregrounds the question of what readers do with impossible time lines.
Many theoreticians have tried to specify our real-world assumptions
about time. This work relies upon the following five axioms.1 First, as
Marie-Laure Ryan (2009b, 142) argues, “time flows, and it does so in a
fixed direction”: forward (rather than backward). Second, according to
Adam Glaz (2006, 106), time possesses not only “directionality” (for-
wardness) but also “linearity”: we think of time as a line or a stream, and
we conceptualize events in terms of chains or sequences. Third, we are
forced to live in the present and cannot travel to the past or the future;
both the past and the future are unreachable. Fourth, our knowledge
about time also relies on principles of logic, such as the principle of non-
contradiction; we assume that an event cannot happen and not happen
at the same point in time. Fifth, even though this is a common desire,
we cannot speed up, slow down, or interrupt the flow of time.
However, our minds can of course imagine fictional scenarios
that transcend our real-world knowledge about time and temporal
149
progression (see Grishakova 2011). In fictional narratives time can
attain an incredible (and indeed physically or logically impossible)
flexibility. As Ursula K. Heise (1997, 64) has shown, “postmodernist
narrative time is detached from any specific human observer, and in
some cases is not meant to represent any temporality other than that
of the text at all.” In most such cases “representation . . . exists in a
temporality of its own which is not dependent on the time laws of the
‘real’ world” (205). Mark Currie (2007, 85) argues more generally that
“fiction is capable of temporal distortion which cannot be reproduced
in lived experience.”
The investigation of temporality has been one of the most popular
research areas in narrative theory. In 1948 Günther Müller noted a dif-
ference between the uniform progression of narrated events and their
representation. He thus drew a distinction between story time, the time
taken up by the action, on the one hand, and discourse time, the time it
takes us to read the narrative, on the other. Today the story-discourse
distinction is generally accepted as the central hub on which narra-
tology is supposed to hinge. The standard view in narrative theory is
that the story or plot can be represented in various ways at the level
of discourse.2 Indeed representing a common view in narratology, H.
Porter Abbott (2007, 39–41) argues that a story “can be told in different
ways,” but the story itself “always proceeds forward in time”: “All stories
move only in one direction, forward through time.”
However, with regard to unnatural experiments with time, this
claim is not quite accurate. In contrast to historiographic or other fac-
tual narratives, fictional narratives do not relate stories that are in any
sense given, prior, or primary, and are then transformed through the
telling. Richard Bauman (1986, 5), for example, points out that event
sequences “are not the external raw materials” but rather “abstractions
from narrative.” Similarly Dorrit Cohn (1990, 781) argues that “serial
moments do not refer to, and cannot therefore be selected from, an
ontologically independent and temporally prior data base of disordered,
meaningless happenings that it restructures into order and meaning.”
Since fictional narratives create (rather than reproduce) stories, these

stories and their temporalities can have any possible shape one can
think of.
In most cases the events of fictional narratives coincide with real-
world possibilities—but they certainly do not have to. According to
Richardson (2002, 52), the story-discourse distinction “presupposes
that it is possible to retrieve or deduce a consistent story ( fabula) from
a text (syuzhet),” and he correctly points out that “in many recent
works, this simply is not the case.” Indeed in unnatural narratives the
story is no longer the sacrosanct chronological sequence of events that
can then be represented in different ways at the level of the narrative
discourse. The story itself can also be unnatural, that is, physically or
logically impossible.
A brief sketch of unnatural temporalities will suggest some of the
ways fictional narratives play with time.3 They may, for example, undo
the directionality of time by presenting us with scenarios in which
time moves backward at the level of the story. Other works of fiction
counter the linearity of time through circular stories that function
like eternal temporal loops, or they fuse distinct periods by undoing
our knowledge that the borders between the past, the present, and the
future are fixed and impenetrable. The story (or plot) can also be con-
tradictory and consist of mutually exclusive events or event sequences.
Finally narratives can deconstruct our ideas about the constant speed
of time: some characters may age at a different rate than others of the
same storyworld. The sections that follow zoom in on these unnatural
temporalities in more detail and suggest some of their functions in
both postmodernist and other narratives.
4.2. Retrogressive Time Lines

Many narratives confront us with reversed temporalities. There are two
types of retrogressive time lines. In Tom Stoppard’s (1972) radio play
Artist Descending a Staircase, Harold Pinter’s (1978) play Betrayal, and
Christopher Nolan’s (2000) film Memento the reversal affects only the
narrative discourse. The discourse presents a chronological sequence
of events in such a way that we gradually move backward through
Unnatural Temporalities 151

time, even though time still moves forward in the storyworld. In these
cases the retrogressive temporality is primarily a matter of order at the
level of the narrative discourse (Genette 1980, 33–85). As Richardson
(2002, 49) explains, such narratives can easily be “situated within the
standard temporal concepts that inform almost all contemporary nar-
rative theory—that is the order of the syuzhet is simply the opposite of
the order of the fabula.”
However, in more extreme (and properly unnatural) cases—such
as Alejo Carpentier’s (1944) short story “Viaje a la semilla” (“Jour-
ney Back to the Source”), Ilse Aichinger’s (1949) “Spiegelgeschichte”
(“Mirror Story”), J. G. Ballard’s (1964) “Time of Passage,” the Czech
film Stastny Konec (Happy End) by Oldrich Lipsky (1968), and Martin
Amis’s (1991) novel Time’s Arrow—it is not the case that the narrative
discourse reverses the story. Rather the story itself, that is, the actual
sequence of events, runs backward in time, and here we enter the realm
of the unnatural. Richardson (2002, 49) argues that such texts, that
is, the “more complexly retroverted narratives,” present “more recal-
citrant conundrums.” I agree; the properly unnatural cases demand
significantly more cognitive processing than cases in which temporal
play merely unfolds at the level of the discourse.
In Amis’s postmodernist Time’s Arrow, intradiegetic time (time
within the story) moves backward. We presumably all know what it
looks like to rewind a movie, and we can reconstruct the chronological
event sequence of the protagonist’s life on the basis of this knowledge.
James Diedrick (1995, 165–67) describes the life of Odilo Unverdorben
(the protagonist, who changes his name to Hamilton de Souza, John
Young, and finally Tod Friendly) as follows:
Unverdorben is born in 1916 in Solingen, the birthplace of Adolf

Eichmann. When he comes of age he enters medical school, mar-
ries, and joins the Reserve Medical Corps. He is posted at Schloss
Hartheim, the notorious medical facility where “impaired” chil-
dren and adults were put to death. . . . Soon after he is transferred
to Auschwitz. He kills inmates with injections of phenol and

assists Mengele (fictionalized . . . as “Uncle Pepi”). . . . Soon he is
assisting the mass exterminations by inserting pellets of Zyklon
b into the gas chambers. . . . At war’s end Unverdorben flees to
escape prosecution: first to the Vatican, then to Portugal, and
finally to America.
The question of what happened in Odilo’s life is necessary for an

interpretation of the novel. Yet more interesting are the questions how
and why the narrator experiences a retrogressive version of this life.
In other words, what is the point of the novel’s unnatural temporal
organization?
The backward movement of time in the storyworld is the central
device on which the novel’s structure is built. For example, the first-
person narrator describes the buying and eating of food:
First I stack the clean plates in the dishwasher. . . . Then you select
a soiled dish, collect some scraps from the garbage, and settle down
for a short wait. Various items get gulped up into my mouth, and
after skilful massage with tongue and teeth I transfer them to the
plate for additional sculpture with knife and fork and spoon. . . .
Next you face the laborious business of cooling, of reassembly,
of storage, before the return of these foodstuffs to the Superette,
where, admittedly, I am promptly and generously reimbursed for
my pains. (Amis 1992, 11, my italics)
The narrator, a kind of homunculus who lives inside the protago-

nist, does not have any power over the novel’s temporality; rather the
temporality has power over him. The reasons for the temporal reversal
do not originate in the narrative discourse. At one point the narra-
tor thinks about his situation in the following self-reflexive manner:
“Why am I walking backward into the house? . . . Is it dusk coming or
is it dawn? What is the—what is the sequence of the journey I’m on?
What are its rules? Why are the birds singing so strangely? Where am
I heading?” (Amis 1992, 6). Two pages later the narrator comments on
the novel’s disorienting temporal arrangement: “I don’t quite recognize

this world we’re in. Everything is familiar but not at all reassuring.
Far from it. This is a world of mistakes, of diametrical mistakes” (8).
Andrew Sawyer (2002, 59, my italics) notes, “The narrator is aware that
there is something unnatural about his situation.”
Indeed the novel presents us with a physically impossible scenario
in which time moves backward, and the narrator merely serves as a
commentator. Hence Time’s Arrow falsifies Abbott’s (2007, 39) claim
that a narrative’s story “always proceeds forward in time.” In contrast to
narratives such as Artist Descending a Staircase, Betrayal, or Memento,
in which sequences of linear story progressions are arranged in a ret-
rogressive order at the level of the narrative discourse, Time’s Arrow
confronts us with a scenario in which time objectively moves backward
at the level of the story.4 Amis’s novel is a very complex narrative
that consists of two interrelated stories: (1) the chronological event
sequence of Odilo’s life, which took place before the novel begins, and
(2) what the narrator-homunculus experiences, which is a retrogres-
sive version of Odilo’s life that begins with his death and ends with
his birth.
Furthermore since the scripts of daily life are reversed, the repre-
sented actions acquire different meanings. For instance, the narrator
thinks that taxi drivers and prostitutes pay their clients (Amis 1992,
30, 66; here “receiving money” becomes “paying money”); that patients
become sick after having been treated by Tod, who works as a doctor
in New Jersey (44; or by the same person as John in New York [76];
here “healing” becomes “making sick”); and, most disturbingly, that
Odilo, a former German Nazi doctor, is creating Jews at Auschwitz
(here “exterminating” becomes “creating”):
The patients, still dead, were delivered out on a stretcherlike appa-

ratus. The air felt thick and warped with the magnetic heat of
creation. Thence to the Chamber, where the bodies were stacked
carefully, and in my view, counterintuitively, with babies and
children at the base of the pile, then the women and the elderly,
and then the men. . . . There was usually a long wait while the

gas was invisibly introduced by the ventilation grills. . . . It was
I, Odilo Unverdorben, who personally removed the pellets of Zyk-
lon b and entrusted them to the pharmacist in his white coat. . . .
Clothes, spectacles, hair, spinal braces, and so on—these came
later. . . . Most of the gold we used, of course, came direct from
the Reichsbank. But every German present, even the humblest,
gave willingly of his own store—I more than any other officer. . . .
I knew my gold had a secret efficacy. All those years I amassed it,
and polished it with my mind: for the Jews’ teeth. (120–21)
Taking the novel’s two interrelated storylines into consideration, I

suggest three possible interpretations of Amis’s text. One can read the
novel’s narrator as the moral conscience Odilo repressed during his life
to be able to cope with his participation in the Nazi genocide.5 Died-
rick (1995, 162) argues that the novel plays with “the folk wisdom that
just before death individuals see their entire lives flash before them.”
More specifically, on his death bed Odilo activates his conscience or
soul and travels back in time with the intention of turning the moral
chaos of his life into something beautiful. In other words, following
reading strategy 3 (subjectification), the novel’s unnatural temporality
can be explained as being part of an internal process, that is, in terms
of Odilo’s wish to turn back the clock and undo his participation in
the genocidal atrocities in Nazi Germany by imagining some kind of
well-ordered pseudo-past.
Indeed at first glance one might feel that the novel’s unnatural
experiment with time follows a moral purpose. However, upon closer
inspection one realizes that the narrator’s perspective bears numerous
resemblances to the worldview of the Nazis. The Nazis also traveled
back in time to construct the pseudo-past of the “original” Aryan race.
Also, like many Nazis, the narrator turns a horrific act of destruction
(the Holocaust) into an act of creation. The novel’s homunculus puts
it this way: “Our preternatural purpose? To dream a race. To make a
people from the weather. From thunder and from lightning. With gas,
with electricity, with shit, with fire” (Amis 1992, 120). Hitler and his

followers also believed that, among other things, the extermination of
Jews would lead to the birth of a new race, the allegedly “pure” Aryan
race. For instance, Joseph Goebbels is quoted as having said, “Every
birth brings pain. But amid the pain there is already the joy of a new
life. It is a sign of sterility to shy away from new life on account of the
pain. . . . Our age too is an act of historical birth, whose pangs carry
with them the joy of richer life to come” (in Griffin 1995, 159). Fur-
thermore, like many Nazis during the Nuremberg trials, the narrator
holds someone else responsible for the atrocities he is involved in. The
homunculus blames John for committing “acts of violence” as a doc-
tor: “Atrocity upon atrocity, and then more atrocity, and then more.
I’m glad it’s not my body that is actually touching their [the patients’]
bodies. I’m glad I have his body in between” (Amis 1992, 92).
One might thus argue, and this is my second suggestion, that the
novel constructs a parallel between the narrator, the homunculus who
cannot or does not do anything about the reversal of time in his own
story, and Nazi followers, who passively noted and accepted the reversal
of moral values between 1933 and 1945. In other words, the unnatural
temporality might serve a specific thematic purpose (reading strat-
egy 4) and represent the indoctrinating and distorting qualities of the
Nazi worldview. From this perspective one can read Time’s Arrow as
a critique of the narrator as a passive follower of the National Social-
ist ideology and, by extension, as a criticism of features such as blind
loyalty, obedience, and submission to the status quo.
Finally, the novel’s ending yields further possible meanings. Time’s
Arrow ends as follows: “When Odilo closes his eyes, I see an arrow
fly—but wrongly. Point first. Oh no, but then . . . We’re away once more,
over the field. Odilo Unverdorben and his eager heart. And I within,
who came at the wrong time—either too soon, or after it was all too
late” (Amis 1992, 165, my italics). The deictic markers here suggest that
the story starts all over again, but this time it follows the chronological
order of Odilo’s life. In accordance with reading strategy 7 (positing a
transcendental realm), the novel’s retrogressive temporality can also
be explained in the context of a vision of the afterlife of Odilo’s soul,

which seems to be trapped in a hell-like setting where Odilo is doomed
to relive his life for all eternity in an endless temporal loop. And maybe
readers feel that being in hell would be a just form of punishment for
Odilo’s active participation in the Holocaust, followed by his escape
from prosecution. At the end the novel seems to finally offer us a
glimpse of poetic justice.
Time’s Arrow is not the only narrative in which time moves back-
ward at the level of the story. Retrogressive temporalities can also
be found in children’s literature and science-fiction novels. In Lewis
Carroll’s ([1889] 1991, 165, 167) children’s novel Sylvie and Bruno, for
example, the first-person narrator manipulates “an outlandish watch,”
which he calls “the Magic Watch,” and thus manages to reverse time’s
arrow. In the sequence that follows, people are “really walking back-
wards,” while a mother and her four daughters gradually undo their
needlework (168). Later, in a dining room, they gulp up their food and
fill their “dirty plates and empty dishes” with mutton and potatoes: “An
empty fork is raised to the lips: there it receives a neatly-cut piece of
mutton, and swiftly conveys it to the plate, where it instantly attaches
itself to the mutton already there. Soon one of the plates, furnished
with a complete slice of mutton and two potatoes, was handed up to
the presiding gentleman, who quietly replaced the slice on the joint,
and the potatoes in the dish” (169).
However, in contrast to Time’s Arrow, the retrogressive temporality
concerns only a short scene in the novel. As in the case of the unnatural
phenomena in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ([1865] 1994)
as well as Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There
(1871), the primary motivation behind this temporal impossibility,
which can be explained by the possibility of magic in the represented
world, seems to be the deliberate construction of a fantasy world whose
setup is maximally different from the real world as we know it to insti-
gate a sense of wonder in the reader. According to Mike Cadden (2005,
59), children’s stories try “to appeal to children through fantasy.” Indeed
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland permanently contrasts “dull real-
ity,” that is, life as it goes “on in the common way,” with the many

interesting “out of-the-way” or “queer” things that happen in Wonder-
land (Carroll [1865] 1994, 137, 10, 6, 14, 17). Toward the end of the novel
Alice is in such an intense state of cognitive disorientation that she
wonders “if anything would ever happen in a natural way again” (113).
Sylvie and Bruno clearly follows the same impetus.6
Retrogressive time lines are also depicted in science-fiction nov-
els, where temporal distortions have become a crucial aspect of the
generic conventions. We can explain them through, say, disruptions of
the time-space continuum or simply as an aspect of our distant future.
In Philip K. Dick’s ([1968] 2002) Counter-Clock World, for instance,
the antinomic time line gets explained as “a cosmic phenomenon of
unknown origin or cause” (Booker and Thomas 2009, 16). Time begins
to move backward in June 1986, when the storyworld reaches the so-
called “Hobart Phase” (Dick [1968] 2002, 5). From this point onward
people are “getting younger and younger” (45), turn into babies, and
return to the womb, and ultimately the zygote separates into sperm
and egg (104). In Brian Aldiss’s (1967, 180) Cryptozoic!, “the flow of time
in fact moves in the opposite direction to its apparent one” (my italics).
However, the antinomic temporalities in science-fiction novels also
differ markedly from the one in Time’s Arrow. Counter-Clock World
uses the reversal of the temporal flow inconsistently. Many actions by
the characters paradoxically presuppose that time moves forward. For
example, the dead are revived, but they do not experience a retrogres-
sive version of their burials and prior lives; rather they are dug out by
a professional company called “The Flask of Hermes Vitarium,” then
they have to undergo medical tests, while Father Faine performs “the
Sacrament of Miraculous Rebirth” (Dick [1968] 2002, 5, 7). And people
do not automatically return to their mother’s womb; women can apply
to have babies who are “searching for a womb” inside their tummies
(103). Time is not consistently reversed here.
Meanwhile Cryptozoic! only alludes to the fact that time moves
backward but does not explicitly spell out or illustrate the unnatural
phenomenon. In the represented world “the so-called future is actually
the past, while the past becomes [the] future” (Aldiss 1967, 183). It is only

that “the overmind” (some kind of collective psychological defense
mechanism) “distort[s] and conceal[s] the real nature of time” (180)
from mankind. The character of Silverstone at one point argues, “Our
perceptions have been strained through a distorting lens of mind so
that we saw things backwards, just as the lens of the eye actually sees
everything upside-down” (191). As readers we learn that this is the case,
but we are never presented with properly reversed sequences or scenes.
Thus while postmodernist narratives such as Amis’s Time’s Arrow
(but also Aichinger’s “Spiegelgeschichte” and Ballard’s “Time of Pas-
sage”) present us with consistently reversed temporalities, earlier
narratives contain only retrogressive parts, sequences, or scenes (Car-
roll’s Sylvie and Bruno), use the antinomic time line inconsistently
(Dick’s Counter-Clock World), or merely inform us that time in the
storyworld moves backward without actually demonstrating it (Aldiss’s
Cryptozoic!). That is to say, one of the ways postmodernist narratives
take up and transform the unnatural tendencies in pre-postmodernist
texts is by extending the scope of retrogressive temporalities, by con-
fronting us with consistently reversed time lines.
4.3. Eternal Temporal Loops

Other narratives, such as Beckett’s ([1963] 1990) postmodernist play
Play, deconstruct the linearity of time by confronting us with circular
temporalities. Such a time line “partially mimes but ultimately trans-
forms the linear chronology of everyday existence; it always returns to
and departs from its origin—which is also its (temporary) conclusion”
(Richardson 2002, 48). In cases of circular temporality the story returns
to its beginning and continues indefinitely in an endless temporal loop.
With regard to Beckett’s Play, Katherine Weiss (2001, 191) observes
that there is “a repeat built into the play, giving the impression of an
endless performance,” and Ruby Cohn (1973, 195) argues that in Play
“time dissolves in repetition.” Indeed at the “end” of the play we learn
that it is to be repeated: “The repeat may be an exact replica of first state-
ment or it may present an element of variation”; however, the “variation”
concerns only the operations of “the light” (Beckett [1963] 1990, 320);

otherwise the story repeats itself so that the action seems to continue
indefinitely.7
Play not only presents us with an infinite temporal circle; the set-
ting and the characters are rather odd too. At the beginning of the play
we are confronted with the following strange scenario: “Front centre,
touching one another, three identical grey urns . . . about one yard high.
From each a head protrudes, the neck held fast in the urn’s mouth. The
heads are those, from left to right as seen from auditorium, of w2, m
and w1. They face undeviatingly front throughout the play. Faces so lost
to age and aspect as to seem almost part of urns. But no masks. Their
speech is provoked by a spotlight projected on faces alone” (Beckett
[1963] 1990, 307). In this dismal world the light, which is described as
“unique inquisitor . . . swivelling at maximum speed from one face to
another” (318), forces the three figures to talk about their past, which
involves a love triangle. We soon learn that m is a weak and indecisive
adulterous man who wants both domestic peace and extramarital spice.
w1 is his possessive and slightly violent wife, and w2 is his more or less
stoic mistress.
With regard to Play, it is of primary importance to distinguish
between the antecedent story of the love triangle (story 1), which takes
place before the play begins, and what the characters experience on
stage (story 2). As I will show, story 2 consists of a partial reenactment
of story 1 (what Beckett termed the “Narration”) as well as the char-
acters’ comments on their present situation (what Beckett called the
“Meditation”; Lawley 1994, 100). Only story 2 involves circularity; the
antecedent story (story 1) can be reconstructed in terms afforded by
real-world experience.
Story 1 runs (more or less) as follows: when w1 suspects her husband
of having an affair with w2, she has him “dogged for months by a first-
rate man” (Beckett [1963] 1990, 308). However, he finds out about it and
bribes this “bloodhound,” who is “glad of the extra money” (309). Later
m tells her about the affair because he thinks that she might kill herself
(or w2) (310). w1 forgives him and comments on the new situation: “So
he was mine again. All mine. I was happy again. I went about singing”

(311). Then w1 believes that m is still seeing w2: “I began to smell her
off him again” (311). m says, “Finally it was all too much. I simply could
no longer—” (311). w1 comments on the situation: “Before I could do
anything he disappeared. That meant she had won. That slut! I couldn’t
credit it. I lay stricken for weeks. Then I drove to her place. It was all
bolted and barred. All grey with frozen dew. On the way back by Ash
and Snodland—” (311).
At this point the “Narration” ends. In terms of story 1, something
important seems to happen, but the narrative refuses to specify the event.
One option would be that m commits suicide, while his wife kills his
mistress and then herself. Also m might decide to kill w2 and w1 and
commits suicide afterward. Alternatively m might decide to run away
with w2, but w1 tracks them down and kills everybody (including her-
self ). The text here presents us with a vacancy or gap. In fact Rosemary
Pountney (1988, 30) argues that “we cannot state when or how their
deaths occurred—or even, with absolute certainty, that they are dead.”
After a break of five seconds in darkness, the “Meditation” begins
and the characters talk about their current condition. m, for example,
comments on this bizarre situation: “When first this change I actually
thanked God. I thought, it is done, it is said, now all is going out” (Beck-
ett [1963] 1990, 312, my italics). However, the figures are unhappy with the
current state and want it to end. The following statement by w2 clearly
confirms this: “To say I am not disappointed, no, I am. I had anticipated
something better. More restful” (312). w1 repeatedly stresses that she
would like to be left alone by the light: “Get off me! Get off me!” (313).
The three characters wonder why they continue to be interrogated by
the “hellish half-light” (312). w1 frequently addresses the question of
what the light actually wants them to do: “Is it that I do not tell the truth,
is that it, that some day somehow I may tell the truth at last and then
no more light at last. For the truth?” (313); “Is it something I should do
with my face, other than utter? Weep?” (314); “Bite off my tongue and
swallow it? Spit it out? Would that placate you?” (314).
Hugh Kenner (1973, 153) notes that “the interrogation is absent-minded
and [the light] often abandons them in mid-narrative, sometimes in

mid-sentence. There is no sign that the interrogator is listening, let
alone paying attention.” Indeed m complains about the tormenting
light: “And now that you are . . . mere eye. Just looking. At my face. On
and off. . . . Mere eye. No mind. Opening and shutting on me. Am I as
much—. . . Am I as much as . . . being seen?” (Beckett [1963] 1990, 317).
m also compares his current state with his former state: “I know now,
all that [the former state] was just . . . play. And all this [the current
state]? When will all this—. . . All this, when will all this have been . . .
just play?” (313).
Where are m, w1, and w2? Why are they in urns? Why does the light
force them to speak? And, most important, why are they experiencing a
temporal loop? A rather common way of explaining this odd scenario
would be to rely on reading strategy 7 (positing a transcendental realm)
and to argue that we are presented with some kind of purgatory without
purification, in which the three dead characters are doomed to relive the
events of their past lives (story 1) in a continuous repetitive cycle (story 2),
that is, a form of life-in-death. (For examples of this way of interpreting
the play, see Cohn 1973, 195; Knowlson 1997, 481; Weiss 2001, 188–90.)
From this perspective the play’s temporal loop correlates with the eter-
nal punishment of the three figures in the next world. m, w1, and w2
are the souls of the dead, trapped forever by their past because they do
not see their sins (egotism, ignorance, self-centeredness?). Furthermore
the light can be seen as a disinterested god who interrogates the figures
but does not actually pay any attention to what they say.
On the other hand, by using reading strategy 5 (reading allegori-
cally), one can explain the play’s eternal loop and its other oddities in
the context of a Beckettian allegory that explores our relationships in
this world from the perspective of the idea of death-in-life, metaphori-
cal forms of death among the living: the inconsiderate and ignorant
way we all treat each other in our relationships leads to a form of death
in this world. Beckett’s Play might suggest that if m, w1, and w2 do not
manage to free themselves from their triangular relationship, they will
remain trapped in it forever. Alternatively it might allude to the idea
that love triangles are an eternal story, bound to repeat itself from cycle

to cycle. Play ambivalently straddles the distinction between this world
and the next one. Like many other works by Beckett, it demonstrates
that ultimately life in the next world (life-in-death) is very similar to
life in this world (death-in-life).
Brian Gatten (2009, 97) approaches Play as an allegory on the pain of
having to be on stage, “a meta-theatrical allegory in which the spotlight
acts as a sort of activated metaphor for the gaze of the audience that
compels the actions of the rigidified characters of conventional melo-
drama.” In this reading the play is a form of metadrama whose eternal
loop suggests that the basic situation of actors in the theater will never
change; they will always have to perform for an indifferent audience.
For Weiss (2001, 188) the play’s title is also “self-referential; it is a play
about the agony of performing”: “The light functions to illuminate
both the director dictating the way in which the play is seen and m’s
‘playing’ with both w1 and w2.” Indeed both the title and the play as a
whole suggest self-reflexivity. Play is aware of its status as play, and it
reflects upon the significance of role-playing.
W. B. Yeats’s ([1939] 1953) ghost play Purgatory also uses a circular tem-
porality or temporal loop.8 However, even though Purgatory was “one
of Beckett’s favourite plays” (Genet 1991, 244) and clearly influenced
the writing of Play, the metatheatrical dimension, which is typical of
postmodernist drama, is entirely absent. Yeats’s Purgatory is about an
old man and his son; at the “beginning” the old man describes the
cycle of time in purgatory:
There are some

That do not care what’s gone, what’s left:
The souls in Purgatory that come back
To habitations and familiar spots. . . .
Re-live
Their transgressions, and that not once
But many times. (Yeats [1939] 1953, 431, my italics)9
The old man believes that his mother’s soul is caught in a temporal cir-
cle and that “she must live / Through everything in exact detail” (434).

He believes her sin has to do with the night of his conception, which is
then reenacted on stage (433). She is from an aristocratic family, and by
giving herself to a lower-class drunkard she “killed the house,” which
the old man considers “a capital offence” (432). He informs us that “she
died in giving birth to [him]” (431) and that when his drunken father
“burned down the house,” he killed him with a knife and “left him in
the fire” (432).
Later the old man kills his own son, allegedly in an attempt to end
the torment of his mother’s soul (Yeats [1939] 1953, 431). Since the old
man considers his conception to be his mother’s sin, the consequence of
this sin, the birth of his son, has to be eradicated as well: “I killed that
lad because had he grown up / He would have struck a woman’s fancy, /
Begot, and passed pollution on” (435). At the “end” of the play we learn
that it is actually the old man himself who is compelled to relive “that
dead night / Not once but many times” (436) because we once again
hear the sound of “hoof-beat[s]” (433, 436) that announce the arrival of
the old man’s father.
One can explain the play’s circular temporality in terms of the old
man’s interiority (reading strategy 3). Through what Freud calls “the
repetition compulsion,” traumatized humans try to come to terms with
their trauma; however, since the actual conflict cannot be resolved by
reliving it, they go through the traumatic experience again and again
(Mann 2002, 477). In the case of Purgatory the old man fantasizes about
his conception and the murder of his father, and he tries to come to
terms with the killing of his father by murdering his own son, which
of course does not solve the problem. Rather “the neurotic activity
is repeated” (477), and at the “end” of the play the old man’s fantasy
continues.
Or one might argue that the old man finds himself in a transcen-
dental sphere (Good 1987, 134), which seems to be a purgatory without
purification, as in Beckett’s play (reading strategy 7). From this perspec-
tive the old man has already died and is forced to relive the night of his
conception, the murder of his father, and the subsequent murder of his
son in a transcendental realm. As in the case of Play, the next world and

the human world are fused. The repetition compulsion in this world
is virtually indistinguishable from the punishment in the next world.
One of the major differences between the two plays is that Play can
be read as a “meta-theatrical allegory” (Gatten 2009, 97) about the
painful process of acting. Beckett’s play contains a metafictional layer
of meaning that is not present in Yeats’s Purgatory, and this layer plays
a central role in postmodernism. Nevertheless both dramatic works
contain circular temporalities that function analogously. The ourobo-
ros structure of temporal loops urges us to cope with a scenario that
lacks a definite point of origination; in both cases the narrative’s end-
ing is simultaneously its beginning (and vice versa). In other words,
both Play and Purgatory end only to begin again and thus present us
with journeys that lead nowhere because they conclude at the point of
their departure. Circular temporalities transcend the scope of Genette’s
(1980, 113–60) tense theory, according to which events can be recounted
“singulatively” (telling once what happened once), “repetitively” (telling
several times what happened once), or “iteratively” (telling once what
happened many times). By contrast Play and Purgatory tell us once
what happens infinitely, or they tell us infinitely what happened once,
or they tell us infinitely what happens infinitely.
4.4. The Fusing of Distinct Temporal Realms

Certain postmodernist narratives question the assumption that the
borders between the past, the present, and the future are fixed and
impenetrable. In these, “elements belonging to different . . . periods
combine within the fictive world at a single point in time to form an
action, a scene, a context of utterance” (Yacobi 1988, 98). David Herman
(1998, 75) refers to this fictional possibility in terms of “polychronic narra-
tion” and argues that polychronic “situations and events root themselves
in more than one place in time.” Indeed fictional narratives sometimes
merge distinct temporal zones or historical periods in “chronomontages”
at the level of the story.
Some narratives deconstruct the distinction between the past, the
present, and the future by fusing chronological incompatibles. For

example, even though Ishmael Reed’s (1976) postmodernist slave nar-
rative Flight to Canada is set in the United States and Canada of the
1860s, numerous forms of modern technology and commodity culture
exist in its storyworld. The novel thus superimposes the technologically
advanced twentieth century onto the second half of the nineteenth
century.10 Flight to Canada is about three slaves—Raven Quickskill,
40s, and Stray Leechfield—who escape from Arthur Swille in Virginia
to the northern United States only to discover that they did not manage
to actually leave slavery behind. For instance, when Quickskill tells
his friend 40s, “We’re not in Virginia no more,” 40s responds, “That’s
what you think. Shit. Virginia everywhere. Virginia outside. You might
be Virginia” (Reed 1976, 76). Quickskill and his girlfriend, the Native
American Quaw Quaw Tralaralara, ultimately make it to Canada, but
they soon learn that Canada is not really that much different from
the United States: the American tradesman Carpenter, who fled to
Canada, tells them that the “Americans own Canada” and “just permit
Canadians to operate it for them” (161). The novel also tells the story of
two “house slaves,” Uncle Robin and Mammy Barracuda, who do not
escape and remain in Virginia until the end.
Quickskill’s poem “Flight to Canada” presents the first chronomon-
tage, Quickskill’s (impossible) plane flight to Canada: “flew in non-stop /
Jumbo jet this a.m.” (Reed 1976, 3). There are yachts (12); sunglasses (12);
bubble gum (26); Laundromats (26); telephones (30); “a carriage which
featured factory climate-control air conditioning, vinyl top am/fm
stereo radio, full leather interior, power-lock doors, six-way power seat,
power windows, white-wall wheels, door-edge guards, bumper impact
strips, rear defroster and soft-ray glass” (36); tape recorders (53–54);
penthouses with giant waterbeds and tvs (56); and elevators (136). In
this strange world people go scuba diving and deep-sea fishing (61), and
at one point we are presented with a live television report of President
Lincoln’s assassination (103). Nineteenth-century Canada is similarly
technologically advanced: Ford, Sears, and Holiday Inn exist, and one
can see “neon signs with clashing letters advertising hamburgers, used-
car lots with the customary banners,” and modern “coffee joints” (160).

We can make sense of this bizarre fusion of distinct temporal zones
by arguing that they are combined to make a specific thematic point
(reading strategy 4). By merging two distinct historical periods, Flight
to Canada suggests that the nineteenth and the twentieth century have
something in common, and since the novel’s most obvious theme is
slavery, the represented chronomontage seems to alert us to contem-
porary forms of exploitation or domination. Flight to Canada uses an
unnatural time line to illustrate that slavery is not only a problem of
the past but continues to play a role in the present. Reed commented on
his earlier novel, Mumbo Jumbo (1972), “I wanted to write about a time
like the present, or to use the past to prophesy about the future—a pro-
cess our ancestors called ‘Necromancy.’ I chose the ’20’s [sic!] because
[that period was] very similar to what’s happening now. This is a valid
method and has been used by writers from time immemorial. Using
a past event of one’s country or culture to comment on the present”
(Dick and Sigh 1995, 60–61).
Flight to Canada clearly follows the same idea. Furthermore the
novel accentuates that there has been technological progress but no real
spiritual or moral development. One might even argue that the novel
construes technological progress as a modern form of slavery. Similarly
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (2002, xvii) argue that the
Enlightenment and the idea of technical progress revert to mythology
in the shape of the culture industry: “The enslavement of people today
cannot be separated from social progress. The increase in economic
productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also
affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a dis-
proportionate advantage over the rest of the population. The individual
is entirely nullified in face of the economic powers.” Along similar lines
Timothy Spaulding (2005, 26) points out that by incorporating temporal
incongruities into Flight to Canada, “Reed links the impulses behind
the American slave system with the ways contemporary mainstream
culture appropriates, commodifies, and consumes black identity and
African American aesthetic production.” Reed’s novel uses its chrono-
montage to posit a link between the slavery of the past and technological

process. New technologies (including the images produced by the cul-
ture industry) are perceived as contemporary forms of slavery.
Time travel stories also combine distinct temporal realms insofar as
a character from the narrative present can travel to—and thus literally
exist in—a different period, namely the narrative past or the narra-
tive future. Time travel is a common phenomenon in genres such as
fantasy and science fiction. The characters are in possession of either a
magical device or a time machine that enables them to visit the worlds
of the past or the future. Journeys into the past differ from journeys
into the future: “In spite of its psychological plausibility, time travel
into the past seems to be a logical impossibility, because any altera-
tion of history is implicitly paradoxical” (Stableford 2006, 532). The
logical impossibility of time travel into the past is usually illustrated
on the basis of the so-called grandfather paradox, which poses the
following questions: “What happens if an assassin goes back in time
and murders his grandfather before his (the assassin’s) own father is
conceived? If his father is never born, neither is the assassin, and so
how can he go back to murder his grandfather?” (Nahin 2011, 114). The
basic argument is that if we travel into the past and change the past
by killing our grandfather, we also change the present because we no
longer exist; this new present makes it impossible for us to travel into
the past in the first place.
On the other hand, the physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard
Mlodinow (2005, 105) claim that once we have the technological means
to do so, “it is possible to travel to the future.” But as long as we have
not experienced a journey into the future (or read a credible report
about it), we consider time travel as such to be unnatural—simply
because it contradicts our real-world experience.
As George Slusser and Robert Heath (2002, 20) have shown, “one
common consequence” of this kind of time travel “is the creation of
alternate timelines or ‘histories.’ ” Generally speaking, one might see
time travel stories “with history alteration” (Dannenberg 2008, 128) as
actualizations or literalizations of counterfactual thought experiments
that spell out what might have happened if we had made different

decisions. In L. Sprague de Camp’s (1939) Lest Darkness Fall, for
instance, a thunderstorm magically transports archaeologist Martin
Padway from 1938 to sixth-century Rome, where he develops, among
other things, the printing press to make sure that the Dark Ages never
take place.11 Similarly, in the fantasy novel Harry Potter and the Pris-
oner of Azkaban, Hermione Granger, a model student at the Hogwarts
School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, receives a time-turner which allows
her to travel back in time to attend “several classes at once” (Rowling
1999, 497).12 Even though Hermione had to promise to “never, ever use
it for anything except [her] studies” (497), she and Harry Potter end
up using this device to alter the course of history by saving Buckbeak,
a hippogriff (504), and Sirius Black, Harry’s godfather (521–22). In the
first version of the novel’s story, Buckbeak was beheaded even though
he was completely innocent, and Sirius Black was wrongly imprisoned.
The two Hogwarts students use their magic powers to restore justice
and to make sure that history follows the desired course of events.
Sometimes, however, journeys into the past do not lead to the
desired consequences and hence do not alter the course of history at
all. In Twain’s ([1889] 1983, 4–5) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court, for instance, the protagonist Hank Morgan is hit on the head
in nineteenth-century Hartford, Connecticut, and miraculously wakes
up in sixth-century England at the court of King Arthur. Hank, who
describes himself as “a Yankee of the Yankees—and practical; yes, and
nearly barren of sentiment” (4), tries to transform Arthur’s medieval
realm into a technologically modern machine society (modeled on
Hartford, his hometown) but fails completely.
Connecticut Yankee is a Menippean satire that ridicules the practi-
cal Yankee Hank, who attempts to set up a perfect utopian society
by imposing his ideas on medieval England. At the same time, the
narrative parodies the conventions of the romance (Sanchez 2007, 31),
and the unnatural temporality can be seen in the context of the over-
all satirical critique. Connecticut Yankee uses time travel as a frame
to connect its two satirical goals. The narrative parodies the conven-
tions of the romance through Hank’s journey to medieval England, his

ridiculous adventures as a knight-errant, and his return to nineteenth-
century Connecticut; at the end Merlin puts a spell on him that makes
him “sleep thirteen centuries” (Twain ([1889] 1983, 443). Hank’s adven-
tures involve exaggerations and obvious spoofs. At one point he and his
companion Sandy reach an ogre’s castle, where they are supposed to free
forty-five (!) imprisoned princesses. However, the castle turns out to be
nothing but “a pig-sty with a wattled fence around it” (183). Sandy then
explains—not very convincingly—that the castle is probably enchanted
to Hank but not to her. Connecticut Yankee also ridicules Hank’s quasi-
imperialist utopianism through his failure by not allowing him to change
the course of history.13
Let me turn to instances of time travel to the future. In H. G. Wells’s
([1885] 2005) novel The Time Machine, for instance, the central pro-
tagonist travels from his present (February 1894) to the year 802,701.14
Hence a character from the narrative present travels to and thus objec-
tively exists in the narrative future. Before his journey the time traveler
thinks that future societies would “certainly be infinitely ahead of
ourselves in all their appliances” (54). But this is not at all the case. In
the future he discovers the rather primitive Eloi, a “pretty little people”
whom he describes as having “a graceful gentleness” and “a childlike
ease” (24). The effete Eloi “spent all their time in playing gently, in
bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating
fruit and sleeping.” However, he “could not see how things were kept
going” (41). At a later point he realizes that his time machine is gone,
and he finds out that it was stolen by the Morlocks, who are ape-like
creatures and keep the Eloi to feed on them.
When the protagonist gets his time machine back, he travels even
further into the future and learns that the situation in which the
Morlocks prey on the Eloi is followed by the ultimate extinction of
humanity and all other life forms (Wells [1885] 2005, 82–85). Since the
regular course of human history leads to a situation in which “all the
sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of
insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives [are] over”
(85), The Time Machine has a consciousness-raising function. Like the

time traveler, the reader thus becomes “an inquirer into the nature
of history and civilization, into the prospects for human community,
into the ultimate destiny of our species” (Crossley 2005, 356). Indeed
The Time Machine can be read as a warning against the potentially
catastrophic consequences of the class conflicts in England at the end
of the nineteenth century.
Gérard Genette (1980, 40) distinguishes among three types of chron-
ological deviations (or anachronies): analepsis (flashback), prolepsis
(flashforward), and co-occurrence. The narratives discussed in this
section take these deviations one step further insofar as the past and
the present, or the present and the future, are merged. In Genette’s ter-
minology one might argue that chronomontages and instances of time
travel blend either analepsis (jumps to the past) or prolepsis (jumps to
the future) with the idea of co-occurrence. While the chronomontage
in Reed’s postmodernist Flight to Canada merges the nineteenth and
twentieth century at the level of the story, the journeys to the past or the
future in fantasy and science-fiction novels usually present us with a
character from one temporal realm who travels to (and thus exists in) a
different one. Postmodernism radicalizes unnatural tendencies that are
present in other narratives insofar as it blends periods as a whole (instead
of merely transporting a figure from one temporal realm to another).
Furthermore, while the conflated temporality in Flight to Canada alerts
us to contemporary manifestations of slavery, the instances of time travel
in earlier narratives serve different purposes. Journeys into the past typi-
cally correlate with the human desire to change the course of history,
while journeys into the future have to do with our wish to know whether
upcoming events conform to our hopes and dreams.
4.5. Violating Formal Logic: Ontological Pluralism

In this section I explore narratives that present logically impossible
temporalities. Richardson (2002, 48) comments on the unnaturalness
of contradictory time lines as follows: “In real life, such contradictions
are not possible: a man may have died in 1956 or he may have died
in 1967, but he cannot have died in 1956 and in 1967.” Some fictional

narratives violate the principle of noncontradiction by representing
mutually exclusive story versions or event sequences so that time is
fragmented into multiple (logically incompatible) itineraries.
John Fowles’s ([1969] 2004) postmodernist or neo-Victorian novel
The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for example, confronts us with three
mutually exclusive endings. In what one might call the “conventional”
ending, Charles Smithson decides not to pursue Sarah Woodruff, a
woman known as the forsaken lover of a French lieutenant, and returns
home to marry his fiancée, Ernestina Freeman, a conventional Victo-
rian woman. However, a page later the authorial narrator informs us
that “the last few pages you have read are not what happened, but what
he [Charles] spent the hours between London and Exeter imagining
might happen” (327). That is to say, using reading strategy 3 (subjecti-
fication), we can define this “ending” as a hoax; it can be explained as
Charles’s fantasy.
After a sequence of loss and retrieval, the narrator presents us with
two more endings. Charles and Sarah Woodruff have sexual inter-
course (Fowles [1969] 2004, 337). Charles then leaves Ernestina, but his
servant Sam does not deliver the letter in which Charles states that he
would like to marry Sarah. Sarah disappears, and Charles looks for her
in Europe and the United States. Charles then learns that Sarah lives
in the house of the pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his wife,
Christina Rossetti, in London. In the “romantic” ending that follows, he
visits her there, and at first she refuses to marry him. However, Sarah
later tells him that they have a daughter (called Lalage) and she does
decide to marry him (438–39). In what one might call the novel’s “exis-
tentialist” ending, Charles and Sarah do not have a daughter, and Sarah
refuses to marry him (perhaps because their earlier sexual experience
was a failure [337]). They part forever, and Charles feels lonely but free:
“He has at last found an atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness on
which to build” (444–45). Pamela Cooper (1991, 109) argues that in this
ending “Charles’s quest for romantic love becomes an initiation into
the loneliness of personal liberty, a perception of human isolation.”

The romantic and existentialist endings are “mutually exclusive,” but
they “have the same ontological status” (McHale 1987, 110). Hilary P.
Dannenberg (2008, 217) also writes that the novel presents its denoue-
ment as “two equally actual contradictory versions.” One could ascribe
these two logically incompatible endings to the vagaries and imagin-
ings of the authorial narrator, who has not decided which ending to
effect and therefore offers different options (reading strategy 3, subjec-
tification). Similarly Ryan (2006b, 670) argues that the irreconcilable
versions are drafts of a narrative in progress, different developments
that the narrator is considering.
However, the novel not only mocks the idea of the god-like and infal-
lible omniscient narrator; it also ridicules the genre of the Victorian
novel as a whole. Hence, by relying on reading strategy 6 (satirization
and parody), one might argue that The French Lieutenant’s Woman
uses mutually exclusive endings to parody the well-formed resolutions
of Victorian novels, that is, the compulsory tying-up of loose ends
in death or marriage. In other words, the novel represents logically
incompatible endings to deliberately frustrate our readerly expectations
with regard to closure.
Finally, by adopting Ryan’s (2006b, 671) strategy of “do it your-
self,” one can also argue that the novel functions like a construction
kit that invites us to choose the ending we like best (reading strategy
8). While traditional or conservative readers might prefer the conven-
tional ending and perhaps refrain from reading the rest of the novel,
more emotionally inclined readers presumably favor the romantic end-
ing, and readers who are less idealistic may prefer the existentialist
version. Interestingly many critics argue that the third ending must be
the “real” version, in which “the narrator got it right” because of “the
order in which the endings are presented” (Wells 2003, 40–41). Also,
while Charles is tantalized by the unconventional Sarah (rather than
the traditionally Victorian Ernestina), we as readers are supposed
to “unwittingly allow [our] desires to be enlisted for a specifically
postmodern agenda” (31). B. S. Johnson’s (1973, 110) postmodernist

short story “Broad Thoughts from a Home” radicalizes this narrative
strategy of deconstructing the ending as follows:
Magnanimous gesture: the reader is offered a choice of endings

to the piece. Group One: The Religious. (a) The quickest conversion
since St. Paul precipitates Samuel into the joint bosoms of Miss
Deane and Mother Church. (b) A more thorough conversion
throws Samuel to the Jesuits. (c) A personally delivered thunder-
bolt reduces Samuel to a small but constituent quantity of impure
chemicals. Group Two: The Mundane. (a) Samuel rapes Miss Deane
in a state of unwonted elation. (b) Miss Deane rapes Samuel in a
state of unwonted absentmindedness. (c) Robert rapes both of
them in a state of unwonted aplomb (whatever that may mean).
Group Three: The Impossible. The next post contains an urgent
recall to England for (a) Samuel (b) Robert (c) both; on account
of (i) death (ii) birth (iii) love (iv) work. Group Four: The Variable.
The reader is invited to write his own ending in the space provided
below. If this space is insufficient, the fly-leaf may be found a suit-
able place for any continuation. Thank you.
According to Ryan (2006b, 671), Robert Coover’s (1969) “The Baby-

sitter” also presents itself as a construction kit that invites readers to
construct their own stories (reading strategy 8, do it yourself ). In this
short story Dolly and Harry Tucker go to a nearby Saturday evening
party, and a babysitter comes to watch their three children, Jimmy,
Bitsy, and a small baby (206). At around the same time, the babysit-
ter’s boyfriend, Jack, and his friend Mark shoot pinball and discuss the
question of how to take advantage of the babysitter (208).
Out of this common situation, Coover’s short story fragments into a
weird circus of possibilities and develops multiple, mutually incompat-
ible plotlines.15 In one of these 107 scenarios, Jack and Mark phone the
babysitter, but she does not allow them to visit her (Coover 1969, 217); in
a second version, they visit and seduce her (216); in a third, they begin
to seduce the babysitter but are interrupted by Mr. Tucker (222); in a
fourth, Mr. Tucker sneaks home from the party to have sex with the

babysitter (218), and in a fifth, they have sex but are interrupted by Jack
(230); in a sixth version, Jack and Mark try to rape the babysitter (225),
and in a seventh, the rape is interrupted by Mr. Tucker’s son Jimmy (231).
And so on and so forth. The story closes with a number of alternative
endings in which, variously, the babysitter is raped and murdered (237),
she accidentally drowns the baby (237), the Tuckers return from the
party to find all is well (238–39), or Mrs. Tucker learns that all of her
children are murdered, her husband is gone, a corpse is in her bathtub,
and the house is wrecked (239).
What is the meaning of these logically incompatible storylines?
At the beginning of the narrative we are still in a position to distin-
guish between sections that are real and sections that are dreams,
wishes, fantasies, films, or television shows. However, as the narrative
progresses, this distinction becomes increasingly unstable because
the various fantasies and film sequences begin to intermingle with
“reality” and with each other. Thomas E. Kennedy (1992, 64) argues
that “the reality here is everything, the sum total of it all—that which
happens, that which is only imagined, that which is watched, wished
for, dreamed, planned, enacted, felt, and thought,” Since the real and
the imagined have the same ontological status, Tom Petitjean’s (1995,
50) contrast between an actual event sequence (“those sections of the
story that refer to a specific time given in figures rather than words”)
and various nonactualized possibilities does not do justice to the text.
Using reading strategy 8 (do it yourself ), one can argue that “The
Babysitter” uses mutually incompatible storylines to make us aware
of hidden potentialities and allows us to choose the scenarios that
we find most compelling (for whatever reason). Similarly Ryan (2006b,
671) explains this short story by arguing that “the contradictory pas-
sages in the text are offered to readers as material for creating their
own stories.” Coover’s short story attends to the possibility of break-
ing out of the routines of our daily lives and urges us to think about
the ways things could have been in suburban America at that time
(even if the represented scenarios imply horrific events like rape, vio-
lence, or death).

In the words of Richard Andersen (1981, 100), “The Babysitter”
highlights “the importance of variety as a means of combating man’s ten-
dency to reduce life and fiction to simple terms that he can understand
but which inevitably fail him because of their limited perspective.”
Indeed multiverse narratives such as “The Babysitter” seem to reflect
upon what Jean-François Lyotard (1997, xxiv) calls the postmodern
incredulity toward the modern master narratives (grand récits) of
progress and enlightenment. The master narratives of modernity were
large-scale theories or philosophies (such as Hegel’s idea of the world
Spirit, Marx’s historical materialism, and Freudian psychoanalysis)
that sought to offer a total explanation of the world. By contrast “The
Babysitter” prefers the proliferation of many “little narratives” (petit
récits) which do not attempt to present an overarching Truth but offer
a qualified, limited truth, one relative to a particular situation. From
Lyotard’s perspective, Coover’s short story presents us with mutually
incompatible plot lines to celebrate the absence of a unifying master
narrative in the postmodern age.
Even though ontological pluralism plays a central role in postmod-
ernist narratives, it was not invented by postmodernism. Science-fiction
stories also often contain mutually exclusive event sequences because
parallel universes exist objectively at the level of the story. In this
context Dannenberg (2008, 128) speaks of “multiple-worlds alternate
histor[ies]” in which “there is an a priori plurality of worlds in the
narrative universe.” Such a cosmology can be found in Larry Niven’s
(1971) “All the Myriad Ways.”16 This story confronts its readers with a
many-worlds cosmology in which interactions between the individ-
ual branches of history are technologically possible. Niven’s narrative
opens, “There were timelines branching and branching, a megauni-
verse of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions?
. . . The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so
that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made
by every man, woman and child on Earth was reversed in the universe
next door” (1). The “Crosstime ships” (4) enable transworld missions
from the narrative’s primary storyworld to “the Nazi world,” “the Red

Chinese world,” “the one with the Black Plague mutation,” “the Con-
federate States of America,” “Imperial Russia,” “Amerindian America,”
“the Catholic Empire,” “the dead worlds” (4–6), and so forth.
“All the Myriad Ways” is about Detective-Lieutenant Gene Trimble,
who is confronted with a plethora of “senseless suicides” and “sense-
less crimes”: “a city-wide epidemic” (Niven 1971, 1). At the beginning
of the story he investigates the suicide of one Ambrose Harmon, who
killed himself after winning five hundred dollars in a game of poker
(3). When Trimble finds out that “more than twenty percent” of all
“Crosstime pilots have killed themselves in the last year,” he at first
contemplates the possibility of “a suicide bug” (4). However, he then
thinks about the implications of the many-worlds cosmology in greater
detail and reaches the following conclusions:
He would go get the coffee and he wouldn’t and he would send

somebody for it and someone was about to bring it without being
asked. . . . Every decision was made both ways. For every wise
choice you bled your heart out over, you had made all the other
choices too. . . . Civil wars unfought on some worlds were won
by either side on others. Elsewhen, another animal had first done
murder with an antelope femur. Some worlds were still all nomad;
civilization had lost out. If every choice was cancelled elsewhere,
why make a decision at all? (5–6, 8)
“All the Myriad Ways” thus deals with the problem that if all possibili-
ties are realized at the same time, people will lack a calculable frame
of reference for their actions. From this perspective the consequences
of a suicide attempt become as unpredictable as the consequences of
immoral behavior; choices in general become meaningless because
they cease to be choices (see Ryan 2006b, 666–67). The story ends as
Trimble pulls the trigger and the story bifurcates into four different
universes or timelines:
And he picked the gun off the newspapers, put it to his head and
fired. The hammer fell on an empty chamber.

fired. The gun jerked up and blasted a hole in the ceiling.
fired. The bullet tore a furrow in his scalp.
took off the top of his head. (Niven 1971, 11)
Niven’s short story suggests that most people would not be able to cog-
nitively cope with the assumption of a many-worlds cosmology, which
explains why “the idea of parallel realities is [still] not yet solidly estab-
lished in our private encyclopedias” (Ryan 2006b, 671). By extension,
“All the Myriad Ways” is critical of the pluralization of the postmodern
subject, which may assume various roles and exists differently in differ-
ent contexts. While “The Babysitter” embraces the multifariousness of
the postmodern age, “All the Myriad Ways” expresses a more skeptical
attitude.
In 1998 the philosopher Graham Priest published an article in which
he posed the following question: “What is so bad about [logical] contra-
dictions?” The rather surprising answer of this philosopher is “maybe
nothing” (426). For him “there is nothing wrong with believing some
contradictions.” For example, he believes that “it is rational (rationally
possible—indeed, rationally obligatory) to believe that the liar sentence
is both true and false” (410).17 Many fictional narratives likewise confront
us with logically incompatible storylines, and it becomes impossible to
deduce a single chronological event sequence as the narrative’s story. In
such cases the represented story actually consists of a web of contradic-
tory but coexisting events, and this is something we as readers should
learn to accept. While Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and
Coover’s “The Babysitter” use logical impossibilities to playfully mock
the strictness of prior genres such as the Victorian novel or celebrate the
absence of the unifying master narratives of modernity by inviting us
to construct our own stories (or little narratives), the many-world cos-
mologies in science-fiction narratives follow a slightly more traditional
understanding of the human subject. Postmodernist narratives celebrate
the multiplicity and heterogeneousness of life in the postmodern age,
whereas “All the Myriad Ways” acknowledges the new options of post-
modernity but does not fully embrace them. Niven’s science-fiction

story instead bemoans the fact that the power of the master narrative
as a legitimating, empowering force is gradually disappearing.
4.6. Coexisting Story Times

Some narratives represent scenarios in which characters age at a differ-
ent speed than others in the storyworld. In such narratives time passes
differently within different reference systems at the level of the story.
Richardson (2002, 50) speaks of differential temporalities in which a
“character ages at a different rate than the people that surround him.”
There are two basic ways that the “personal clocks” carried by indi-
vidual characters can differ from those of others: characters can age
more slowly than others, or they can age more quickly. In both cases
we are confronted with coexisting story times.
Caryl Churchill’s ([1979] 1985) play Cloud Nine offers a strange sce-
nario in which the characters age more slowly than the society that
surrounds them. The first act of the play “takes place in a British colony
in Africa in Victorian times,” while the second one is set “in London in
1979.” Even though about one hundred years pass between Acts I and II
(story time 1), “for the characters” it is only “twenty-five years later”
(243; story time 2). John M. Clum (1988, 104) sees the different time
zones as “a bow to the theory of relativity which replaces the absolutes
of Clive’s empire” in the first act. However, the absolutes of Clive’s
empire, based on patriarchal and colonialist thought, are notably still
in force in Act II. Here the differential temporality may suggest that
even though time has moved on, there has not been much progress
in other respects: certain developments—concerning sex, gender, and
colonialism—lag behind the general unfolding of a more democratic
society in the Britain of the late 1970s.18 In other words, the unnatural
temporality in Cloud Nine serves a specific thematic purpose (reading
strategy 4). It deliberately displaces the continuity of linear time by
contrasting it with the asynchronous unfolding of historical memory.
Ann Wilson (1997, 155) writes, “The chronological passage of time does
not have a commensurate impact on the lives of the characters who
experience change at a slower rate.”

For example, even though society jumps a century ahead, colonial-
ism still exists in Act II. While the first act takes place in Africa during
the times of British colonial rule, the second act alludes to the con-
tinuation of the imperialist project in Northern Ireland through Lin’s
brother, who has died in a battle in Belfast (Churchill [1979] 1985, 291,
303, 310–11). While colonial oppression continues in the world of the
play, there is definitely more sexual freedom and less gender oppression
in Act II. In her foreword to the play, Churchill describes this develop-
ment: “In the second act, more energy comes from the women and the
gays. The uncertainties and changes of society, and a more feminine
and less authoritarian feeling, are reflected in the looser structure of
the act” (246).19
At the same time, however, the characters in Act II are hardly more
happy than those in Act I. Elaine Aston (1997, 35) argues that “although
the 1970s setting for Act II implies a more liberal time period than the
Victorian past, characters are still seen to be struggling with gender
roles and identities.” Betty still has a rather essentialist notion of “mas-
culinity” and believes that “real little boy[s]” don’t cry (Churchill [1979]
1985, 293). For his part, Edward announces that he would rather like to
“be a woman” (307), and his “feminine” behavior alienates him from
his boyfriend, Gerry (297, 306). Victoria’s husband, Martin, might be
impotent, but he believes that Victoria does not have orgasms with him
because she “still feel[s] dominated by [him]” (301). Despite the new
liberalism, the characters still struggle with their sex lives and gender
identities. Their pasts cannot simply be shaken off: both acts are set in
a colonial context and dominated by a sense of confusion about sex and
gender (and the tenacious persistence of these themes is highlighted by
the play’s differential temporality).20
To my knowledge the first differential temporality that involves the
slowing down of time can be found in De Nugis Curialium (Courtiers’
Trifles), a twelfth-century collection of magical narratives by Walter
Map (1983). In one of Map’s stories a pygmy king and the Briton king
Herla agree to attend each other’s weddings. After King Herla leaves
the pygmy’s otherworld, he discovers that he has actually spent “two

hundred years” of human time there (story time 1), while in his own
experience—during his stay—the lapse of time seems to have encom-
passed “but three days” (31; story time 2). Like the characters in Cloud
Nine, Herla ages at a slower rate than the other inhabitants of the
human world.
King Herla also finds out that during his stay with the pygmy,
the Saxons took possession of his kingdom (Map 1983, 31).21 Upon
Herla’s departure from the otherworld, the pygmy presents him with
a bloodhound and tells Herla that “on no account must any of his train
dismount until that dog leapt from the arms of his bearer” (29). How-
ever, on their return to the human world, some of Herla’s men forget
the pygmy’s orders, dismount, and immediately turn into dust. Finally,
we are told that “the dog has not yet alighted” and that “King Herla
still holds on his mad course with his band in eternal wanderings” (31).
That is, Herla and his gang, who no longer fulfill any function in the
real world, are doomed to wander around England forever.
Like Cloud Nine, Map’s narrative uses its differential temporality
to make a thematic point (reading strategy 4), which has to do with
certain attitudes or psychological predispositions. Courtiers’ Trifles cri-
tiques leaders who do not pay sufficient attention to the demands of the
actual world. Map’s (1983, 31) text connects Herla’s wanderings in aimless
rounds to the English king Henry II (1154–89): “Recently, it is said, in
the first year of the coronation of our King Henry,” Herla and his men
“ceased to visit our land in force as before . . . as if they had transmitted
their wanderings to us.” Later the narrator argues that Henry II shares
the restlessness of Herla (371) and is thus incapable of comprehending the
problems of the real world: “We rush on at a furious pace; the present
we treat with negligence and folly, the future we entrust to chance, . . . we
are more than any man lost and depressed” (373).
According to Roseanna Cross (2008, 170), the implication of Map’s
differential temporality is that all kings potentially face the danger of
entering a different temporal realm, and thus of becoming oblivious to
present concerns. In this context the supernatural figure of the pygmy
represents qualities (such as restlessness and inattention) that make

kings forget their duties and tasks. Furthermore the fact that after hav-
ing visited the pygmy’s time zone, some of Herla’s men fall to dust while
others are doomed to eternal wandering clearly suggests that they have
become irrelevant to the human world. In a nutshell Courtiers’ Trifles
uses disparate temporal realms to discriminate between leaders who
fail to address the problems of the real world and determined leaders
who actually try to solve these problems.
The differential temporalities in Cloud Nine and Courtiers’ Trifles
confront us with different types of story time that pertain to the
same storyworld, that is, different yet coexisting story times. Narra-
tive theorists typically assume the existence of a uniform story time
(the time taken up by the action) that can be related to the discourse
time (the time it takes the recipient to read or view the narrative in
question) in five different ways (see Genette 1980, 87–112).22 However,
slow-downs and speed-ups may also occur at the level of the story.
Characters can actually and objectively age at a different speed (or in
another way) than other inhabitants of the represented world. Dif-
ferential time lines may serve different functions. While Churchill’s
postmodernist Cloud Nine uses coexisting story times to show that
certain developments—concerning sex, gender, and colonialist ideas—
lag behind the development of a more democratic society in Britain of
the 1970s, the medieval Courtiers’ Trifles employs a differential tempo-
rality to demonstrate that inattention may cause leaders to lag behind
the demands of the actual world. Cloud Nine thus focuses on the ways
society continues to imprison the individual, while Courtiers’ Trifles
demands a certain ethical agenda from the individual.
4.7. Summary
Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck (2005, 113) speak of “the collapse of
linear time” in postmodernism. Indeed the unnatural temporalities
of postmodernist narratives undo various aspects of our knowledge
of time and temporal progression in the actual world. These time
lines involve “counterontological idea[s]” that are “violation[s] of our
intuitive expectations about the ‘nature’ of time” (Zunshine 2008, 69).

However, the impossible time lines of postmodernism are not unprec-
edented; rather they have been anticipated in various ways. Fictional
narratives had projected retrogressive time lines, temporal loops, the
merging of distinct periods, logically incompatible storylines, and dif-
ferential temporalities long before the production of the self-reflexive
metafictions of postmodernism.
As I have shown, most of the unnatural temporal manipulations in
literature that is not perceived as being postmodernist can be explained
through generic conventions (reading strategy 2). These time lines can
be explicated through the workings of magic or other supernatural
phenomena (as in medieval narratives, children’s literature, Yeats’s
ghost play, and more recent fantasy fiction), through satirical critique
that involves temporal exaggerations that are so extreme they become
impossible (as in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee), or through technological
interventions or simply the setting in the future in science fiction (as in
all the other narratives discussed in this chapter).
In the first case the temporal distortions have to do with magic
devices (such as time turners or magic watches), supernatural creatures
(such as the devil or a pygmy) that can tamper with the flow of time, or
the narrative’s being set in a transcendental realm (such as purgatory).
With regard to otherworldly interventions, Nancy H. Traill (1996, 11)
argues that through their “exceptional powers, supernatural entities
may enter the natural domain and interfere, for better or worse, in
human affairs. They may take any number of suprahuman forms—
whether demons, gods, gnomes, or revenants makes little difference . . .
the important point being that they violate natural laws” (my italics),
such as the flow of time in the human world.
In the second case time is not distorted by supernatural means;
instead some unnatural time lines can be seen in the context of “areal-
istic” satirical critique, which involves exaggerations, distortions, or
caricatures that “go beyond the reality of everyday life” (Booker and
Thomas 2009, 5, 327). In such narratives the point of the temporal
impossibilities is often to parody the conventions of certain literary
genres (such as romances in Connecticut Yankee).

In the third case the temporal impossibilities involve technologi-
cal innovations (such as time machines or spaceships that travel to
parallel universes) or cosmic phenomena such as disruptions of the
time-space continuum. Kingsley Amis (1960) argues that in science
fiction, unnatural time lines get explained by technological progress
or by virtue of being set at some point in the future. He describes sci-
ence fiction as “that class of prose narratives treating of a situation that
could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesised on the
basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science
or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin”
(18, my italics).
The self-reflexive metafictions of postmodernism hark back to
impossible temporalities in well-known historical genres, and they
either extend or radicalize them or they use them in the context of a
specifically postmodern agenda. For example, Time’s Arrow extends the
temporally reversed scenes in Sylvie and Bruno, Counter-Clock World,
and Crypotozoic! by reversing time’s arrow in the novel as a whole and
by having its narrator comment on the unnatural time flow. Beckett’s
Play contains a circular temporality, as does Yeats’s Purgatory, but it
uses the temporal loop in a metadramatic context: in contrast to Yeats,
Beckett critically reflects upon the agony of having to perform. The
chronomontage in Reed’s Flight to Canada radicalizes the situation in
time travel narratives, in which a character from one period is literally
present in a different one, by fusing time spheres as a whole (namely the
nineteenth and the twentieth century). Postmodernist narratives such as
The French Lieutenant’s Woman and “The Babysitter” celebrate playful-
ness or the absence of unifying master narratives, while “All the Myriad
Ways” does not follow the postmodern agenda and instead expresses a
more critical attitude toward many-world cosmologies. Finally, while
the postmodernist Cloud Nine uses its differential temporality to stage
the sexual liberation of the individual, Courtiers’ Trifles remains tied to
moral questions (which are typical of medieval literature): Map’s nar-
rative suggests that good leaders are those who are not easily distracted
and display qualities such as constancy and attentiveness.

5 Antimimetic Spaces
5.1. Narratology and Space

Manfred Jahn and Sabine Buchholz (2005, 552) define narrative space
as “the environment in which story-internal characters move about and
live.” I use the term similarly, to denote the where of narrative, that is,
the demarcated space of the represented storyworld, including objects
(such as houses, tables, chairs) or other entities (such as fog) that are
part of the setting.
Narrative space has traditionally been considered much less important
than narrative time. For example, Lessing (1974, 102–15) defined narrative
literature as an art of time rather than space, and Gérard Genette (1980)
was also much more interested in investigating temporal progression
than issues of spatial organization in narrative. E. M. Forster’s ([1927]
1954: 130) example of a minimal plot—“The king died and then the
queen died of grief ”—does not even contain any reference to space,
and we are presumably all familiar with bare stages in the theater that
do not obstruct our understanding of the play’s represented action.
Other theorists, however, have dealt with the representation of nar-
rative space and its potential significance in great detail. Already in
the 1920s Mikhail Bakhtin ([1938–73] 1981, 84) developed the concept
of the “chronotope” or “time space,” which highlights “the intrinsic
connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically
expressed in literature.” Seymour Chatman (1978, 96 ff.) distinguishes
not only between story time and discourse time but also between
story space (the space of the action) and discourse space (the environ-
ment of the narrative discourse). In The Poetics of Space, the French
philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1964, 47) shows that “inhabited space
185
transcends geometrical space.” He semanticizes architectural struc-
tures (such as houses, drawers, wardrobes, corners) by developing the
concept of “lived space” (espace vécu), that is, humanly experienced
space, and addresses the question of what space means to its inhabit-
ants. The notion of “lived space” indicates “that human . . . conceptions
of space always include a subject who is affected by (and in turn affects)
space, a subject who experiences and reacts to space in a bodily way, a
subject who ‘feels’ space through existential living conditions, mood,
and atmosphere” (Jahn and Buchholz 2005, 553).
Gabriel Zoran (1984), Ruth Ronen (1986), Holly Taylor and Barbara
Tversky (1992, 1996), David Herman (2001; 2002, 263–99), and Marie-
Laure Ryan (2003, 2009a) have shown that narrative comprehension
closely correlates with an understanding of the spatial organization of the
storyworld.1 Herman (2001, 534) explains that storytelling entails “model-
ing, and enabling others to model, an emergent constellation of spatially
related entities,” and Ryan (2003, 237) argues that “the reader’s imagina-
tion needs a mental model of space to simulate the narrative action.”
According to Taylor and Tversky (1996, 389), we use spatial concepts
to organize “space hierarchically, by salience or functional signifi-
cance, and by describing elements at the top of the hierarchy prior to
those lower in the hierarchy.” At issue are “deictic expressions such as
‘here,’ ‘there,’ ‘left,’ ‘right,’ etc.” (Jahn and Buchholz 2005, 552) as well
as “locative adverbs ( forward, together, sideways) and prepositions
(beyond, with, over), which convey information about the geometric
character of located and reference objects (volumes, surfaces, points,
and lines)” (Herman 2002, 274–75).
The aim of this chapter is to further our understanding of narra-
tive space by determining the potential functions of unnatural spaces.
Narrative spaces can be physically impossible (if they defy the laws of
nature) or logically impossible (if they violate the principle of non-
contradiction). I show in what ways narratives may denaturalize our
knowledge of space, and I move from an analysis of spatial frames
(“the immediate surroundings of actual events”) to the setting (“the
general socio-historico-geographical environment”), and from there

to the story space (“the space relevant to the plot, as mapped by the
actions and thoughts of the characters”; Ryan 2009a, 421–22). I then
build on Bachelard’s concept of “lived space”—discussing how such
space requires a human experiencer—to address the significance of
representations of impossible space.2 I assume that unnatural spaces
fulfill a determinable function and exist for a particular reason; they
are not just ornamental or a form of art for art’s sake.3
Brian McHale (1987, 45) argues that in postmodernist narratives,
“space . . . is less constructed than deconstructed . . . or rather con-
structed and deconstructed at the same time.” In this chapter I show
that this claim is also true of many non-postmodernist narratives. For
instance, in epics, some romances, children’s stories, and fantasy narra-
tives, powerful supernatural creatures inhabit or conjure up unnatural
settings through magic (or they derive their magic power from the
settings). Satires often use impossible spaces to critique certain enti-
ties through caricature and distortion. Metaleptic jumps in certain
realist novels, which primarily serve a metanarrative function, also
set important precedents for the violation of ontological boundaries
in postmodernism.
In this chapter I am concerned with the following kinds of spatial
distortion: manipulation of the extension of space (5.2); disruption of
spatial orientation (including the logic of space; 5.2 and 5.3); destabi-
lization of space (5.2 and 5.3); impossible creation or appearance of
objects and changes to the setting (5.3); and formation of unnatural (i.e.,
nonactualizable) geographies (5.4). My discussion of metalepses (5.5) is
conceptually related to space insofar as metaleptic jumps transgress the
boundaries of realms we know to be separate. As in the other chapters,
I move from postmodernist examples of unnaturalness to discussions
of the same phenomena in other types of narrative.
5.2. Unnatural Containers: When the Interior Exceeds the Exterior

Mark Z. Danielewski’s (2000) novel House of Leaves deals with The
Navidson Record, a book written by an author called Zampanò on the
basis of film footage about Will Navidson and his family. Navidson
Antimimetic Spaces 187

started his film project by mounting a number of cameras around the
family house on Ash Tree Lane (somewhere in Virginia) and equip-
ping them with motion detectors to turn them on and off (10). In the
novel’s “Introduction” (xi–xxiii), written by Johnny Truant, we learn
that Zampanò is dead and that his corpse was found by Lude, who took
Truant to Zampanò’s place. Truant took Zampanò’s manuscript with
him (xvii), added footnotes and other material, and had it published by
a group of editors. These editors have in turn added footnotes, which are
not footnotes to the main text but footnotes to the footnotes by Truant.
The interesting thing about the architectural design of Navidson’s
house on Ash Tree Lane is that it is full of physical and logical impos-
sibilities. Among other things, it constantly alters its internal layout.
For instance, when Will Navidson and his family return from a trip to
Seattle in early June 1990, they realize that their house has transformed
itself: they discover a new “white door with a glass knob” that leads to a
“walk-in closet” and a “second door” (“identical to the first one”), which
“opens up into the children’s bedroom” (Danielewski 2000, 28). When
Navidson begins to investigate the house on the basis of building plans
and measurements that he takes, he discovers that “the width of the
house inside” impossibly exceeds “the width of the house as measured
from the outside by 1/4" ” (30).
Furthermore a dark, cold hallway (called “The Five and a Half Min-
ute Hallway”) has developed in the living room wall, and it even exists
at two places at the same time. At first we learn that the hallway has
emerged “on the north wall” (Danielewski 2000, 4), but later we are
told that it is located “in the west wall,” which of course violates the
principle of noncontradiction (57; see also Truant’s footnote 68 on this
logical impossibility).4 This hallway permanently changes its size: it can
both shrink (60) and grow (61). When Navidson inspects the hallway,
he realizes that it has expanded into a labyrinth of seemingly infi-
nite dimensions: “a constant stream of corners and walls, all of them
unreadable and perfectly smooth” (64). Inside the hallway spatial ori-
entation is impossible (68), and compasses refuse to settle on any one
direction inside the house (90).5

The novel’s characters engage in five desperate explorations in which
they inspect, photograph, and try to make sense of the enigmatic hall-
way. Among these characters are Navidson, his brother Tom, and Bill
Reston, as well as three explorers: Holloway Roberts, Jed Leeder, and
Wax Hook. Inside the hallway Holloway Roberts loses his mind and
shoots both Jed Leeder and Wax Hook. The former dies, the latter
recovers, and Holloway commits suicide in the hallway (Danielewski
2000, 207, 317–18, 334–38). At one point Navidson gets lost in the house’s
labyrinth because the stairway suddenly expands (289). He then reports
that he has been falling “for at least fifty minutes,” so he must be “at
an impossible distance down” (305). At a different point “the stairs
suddenly stretch and drop ten feet,” while the “circular shape of the
stairwell bend[s] into an ellipse before snapping back to a circle again”
(272). At a later stage the house even attacks its inhabitants: “We watch
the ceiling turn from white to ash-black and drop. Then the walls close
in with enough force to splinter the dresser, snap the frame of the bed,
and hurl lamps from their nightstands, bulbs popping, light executed”
(341). This house is clearly unnatural: it defies representation in the
traditional sense as well as “any sort of accurate mapmaking” (109).
The deconstructionist Will Slocombe (2005) interprets House of
Leaves as an allegory on the objective nothingness of the poststruc-
turalist or nihilist universe, in which our desperate quests for meaning
are ultimately rendered futile (reading strategy 5); the novel’s characters
fail because the shape-shifting house cannot be mastered, and we as
readers fail because the text deconstructs itself and cannot be mastered.
Slocombe writes, “House of Leaves introduces the idea that nihilism
exists beneath all forms of discourse, whether linguistic (the literary)
or visual (the architectural). . . . The House [he means both the house
at the story level and the novel House of Leaves] continually resists . . .
readings . . . through the appearance of deconstructive elements within
the text itself, stopping our reading before it starts” (88, 97).
Like Slocombe, I think that one can explain the unnatural spatial
parameters of the house in Danielewski’s novel by reading them alle-
gorically (reading strategy 5), that is, as signifying the absurdity or

nothingness that potentially pervades all human relations. The house’s
labyrinth notably puts an end to Karen’s and Navidson’s otherwise
thriving sex life (Danielewski 2000, 62), and it also leads to “impatience,
frustration, and increasing familial alienation” (103). The house thus
becomes a version of the hostile world as such—a world that systemati-
cally undermines successful interactions with others. The following
footnote by the editors also invites us to see a link between the house
and nothingness: “The walls are endlessly bare. Nothing hangs on them,
nothing defines them. They are without texture. Even to the keenest eye
or most sentient fingertip, they remain unreadable. You will never find
a mark there. No trace survives. The walls obliterate everything. They
are permanently absolved of all record. Oblique, forever obscure and
unwritten. Behold the perfect pantheon of absence” (423).
However, Danielewski’s novel does not simply argue that our being
in the world is ultimately pointless and then leaves it at that; House of
Leaves goes one step further. Beyond describing the problem of the
nothingness of our existence, the novel also presents a solution to this
problem, and this solution has to do with love or, more generally, the
confrontation with others. Karen and Navidson counter the house’s
nothingness through the redemptive power of love, while Truant
opposes the nothingness of the house by confronting the fate of his
mother, Pelafina.
House of Leaves frequently contrasts the nothingness of the house
with the relationship between Karen and Navidson. For example,
despite the alienation between the two, Karen’s terror immediately “dis-
solves into a hug and flood of words” (Danielewski 2000, 322) whenever
she sees her husband. Later Karen makes a film called “A Brief His-
tory of Who I Love,” which “serves as the perfect counterpoint to that
infinite stretch of hallways, rooms, and stairs. The house is empty, her
piece is full. The house is dark, her film glows. A growl haunts that place,
her place is blessed by Charlie Parker. On Ash Tree Lane stands a house
of darkness, cold, and emptiness. In 16mm stands a house of light, love,
and color. By following her heart, Karen made sense of what that place
is not” (368, my italics). This film enables Karen to rediscover “the

longing and tenderness he [Navidson] felt toward her and their chil-
dren” (368). Furthermore when Navidson is trapped inside the hallway
in a state of total despair, his thoughts turn to his wife: “ ‘Light,’ Navid-
son croaks. ‘Can’t. Be. I see light. Care—’ ” (488). Sophia Blynn, one of
Zampanò’s many quoted “critics,” argues that “it’s commonly assumed
his last word was ‘care’ or the start of ‘careful.’ ” However, she believes
that “this utterance is really just the first syllable of the very name on
which his mind and heart had finally come to rest. His only hope, his
only meaning: ‘Karen’ ” (523). Once Karen and Navidson reunite, the
house dissolves and they find themselves on the beautiful lawn of their
front yard (524). According to Natalie Hamilton (2008, 7, 5), “The novel
implies that their love for each other brings them safely out of their
individual labyrinths”; “each level of Danielewski’s text involves char-
acters attempting to navigate the maze of the self, and these attempts
are in turn echoed in the structure of the text.”
Throughout the novel Johnny Truant tries to come to terms with
his excessively emotional mother, Pelafina, who tried to strangle him
and was sent to a mental institution. Among other things, we learn that
when his father took her away from him, she roared like an animal,
and this roar still haunts Truant’s mind (Danielewski 2000, 517, 71, 327).
Truant tells others that his mother has been dead for a long time (129). Yet
toward the end of the novel he seems to have forgiven his mother, and
he also seems to have found some kind of temporary peace: “Somehow
I know it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be alright. It’s going to be
alright” (515). According to Katharine Cox (2006, 14), the labyrinthine
process allows Truant “to remember his mother in ordinary terms as he
finally adopts a touching and pared down narrative, free from obvious
invention, hyperbole and mythical allusion to describe his mother.”
Danielewski’s novel suggests that reconciliation and forgiveness are
ways of countering the alienating nothingness of the unnatural house
on Ash Tree Lane. In this context it is hardly surprising that the solitary
author Zampanò, who shied away from confrontations with others and
even “sealed his apartment in an effort to retain the various emanations
of his things and himself ” (Danielewski 2000, xvi), is dead. Zampanò’s

attitude is diametrically opposed to the approach of Navidson, Karen,
and Truant, which closely correlates with “the human will to persevere”
(368) and to overcome the unnatural house.
Containers that are bigger on the inside than they are on the out-
side can also be found in children’s books and fantasy novels. There
they typically serve to underscore the power and authority of certain
otherworldly figures. In P. L. Travers’s children’s book series Mary Poppins
(1934–88), for instance, the central protagonist, a magical nanny, possesses
a practically bottomless carpetbag, which, despite its regular exterior size,
contains numerous items, such as “a starched white apron, . . . a large cake
of Sunlight Soap, a toothbrush, a packet of hairpins, a bottle of scent, a
small folding armchair . . . , a box of throat lozenges, . . . seven flannel
nightgowns, four cotton ones, a pair of boots, a set of dominoes, two
bathing-caps and a postcard album” (Travers 1934, 16–18). This is as
much as to say that the bag is bigger on the inside than it is on the
outside. In this instance it is magic that produces the unnatural within
the bag, in analogy with the magic hat containing rabbits and scarves
in magicians’ performances. Jane and Michael Banks, two children
who live in a very strict English household on Cherry Tree Lane, are
immediately enchanted by their new governess: “It was all so surprising
that they could find nothing to say. But they knew, both of them, that
something strange and wonderful had happened at Number Seventeen,
Cherry Tree Lane” (18).
Catherine L. Elick (2001, 461) argues that “both in her role as nurse-
maid and as orchestrator of magical adventures,” Mary Poppins “is a
personage of great, even cosmic, authority.” Indeed throughout the
book series the subversive nanny uses magic to carry out destabilizing
assaults on the worldview of the Banks children: they visit a zoo where
humans are caged, and the children can talk to the animals (“Full
Moon” in Marry Poppins [1934]). Parties can be held among the stars
(“The Evening Out” in Mary Poppins Comes Back [1935]) or under water
(“High Tide” in Mary Poppins Opens the Door [1943]).6
A whole dwelling that is bigger on the inside than it is on the out-
side (like the house in House of Leaves) can be found in J. K. Rowling’s

(2000) fantasy novel Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. When Harry
Potter attends the Quidditch World Cup with Hermione and the Wea-
sleys, they set up two “shabby two-man tents” (79) that Mr. Weasley
had borrowed from a colleague called Perkins, and Harry thinks that
they are far too small to accommodate “a party of ten” (80). But when
Mr. Weasley invites him to take a look inside, Harry quickly changes
his mind: “Harry bent down, ducked under the tent flap, and felt his jaw
drop. He walked into what looked like an old-fashioned, three-room
flat, complete with bathroom and kitchen” (80).
While the impossible geometrical organization of the house in House
of Leaves represents the threatening nothingness of our existence, both
Mary Poppins’s unnatural carpetbag and the impossible tent in Harry
Potter and the Goblet of Fire highlight that certain wonder-inducing
creatures (such as otherworldly nannies, wizards, or witches) in chil-
dren’s books and fantasy novels are capable of magic and therefore
not bound by real-world limitations of space. In the words of Sara
Gwenllian Jones (2005, 161), such genres are populated with creatures
that “have magical powers” and can thus easily disregard “the natural
laws of material reality.” Indeed these superhuman figures can manipu-
late space by extending it, thus providing extra space as they desire
or wish. Moreover while children’s stories and fantasy novels contain
individual existents whose interior size exceeds their exterior size, the
postmodernist House of Leaves as a whole is set in a house that is bigger
on the inside than it is on the outside. In this sense postmodernism
takes features of children’s stories and fantasy novels to an extreme, and
it also uses them in a different context: the house in House of Leaves is
supposed to defy the meaning-making process.
5.3. The External Materialization of Internal States

In Angela Carter’s ([1972] 1985) novel The Infernal Desire Machines
of Doctor Hoffman, unnatural spaces proliferate as well. The diabolical
Dr. Hoffman wages a massive campaign against reason and uses reality-
modifying machines to expand the dimensions of time and space. He
seeks to liberate the human unconscious and to objectify desire, and

his machines use the secretions of numerous copulating young couples
in mesh cubicles to achieve this goal (208–14). The doctor’s machines
manage to turn the novel’s world into a phantasmagoria that is remi-
niscent of the paintings by the surrealist Salvador Dalí. As a result the
external world acquires fluidity:
Cloud palaces erected themselves then silently toppled to reveal

for a moment the familiar warehouse beneath them until they
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. (18–19)
In this novel internal desires become externalized and materialize

as entities in the storyworld. Later the projected world reaches another
phase, called “Nebulous Time” (Carter [1972] 1985, 166), which carries
Dr. Hoffman’s revolution even further because at this stage, characters
can—actually and objectively—be numerous other characters at the
same time. (Dr. Hoffman even explicitly states that his “is not an either/
or world” [206] but a world that involves logical impossibilities.) During
this phase Desiderio, a government minister, meets a Lithuanian count
and his slave, Lafleur, who turns out to be Albertina, Dr. Hoffman’s
beautiful daughter, with whom Desiderio falls helplessly in love (164).
Desiderio and the count visit a brothel, which is run by a Madame,
who turns out to be Albertina as well (136). The brothel’s interior is
described as follows:
They had employed a taxidermist instead of an upholsterer and

sent him a pride of lions with instructions to make a sofa out
of each pair. At both ends of the sofas, flamboyantly gothic
arm-rests, were the gigantically maned heads of these lions. Their

rheumy, golden eyes seeped gum and their cavernous, red mouths
hung sleepily ajar, gaping wider, now and then, in a sleepy yawn
or to let out a low, rumbling growl. The serviceable armchairs
were brown bears who squatted on their haunches with the mel-
ancholy of all the Russias in their liquid eyes. . . . The occasional
tables ran about, yelping obsequiously; they were toadying hyenas
and on their brindled backs were strapped silver trays contain-
ing glasses, decanters, bowls of salted nuts and dishes of stuffed
olives. (131–32)
Using reading strategy 5, readers can make sense of the unnatu-

ral spaces in Infernal Desire Machines by seeing them as parts of an
allegorical confrontation between diametrically opposed ideas or con-
cepts, such as Apollo versus Dionysus, the Freudian reality principle
versus the pleasure principle, order versus freedom, or conformism
versus individualism (reading strategy 5). In this conflict the drab
Minister of Determination (who loves empirical reality, logic, and sta-
sis) represents the former ideas, while the crazy sadist Dr. Hoffman
(who loves desire, chaos, and unrest) stands for the latter ones.
The novel also makes a thematic point (reading strategy 4). It illus-
trates that, taken to an extreme, every idea (including the idea of
creative freedom) may potentially lead to the establishing of hierarchies
and thus a state of domination.7 Hence we should take into consideration
not only ideas but also attitudes toward ideas. For example, Dr. Hoffman’s
former physics professor (who now works as a blind peep-show propri-
etor) believes that “when the sensual world unconditionally surrenders
to the intermittency of mutability, man will be freed from the tyranny
of a single present. And we will live on as many layers of conscious-
ness as we can, all at the same time. After the Doctor liberates us,
that is. Only after that” (Carter [1972] 1985, 100). However, as the novel
shows, Dr. Hoffman’s yearning for “absolute authority to establish a
regime of total liberation” (38, my italics) implies tyranny, subjection,
and confinement, just like the Minister’s vulgar logical positivism and
sense of order.

Infernal Desire Machines is structured around a rather static dichot-
omy that does not allow its two poles to merge, interact, or reach a state
of equilibrium. At the end of the novel Desiderio feels caught between
two alternatives that cannot “possibly co-exist”: while the Minister’s
attitudes lead to “a barren yet harmonious calm,” Dr. Hoffman’s atti-
tudes imply “a fertile yet cacophonous tempest” (Carter [1972] 1985,
207). Desiderio has to make a choice between desire (Dr. Hoffman
wants to lock him up in a cubicle with Albertina) and reality. He finally
opts in favor of restoring reality and kills both Dr. Hoffman and his
daughter (216–17).
The external materialization of internal states can also be observed
in other narratives. Romances and fantasy novels, for example, contain
wizards and witches who can immediately cause changes in the outer
world through the use of magic (or sorcery).8 In cases of beneficial white
magic, the external materialization of internal states correlates with
the celebration of superhuman qualities, that is, the human wish to have
absolute power over the external world. In cases of black magic, on
the other hand, immediate changes in the external environment cor-
relate with the fear of being dominated by malicious powers.
For instance, in the course of his quest in the fourteenth-century
romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Gawain reaches a splen-
did castle that appears out of nowhere: suddenly, “hit schemered and
schon þuȝ þe schyre okez” (Tolkien and Gordon 1967, 22, l. 772).9 The
castle is fortified with gleaming turrets and white pinnacles so that it
seems “like a white paper cutout used for table decorations at medieval
feasts” (Kline 1995, 110):
So mony pynakle payntet watz poudred ayquere,

Among þe castel carnelez clambred so þik,
þat pared out of papure purely hit semed. (Tolkien and Gordon
1967, 23, l. 801–2)10
Barbara Kline (1995, 110) points out that “from the outside the castle
appears almost surreal.” Yet we can cognitively cope with the castle’s
fundamental insubstantiality as a form of (black) magic once we know

that it was conjured up by the witch Morgan le Fay in the context of
her plan to test the Knights of the Round Table, drive Sir Gawain mad,
and frighten Queen Guinevere to death (Tolkien and Gordon 1967, 68, ll.
2459–60).
Kline (1995, 107, 114) uses Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to demon-
strate that, “contrary to modern views, it is evident that the merging of
the ‘real’ world and Faerie was not simply accepted with an arched brow
and childlike wonder in the Middle Ages. . . . The discomfort and fear
associated with the events of the Otherworld are clearly displayed in
the text of Gawain and repeatedly pointed out by the author.”11 Among
other things, this romance alludes to Gawain’s confusion about the
otherworldly castle, and it also stresses the confusion of King Arthur’s
knights about the Green Knight’s unnatural hue.
Another example is Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale,” in which Aurelius’s
brother suggests to Aurelius that he should consult a magician to win
Dorigen’s love by fulfilling the (impossible) condition of her promise.
Earlier Dorigen said that she would love Aurelius only if the black
rocks on the coast below disappeared. The possibility of magic spells
that cause immediate changes in the external world is here taken for
granted. Aurelius’s brother remembers having seen a magic book that
“spak muchel of the operaciouns / Touchinge the eighte and twenty
mansiouns / That longen to the moone” (Chaucer 2005, 422, ll. 1129–31).12
Later he wishes to discover a magician who employs
this moones mansions . . .

Or oother magik naturel. . . .
For with an appearance a clerk may make,
To mannes sighte, that alle the rokkes blake
Of Britaigne were yvoided everychon. (422–23, ll. 1154–59)13
Magic (or perhaps white magic) is here seen as the solution to Aurelius’s
problem insofar as a magician could remove the black rocks on the
coast and Aurelius could thus win Dorigen’s love.14
Magic spells that cause immediate changes in the environment can
also be found in Rowling’s (2007) fantasy novel Harry Potter and the

Deathly Hallows. For example, when Hagrid tries to take Harry Potter
to a safe location by means of a flying motorbike (to save him from
the evil Lord Voldemort), they are attacked by three Death Eaters.
Harry uses the blasting curse (“confringo”) to cause the motorbike’s
sidecar to explode. As a result the Death Eater nearest it is blasted off
his broom and falls from sight (54). Hermione Granger uses another
spell (“deprimo”) to “blast . . . a hole in the sitting-room floor” (343)
of the Lovegoods’ house to escape from Xenophilius Lovegood. And
in the chapter “The Battle of Hogwarts,” the evil Crabbe uses a spell
(“descendo”) to cause “the wall . . . to totter” and then “crumble . . . into
the aisle next door,” until Harry points his wand “at the rampart, crie[s]
‘Finite!’ and it stead[ies]” (506).
What all these magicians, wizards, and witches have in common
is an ability to create objects or cause immediate changes in the set-
ting through their will and the knowledge of appropriate verbal spells
(just like the mad scientist Dr. Hoffmann). In this context Tolkien
(1966, 22) argues that “the power of making immediately effective by
the will the visions of ‘fantasy’ ” is an essential feature of fairy stories.
H. Porter Abbott (2008a, 168) comments on situations in which “the
possible world of fantasy” becomes “the story’s actual world”: “This is
something that cannot happen in the actual world we live in, at least to
my knowledge. Yet it can happen in the fictional world.” Indeed such
fusions of interiority and exteriority exist in postmodernist narratives
but also in romances and fantasy novels, where wizards and witches
can change their (external) environment through magic spells (which
formalize internal wishes). Postmodernism constitutes a radicalization
of romances and fantasy novels because the whole world of Infernal
Desire Machines is dominated by Dr. Hoffmann’s crazy attempts to
objectify internal states.
5.4. Geographical Impossibilities, Unnatural Geographies

Other narratives deconstruct geographical spaces by fusing different
real-world locations into a new whole or by altering actual places and
their attributes to such an extent that they are no longer recognizable.

Fictional changes to real-world settings are of course not physically
or logically impossible per se; I am interested in them only if they
lead to unnatural constellations, that is, geographies that would be
nonactualizable, impossible in the real world.
Guy Davenport’s (1979, 108–13) short story “The Haile Selassie Funeral
Train” presents us with an Ethiopian train that follows a geographically
impossible itinerary that turns Europe into an unnatural collage-like
zone: from Deauville in Normandy, the train passes through Barcelona,
along the Dalmatian coast, through Genoa, Madrid, Odessa, Atlanta
(Georgia, usa), and back to Deauville (see McHale 1987, 45).15 In addi-
tion the short story dispenses with real-world temporal progression
and merges the past, the present, and the future into a chronomontage.
We learn that the train is traveling “in 1936” (108–9) and that it is the
funeral train of Haile Selassie (Ras Taffari), the last emperor of Ethio-
pia (1892–1975). It includes passengers such as James Joyce (1882–1941)
and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918). Hence the short story fuses the
narrative present (the year 1936) with the past (the period before 1918,
when Apollinaire was still alive) and the future (the period after the
death of Selassie in 1975).
In this unnatural collage of spatial and temporal zones, Davenport’s
short story revives Apollinaire, “one of the first to have conceived of
modern Europe as a heterotopian zone” (McHale 1987, 46), while
simultaneously dispensing with Selassie, “the last emperor of a three-
thousand-year-old monarchy in Ethiopia” (Olsen 1986, 157). The story’s
spatial and temporal impossibilities serve a thematic purpose (read-
ing strategy 4) that has to do with the idea of hybridity: “The Haile
Selassie Funeral Train” seems to call for the end of the totalizing and
hierarchical monarchy system and the simultaneous development of a
more open or hybrid Europe. The unnamed narrator is fascinated with
Apollinaire, who can be characterized in terms of hybridity as well:
Apollinaire’s true name was Wilhelm Albert Wlodzimierz Apolinary
Kostrowicki, and he was a French poet of Italian and Polish decent. At
one point the narrator tells us that “a bearded little man in pince-nez
must have seen with what awe I was watching Apollinaire, for he got

out of his seat and came and put his hand on my arm” (Davenport 1979,
109, my italics), while at another time, he highlights “the compassion
[he] felt for the wounded poet” (109).
Even though the short story favors the proliferation of a multitude
of different discourses in a more hybrid Europe, it does not confront
us with a naïve vision. In the background we witness the dangerous
presence of Irish nationalists, Triestine irredentists, Italian fascists,
federales of the Guardia Civil, Ethiopian infantrymen, and Kuomin-
tang sergeants (Davenport 1979, 110, 112). When Apollinaire sees the
burning library at Louvain, he wonders, “What in the name of God
could humanity be if man is an example of it?” (112). In the world of
the short story, in which “we have no shepherds” (113), a more hybrid
Europe is just one option among many others. But it is clearly one that
the narrative favors, and the spatial and temporal impossibilities serve
to underscore this argument.
Epics and satires also challenge our geographical or physical knowl-
edge of the world to such an extent that the resulting scenarios become
“non-actualizable” (Ronen 1994, 51), that is, impossible in the real
world. However, the unnatural geographies in these genres usually
serve different purposes. The mere of Grendel and his mother in the
Old English epic Beowulf, for instance, is not only infested with other
monsters such as sea-dragons (“sæ-dracan”; Heaney 2000, 98, l.1426); it
also (impossibly) burns at night: “þǣr mæg nihta gehwǣm nīð-wundor
sēon, / fȳr on flōde” (94, ll. 1365–66).16 E. G. Stanley (1956, 441) notes
that “factually the scenery could hardly exist,” and Richard Butts (1987,
113) even speaks of the “highly unnatural character of the landscape”
(my italics). Hrothgar underscores the mere’s magical qualities by telling
Beowulf that a hart in flight would give up its life to pursuing hounds
rather than jump into the water:
Heorot hornum trum holt wudu sēce,

feorran geflȳmed, ǣr hē feorh seleð,
aldor on ōfre, ǣr hē in wille,
hafelan hȳdan. (Heaney 2000, 94, ll. 1369–72)17

Butts (1987, 115) argues that Hrothgar here tries to “impress upon
Beowulf the very fearful and unnatural aspect of the place” (my ital-
ics). In other words, the epic uses the setting of the lake to emphasize
the magic capabilities of its inhabitants: Grendel and Grendel’s mother.
We can cope with this mere because we know that supernatural forces
and settings are important ingredients of epics. The brave hero Beowulf
has to enter a supernatural realm that defies the laws of nature and then
serves as the stage for an allegorical confrontation between the forces
of good (Beowulf ) and evil (Grendel’s mother).18
In part 3 of Swift’s ([1726] 2003, 146) Gulliver’s Travels, the first-
person narrator also encounters an unnatural location, namely the
flying island of Laputa, “an Island in the Air, inhabited by Men, who
were able . . . to raise, or sink, or put it into Progressive Motion, as
they pleased.” The narrator describes this physically impossible island,
which is part of the Kingdom of Balnibarbi: “The Flying or Floating
Island is exactly circular, its Diameter 7837 Yards, or about four Miles
and an Half, and consequently contains ten Thousand Acres. It is three
Hundred Yards thick. The bottom or under Surface, which appears to
those who view it from below, is one even regular Plate of Adamant,
shooting up to the Height of about two Hundred Yards” (155). The island,
which defies the law of gravity, is moved “by means of [a] Loadstone”
(156) that “is under the Care of certain Astronomers, who from time
to time give it such Positions as the Monarch directs” (158). With this
lodestone “the Island is made to rise and fall, and move from one place
to another” (156).
The bizarre inhabitants of this island are so fond of “Mathematics
and Music” that their food comes in the shape of geometrical figures
and musical instruments (Swift [1726] 2003, 152, 149–50). When they
praise “the Beauty of a Woman,” they use “Geometrical Terms” or “words
of Art drawn from Music” (152). Since they dislike the practical, they
are typically “taken up with intense Speculations” (148) or listen to “the
Music of the Spheres” (151). The narrator points out that they are usually
“so abstracted and involved in Speculation that [he] never met with such
disagreeable Companions” (162). In Lagado, the capital of Balnibarbi,

the narrator witnesses a series of peculiar experiments carried out
by members of the Academy: one of these “scientists” is supposed to
“reduce human Excrement to its original Food,” while another one tries
to “calcine Ice into Gun Powder” (168).
Unlike the burning lake in Beowulf, we cannot ascribe the unnatu-
ral island of Laputa to the realm of the supernatural. Rather it has to
be seen in the context of the novel’s overall exaggerations that serve a
satirical purpose.19 The most striking feature of the island is that it can
fly—a characteristic that creates a physical distance between Laputa
and the rest of the storyworld. One can try to make sense of this fea-
ture by looking at it from the vantage point of the island’s ivory-tower
inhabitants as well as the bizarre experiments carried out in Lagado.
One can explain the flying island as ridiculing scientific explorations
in the context of the Royal Society, which played an important role in
eighteenth-century Britain, or the period’s new schools of learning.
From this perspective the island’s unnatural ability to fly can be seen
as representing the inapplicability or pointlessness of the new theories
and learned subjects (see also Hunter 2003, 229–30).
But one can also intuit a link between Laputa, which is part of
the Kingdom of Balnibarbi, and the politics of absolutism. Robert P.
Fitzgerald (1988, 222), for one, argues that Swift derived the idea of the
flying island “from a literal application of sovereignty, which derives from
super, ‘over, above.’ ” Indeed the novel’s narrator (mistakenly) describes
the etymology of the phrase la puta (Spanish for “whore”) as follows:
“Lap in the old obsolete Language signifieth High, and Untuh a Governor,
from which they say by Corruption was derived Laputa from Lapun-
tuh” (Swift [1726] 2003, 150). Fitzgerald (1988, 214) draws a link between
Laputa, whose movements are directed by the King of Balnibarbi, and
the ideas of absolutism in the work of Jean Bodin, Robert Filmer, and
Thomas Hobbes. From this perspective the flying island might serve to
critique the aloofness of absolutist rulers, that is, the distance between
the monarchy system and its subjects.
Impossible transformations of geographical settings can be found
in postmodernist narratives but also in epics and satirical texts, where

they serve different functions. While the burning lake in Beowulf accen-
tuates the power of supernatural creatures, the flying island of Laputa
either critiques the new schools of learning or the politics of absolutism.
Davenport, on the other hand, uses the collage-like version of Europe
in the context of a specifically postmodern agenda. “The Haile Selassie
Funeral Train” follows the spirit of Lyotard’s (1997, xxiv) postmodern
“incredulity toward metanarratives,” that is, totalizing thought sys-
tems, and instead argues in favor of pluralism and the proliferation of
numerous little narratives in a more hybrid Europe.
5.5. Transgressing Storyworld Boundaries: Ontological Metalepsis

Ontological metalepsis is another common unnatural phenomenon.
The term denotes jumps between narrative levels that involve actual
transgressions or violations of ontological boundaries (such as trans-
migrations between the primary storyworld and [embedded] fictional
texts or imaginations). Genette (1980, 234–35) defines metalepsis as “any
intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic
universe (or by the diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe,
etc.), or the inverse.”
Since Genette’s original definition, narratologists have devised mul-
tiple taxonomies of metaleptic techniques and effects (see Ryan 2006a).
Monika Fludernik (2003b, 389), for example, has identified four types of
metalepsis: (1) authorial metalepsis (as in Virgil “has Dido die”), which
serves to foreground the inventedness of the story; (2) ontological meta-
lepsis (type 1), in which the narrator (or a character) jumps to a lower
diegetic level; (3) ontological metalepsis (type 2), in which a fictional
character jumps to a higher narrative level; and (4) rhetorical metalepsis.
Fludernik also distinguishes between ‘“real” and “metaphorical metalep-
sis,” that is, “between an actual crossing of ontological boundaries and
a merely imaginative transcendence of narrative levels” (396). Autho-
rial and rhetorical metalepsis can be described as merely metaphorical
modes in which no actual boundary crossing takes place. To put this
point another way, only ontological metalepses involve unnatural
transgressions of storyworld boundaries. Ontological metalepses are

physically impossible because in the actual world, entities from two
different ontological domains cannot interact. For instance, a fictional
character cannot transmigrate into the actual world, and a real person
cannot literally transmigrate into a fictional text.
With regard to ontological metalepses, I distinguish between
ascending metalepses (in which, say, a fictional character literally trans-
migrates from an embedded fictional text into the primary storyworld)
and descending metalepses (in which, say, a character from the pri-
mary storyworld transmigrates into a fictional text). Such metalepses
involve the transgressive violation of world boundaries through jumps
between ontologically distinct zones (see also Alber and Bell 2012).
In Woody Allen’s (1980) short story “The Kugelmass Episode,” the
twentieth-century university professor Kugelmass enters the world
of Flaubert’s (1856) Madame Bovary and has an affair with Emma
Bovary.20 In this example of descending metalepsis, Kugelmass is seek-
ing solace from a life in which he is “unhappily married for the second
time,” has “two dull sons,” and is “up to his neck in alimony and child
support” (61). As they spend more time together in the world of Flaubert’s
nineteenth-century novel, Kugelmass teaches Emma about twentieth-
century life in New York; consequently she wants to visit. In an ascending
metaleptic jump, she moves to New York and indulges in modern life.
Emma and Kugelmass go “to the movies, ha[ve] dinner in Chinatown,
pass two hours at a discotheque, and [go] to bed with a tv movie” (72).
Everything seems to be idyllic until their relationship is strained by
modern life. Emma cannot get a job, and Kugelmass cannot afford to
pay for her to stay in the Plaza Hotel any longer. The realities of modern
life result in both parties willing Emma to move back to her original
world, to which she eventually returns. At the end of this humorous
short story Kugelmass performs another descending metaleptic jump
and is mistakenly transported into the world of “an old text-book,
Remedial Spanish,” where he is chased by “a large and hairy irregular
verb” (Allen 1980, 78).
Following reading strategy 6 (satirization and parody), one can inter-
pret the metaleptic jumps in “The Kugelmass Episode” as ridiculing the

characters’ “over-reaching desire” (McHale 1987, 123) as well as their
attempts at escapism. Both Kugelmass and Madame Bovary want to
be with someone from a different ontological domain. However, their
(strictly speaking impossible) relationship does not work out, and at the
end Kugelmass’s transgressive desire takes him to the world of an old
textbook, where he does not want to be at all. Kugelmass and Emma
seek to flee their original storyworlds to pursue what they perceive to
be a more exciting existence in another encyclopedia. They therefore
also use metaleptic jumps as a means of escape. Furthermore the fact
that Emma returns to her original nineteenth-century storyworld
while Kugelmass persists in his metaleptic endeavors away from his
life in the actual world suggests that it is modern life in particular
that is the source of the characters’ unhappiness and their interest
in escapism.
In John Fowles’s ([1969] 2004) neo-Victorian novel The French Lieu-
tenant’s Woman, the authorial narrator at one point descends into the
storyworld, where he shares a train compartment with Charles, one of
the novel’s protagonists. This descending metaleptic jump is unnatural
because the narrator moves from the twentieth century (he lives “in
the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes” [97] and com-
ments on sexuality in the nineteenth century from the perspective of
his contemporary worldview [258–61]), into the narrated world, which
is set in England in 1867 (9).
During the journey the bearded narrator, who tells us that he has
“the look an omnipotent god . . . should be shown to have” (Fowles
[1969] 2004, 389), thinks about the question of what to do with the
character of Charles. In order to come up with an idea, he descends
into the storyworld: “Charles has opened his eyes and is looking at me.
There is something more than disapproval in his eyes now; he perceives
I am either a gambler or mentally deranged. I return his disapproval,
and my florin to my purse. He picks up his hat, brushes some invisible
speck of dirt (a surrogate for myself ) from its nap and places it on his
head” (390, my italics). This descending metaleptic jump is different
from Genette’s authorial metalepsis insofar as the novel represents the

narrator as actually jumping down into the world of his character. The
narrator can be seen by Charles, and the two figures exchange looks.
Following reading strategy 6, one might argue that the novel uses this
metaleptic jump to parody the very idea of a god-like omniscient narra-
tor by showing that, in this case at least, the narrator is not omniscient
at all. Fowles’s narrator does not really know what do with the character
of Charles, self-reflexively thematizes this lack of knowledge, and, in
order to gain inspiration, hangs out in the storyworld for a while.
There are many metaleptic jumps in pre-postmodernist narratives
that anticipate the ontological metalepses of postmodernism. Some
of these metalepses are metaphorical ones in which we are invited to
think that the extradiegetic narrator appears at the intradiegetic level,
but the boundary crossings are of course merely imaginary. Then there
are cases in which the authorial narrator, “whose world is distinct from
that of the characters” (Stanzel 1984, 17), briefly assumes the shape of a
real person to appear in the world of the characters. Both metaphori-
cal metalepses and the brief descents of the authorial narrator into the
world of the characters set important precedents for the unnatural
metalepses in postmodernist narratives where ontological limits are
violated. Certain pre-postmodernist narratives, finally, contain proper
cases of ontological metalepsis because we can observe an actual cross-
ing of ontological boundaries.
The following passage of metalepsis in Charlotte Brontë’s ([1849]
2006) novel Shirley, for instance, is an example of the first case. It is
merely metaphorical because the extradiegetic narrator and narratee
descend into the storyworld only as if they were inhabitants of the
intradiegetic world of the characters: “You shall see them, reader.
Step into this neat gardenhouse on the skirts of Whinbury, walk for-
ward into the little parlour—there they are at dinner. . . . You and I will
join the party, see what is to be seen, and hear what is to be heard” (6, my
italics; see also Fludernik 2003b, 397n5; Ryan 2001a, 89).21
Another metaphorical metalepsis can be found in George Eliot’s
([1859] 2001) novel Adam Bede. Here the narrator and the narratee
enter the dining room of Mr. Irwine, the vicar: “Let me take you into

that dining room, and show you the Rev. Adolphous Irwine. . . . We will
enter very softly and stand still in the open doorway, without awaking
the glossy-brown setter who is stretched across the hearth . . . or the
pug, who is dozing, with his black muzzle aloft, like a sleepy president”
(52). One might argue that since the narrator alludes to the possibility
of waking Irwine’s pets, he and the narratee must be literally present
at the scene. However, the fact that they do not wake them indicates
that we are here confronted with another imaginative transgression
of boundaries.
Let me move on to the second case. As Franz K. Stanzel (1984, 204–5)
has shown, the authorial narrator of William Thackeray’s ([1848] 2001)
novel Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero at one point appears in the
world of his characters (like a peripheral first-person narrator). The
narrator describes this encounter with the characters as follows: “It was
at the little comfortable Ducal town of Pumpernickel . . . that I first saw
Colonel Dobbin” (729). Later the narrator tells us that the character of
Tapeworm “poured out into the astonished Major’s ears such a history
about Becky and her husband as astonished the querist, and supplied
all the points of this narrative, for it was at that very table years ago that
the present writer had the pleasure of hearing the tale” (783, my italics).
The character of Tapeworm is here (somewhat surprisingly) presented
as the source of the narrator’s detailed knowledge about Becky Sharp.
Such a meeting is possible only if the authorial narrator transmigrates
from his own fictional realm into the world of the characters by assum-
ing the shape of an embodied (or real) person.
The authorial narrator of Eliot’s ([1859] 2001, 168–69) novel at one
point also announces that he has met his character Adam Bede and
that they have interacted with one another: “I gathered from Adam
Bede, to whom I talked of these matters in his old age, that few clergy-
men could be less successful in winning the hearts of the parishioners
than Mr Ryde” (my italics; see also Warhol 1986, 815). As in the case
of Vanity Fair, this interaction is possible only if the authorial nar-
rator moves into the world of the characters by assuming a physical
existence.22 Stanzel (1984, 204) argues that in such cases the authorial

narrator tries “to furnish his personality with a physical existence, to
transform himself from an abstract functional role into a figure of
flesh and blood.”
Even though the two types of metalepsis discussed so far set important
precedents for ontological ones, they primarily serve “to enhance the
reader’s immersion in the fiction” (Fludernik 2003b, 384–85). Indeed
they constitute deliberate metanarrative celebrations of the act of nar-
ration which add to the illusion of experiencing a stable narrative world
(see Neumann and Nünning 2009). Alternatively one might argue that
such metalepses serve to convey the illusion that the (fictional) charac-
ters are actual people because the narrator (or the narratee) can literally
meet them, talk to them, or otherwise interact with them. Robyn War-
hol (1986, 815) suggests that such “metalepses are meant to reinforce the
reader’s serious sense of the characters as, in some way, real.”
There are also pre-postmodernist metalepses whose status as meta-
phorical or ontological metalepsis remains undecidable, while others
are indeed properly ontological (and hence unnatural). The metaleptic
jump in Sir Philip Sidney’s ([1580] 1974) pastoral Renaissance romance
Old Arcadia, for instance, wavers ambivalently between metaphorical
and ontological metalepsis. At one point the extradiegetic narrator
claims to hear the cries of Dametas, one of his intradiegetic charac-
ters, and since the narrator also tells us that he is able to “comfort” his
character, the ontological divide between the two separate storyworlds
seems to be rather porous: “But methinks Dametas cries unto me, if I
come not the sooner to comfort him, he will leave off his golden work
hath already cost him so much labour and longing” (264, my italics).
It is hard to tell whether the narrator actually hears his character’s
cries and whether he could really step down into his storyworld to
comfort him.23 In other words, the boundary crossings might be actual
or merely imaginative ones. The primary purpose of this metalepsis
is presumably to highlight that the creator of Dametas cares about his
creation like a benevolent god.
A proper ontological metalepsis can be found in John Lydgate’s (1431)
epic poem Fall of Princes, which is an English version of Laurent de

Premierfait’s (1409) Des cas de nobles hommes et femmes, itself based
on Boccaccio’s (1355–60) Latin text De casibus virorum illustrium (Ber-
gen 1924, 1, ll. 1–3).24 Lydgate’s Fall of Princes presents “the fall of nobles”
(Bergen 1924, 3, l. 77), that is, a series of lamentable tragedies of famous
men and women. In the prologue we are told that we will be presented
with “noble stories” that demonstrate “how al the world shal faile”
(5, ll. 158–59).
In this narrative the extradiegetic narrator tells us about the intradi-
egetic figure of “bochas [Boccaccio] the poete” (Bergen 1924, 106,
l. 3844) and the (hypodiegetic) stories he writes. At one point Boccaccio
takes “his penne” to “write the story, and be compendious, / Afforn all
other off Duk Theseus” (106, ll. 3846–50), but then Thyestes, the son of
Pelops, appears before him and urges Boccaccio to forget about Duke
Theseus and write down his own story first because he considers it to
be the most tragic of all stories:
But at his bak Bochas dede oon see,

Which cried loude & bad he sholde a-bide:
“Bochas,” quod he, “fro the me list nat hide
My woful cas, nor in no wise spare
My pitous compleynt to the to declare!
I am Thiestes, be-spreynt al with wepyng,
Drownyd in teris, as thou maist weel see. . . .
My will is this, that thou anon proceede
To turne thi stile, and tak thi penne blyue,
Leue Theseus, tak now off hym non heede,
But my tragedie first that thou descryue.
For I suppose that in al thi lyue,
That thou sauh neuer a thing mor dolerous, . . .
Than is, allas, my mortal auenture.” (106–7, ll. 3853–72)25
Boccaccio then pauses and listens to Thyestes’s story: “And with that
woord John Bochas stille stood, / Ful sobirly to yiue [give] hym audi-
ence” (107, ll. 3879–80). We are here confronted with an ontological
metalepsis or, more specifically, an ascending metalepsis because a

character from the hypodiegetic level of Boccaccio’s book jumps to the
intradiegetic level of Boccaccio, the author, to talk to him.
In his story Thyestes represents his brother Atreus as being a vicious
scoundrel who is responsible for his tragic downfall.26 As soon as Thy-
estes has finished his tale, the furious Atreus appears before Boccaccio
to complain about Thyestes’s story:
atreus afftir, with a ful pale cheer,

And off envie ful ded in his visage,
Onto Iohn Bochas gan approche neer,
Lich as he hadde be fallen in a rage,
And furiousli abraid in his langage,
“How may this be, that lik a man wer wood,
Thiestes hath his venym sowe a-brod
And like a rebaude falsli me accusid.” (Bergen 1924, 113, l.
4082–89)27
Again a character jumps from the hypodiegetic to the intradiegetic

level to argue with Boccaccio. In his story Atreus likewise represents
his brother Thyestes as being a vicious scoundrel who is responsible
for his tragic downfall.28 After listening to the stories by Thyestes and
Atreus, Boccaccio puts away his pen and refuses to write another word
about them:
Whan Iohn Bochas fulli hadde espied

Off these too brethre thaccusaciouns,
And how thei hadde maliciousli replied
Ech ageyn other in ther discenciouns,
He gan dulle to here ther mociouns,
Pu vp his penne & wrot nat mor a woord
Off ther furie nor off ther fals discord. (117, l. 4208–14)29
The metaleptic jumps by Thyestes and Atreus involve the transgressive

violation of world boundaries, just like the ascending metalepses in
Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode” and other postmodernist narratives.30

These two ascending metaleptic jumps, which are reminiscent of the
ways sinners pray to God to convince him of their innocence, serve
two functions. First, we can observe a striking discrepancy between the
comic or playful form of the metalepses (characters suddenly appear
before their author) and the tragic content of the two stories. The nar-
rative seems to ridicule Thyestes and Atreus for blaming one another
without being able to admit their own flaws, faults, or failures. Second,
the two ascending metaleptic jumps also establish Boccaccio as a moral
(perhaps even god-like) authority who can judge the two characters.
Boccaccio listens to the two tales but then decides to write “nat mor
a word” about Thyestes and Atreus. In particular he blames them for
being “fals,” that is, completely mistaken, in their discord.
Compared to earlier narratives, postmodernist ones contain many
more ontological metalepses that deconstruct boundaries or separa-
tions that we consider to be fixed. Furthermore, in contrast to the
postmodernist cases, most of the earlier examples of metalepsis para-
doxically contribute to substantiating the illusion of authenticity that
the narrative seeks to create. They serve as comments on the frame of
storytelling and reinforce the narrator’s power to guide us through the
narrative. Nevertheless the tradition of ontological metalepsis does
not begin with the advent of postmodernism; rather it reaches as far
back as the Middle Ages. The ascending and descending metalepses in
Fall of Princes and Old Arcadia function exactly like the ones in “The
Kugelmass Episode” and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The major
differences concern quantity as well as tone and atmosphere. Postmod-
ernist narratives contain more instances of ontological metalepsis than
earlier narratives, and the transmigrations of postmodernism typically
have a parodic function, while the earlier ones involve a slightly more
moralist attitude.
5.6. Summary
The unnatural spaces of postmodernist narratives are “strange and
unfamiliar places” which lie “outside the known worlds of realist fiction

and everyday experience” and constitute “a fascinating challenge to
readers and critics” (Kneale 1996, 147). My findings corroborate the
hypothesis that postmodernism closely correlates with the annihilation
of traditional space or the projection of what one might call “monstrous
space,” that is, “a space that is in constant motion and has no estab-
lished centers” (Herman and Vervaeck 2005, 113).
However, unnatural spaces do not exist only in postmodernist
narratives. The major difference between the impossible spaces in
postmodernism and the unnatural spatial coordinates in other nar-
ratives is that most of the latter can be redeemed by recourse to the
conventions of certain genres. Most of the impossible spaces analyzed
in this chapter can either be seen as otherworldly settings where super-
natural creatures reside (or spaces that have been influenced by magic
or sorcery), locations that involve satirical exaggerations, distortions, or
caricature, or the boundary crossings between different zones have
to do with metanarrative statements that foreground the power of the
omniscient narrator in the context of literary realism.31
Even though it is sometimes rather difficult to produce mental
representations of the spaces discussed in this chapter, what Marco
Caracciolo (2011, 117, 119) calls “the reader’s imaginative projection into
[the] fictional world . . . ,” which he describes as “an illusion founded on
the sense that we could be there,” is still possible. However, it is clearly
easier for us as readers to project ourselves into unnatural spaces if
we can evoke suitable discourse contexts within which these spatial
impossibilities can be embedded (see also Nieuwland and van Berkum
2006, 1109).
As I have shown in my four analytical chapters, the unnatural
always urges us to create new mental models through blends (read-
ing strategy 1) because storyworlds that contain impossibilities cannot
be reconstructed on the basis of real-world parameters only. At the
same time, numerous earlier narratives confront us with conventional-
ized impossibilities. In such cases the process of blending has already
been completed, and we have come to associate the impossible blend
with certain generic conventions (reading strategy 2). The process of

conventionalization has been influenced by reading strategies 1 (the
blending of frames), 4 (foregrounding the thematic), 5 (reading alle-
gorically), 6 (satirization and parody), and 7 (positing a transcendental
realm). In other words, these five navigational tools have fed into the
generic knowledge on which reading strategy 2 (generification) is based.
Since reading strategy 3 (subjectification) reveals the seemingly unnatu-
ral to be only part of a dream or a hallucination, I have not extensively
focused on this navigational tool. On the other hand, since every nar-
rative has themes, reading strategy 4 (foregrounding the thematic) plays
a role in all of my readings (just like reading strategy 1). The “do it
yourself ” strategy (reading strategy 8) can be helpful with literary texts
containing logical impossibilities, which we can deal with by approach-
ing such narratives as construction kits. Reading strategy 9 (the Zen way
of reading) is important from a psychological perspective because it
urges us to savor the unnatural as well as related feelings or emotions.
Apart from reading strategies 1 and 4, which play a central role in all
my readings, 5, 6, and 7 were the ones that I have used most frequently
in my analyses.
Given that the Zen way of reading (reading strategy 9) as well as
reading strategies 1 (the blending of frames) and 2 (generification)
concern the acceptance of the unnatural and the integration of impos-
sibilities into our cognitive architecture, they might be associated with
an “unnatural response” to literature. We actively move beyond the
realistically possible to approach what is represented by the narrative
text. All the other reading strategies, on the other hand, have to do
with the process of meaning-making in which we try to find out what
the unnatural has to say about us and the world we live in. In other
words, the six other navigational tools do not involve an “unnatural
response”; they primarily deal with the question of what the unnatural
has to say about “mortal life: how to understand it and how to live it”
(Nagel 1979, ix).
In the words of Ellen Spolsky (2002, 57), I am proposing “a theory of
[interpretive] survival that depends upon adaptation . . . by recatego-
rization” and builds on, but ultimately moves beyond, Lisa Zunshine’s

(2008, 164) argument that “cognitive uncertainty . . . flexes and trains
our categorization process.” The cognitive mechanisms on which
these navigational tools are based are of course “powerfully reduc-
tive” (McHale 1992a, 72). Nevertheless I hope to have shown that the
application of these reading strategies to physical, logical, and human
impossibilities can enrich the polysemic makeup of the narratives dis-
cussed in this study—in particular when they are combined with the
Zen way of reading, which does justice to the “presence effects” and the
related idea of being “quiet for a moment” (Gumbrecht 2004, 133–52).

Conclusion
Fictional narratives always allow us to reconceptualize our experi-

ence of the world. They are important tools for the organization and
reorganization of human experience. So what exactly is at stake when
narratives depict, and we as recipients try to come to terms with,
unnatural scenarios or events? What is gained through the radicaliza-
tion of the fictional in the impossible? First of all, physical, logical, and
human impossibilities centrally concern the nature of representation
or mimesis in Aristotle’s sense (see also Petterson 2012). The unnatural
consistently urges us to create new mental models that transcend our
real-world knowledge (e.g., through frames such as that of the talk-
ing breast, the dead character, the retrogressive temporality, or the
shape-shifting house). It thus seeks to exhaust the possibilities of our
imagination and the worlds of fiction. The unnatural addresses the lim-
its of both the thinkable and the representable.
Generally speaking, represented impossibilities move beyond
the world as we know it. The unnatural thrives on surprise and the
unexpected scenarios or events that are born from its unpredictable
principles. The stimulation of our imagination through the depiction of
impossibilities closely correlates with an aesthetic kind of pleasure that
is perhaps valuable in itself insofar as it draws us “forwards towards
the new, into strange, unfamiliar and monstrous compounds” (Gib-
son 1996, 272). Brian Richardson (2006, 135) points out that the “desire
to ‘make it new’ ” is “a primary motive” behind representations of the
unnatural. To paraphrase Werner Wolf (2005, 102), one might also argue
that the unnatural celebrates the faculty of the imagination, that is, “the
faculty of the human mind to engage in the field of ‘the imaginary’
215
regardless of rational ‘impossibilities,’ ” as a source of enjoyment and
stimulation.
On the other hand, it is demanding to engage in the imaginative
stimulations with which the unnatural correlates. Physical, logical, and
human impossibilities pose acute challenges to the reader’s imagina-
tion, which is forced to grapple with extremely awkward problems of
conceptualization. One might thus wonder why certain authors represent
and certain readers desire to encounter impossible scenarios or events
that potentially lead to states of cognitive disorientation. Lisa Zunshine
(2008, 144) suggests that dealing with impossibilities is “crucial to our
cognitive well-being”; she believes that “contemplating concepts that
challenge our cognitive biases may help the mind to retain its flexibility
and its capacity for responding to its infinitely complex and changing
environment.” Even though I do not see an intrinsic connection between
narrative structures and ideological ramifications, I build on Zunshine’s
argument as follows: unnatural scenarios and events are particularly well
designed to make us more flexible because such textual segments urge us
to deal with extremely recalcitrant concepts. Indeed by taking us to the
most remote territories of what can be imagined, unnatural scenarios and
events significantly widen the cognitive horizon of human awareness.
At the same time, the idea that fiction induces false expectations in
its recipients by immersing them in far-fetched situations or activities
has a long tradition. Plato, for instance, banned all types of art from
his Republic because art would only distract people from the perfect
World of Ideas. John Searle (1975, 332) distinguishes between serious
and pretended (or fictional) speech acts and wonders why “we attach
such importance and effort to texts which contain largely pretended
speech acts.” From this (critical) perspective the representation of
impossibilities is of course particularly misleading because, at least at
first glance, it seems pure pretense that is completely unrelated to seri-
ous human concerns. By contrast I argue that the unnatural not only
widens our cognitive horizon by urging us to create new mental models
but also challenges our limited perspective on the world and invites
us to address questions that we would perhaps otherwise ignore. For
216 Conclusion
example, by consistently highlighting the suffering of animals under
ignorant humans, the animal narrators in circulation novels and chil-
dren’s books have gradually made humans aware of this problem.
As Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2010) has shown, fictional narratives often
widen our mental universe beyond the actual and the familiar and pro-
vide important playing fields for several (sometimes funny, sometimes
disconcerting) thought experiments. Similarly Wolfgang Iser (1996, 21)
argues that fiction allows us “to lead an ecstatic life by stepping out of
our entanglements and into zones we are otherwise barred from.” For
him fictional literature “is not hedged in either by the limitations or
the considerations that determine the institutionalized organizations
within which human life otherwise takes its course” (19). Schaeffer’s
and Iser’s statements are especially true of fictional narratives that involve
the unnatural. At the most general level such narratives give us a sense of
“what it is like” (Herman 2009, 14)—or perhaps what it might be like—to
experience worlds that transcend physical laws, logical principles, and
standard human limitations of knowledge and ability as well as related
feelings of helplessness, incomprehension, and bafflement.
Represented impossibilities urge readers to imaginatively assume
perspectives that differ markedly from their familiar everyday experi-
ence. Indeed unnatural scenarios and events enable readers to address
the question of what it might be like to be a different entity, to have
direct access to the thoughts of others, to inhabit a world that is dom-
inated by impossible temporalities, or to experience shape-shifting or
otherwise unnatural spaces. In other words, the unnatural attends to
the question of what it might be like for us to be in situations that are
unknown and potentially difficult to deal with. Thus while some unnatu-
ral constellations evoke feelings such as discomfort, fear, worry, panic,
terror, or horror, others stir up feelings of pleasure, amusement, delight,
and comic joy. It goes without saying that these strong emotional
responses or “presence effects” in Gumbrecht’s (2004, 17) sense feed
back into the appeal of the unnatural.
Despite my more or less desperate attempts to make sense of the
unnatural by linking it to the “ ‘human interest’ question” (S. H. Olsen
Conclusion 217
1987, 67), I do not mean to suggest that now everything is in order and
we can file away the not yet conventionalized instances of the unnatural
in postmodernism. On the contrary, from my perspective the self-
reflexive metafictions of postmodernism are interesting and unsettling
because they consistently play with the unnatural, thus highlighting
what I consider to be the specificity of fiction. Certain phenomena or
cognitive configurations (namely those that involve the unnatural) can
only be derived from and are thus limited to being experienced in the
world of fiction—they cannot be experienced anywhere else.
Given that the unnatural scenarios and events discussed in this
study are all “non-actualizable” (Ronen 1994, 51), they can be experi-
enced only in our imagination. Like David Herman (2011a, 12), I feel
that the ability to recognize the distinctiveness of fictional representa-
tions from nonfictional representations of the world is a “crucial growth
point in the ontogeny of human intelligence.” Children, for example,
gradually have to learn to distinguish between fantasy and reality. In
the words of Brian Boyd (2009, 186), they “need to be able to grasp the
real, to work out what to expect of inanimate and animate, of different
kinds of things and animals, of different behaviors and situations.”
For adults who are incapable of distinguishing between their halluci-
nations and reality (due to, say, excessive drug use or psychophysical
disturbances) it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate within the
actual world or interact with others. Since it is crucial for humans to be
able to differentiate between the actual world and the worlds of fiction,
I join the efforts to highlight the specificities of fiction. Only fiction can
represent physical, logical, and human impossibilities. The unnatural
thus sheds new light on the old idea of the literariness or distinctiveness
of fictional literature, that is, the question of how literature differs from
other discursive modes. I suggest that the possibility of representing
the impossible is the most crucial difference between fiction and other
modes of discourse. It is only in the world of fiction that impossible
narrators, characters, temporalities, and settings can be simulated.
At the same time, however, I agree with Herman’s (2011a, 12) argu-
ment that we can make sense of fictional texts only on the basis of
218 Conclusion
preexisting frames and scripts, that is, “the same protocols” or tem-
plates that we also use to make sense of the real world. Similarly Mark
Turner (1996, v) points out that “the literary mind is not a separate
kind of mind”; rather “it is our mind.” Unnatural scenarios and events
consistently urge us to develop new frames and scripts on the basis of
impossible blends, but we can make sense of them only on the basis
of our cognitive architecture, so I see my reading strategies as isolat-
ing some of the mechanisms that readers may resort to when they
are confronted with literary texts that represent impossibilities. Our
dealing with the unnatural in fictional narratives has its roots in what
children do when they pretend to be somebody or something else. As
Boyd (2009, 187, 182) has shown, children “readily step over the actual
into the possible and the impossible” in pretend play; nevertheless they
“test the implications of their imagined contexts without confusing
them with the real” (my italics). Something very similar seems to hap-
pen when we deal with represented impossibilities in fiction. We accept
the unnatural as an objective constituent of the storyworld and then
ponder its implications. Interestingly Boyd has also shown that pretend
play actually helps children clearly separate reality and fiction. Even
at early stages children “do not confuse their fantasy and reality, and
from the age of three those who do have imaginary companions per-
form better than others on tests of the ability to differentiate between
the real and the imagined” (182–83).
I have discussed the use of impossibilities in non-postmodernist
narratives, thus addressing and reconceptualizing what Andreas Huys-
sen (1986, 181) calls postmodernism’s “long and complex history.” I have
looked at English literary history from the perspective of the unnatu-
ral, and my findings lead me to disagree with Richardson’s (2011, 35)
argument that “there can be no real tradition of the unnatural.” My
approach positions the phenomenon of postmodernism as “fundamen-
tally relational” insofar as it highlights “the gesture of . . . historical
citation” (Huyssen 1986, 183–84). Even though experimental narrative
techniques usually occur in postmodernist narratives, postmodernism
is not the wholly unprecedented explosion of antirealism that certain
Conclusion 219
critics consider it to be. Rather, even though postmodernism can be
described in terms of the concentration and radicalization of unnat-
uralness, postmodernist narratives are obviously embedded in the
history of fictional narrative. They relate to and transform unnatural
scenarios and events that have already been conventionalized in estab-
lished genres and make these scenarios or events strange again by using
them in contexts where we do not expect to find them.
I have tried to elucidate the fact that postmodernist narratives typi-
cally use unnatural scenarios and events that are virtually identical to
those found in earlier narratives. Postmodernism transforms the use of
impossibilities in historical genres, and the following processes, which
partly overlap, play an important role in this context:
1. The qualitative radicalization of modes of the unnatural

2. The quantitative extension and/or concentration of impossibilities
3. The demotion of supernatural creatures and the simultaneous
spreading of the impossible around the world
4. The continuation of ridicule through extreme forms of
exaggeration
5. The shift to a specifically postmodern agenda
6. The explicit foregrounding of the impossible through metafiction
1. Postmodernist narratives often radicalize the unnatural phe-

nomena we find in earlier narratives and take them to an extreme.
For example, Butler’s postmodernist “Jealous Husband” radicalizes
the fusion of humans and animals in beast fables (where the blend
serves to ridicule human folly) and circulation novels and children’s
stories (where the blend serves to critique cruelty against animals) by
questioning the foundations of the dichotomy human versus animal.
Like Derrida (2002) in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to
Follow),” Butler’s short story accentuates similarities between humans
and nonhuman animals, thus radically undercutting traditional claims
concerning the distinctiveness or special status of humans. “Jealous
Husband” takes the earlier fusions of humans and animals one step
220 Conclusion
further. Another radicalization of earlier modes of unnaturalness can
be found in Reed’s Flight to Canada. While time travel narratives such
as de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall or Wells’s The Time Machine present
us with characters who travel from one temporal realm to another,
Reed’s novel confronts its readers with a temporality that fuses the
1860s and the twentieth century. The latter fusion constitutes a radical-
ization of the former one because it not only represents an individual
character that travels from the narrative present to the narrative past
or the narrative future; the fusion also concerns historical periods that
are blended at the level of the story.
2. Postmodernism frequently builds on the unnatural passages of
historical genres and extends them so that unnaturalness exists in a
(quantitatively speaking) higher concentration and dominates the nar-
rative as a whole. Thus Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno contains individual
passages in which time moves backward, Dick’s Counter-Clock World
uses the reversal of the temporal flow inconsistently, and Aldiss’s Crypto-
zoic! only alludes to the retrogressive temporality but does not illustrate
its workings at all, but Amis’s postmodernist Time’s Arrow is completely
dominated by an antinomic time line: the novel begins with the pro-
tagonist’s death and ends with his birth, and the scripts of everyday life
are reversed on every page. Similarly whereas Rowling’s Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire contains only a brief reference to a tent whose
interior size exceeds its exterior size, Danielewski’s postmodernist House
of Leaves as a whole is set in a house that is bigger on the inside than
it is on the outside. Further, Allen’s “Kugelmass Episode” contains many
more examples of ontological metalepsis than earlier narratives do; it
is actually dominated by metaleptic jumps that transgress ontological
boundaries. In these senses postmodernism extends prior manifestations
of unnaturalness. Postmodernist narratives correlate with a higher con-
centration of unnaturalness than older or more traditional narratives.
3. In addition postmodernist narratives deconstruct hierarchies by
demoting supernatural creatures while simultaneously distributing
the impossible in nonmagical areas. Earlier narratives such as epics,
romances, Gothic novels, and fantasy novels feature supernatural
Conclusion 221
characters that stand above the laws of reality. Such figures may read
other people’s minds, speed up or slow down the natural flow of time,
will immediate changes the environment, transform themselves or oth-
ers into other entities, and so forth. What happens in postmodernist
narratives is that ordinary (i.e., nonsupernatural) characters become
capable of achieving the physically, logically, or humanly impossible as
well. In postmodernism the characters no longer have to be of super-
natural origin to have certain impossible abilities. In Map’s medieval
Courtiers’ Trifles, for example, King Herla has to be bewitched by a
pygmy with supernatural powers to remain in his world for two
hundred years rather than the three days Herla believes he spends
there. Such a differential temporality can also be found in Churchill’s
Cloud Nine, where the existence of two different story times does not
depend upon magic at all. Whereas in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur only
supernatural creatures like Merlin and Morgan le Fay can initiate the
transformation of a character into a different one, in postmodernist
narratives (such as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Kane’s Cleansed)
ordinary human figures freely transform into other entities or char-
acters. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children endows a character-narrator in
postcolonial India with (quasi-magic) mind-reading abilities that had
traditionally been reserved to the omniscient narrator of realist fiction.
4. Many eighteenth-century narratives (such as Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, and the circulation novels that
flourished between the 1770s and the 1790s) use the unnatural to mock
psychological predispositions or states of affairs. This tradition of satiric
exaggeration is continued in postmodernist narratives such as Butler’s
“Jealous Husband,” Roth’s The Breast, Allen’s “Kugelmass Episode,”
and Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. These narratives use the
unnatural either to ridicule figures that take themselves too seriously
or to parody certain generic conventions. Butler’s short story satirizes
an American husband who has turned himself into a parrot through
his feelings of jealousy as well as his helplessness; The Breast mocks
a professor of literature for taking his profession too seriously; “The
Kugelmass Episode” ridicules the characters’ transgressive desires; and
222 Conclusion
The French Lieutenant’s Woman parodies the idea of an all-knowing
omniscient narrator as well as the tidy-dénouement conventions of the
Victorian novel. In all of these cases characters or narrators are urged
to let go of their obsessions and to take themselves less seriously. Post-
modernism encourages a somewhat more relaxed attitude toward life.
5. Not surprisingly the use of the unnatural in postmodernist narra-
tives relates to a specifically postmodern agenda that involves distrust
of the master narratives of modernity (Lyotard 1997, xxiv) and align-
ment with the central assumptions of posthumanism (Hayles 1999).
Postmodernist narratives such as Coover’s “The Babysitter” and
Davenport’s “The Haile Selassie Funeral Train,” for example, use logically
incompatible plotlines or geographically impossible settings to celebrate
the absence of a unifying master narrative that tries to give a total expla-
nation of the world. In earlier literary texts unnatural phenomena such
as ontological pluralism and impossible geographies appear as well,
but there they perform different functions. Postmodernist fiction also
closely correlates with the posthumanist project (Hayles 1999): it decon-
structs the idea of a stable and unified human identity. Stuart Sim (2011,
299) summarizes the major differences between the postmodern under-
standing of the human subject and earlier conceptualizations as follows:
Postmodernism has rejected the concept of the individual, or

“subject,” that has prevailed in Western thought for the last few
centuries. For the latter tradition, the subject has been a privileged
being right at the heart of cultural process. Humanism has taught
us to regard the individual subject as a unified self, with a central
“core” of identity unique to each individual, motivated primarily by
the power of reason . . . . [For] . . . postmodernists, the subject is a
fragmented being that has no essential core of identity, and is to be
regarded as a process in a continual state of dissolution rather than a
fixed identity or self that endures unchanged over time. (my italics)
However, the relationship between postmodernist and earlier nar-

ratives can hardly be conceptualized in terms of a simple binary. The
deconstruction of the traditional human subject in literary history
Conclusion 223
involves a slow and gradual process composed of numerous steps. As
I have shown, many non-postmodernist narratives already undo the
category of the human and thus destabilize anthropocentric ideologies
by fusing humans and animals (beast fables and children’s stories), the
world of the living and the realm of the dead (romances and Gothic
novels), the anthropomorphic and the inanimate (circulations novels),
or humans and machines (science-fiction novels) or by transforming or
multiplying characters through magic (romances and fantasy novels)
or new technologies (science fiction). Again, compared to earlier narra-
tives, postmodernist ones involve a numerically higher concentration of
textual instances or examples of the deconstruction of the traditionally
human character.
6. Even though many earlier narratives represent scenarios and
events that are as unnatural as the ones we find in postmodernism, we
find such fusions to be disorienting only in the context of a postmod-
ernist narrative. We do not even notice the fundamental impossibility
and thus unnaturalness of similar blends in earlier works (which can
perhaps be classified as being “muted” forms of metafiction). For exam-
ple, a speaking animal (such as the parrot in “Jealous Husband”) strikes
us as odd in a postmodernist narrative but not so much in a beast fable
or a children’s story; a talking corpse (such as the dead father in Pinter’s
Family Voices) is estranging in a postmodernist text, but a ghost in a
Gothic novel is not; differential temporalities are weird in a postmodern-
ist narrative (such as Churchill’s Cloud Nine) but not in a magical tale
such as Map’s Courtiers’ Trifles; shape-shifting locations (like the house
in House of Leaves) are disconcerting in a postmodernist narrative but
certainly not in a fantasy novel where magic is possible.
This is so because in contrast to earlier narratives, postmodernist
ones explicitly foreground the impossibility of the represented scenario
or event as a form of metafiction. In addition postmodernist narratives
set up and depend upon realist expectations to a much higher degree
than has hitherto been noticed. The physical, logical, or human impos-
sibilities of postmodernism strike us as strange because they contradict
our readerly expectations, which are primarily based on our real-world
224 Conclusion
knowledge. In other words, postmodernist narratives have a tendency
to first invoke and then explicitly transgress realist expectations. On the
one hand, compared to earlier narratives, we can find a quantitatively
and qualitatively higher degree of unnaturalness in postmodernism.
On the other hand, unnaturalness and realism always coexist in post-
modernist fiction, without the former assimilating the latter.
This pattern has consequences for my conception of postmodernism.
I suggest that postmodernist narratives not only consistently project
unnatural scenarios and events but tend to form part of an intertextual
endeavor that radicalizes physical, logical, or human impossibilities that
have already been conventionalized in well-known historical genres and
defamiliarizes these impossibilities again by transferring them to realist
contexts where we do not expect them to occur. In other words, post-
modernist narratives blend our actual-world encyclopedia with the
encyclopedias of certain historical genres by using the impossible nar-
rators, characters, temporalities, or spaces of earlier narratives in the
context of otherwise realist storyworlds.
My redescription of postmodernist narratives helps explain the
estranging effects that we typically associate with postmodernism.
Wolf Schmid (2005, 98), for example, points out that “defamiliarisa-
tion informs all anti-realist and playful narrative techniques, especially
those used in metafictions and in postmodern rewrites.” These feel-
ings of estrangement correlate with the discrepancy between unnatural
scenarios or events and the context within which they are used. In
most cases the context set up by postmodernist narratives is, by and
large, a realist one, that is, one that is based on real-world cognitive
parameters. For instance, the parrot narrator of Butler’s “Jealous Hus-
band” is embedded in a relatively straightforwardly realist text. The
same is true of Carter’s Nights at the Circus, where the bird-woman
moves through a storyworld that we can easily reconstruct on the basis
of natural cognitive parameters, and Reed’s Flight to Canada, where
the fusing of the nineteenth and the twentieth century occurs within
an otherwise realist world. Similarly Allen’s “Kugelmass Episode” is a
relatively realist short story—except for the various metaleptic jumps.
Conclusion 225
In all of these cases unnaturalness and realism exist side by side. Fur-
ther, it is usually the case that only one narrative parameter involves
the unnatural, while the rest of the narrative can be reconstructed on
the basis of our real-world knowledge. At the same time, postmodernist
narratives highlight, accentuate, or explicitly foreground the physical,
logical, or human impossibility of their unnatural narrative features.
How does my reconceptualization relate to other takes on postmod-
ernism? Charles Jencks (1992) is largely responsible for the currency
of postmodernism in the area of architecture. He characterizes post-
modernist architecture in terms of its pluralism, eclecticism, and
playful revivalism:
An essential goal of the post-modern movement—the movement

as opposed to the social condition—is to further pluralism, to
overcome the elitism inherent in the previous paradigm. . . . The
different ways of life can be confronted, enjoyed, juxtaposed,
represented and dramatized, so that different cultures acknowl-
edge each other’s legitimacy. The motives are equally political
and aesthetic. Double-coding, to put it abstractly, is a strategy
of affirming and denying the existing power structures at the
same time, inscribing and challenging different tastes and oppo-
site forms of discourse. This double-voiced discourse has its own
peculiar laws and beauties and it constitutes the fundamental
agenda of the post-modern movement. (12–13)
Building on these ideas, Linda Hutcheon (1988, 16, 40) and Christian
Moraru (2005) have developed their own theories of postmodernist
narrative that highlight the intertextuality of postmodernism. Hutch-
eon (1988, 27) sees the most important feature of postmodernism in the
parodic transformation of tradition, which serves a political agenda:
“To include irony and play is never necessarily to exclude seriousness
and purpose in postmodernist art.” Moraru (2005, 22), for his part,
defines “postmodernism as representation that operates digressively,
and conspicuously so, through other representations.” He also seeks to
“capture the . . . interrelational nature of postmodern representation,
226 Conclusion
its quintessential intertextuality” (22). I see the use of conventionalized
impossibilities from earlier texts in postmodernist narratives as yet
another manifestation of this quintessential intertextuality. It is one
important way in which postmodernist narratives hark back to prior
texts that Hutcheon and Moraru do not specifically address.
At first glance my argument concerning the recycling of already
conventionalized impossibilities in postmodernist narratives seems
to be similar to Fredric Jameson’s (1991) ideas about the central role of
pastiche in postmodernism. Jameson argues that in postmodernism
“parody finds itself without a vocation. . . . It is a neutral practice of
such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of
the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction.” He also
speaks of “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the
play of random stylistic allusion” (17–18). However, I do not consider post-
modernism’s intertextuality, that is, the recycling of conventionalized
impossibilities, to be “devoid . . . of any conviction.” From my perspec-
tive the harking back to the unnatural in earlier narratives involves both
change and continuity, and it always serves a particular purpose, which
the outlined reading strategies potentially help determine.
Patricia Waugh (1984, 1–11) defines postmodernism in terms of self-
reflexivity or metafiction. The term metafiction denotes a type of fiction
that deals with the question of how fictions are made; it is a kind of self-
conscious fiction that reflects upon its own fictionality. Given my focus
on the unnatural, one can argue that postmodernism is metafictional in
two senses. On the one hand, postmodernist narratives foreground their
own fictionality by projecting physical, logical, or human impossibili-
ties; unnatural scenarios and events are instances of self-reflexivity that
highlight the fictionality of fiction insofar as they can be represented
only in the world of fiction (and postmodernist narratives typically
express and foreground an awareness of this fact). On the other hand,
it can be argued that postmodernism is about fiction because it harks
back to the history of literature and recycles conventionalized impos-
sibilities from earlier genres by transferring them to—or blending them
with—realist contexts.
Conclusion 227
A third well-known definition of postmodernism is that proposed
by Brian McHale (1987, 10), who argues that ontological instability is
the dominant characteristic of postmodernism: postmodernist fic-
tion is either concerned with the ontology of the literary text itself
or the ontology it projects. My definition of postmodernism centrally
concerns the idea that different kinds of worlds are placed in confron-
tation: the actual world, the worlds of postmodernist narratives, and
the worlds of well-known historical genres. Since unnatural scenarios
and events contradict our real-world parameters, the representation of
impossibilities is of course one important way of foregrounding onto-
logical questions. At the same time, my approach allows us to see that
the same entity or unnatural element can function differently in dif-
ferent contexts. As I have already said, the represented impossibilities
of postmodernism strike us as estranging, whereas the same unnatural
phenomena in earlier narratives typically do not.
Moreover my redescription of postmodernism opens up a new per-
spective on the history of postmodernism. Postmodernist narratives
are connected with historical genres through modes of the unnatu-
ral. I assume fluid rather than rigid boundaries between the types
of literature that I have discussed in this study, all of which contain
impossibilities of some sort. From the perspective of the unnatural,
postmodernism is not so much an immediate reaction to the used-
upness of the aesthetics of the modernist novel (see Barth 1984; Hassan
1987), where the unnatural primarily concerns the representation of
consciousness, that is, the fact that the neutral narrative medium is
capable of reading the minds of the characters. Rather postmodern-
ist narratives can now be construed as continuing the workings of the
unnatural in the magical worlds of the supernatural, the distorted worlds
of satires, and the futurist projections of science-fiction novels—which
they foreground in (more or less) realist contexts.
Generally speaking, my findings corroborate the idea that in the
world of fiction “the unnatural is everywhere” (Alber et al. 2010, 131).
Many or perhaps even most fictional narratives involve a certain
degree of unnaturalness because their storyworlds contain impossible
228 Conclusion
scenarios or events. Postmodernism can be described in terms of the
concentration and radicalization of unnaturalness, but impossibili-
ties also feature prominently throughout English literary history. Like
Herman, I see literary history as “an ever-expanding field of forces,
crisscrossed by multiple vectors of change” (Richardson and Herman
1998, 289). Two of the most important vectors of change “that continu-
ously fluctuate, battle against, merge with, and interanimate each other
dialogically” (Richardson 1997b, 304) are natural mental models, which
involve real-world cognitive parameters, and unnatural mental models,
which involve the representation of impossibilities. Consequently the
unnatural in its various modes is an important and hitherto neglected
driving force behind the creation of new generic configurations, and
thus the development of literary history (including the phenomenon
of postmodernism).
McHale (1992a, 247) is of course right in defining science fiction as
the sister genre of postmodernism because both text types “raise and
explore ontological issues.” I extend McHale’s argument by arguing
that postmodernism has numerous other sister genres as well. Since
various earlier genres use similar impossible blends as postmodern-
ist texts, postmodernist narratives are connected with these generic
configurations through manifestations of the unnatural. Apart from
science fiction, which typically “close[s] off the subversive potential of
the impossible . . . through recourse to scientific rationality” (Kneale
1996, 156), two other pre-postmodernist strands of unnaturalness can
be singled out as being especially important: narratives that deal with
impossibilities that have to do with supernatural forces, and satirical
literary texts that use exaggerations that merge with the unnatural.
David Fuller’s (2004, 161) characterization of romances, for
instance, immediately evokes connections to the unnaturalness of post-
modernism; he highlights the unnaturalness of the romance, whose
“anti-realism . . . connects it more or less with all forms of fiction”:
“The fundamental aim and method of romance is that some central
experience should be presented as far as possible free of the contingent
circumstances that realism—or any compromise with realism—is forced
Conclusion 229
to hang on it.” Hence the romance delights in “the improbable, the
mysterious, or the marvelous—magical, supernatural, or divine—which
should not be obscured . . . but should rather be heightened so that
fictionality may be relished” (161). Similarly Dustin Griffin (1994, 6)
accentuates two important elements of satire that are reminiscent of
the antimimetic in postmodernism, namely the “satyr (the half man–
half beast, suggesting that satire is lawless, wild, and threatening)” and
the “lanx satura (the ‘mixed’ or ‘full platter,’ suggesting that satire is a
formless miscellany, and food for thought).” Furthermore Griffin points
out that during its long history satire was again and again seen as “a
lawless form that ought to be restrained” because it seeks to “ruffle
or disturb [the world’s] smooth surfaces,” thus threatening “innocent
victims” and endangering “the state” (16, 27).
What I have presented in this study is not a teleological model that
conceptualizes postmodernism as the crowning (unnatural) achieve-
ment of the development of literary history since the Old English epic.
Rather I have qualified the stereotypical argument about the playful
extravagance of postmodernism by showing that impossibilities play
a central role in the more or less random drifts of generic and cross-
generic mutations over time. To recapitulate: the conventionalization
of impossibilities frequently leads to the creation of new literary genres;
once an unnatural element has been converted into a basic cognitive
frame, it can be used for a different purpose, and this change in per-
spective frequently also leads to the creation of new genres. What
postmodernist narratives do, finally, is use conventionalized impossi-
bilities from historical genres and make them strange again by blending
them with a realist context.
One of the most interesting questions is the question of what will
happen after the inevitable decline of postmodernism. It is hard to pre-
dict how post-postmodernist narratives will negotiate the unnatural,
or if they will resort to impossibilities at all. One potential scenario
might be that postmodernist narratives have actually exhausted this
game with impossibilities so that we will perhaps witness a return to
230 Conclusion
realist mental models in post-postmodernist novels, short stories, and
plays (see, e.g., Foster 1996; Nünning 1996; McLaughlin 2012).
The current literary scene is in a sense torn between the continua-
tion of the postmodernist project and a return to more realist types of
storytelling in the context of post-postmodernism. On the one hand,
there are authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski and Jasper Fforde who
still write metafictional types of fiction that contain a high degree of
unnaturalness (such as Danieleswski’s [2006] Only Revolutions and
Fforde’s [2001–12] novel series about the literary detective Thursday
Next) and can be classified as being postmodernist. In Fforde’s (2003)
The Well of Lost Plots, for example, the real-world character of Thursday
Next descends into the Well of Lost Plots, the place where all fiction
is created. Inside this Well, Next lives in an unpublished novel called
“Caversham Heights,” and she also works as an apprentice to Miss Hav-
isham from Dickens’s Great Expectations. Among other things, we learn
that “ ‘impossible’ was a word that should not be bandied about the Well
without due thought” because “imagination being what it is, anything
could happen—and generally did” (135). At one point, for instance, the
world of another unpublished text called “The Sword of the Zenobians”
gets infected by the “mispeling vyrus,” which causes dramatic changes
in the setting. Thursday Next describes these as follows: “The room
mutated as the mispeling got a hold. The floor buckled and softened
into flour, the walls changed into balls. I looked across at Havisham.
Her carrot was a parrot, too” (170). The vyrus turns a handle into a
candle, hands into glands, and rubber into blubber.
On the other hand, post-postmodernist authors such as David
Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan,
Rick Moody, and Richard Powers greet postmodernism with grow-
ing impatience. They perceive postmodernist narratives as being too
difficult, too elitist, and too brainy and wonder why postmodernists
are incapable of presenting their readers with characters they can easily
identify with and storyworlds in which they can lose themselves. The
complaints about postmodernism reach a climax in Franzen’s (2002)
Conclusion 231
essay “Mr. Difficult,” in which Franzen dismisses postmodernism as
being boring, ludicrous, and self-important:
To sign on with the postmodern program, to embrace the notion

of formal experimentation as a heroic act of resistance, you have
to believe that the emergency that [William] Gaddis and his fel-
low pioneers [i.e., other postmodernists] were responding to is
still an emergency five decades later. You have to believe that
our situation as suburbanized, gasoline-dependent tv-watching
Americans is still so new and urgent as to preempt old-fashioned
storytelling. . . . To serve the reader a fruitcake that you wouldn’t
eat yourself, to build the reader an uncomfortable house you
wouldn’t want to live in: this violates what seems to me the cat-
egorical imperative for any fiction writer. This is the ultimate
breach of Contract. (259–63)
The post-postmodernist literary scene is extremely heterogenous:

while some of these ventures, such as the novels Gain (1998) and The
Time of Our Signing (2003) by Richard Powers and most of the narra-
tives by Franzen, can be described in terms of a simple return to realism
or “old-fashioned storytelling,” others, such as “Westward the Course
of Empire Takes Its Way” by David Foster Wallace (1989) and Rick
Moody’s (2005) The Diviners, acknowledge postmodernist strategies
and even explicitly use them. But even these post-postmodernists try to
transcend these techniques, “to write through them, to break through
the cycle of self-reflexivity, to represent the world constructively, to
connect with others” (McLaughlin 2012, 215). Even such authors aim,
“perhaps quixotically, to reconnect with something beyond represen-
tation, something extralinguistic, something real” (213). Given the
extensive play with the unnatural in postmodernist narratives, this
return of the real and different types of realism does not strike me as
being particularly surprising.
232 Conclusion
Notes
Introduction
1. The term storyworld denotes “mental models of who did what to and
with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which
interpreters relocate . . . as they work to comprehend a narrative” (Herman
2005, 570). I use the term scenario in a broad sense to denote fictional
situations as well as contexts in which storytelling practices unfold, while
the term event refers to both (deliberate) actions and (accidental or non-
volitional) happenings.
2. I use the term postmodernist to refer to self-reflexive or metafictional
developments in the arts, while the term postmodern denotes a societal
condition roughly speaking after the 1960s.
3. Viktor Shklovsky ([1921] 1965, 12) uses the term defamiliarization to high-
light fiction’s ability to “make strange”: “the technique of art . . . to make
objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and
length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end
in itself and must be prolonged.” Metafiction is estranging because it is
anti-illusionist; it subverts the illusion of experiencing a stable fictional
world. According to Patricia Waugh (1984, 2), metafiction is “a term given
to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws
attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the
relationship between fiction and reality.”
4. The term mode refers to a kind, type, or manifestation of unnaturalness.
I look at the unnatural across genres and across time to see how one
unnatural scenario or event is like, or unlike, another.
5. The postmodernist disruption of the narrative discourse (through, say,
odd syntax, deliberate nonfluency, the excessive use of unexpected regis-
ters, or violations of typographic conventions; McHale 1987, 148–75), for
instance, foregrounds the fictionality of fiction, but it does not involve the
representation of impossibilities.
233
6. Most of the essays collected in Federman (1975a) express an understand-
ing of postmodernist narratives as a radically new antimimetic attitude.
Similarly Seyla Benhabib (1996, 544) associates postmodernism with “the
end of the episteme of representation,” while for Jean-François Lyotard (1997,
15) postmodernism closely correlates with a fascination with the impossible
and the idea of presenting the unpresentable: “The postmodern would be
that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself,
that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus
of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible,
and inquires into new presentations—not to take pleasure in them, but to
better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.”
7. In contrast to theoretical genres, historical ones “result from an observa-
tion of literary reality” (Todorov 1973, 13).
8. Louis K. Barnett (1990, 242) even considers the term postmodernist to be
“a rubric that will readily accommodate Gulliver’s Travels.”
9. Tzvetan Todorov (1973) discusses different ways in which fictional nar-
ratives may negotiate the supernatural. He distinguishes between the
uncanny, the fantastic, and the marvelous modes. For the purposes of
this study, the most relevant category is “the marvelous.” In such cases we
have to accept the supernatural as an objective constituent of the story-
world (42). As far as English literature is concerned, the marvelous plays
an important role in epics, some romances, Gothic novels, children’s liter-
ature, ghost plays, and later fantasy fiction. Like Traill, Lance Olsen (1987,
14) posits a link between the marvelous and postmodernism: he argues
that “fantasy becomes the vehicle for the postmodern consciousness.”
10. Lubomír Doležel (1998, 177) describes encyclopedias as “shared commu-
nal knowledge” and argues that “the actual-world encyclopedia is just
one among numerous encyclopedias of possible worlds. Knowledge about
a possible world constructed by a fictional text constitutes a fictional
encyclopedia.”
11. I use a specific definition of the term unnatural narratology. From my
perspective unnatural narratology looks at the various ways in which
narratives deviate from real-world frames. In a first step, it develops
new tools and modeling systems to capture the functioning of antirealist
narratives. In a second step, it tries to interpret the represented impos-
sibilities. See, for example, the publications by Alber; Heinze; Iversen;
Mäkelä; Nielsen; Richardson; and Tammi. See also the essays in the
edited collections Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology (Alber
and Heinze 2011) and A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative (Alber, Nielsen,
234 Notes to pages 10–14

and Richardson 2013); Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012; Alber et al.
2010; as well as the debates about unnatural narratology in Fludernik 2012;
Alber, Iversen, et al. 2012; Klauk and Köppe 2013; Alber, Iversen, et al. 2013.
12. More recently, Nielsen has identified the unnatural with narratives
that “have temporalities, storyworlds, mind representations, or acts
of narration that would have to be construed as physically, logically,
mnemonically, or psychologically impossible or highly implausible in
real-world storytelling situations” (Alber, Iversen, et al. 2012, 373). I agree
with this definition; I would only leave out the “highly implausible” and
focus exclusively on the impossible, and I would stress that impossibili-
ties are actually often represented in real-world storytelling situations
(see Bauman 1986, 2005).
13. In their analyses of nonhuman storytelling, Lars Bernaerts et al. (2014,
68) likewise take their departure “from the paradoxical idea that read-
ers are invited to reflect upon aspects of human life when reading the
fictional life stories of non-human narrators.”
14. This approach is also endorsed by Stefan Iversen (2013, 96).
15. At the same time, I do not at all wish to imply that Nielsen never inter-
prets; see, for example, his fascinating reading of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale
Heart” in Nielsen (2011a) or his interpretation of Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar
Park (Nielsen 2011b).
16. To be fair, Brian Richardson discusses pre-postmodernist manifestations
of the unnatural (see 1989, 2002, 2011, 2015), as do Nielsen (2004) and
Mäkelä (2013b).
17. Other important studies that look at represented impossibilities are
Antonsen 2007, 2009; Ashline 1995; Brewster et al. 2000; Docherty 1983,
1991; Fitch 1991; Fokkema 1991; Hayman 1987; Heise 1997; Littlewood and
Stockwell 1996; Orr 1991; Sherzer 1987; Ricardou 1971; Waugh 1984.
18. My diachronic approach was anticipated by Alter 1975; Brooke-Rose 1981;
Wolf 1993.
1. Theorizing the Unnatural

1. In contrast to Richardson’s claim (2015, 13), I never use “a fifteen-foot-tall
human” as an example of a physical impossibility. I think that this would
be a rather boring example.
2. Frames and scripts are cognitive parameters. Frames are static and relate
to our knowledge of the organization of, for example, a house. Scripts
are dynamic and cover action sequences, such as going to a restaurant or
concert.
Notes to pages 16–26 235

3. Remigius Bunia (2011, 697) follows a similar approach. He uses the
concept of “world semantics,” which “tells us to expect that, at a
particular time, a person can only be in one place, that things do not
disappear while no one is looking at them, and that time has neither
holes nor loops.”
4. Katherine Kearns (1996, 27) stresses the complex constructedness of liter-
ary realism by arguing that “the topography of realism is wonderfully
treacherous, as riddled with shafts and tunnels as Coketown’s meadows,
and if one stays within the text rather than above it one may fall down any
number of rabbit holes.”
5. The readings of nonhuman narrators by Lars Bernaerts et al. (2014, 88)
are also based on “the scientific worldview of modern Western culture.”
6. See, for example, the ideas about witchcraft that are expressed in Joseph
Glanvill’s (1681) Saducismus Triumphatus and Cotton Mather’s (1689)
Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions.
7. More devastating examples of this boundary crossing include the Salem
witch trials between 1692 and 1693 (when ordinary women were consid-
ered to be actual witches) as well as similar events throughout Europe, the
Holocaust (when Jewish citizens were literally thought to be lice, vermin,
or diseases), and the Rwandan genocide of 1994 (when the Hutu consid-
ered the Tutsi to be cockroaches that had to be eliminated).
8. My general approach to the literature of the past follows Roger D. Sell
(2000, 4), who argues that historical contexts are not completely
unbridgeable: “If contexts really were as influential as historicism . . .
many attempts at communication would be complete non-starters. . . .
For communication between differently positioned people to stand any
chance of satisfying both parties, the human imagination must be suf-
ficiently autonomous to empathize with modes of being and doing that
are different from the ones valorized within its most immediate milieu.
The power of imaginative self-projection into otherness is in fact a kind of
provisional independence of spirit which the mediating critic can seek to
stimulate in readers.”
9. For example, when Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland tries to
come to terms with her unnatural experiences in Wonderland, she uses
real-world and generic knowledge to orient herself. She resorts to her
knowledge of mathematics (Carroll [1865] 1984, 3, 15) and geography (4,
15), and at some point believes that she has landed in a fairy tale (33). After
a while she gets used to the unnaturalness of this world, and everything
seems “quite natural to Alice” (21).

10. See Amit Marcus (2012) for a critique of an earlier version of these read-
ing strategies (Alber 2009). I have reordered and partly reformulated the
navigational tools on the basis of his critique (see also Alber 2013b, 2013d,
2013e) and would like to thank him for his important input.
11. Similarly Roger D. Sell (2000, 3) argues that certain types of literary com-
munication lead to “mental re-adjustments,” that is, changes in people’s
thought-worlds.
12. This reading strategy (“generification”), which plays a role in cases of
conventionalized impossibilities, is rather similar to Yacobi’s (1981, 115)
“generic principle,” the idea that the “generic framework dictates or
makes possible certain rules of referential stylization, the employment of
which usually results in a set of divergences from what is generally accepted
as the principles governing actual reality.” What Ryan (2006b, 670) refers
to as “magic” is actually a subcategory of reading strategy 2: she argues that
when we appeal to the supernatural, we admit “the irrational or fantastic
nature” of the represented world.
13. Richardson (2015, 18), on the other hand, argues that “it takes a lot of
repetition—and widespread knowledge of that repetition—to fully con-
ventionalize the antimimetic.” I believe that Richardson’s own critical
work and the many examples he uses contribute to the process of con-
ventionalizing the antimimetic (because more and more readers become
familiar with it). Richardson feels that I am “far too quick to call a new
practice conventional” (18n10). In contrast to Richardson, I maintain that
it is difficult for practices to remain unexpected, confusing, or unnerving
over a longer period of time. At one point, even the postmodernist games
with the unnatural will be conventionalized and perceived as being
outmoded.
14. To clarify my terminology: the term conventionalization denotes the
transforming of unnatural scenarios or events into cognitive frames
(such as the speaking animal in beast fables) in the context of reading
strategy 2, while the term naturalization only refers to reading strategy 3,
which reveals the seemingly unnatural to be something entirely natural. I
refer to all of the other reading strategies as explanatory tools or sense-
making mechanisms.
15. While Ryan (2006b, 669) refers to this navigational tool in terms of “men-
talism,” Yacobi (1981, 118) calls it “the perspectival principle” and argues
that we can sometimes attribute the unexplainable “to the peculiarities
and circumstances of the observer through whom the world is taken to be
refracted.”

16. Yacobi (1981) refers to thematic readings in terms of the “functional
principle.” For her “the work’s aesthetic, thematic and persuasive goals
invariably operate as a major guideline to making sense of its peculiari-
ties” (117).
17. Ryan (2006b, 669) refers to this reading strategy in terms of “allegory and
metaphor” and argues that in some cases the point of the impossible is to
“illustrate an idea rather than to represent objectively happening courses
of events.”
18. The case of satire is even more complicated than the case of allegory because
the term satire designates both “a mode, that is, a tone and an attitude” and
“a genre, a class of literature with a distinct repertory of conventions” (Real
2005, 512). I therefore distinguish between satire as a broad discourse mode
(which involves critique through exaggeration) and satire as a genre that
deploys the satiric mode in a certain way and has a specific object of ridi-
cule (such as the beast fable, the Menippean satire, the circulation novel, the
social satire, the mock literary history, or parodies of certain genres).
19. One does not have to believe in the actual existence of heaven, purgatory,
or hell to be able to imagine that a fictional narrative is set in such a tran-
scendental realm.
20. Similarly John Ashbery (1957, 251) sees Gertrude Stein’s “impossible work”
as an “all-purpose model which each reader can adapt to fit his own set of
particulars.”
21. Apart from the principles that I have discussed so far, Yacobi (1981, 114–15,
116–17) mentions “the genetic principle,” which explains discrepancies in
causal terms related to the production of the text by its author, and “the
existential principle,” which reconciles discordant elements in terms of
a unique storyworld that cannot be accounted for by the constraints of a
known genre. I am not really convinced of the explanatory power of the
genetic principle when it comes to the unnatural. I feel that, unless one
tries to explain slips or mistakes, invoking “the historical producer” (114)
does not explain very much. The existential principle, on the other hand,
plays a crucial role in all reading strategies—with the exception of reading
strategy 2, which explains the unnatural through generic conventions,
and reading strategy 3, which naturalizes the unnatural as a fantasy of a
character or the narrator. All my other navigational tools concern unique
storyworlds that have a peculiar structure because within them physical,
logical, or human impossibilities objectively exist.
22. Perhaps my account even indicates that little is impossible for cogni-
tion. My own reading experience and the bulk of secondary literature on

unnatural scenarios and events suggest that the human mind is able to
deal with even the most bizarre textual features.
23. Bernaerts et al. (2014, 69) likewise conceive of nonhuman narration in
terms of a specific oscillation, namely “as the result of a double dialectic
of empathy and defamiliarization.” In my own terminology this dialectic
concerns the interplay between explanation and acceptance.
2. Impossible Narrators
1. Further examples of animal narrators can be found in William Kotz-
winkle’s (1976) novel Doctor Rat, Leigh Buchanan Bienen’s (1983) short
story “My Life as a West African Gray Parrot,” Leon Rooke’s (1983) novel
Shakespeare’s Dog, John Hawkes’s (1993) novel Sweet William: A Memoir
of Old Horse, and Sam Savage’s (2006) novel Firmin: Adventures of a
Metropolitan Lowlife. The twelve narrators in Orhan Pamuk’s (1998) My
Name Is Red are a dog, a miniature representation of a horse, death, the
color red, seven humans (one of them dead), and a gold coin. Paul Aus-
ter’s (1999) novel Timbuktu is yet another interesting text insofar as a dog
(called “Mr. Bones”) serves as the narrative’s reflector-“character.”
2. Similarly Julian Barnes’s (1989) short story “The Stowaway” is narrated
by a witty woodworm on Noah’s ark. Like “Jealous Husband,” this short
story focuses on the world and perceptions of an animal. At the same
time, this animal offers an alternative version of a well-known story, a
mock-history of Noah’s ark; the woodworm narrator critiques Noah for
being an arrogant, egotistical, and self-possessed individual. “The Stow-
away” also demonstrates that the fate of the woodworm and the fate of
Noah are linked because they are literally in the same boat.
3. The modern English translation reads as follows: “Truly I came to do no
other thing / Than just to lie and listen to you sing. / You have as merry a
voice as God has given / To any angel in the courts of Heaven” (Chaucer
1979, 245).
4. Teresa Mangum (2002, 35) wonders why “so many nineteenth-century
readers willingly accepted the fiction of the speaking animal.” This partly
has to do with the fact that the primary recipients were children, who can
easily imagine that animals talk. As far as adults are concerned, the con-
ventionalization of the speaking animal in earlier genres such as the beast
fable and the circulation novel, neither of which features in Mangum’s
account, might also play a role.
5. Derrida (2002, 405) states the following about beast fables: “Above all, it
would be necessary to avoid fables. We know the history of fabulation and

how it remains an anthropomorphic taming, a moralizing subjection, a
domestication. Always a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the ani-
mality of man, but for and as man.”
6. Other nonhuman narrators can be found in postmodernist narratives.
While the narrator of Ursula K. Le Guin’s (1975) short story “Direction of
the Road” is an oak tree, one of the narrators in Helen Oyeyemi’s (2009)
novel White Is for Witching is a house. The speaking breast in Roth’s novel
was anticipated by the talking vaginas in Guérin’s thirteenth-century
fabliau Du chevalier qui fist parler les cons as well as Diderot’s (1748) novel
Les bijoux indiscrets (Indiscreet Toys).
7. Among other things, he believes that an accident has turned him into
“a quadruple amputee” (Roth 1972, 17); that the transformation has to
do with his fascination with the breasts of his girlfriend (34); that his
metamorphosis involves the “primitive identification with the object of
infantile veneration” (60); or that he is simply hallucinating (49).
8. Ian Watt (1957, chapter 2) situates the “birth” of the novel and the new
interest in details of domestic life at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, when the rising middle class produced readers whose interests
directed writers toward this new topic and through it to new forms. In
The Rise of the Novel, Watt focuses exclusively on the realisms of Defoe,
Fielding, and Richardson and thus completely ignores the circulation
novels of the eighteenth century as well as other manifestations of the
unnatural such as Swift’s satirical Gulliver’s Travels and the Gothic novel.
From my perspective the development of the novel can be more fruitfully
described in terms of the interaction between natural and unnatural
features. In this context see Patricia Meyer Spacks (2006, 2–4), who looks
at “deviations from realism” to present “a more complicated, confusing,
and compelling picture” of the eighteenth-century novel.
9. The 1710 Copyright Act (also known as the Statute of Anne) and the legal
battles over statutory copyright discussed by Hilary Jane Englert (2007)
enter the context of these narrative experiments. Although the Copyright
Act formally granted the author the exclusive right to control the copy-
ing of his books, the actual impact on authors was minimal. Before 1710
the common practice was that publishers bought the original manuscript
from the author. After the passing of the copyright act, this practice was
continued; the only change was that the publishers bought the manu-
script’s copyright as well.
10. It might even be argued that these object narratives anticipate the idea of
the death of the author (Barthes [1968] 2001, 1470).

11. Numerous ways of engaging with narratives—such as blending (read-
ing strategy 1), the foregrounding of a particular theme (reading
strategy 4), the principles of allegory (reading strategy 5) and satire
(reading strategy 6)—have contributed to the conventionalization of
object narrators.
12. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term telepathy denotes
“the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to
another, independently of the recognised channels of sense.”
13. Further realistically impossible homodiegetic narrators can be found in
Rick Moody’s (1995) short story “The Grid” (see also Heinze 2008) and
Kim Scott’s (1999) novel Benang: From the Heart.
14. The use of the term omniscient is ill-advised here because Saleem Sinai is
not located above and beyond the storyworld and thus endowed with an
Olympian perspective. The only feature Sinai shares with the traditional
omniscient narrator is omnimentality. As I will show, Rushdie’s telepathic
first-person narrator literalizes the conventional omnimentality of the
omniscient narrator.
15. Laura Buchholz (2013, 340–43) not only deals with Saleem Sinai’s tele-
pathic qualities. She also looks at “the unnaturalness of the conflation of
time in Saleem’s narrative transaction” (339) as well as “the impossible
occurrences of magical phenomenon and the illogical occurrences of
contradictory or counterfactual actions” (345).
16. Saleem is also hybrid in a different sense: his father is English (and a for-
mer colonizer), his mother a Hindu (and a former colonized), and he is
brought up as a Muslim by a Catholic ayah (Gurnah 2007, 101). Saleem also
tells us that “when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira,
we all found that it made no difference! I was still [the] son [of Ahmed
Sinai and Amina Sinai]: they remained my parents. In a kind of collective
failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way
out of our pasts” (Rushdie 1981, 117).
17. On you-narratives, see also Bonheim 1983; DelConte 2003; Fludernik
1994a, 1994b, 2011; Kacandes 1993, 1994; Margolin 1994; Richardson 2006,
17–36; Wiest 1993, 1999.
18. We are here confronted with what one might call one-way telepathy: the
narrative voice can read the thoughts of the protagonist, but the pro-
tagonist cannot read the thoughts of the narrative voice. Another human
impossibility is represented in Ayi Kwei Armah’s (1973) novel Two Thou-
sand Seasons. In this case the pronoun we cuts across the realm of the
living and the world of the dead as it refers to the shared consciousness of

black Africans who have lived over a period of one thousand years (i.e.,
two thousand seasons) (see also Alber 2015).
19. David A. Salomon (1994, 38) highlights the novel’s “spiritual nihilism” as
well as the numerous “time lapses and amnesia-like accounts of activi-
ties.” Marcia Noe (1998, 167) points out that the protagonist’s “failure to
deal effectively with crucial texts in his life is compounded by his inability
to read the larger text of his environment.”
20. According to Watt (1957, 12), the realist novel was born during the eigh-
teenth century: realism “begins from the position that . . . the external
world is real, and that our senses give us a true report of it.” The fact
that members of the middle class (as opposed to the aristocracy, as in
romances) become the dramatis personae of fictional texts reflects the
growing importance of the novel’s bourgeois readership, which in turn
has to do with the development of capitalism in Britain (chapter 2).
Modernist novels, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with
the representation of consciousness, that is, character interiority. Brian
McHale (1987, 9) argues that “the dominant of modernist fiction is
epistemological.”
21. At a different point Cohn (1990, 791; 1999, 123) argues that the het-
erodiegetic narrator’s voice “is by definition otherworldly, by nature
unnatural” (my italics). I am not entirely sure whether she uses the term
unnatural to accentuate that certain third-person narrators move beyond
real-world possibilities and do things that are humanly possible, but I feel
that her use of the term is relatively close to my own.
22. For Stanzel (1984, xvi) the authorial narrator exists in a different fictional
realm than the characters do (“non-identity of the realms of existence”);
the point of view from which the narrated world is perceived or repre-
sented is a panoramic or Olympian one (“external perspective”); and the
narrator is an overt and intrusive teller who narrates, informs, and com-
ments as if transmitting a piece of news or a message (“teller-character”).
23. Indeed authors know everything about the fictional worlds they cre-
ate. Wayne C. Booth (1983, 161, 265) speaks of the “ ‘unnaturally’
all-knowing . . . author” and points out that “all good novelists know all
about their characters—all they need to know.”
24. Wilhelm Füger (1978) and Leona Toker (1993) also show that omniscient
narrators are not automatically all-telling: they often withhold information,
and some of them are influenced by cognitive principles that limit them.
25. See Sternberg (2007, 687) for a critique of Culler and Royle as well as a
defense of the term omniscience and “the whole divine model with it.”

26. Douglas Kelly (1992, 189) defines the romance as “a record of marvel
and the adventure or adventures it generates.” In contrast to the realist
novel, which focuses on the middle class or bourgeoisie, the romance is
about the aristocracy, and certain manifestations (such as Breton lais and
romances that deal with “the matter of Britain”) contain supernatural
creatures and events.
27. There are alternative models as well. Some critics see the omniscient
narrator, at least partly, as an investigating “histor” (Scholes et al. 2006,
272–73), while D. A. Miller (1988) defines him as an authoritarian tyrant
or police sleuth.
28. There is no specific point at which the unnatural first enters literary
history; rather fiction seems to always involve the representation of
impossibilities. Unnatural scenarios and events can, for example, also be
found in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, which is one of the oldest
written documents, the ancient Indian Vedas, composed in Vedic San-
skrit, and the Ramayana, an ancient Sanskrit epic.
3. Antirealist Figures
1. Vladimir Propp ([1928] 1958) analyzes characters from the perspective
of plot. He ascribes thirty-one plot functions to the dramatis personae
(24–59), and he also defines rules for the distribution of these functions in
individual Russian folktales (72–75). Algirdas-Julien Greimas ([1966] 1983,
207) was influenced by Propp’s subordination of characters to plot when
he developed his own typology of actantial roles; he abstracts six actants
(or action facets) to which characters can be reduced: subject, object,
sender, receiver, helper, and opponent.
2. Robert Bartlett (2008, 12–13) points out that according to the Catholic
theologian Henri de Lubac, the idea that certain forces are “above nature
(supra naturam)” was “common from the fourth century onwards,” and
that the term supernatural was first used in the thirteenth century.
3. Further examples of characters that are half human and half animal can
be found in Angela Carter’s ([1979] 1985) The Bloody Chambers, a collection
of postmodernist fairy tales that parody the frequently patriarchal or misog-
ynist thrust of the original versions. In “The Werewolf,” “The Company of
Wolves,” and “Wolf-Alice,” for instance, Carter fuses features of humans
and animals to create “a space where both women and men can express their
animal drives, can live their bestial natures, can embrace their erotic selves”
(Lau 2008, 92). In other words, the animal features of these figures repre-
sent the bestial aspects of human sexuality, which are celebrated.

4. As Regenia Gagnier (2003, 106) explains, the term New Woman was
applied to self-consciously modern women at the fin de siècle: “The New
Women were testing the limits of autonomy and emotion, constraint and
freedom, at the level of the individual person and body.”
5. Later Grendel and his mother are described as huge marauders (“micle
mearcstapan” [Heaney 2000, 94, l. 1348]), while Grendel’s birth is notably
referred to as “unnatural” (95, l. 1353); the monster is referred to as being
“earm-sceapen” (94, l. 1351).
6. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a dragon is “a mythical
monster, represented as a huge and terrible reptile, usually combining
ophidian and crocodilian structure, with strong claws, like a beast or bird
of prey, and a scaly skin; it is generally represented with wings, and some-
times as breathing out fire.”
7. The term epic goes back to the Greek epos (“word” or “discourse”) and
denotes “a long narrative poem about heroes performing impressive
deeds usually in interaction with gods” (De Jong 2005, 138). The epic has
its roots in heroic poetry, which “preserves the memory and glorious
deeds of the past performed by superior beings who sought and deserved
honour” (138; see also Mikics 2007, 104). Earlier examples are the Meso-
potamian Epic of Gilgamesh (one of the oldest written stories), Virgil’s
Aeneid (ca. 29 to 19 bc), Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (ca. 8 bc), and Ovid’s
Metamorphoses (ca. ad 8).
8. The original fourteenth-century prose version is by Jean D’Arras (1382–
94) and was translated from French into English around 1500. The
genre of the romance developed in France during the 1100s as “a spe-
cies of magical narrative” (Heng 2003, 4) that focuses on the chivalric
values of the aristocracy and involves supernatural phenomena such
as dragons, wizards, and magic spells. As far as the situation in medi-
eval England is concerned, one has to distinguish between romances
that feature the supernatural and romances that do not. Examples of
the former are romances that deal with “the matter of Britain,” that is,
King Arthur (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Thomas Malory’s
Le Morte Darthur), and Breton lais about fairies (Sir Orfeo and Thomas
Chestre’s Sir Launfal), while examples of the latter are romances that
deal with “the matter of France” (Duke Roland), “the matter of Rome”
(Kyng Alisaunder), “the matter of England” (King Horn), as well as ori-
ental romances (Guy of Warwick).
9. “Raymond saw Melusine within the bath: up to her navel, she was
in the form of a woman combing her hair, and from the navel downward

she was like a great serpent. Her tail was as big and thick as a barrel,
and it was so long that while Raymond looked at her, she made it
frequently touch the roof of the chamber, which was quite high”
(my translation).
10. The most characteristic conventions of the Gothic novel are supernatu-
ral grotesquerie, haunted castles or dark dungeons, the monomaniac
villain, the damsel in distress, and its focus on curses and transgres-
sions of taboos (Szalay 2005, 208). Maggie Kilgour (1995, 7) comments
on the Gothic novel: “The art that is completely fanciful, an autonomous
creation that does not refer to reality, offers a tempting alternative to
the mundaneness of everyday life. It was feared that readers of fictions,
seduced by the enticing charms of an illusory world, would lose either
their grip on or their taste for reality.”
11. In an English letter from 1727, Voltaire (1913, 90) said about Gulliver’s
Travels that it contained “new fangled follies” and “wild inventions.”
Interestingly he concludes his letter by stating that “nothing unnatural
may please long” (90, my italics). Not surprisingly, Samuel Johnson (1824,
20), who felt that fiction should “exhibit life in its true state, diversified
only by accidents that daily happen in the world,” also disliked it. In
his Lives of the English Poets, Johnson (1825, 258) describes his mixed
feelings by referring to Swift’s narrative as “a production so new and
strange, that it filled the reader with a mingled emotion of merriment
and amazement. . . . Criticism was for a while lost in wonder; no rules of
judgment were applied to a book written in open defiance of truth and
regularity.”
12. J. Paul Hunter (2003, 233) points out that some critics see the
Houyhnhnms as “human paradigms,” while others interpret them as
“false ideals” (see also Marshall 2005, 223).
13. The narrative clearly critiques the narrator for being mistaken in many
of his judgments (despite his overpowering self-confidence and feelings
of heroism and grandeur; see Sanchez 2007, 23). The general point seems
to be that humans have a tendency of taking themselves far too seriously
and indulging in self-satisfaction and pride.
14. Further examples of vicious aliens are the spider-like Morlocks in H. G.
Wells’s ([1895] 2005) The Time Machine, the slug-like aliens from Titan
in Robert A. Heinlein’s (1951) The Puppet Masters, the Hrrubans, the cat-
like aliens in Anne McCaffrey’s (1969) novel Decision at Doona, and the
Fithps, the man-size elephants with multiple trunks in Larry Niven and
Jerry Pournelle’s (1985) novel Footfall.

15. Other dead characters include the first-person narrator of Samuel
Beckett’s ([1954] 1977) short story “The Calmative,” most of the figures in
Muriel Spark’s (1973) novel The Hothouse by the East River, Brian in Caryl
Churchill’s ([1979] 1985) play Cloud Nine, Walter Rathenau in Thomas
Pynchon’s (1973) novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the characters that had been
killed by Francis Phelan in William Kennedy’s (1983) novel Ironweed, the
dead child in Caryl Churchill’s (1994) play The Skriker, Ian in Sarah Kane’s
(1995) play Blasted, Graham in Cleansed (Kane 2001), and Susie Salmon,
the first-person narrator in Alice Sebold’s (2002) novel The Lovely Bones.
16. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, fairies are “one of a class of
supernatural beings of diminutive size, in popular belief supposed to pos-
sess magical powers and to have great influence for good or evil over the
affairs of man.”
17. The modern English translation reads as follows: “For some there stood
who had no head, / and some no arms, nor feet; some bled / and through
their bodies wounds were set, / and some were strangled as they ate, /
and some lay raving, chained and bound, / and some in water had been
drowned; / and some were withered in the fire, / and some on horse, in
war’s attire. / And wives there lay in their childbed, / and mad were some,
and some were dead; and passing many there lay beside / as though they
slept at quiet noon-tide. / Thus in the world was each one caught / and
thither by fairy magic brought” (Tolkien [1975] 1986, 125, ll. 391–404).
18. The figure of the ghost is also an essential feature of the revenge trag-
edy, which flourished during the Renaissance. Examples are the ghost
of Andrea in Thomas Kyd’s (1592) The Spanish Tragedy and the ghost of
Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s (1602) Hamlet. These ghosts return to the
living to right a wrong.
19. Other postmodernist narratives also use robot-like behavior to reveal the
artificiality of their characters. Gravity’s Rainbow, for instance, fore-
grounds numerous similarities between the character of Slothrop, the v-2
rocket, whose arc the novel’s title refers to, and Imipolex g, “the first plas-
tic that is actually erectile” (Pynchon 1973, 699). Most important, Slothrop
typically has erections and sexual intercourse in future v-2 targets. Ágota
Kristóf’s (1986) novel Le grand cahier (The Notebook) has (robot-like)
twins who always say exactly the same thing at the same time in their
interactions with other characters (see also Alber 2015).
20. In this context one can also mention the story of Pygmalion in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses (ad 8). Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with a
statue, which then turns into a real woman.

21. There are a number of other examples of mind-infused robots in science
fiction. Philip K. Dick’s ([1968] 2002) novel Counter-Clock World con-
tains Carl Gantrix, a philosophical and emotional robot that has a will
of its own, while the character of Wintermute in William Gibson’s (1984)
Neuromancer is an artificial intelligence with a sense of self-awareness.
In Dan Simmons’s (1990) novel The Fall of Hyperion intelligent machines
seek to wipe out humanity, while in Richard Morgan’s (2002) Altered
Carbon, digital versions of human personalities can be stored and then
downloaded into new bodies. Marvin, the paranoid android in Douglas
Adams’s (1979–92) parodic science-fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy, “deals in a sarcastic way with unreal techno-optimist
expectations by showing some of the absurd consequences of emotions in
supercomputer robots. Marvin can cause any cybernetic control system
to break down completely just by connecting to it and sharing his melan-
choly view of the world and his own situation” (Brier 2011, 95).
22. The play features four more or less unhappy couples: Carl and Rod, Grace
and Graham, Robin and Grace, and Tinker and Woman (who works as a
stripper).
23. Tinker and Graham both comment on her metamorphosis by saying,
“Goodbye, Grace” (Kane 2001, 146). Similarly in Gravity’s Rainbow,
Tyrone Slothrop turns into a site of crossings: “At last, lying one after-
noon spread-eagled at his ease in the sun, at the edge of one of the ancient
Plague towns he becomes a cross himself, a crossroads, a living intersec-
tion where the judges have come to set up a gibbet for a common criminal
who is to be hanged at noon” (Pynchon 1973, 625). Later he is dissemi-
nated and “scattered all over the Zone,” and “it’s doubtful if he can ever
be ‘found’ again, in the conventional sense of ‘positively identified and
detained’ ” (712). The transformation of Slothrop is often associated with a
new (postmodern or posthuman) way of conceptualizing the human sub-
ject. Jeffrey T. Nealon (1993, 126–27), for instance, argues that “Slothrop’s
scattering disrupts a kind of subjectivity that is part and parcel of the
contemporary war state that depends on identity, property, statistics, and
the individual.”
24. This idea is also reflected in Grace’s request to Graham: “Love me or kill
me, Graham” (Kane 2001, 120). In addition the play’s title evokes both
the idea of spiritual cleansing and the brutalities associated with ethnic
cleansings (as in the former Yugoslavian conflict; Waters 2006, 380).
25. Indeed we learn that “Morgan le Fay . . . was a grete clerke of nygroman-
cye” (Malory [1485] 1983, 35, I.2. 22–24).

26. Other creatures that are capable of effecting magic transformations (and
are slightly more ambivalent than Merlin and Morgan le Fay) include
“La Beale Isoud” (Malory [1485] 1983, 207, XIII.2.30ff.); Nimue, “the Lady
of the Lake” (64 II.3.31); Nenyve, “the Damoysel of the Lake” (116 IV.24.8);
“Dame Brysen” (401 XI.2.11); and Sir Marokk’s wife, who can somehow
turn her husband into a werewolf: “Sir Marrok, the good knyghte . . .
was bitrayed with his wyf, for she made him seuen yere a werewolf ” (552
IX.11.20–21, my italics).
27. Nymphadora Tonks and her son, Teddy Lupin, the “metamorphmagi” in
J. K. Rowling’s fantasy series Harry Potter, can also change their physical
appearance at will. As in the case of Beorn, this is a form of white magic.
28. Similarly in Jack Finney’s (1955) novel The Body Snatchers, the small town
of Mill Valley, California, is invaded by alien seeds from outer space.
The seeds are able to replace people with perfect duplicates, while the
human originals turn into dust. The novel may depict the anticommunist
paranoia of the McCarthy era (Booker and Thomas 2009, 30), but we can
also approach it as “a clever assault on the dehumanizing conformity of
small town life in America in the 1950s” (De Villo 1988, 186). In the former
case the shape-shifting alien represents communist ideology, while in the
second case it stands for the (spreading and destructive) conformity of
small-town America.
29. According to Beck (2000, 12), the term globalization refers to “the
empirically ascertainable scale, density and stability of regional global
relationship networks and their self-definition through the mass media, as
well as of social spaces and of image-flows at a cultural, political, economic
and military level. World society is thus . . . a world horizon characterized
by multiplicity and non-integration.”
30. The workings of ideology also explain the use of disembodied voices
(rather than real characters with names). According to Althusser (1984),
ideology erases the speaking subject insofar as it speaks for the indi-
vidual. In the play ideology speaks through erased subjects, and the
individuals behind these utterances no longer matter.
31. We might at some point be able to literally duplicate people through new
technologies or create multiple versions of people through cloning. How-
ever, as long as we have not experienced duplicates of the same person, we
consider them unnatural.
32. In the “Preface to the Second Edition” of The Castle of Otranto, Wal-
pole ([1764] 1966, 21) also argues that “the actions, sentiments, and
conversations of the heroes and heroines [of medieval romances] were

as unnatural as the machines employed to put them in motion” (my
italics).
4. Unnatural Temporalities
1. I am not claiming that what I present here is a complete list; it is open to
additions and alterations. Also the axioms in this list may occasionally
overlap. I am aware of the fact that John Gribbin (1984) has shown that in
the subatomic realm, time does not flow in a uniform fashion. However,
this observation does not influence our perception of time in the actual
world.
2. The term plot (in at least in one of its meanings) refers to the logical and
chronological concatenation of events (Abbott 2007, 43). Following Dorrit
Cohn (1990, 779n8), I use the terms story and plot interchangeably.
3. Story (or plot) entails time (or temporal progression), but temporal pro-
gression does not entail plot (or story). Samuel Beckett’s (1969) “Lessness”
is a text that has temporal progression but no story (see Alber 2002).
4. Amis’s novel also refutes Vladimir Nabokov’s (1975, 252) claim that
“nobody can imagine in physical terms the act of reversing the order
of time.”
5. In The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton (1986, 418) explains that “the key to
understanding how Nazi doctors came to do the work of Auschwitz is the
psychological principle I call ‘doubling’: the division of self into two func-
tioning wholes, so that the part self acts as an entire self.” Martin Amis
(1992, 167) has remarked that he owes “a great debt to [his] friend Robert
Jay Lifton,” whose psychological insights seem to have fed into the split
between the narrator-homunculus and the protagonist.
6. Gabriele Schwab (1994, 177) speculates that Carroll marks “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 simula-
crum of postmodernism.” In this study I also look at anticipations of the
antimimeticism of postmodernism, but in contrast to Schwab, I argue
that the roots of postmodernist unnaturalness stretch much further back
than the nineteenth century. Physical, logical, and human impossibilities
also proliferate in the heroic epos and other forms of medieval literature
as well as in eighteenth-century satires, for instance.
7. The shortest example of a temporal loop that I am aware of is John Barth’s
([1968] 1988) minimalist Möbius-strip narrative “Frame-Tale,” the first
chapter of Lost in the Funhouse. The longest example I know is Joyce’s
([1939] 1976) Finnegans Wake, in which the last sentence (“a way a lone a

last a loved a long the”) links up with the first one (“riverrun, past Even
and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commo-
dious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” [628, 3]).
Other circular temporalities can be found in Gabriel Josipovici’s (1974)
“Mobius the Stripper: A Topological Exercise,” Michael Turner’s (1999)
novel The Pornographer’s Poem, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s (2006) Only
Revolutions.
8. I would like to thank Brian Richardson for mentioning this play to me.
As Sukehiro Hirakawa (1996) and Hae-Kyung Sung (1996) have shown,
Yeats’s play was influenced by the so-called ghost play, a medieval type of
Japanese Noh drama that is “not realistic” (Hirakawa 1996, 37). In such
Noh plays the supernatural dominates the stage (in the form of spirits
or ghosts) and the action develops toward a moment of revelation (Sung
1998, 108).
9. Further temporal loops (that have to do with either magic or technologi-
cal innovations) can be found in E. R. Eddison’s (1922) fantasy novel The
Worm Ouroboros, Samuel R. Delany’s (1974) science-fiction novel Dhal-
gren, and Philip K. Dick’s (1975) science-fiction story “A Little Something
for Us Tempunauts.”
10. Similarly Howard Brenton’s (1980) play The Romans in Britain fuses the
time of the Roman Empire, which began to develop around 44 bc, with
the twentieth century: at one point Julius Caesar arrives in a helicopter to
battle offensive Celts. Further examples of chronomontages can be found
in Julio Cortázar’s (1966) short story “El otro cielo” (“The Other Heaven”)
as well as Ishmael Reed’s novels Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969)
and Mumbo Jumbo (1972).
11. Visits to the past can also be found in the comical fantasy play Anno
7603 by the Norwegian Johann Wessel (1785) and in science-fiction short
stories such as Edward Everett Hale’s (1881) “Hands Off,” “Minus Sign”
by Jack Williamson and John Campbell (1942), and Isaac Asimov’s (1958)
“Lastborn.”
12. According to Professor Dumbledore, the Time-Turner enables people “to
be in two places at once” (Rowling 1999, 528).
13. Journeys into the past can also lead to undesired results. Examples can
be found in Ray Bradbury’s (1952) short story “A Sound of Thunder” and
Stephen Fry’s (1996) novel Making History.
14. The Time Machine is usually considered the first science-fiction novel
(Booker and Thomas 2009, 179). Yet Wells’s journey to the future was
anticipated by Mary Shelley’s (1826) novel The Last Man, in which Shelley

claims to have found Sibylline prophetic writings about a man living in
the twenty-second century. In Wells’s narrative, Shelley’s mystical appa-
ratus is replaced by a technological one. Time machines that are based on
the one in Wells’s novel can be found in Miles J. Breuer’s (1931) “The Time
Flight” and Ronald Wright’s (1997) A Scientific Romance.
15. Further examples of multiverse narratives are Ts’ui Pen’s novel in Jorge
Luis Borges’s (1941) short story “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”
(“The Garden of Forking Paths”), Vladimir Nabokov’s (1962) novel Pale
Fire, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s (1965) novel La maison de rendez-vous, Ayn
Rand’s (1968) play Night of January 16th, Michael Frayn’s (1998) play
Copenhagen, the German film Lola rennt (Run Lola Run, 1998) by Tom
Tykwer, and Rudolph Wurlitzer’s (2008) novel The Drop Edge of Yonder.
16. Many-worlds cosmologies are also represented in science-fiction nar-
ratives such as Murray Leinster’s (1934) “Sidewise in Time,” John
Wyndham’s “Opposite Number” (1959) and “Random Quest” (1961),
Ursula Le Guin’s (1971) The Lathe of Heaven, Philip K. Dick’s (1966) Now
Wait for Last Year, Gregory Benford’s (1980) Timescape, and Alan Light-
man’s (1993) Einstein’s Dreams.
17. A liar sentence is a statement by a liar who points out that he or she is
lying (such as “Epimenides the Cretan says, ‘all the Cretans are liars’ ”). If
we assume that what Epimenides says is true, the sentence is false, and if
we assume that what Epimenides says is false, the sentence is true.
18. Virginia Woolf’s (1928) Orlando uses its differential temporality to simi-
lar ends. In this novel, 350 years pass (story time 1), while the figure of
Orlando ages only twenty years (story time 2). Orlando highlights that
in 350 years of literary history, not much has been achieved in terms of a
more liberal attitude toward women or questions of sex and gender.
19. Indeed while Act I presents us with a situation in which sexual ori-
entations and gender identities are strictly controlled by Clive, Act II
confronts us with a wider variety of such orientations and identities. For
example, Lin’s daughter Cathy is allowed to live out her “masculine” side
by playing with war toys; Lin is a lesbian and fancies Victoria; Victo-
ria is married to Martin, a “feminine,” soft, and liberal man; and finally
Edward is a “feminine” homosexual, while his boyfriend Gerry is a more
“masculine” homosexual (Churchill [1979] 1985, 291, 292, 300–301, 306).
20. Characters may also age impossibly quickly. In D. M. Thomas’s (1981, 213)
novel The White Hotel, concentration camp inmates literally become “old
in minutes” to underline the inhuman horrors of the Nazi terror. This
differential temporality was anticipated by the ending of Christopher

Marlowe’s (1592) The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor
Faustus, where the flow of time accelerates to accentuate the looming
horrors of hell as well as the devil’s superhuman powers.
21. As Roseanna Cross (2008) has shown, the eponymous heroes in the
fifteenth-century romance Thomas of Erceldoune and the Old French
lay Guingamor also think that they have spent only three days in an
otherworld, while they have actually been there for several years. The
twelfth-century Latin romance Historia Meriadoci, on the other hand,
features a parallel world in which time moves faster than it does in the
human world.
22. (1) In scenic presentations, story time and discourse time are approximately
equal; (2) in speed-ups, the discourse time is shorter than the story time;
(3) in slow-downs, the discourse time is longer than the story time; (4) in
ellipses, a stretch of story time is not represented at the discourse level;
and (5) in pauses, the discourse time elapses on description, while the
story time stops.
5. Antimimetic Spaces
1. In recent years some critics have even begun to speak of a “spatial turn”
in literary studies (see, e.g., Warf and Arias 2009).
2. Similarly Marco Caracciolo (2011, 117) addresses “the reader’s imaginative
projection into fictional worlds” and shows that “our comprehension of
spatial references in narrative contexts draws on mental imagery to pro-
duce a simulation of narrative space.” Caracciolo argues that even when
we are confronted with recalcitrant spaces, “the simulation can [still] be
run; it is just that it requires a considerable cognitive effort” (134). In con-
trast to Caracciolo, I am interested not only in recalcitrant spaces but also
in physically or logically impossible spatial parameters.
3. Elana Gomel (2014) also looks at the cultural significance of impossible
topologies from ancient mythologies to postmodernist narratives.
4. Truant’s footnote reads as follows: “There’s a problem here concerning the
location of ‘The Five and a Half Minute Hallway.’ Initially the doorway
was supposed to be on the north wall of the living room (page 4), but
now, as you can see for yourself, that position has changed. Maybe it’s a
mistake. Maybe there’s some underlying logic to that shift. Fuck if I know.
Your guess is as good as mine” (Danielewski 2000, 57).
5. Further shape-shifting settings can be found in Flann O’Brien’s
(1967) novel The Third Policeman and Harold Pinter’s (1967) play
The Basement.

6. For an analysis of other magical spaces in Mary Poppins see Hagena
1999.
7. The novel is full of examples of sexual domination such as pedophilia,
gang rape, and various forms of sadomasochism. For instance, Desid-
erio has sexual intercourse with the fifteen-year-old Mary Anne, and
the river people marry him to the nine-year-old Aoi (Carter [1972]
1985, 62, 81). Also Desiderio is repeatedly gang-raped by the Moroccan
acrobats of desire (115–18), and Albertina is gang-raped by a group of
centaurs (179).
8. The Oxford English Dictionary defines sorcery as “the use of ritual activi-
ties or observances which are intended to influence the course of events
or to manipulate the natural world, usually involving the use of an occult
or secret body of knowledge.”
9. In present-day English this sentence reads “It shimmered and shone
through the shining oaks” (Tolkien [1975] 1986, 34).
10. The modern English translation reads as follows: “So many a painted pin-
nacle was peppered about, / among the crenelles of the castle clustered
so thickly / that all pared out of paper it appeared to have been” (Tolkien
[1975] 1986, 35). It is perhaps also worth noting that Sir Gawain’s journey
to the castle is represented as a journey through an unknown otherworld
where he encounters numerous marvels (“meruayl” [20, l. 718]) such as
dragons (“wormez” [20, l. 720]) and giants (“etaynez” [20, l. 723]).
11. Corinne Saunders (2010, 2) writes that certain medieval romances do
indeed “present imaginary otherworlds . . . that promise what reality
cannot.” Furthermore “the great conventions of romance” involve “super-
natural intervention[s] that oppose . . . everyday reality with marvelous
possibility” (2). As far as English romances are concerned, this is true of
Breton lais and romances that deal with “the matter of Britain.”
12. In present-day English this passage reads as follows: “This book displayed /
The workings of the moon; there were expansions / In detail on the eight-
and-twenty mansions” (Chaucer 1979, 437).
13. The modern English translation reads as follows: Aurelius’s brother wishes
to “discover some old fellow of the kind / Who has these moony mansions
in his mind / . . . or has some power above / All this. . . . / A learned man
could hoodwink all beholders / With the illusion that the rocks and boul-
ders / Of Brittany had vanished one and all” (Chaucer 1979, 438).
14. “Magik naturel” denotes a subform of white magic, what Saunders (2010, 1)
describes as a “more positive, learned form of magic, especially associated
with clerks.”

15. One can cite further examples of geographical impossibilities. Guy
Davenport’s (1976) short story “The Invention of Photography in Toledo,”
for example, fuses Toledo, Spain, with Toledo, Ohio, in a “disorienting
double-vision” (McHale 1987, 47), while Walter Abish’s novel (1974) Alpha-
betical Africa offers a version of the landlocked Republic of Chad (often
referred to as the “dead heart of Africa”) that suddenly and inexplicably
has beaches.
16. In present-day English: “At night there, something uncanny happens: /
the water burns” (Heaney 2000, 95, l. 1365–66).
17. In English this passage reads as follows: “The hart in flight from pursuing
hounds / will turn to face them with firm-set horns / and die in the wood
rather than dive / beneath its surface” (Heaney 2000, 95, ll. 1369–72).
18. Aristotle (1995) also writes about the central role of the supernatural in
epics. In his Poetics, he argues that the marvelous has a place in tragedy,
“but epic has more scope for the irrational (the chief cause of awe)” (123,
1460a).
19. Paul K. Alkon (1990, 174) sees the flying island of Laputa as one of the
most important anticipations of science fiction because it is clearly remi-
niscent of later ufos or flying saucers, as in Bernard Newman’s (1948)
science-fiction novel The Flying Saucer.
20. Flann O’Brien’s (1939) novel At Swim-Two-Birds teems with metaleptic
jumps, but they are not ontological ones because they take place only in
the imagination of the primary (extradiegetic) narrator. Proper ontologi-
cal metalepses occur in Julio Cortázar’s (1967) short story “La continuidad
de los parques” (“The Continuity of Parks”), Tom Stoppard’s (1968) play
The Real Inspector Hound, B. S. Johnson’s (1973) novel Christie Malry’s
Own Double-Entry, Coleman Dowell’s (1976) novel Island People, Robert
Coover’s (1977) novel The Public Burning, Woody Allen’s (1985) film The
Purple Rose of Cairo, Mark Leyner’s novel (1992) Et Tu, Babe, and Jasper
Fforde’s seven novels about Thursday Next, a literary detective: The Eyre
Affair (2001), Lost in a Good Book (2002), The Well of Lost Plots (2003),
Something Rotten (2004), First among Sequels (2007), One of Our Thurs-
days Is Missing (2011), and The Woman Who Died a Lot (2012).
21. Something similar happens in book 1 of Tom Jones, where the reader is
invited to attend on the characters’ convivial occasion.
22. To my mind these two cases of metalepsis illustrate why it is ill-advised
to argue that in heterodiegetic narrative, the narrator is identical with the
author (see Currie 2010; Dawson 2014; Walsh 2007). The argument that

the author is here literally appearing in the storyworld of his own creation
does not strike me as convincing.
23. If this is the case, the former would be an ascending metaleptic jump (the
narrator literally hears the voice of one of his characters), while the latter
would be an example of descending metalepsis (the narrator jumps into
the character’s storyworld to comfort him).
24. I would like to thank Theresa Hamilton and Monika Fludernik for men-
tioning this text to me.
25. I have translated the passage as follows: “But at his back, Boccaccio saw
someone who cried loud and bid him to stop: ‘Boccaccio,’ he said, ‘I nei-
ther want you to exclude my woeful case nor prevent me from declaring my
pitiful complaint to you. I am Thyestes, full of sorrow, drowned in tears, as
you can see. . . . It is my will that you immediately proceed to change your
topic and take your pen before long. Leave Theseus; pay no more attention
to him. Describe my tragedy first. I suppose that during all your life, you
have never seen anything more dolorous . . . than, oh dear, my life.”
26. According to this story, Atreus wrongly accused Thyestes of adultery,
exiled him from their country, tried to kill him, and even gave him his
three children to eat.
27. My translation reads as follows: “After this, Atreus approached Boccaccio
with a pale and envious face and complained furiously, as if he had fallen
into a rage: ‘How can it be that Thyestes spreads his poison like a madman
and accuses me wrongly like a rascal?’ ”
28. In Atreus’s version of the story, Thyestes wronged him first because he
had three children with Europa, the wife of Atreus, and even a son by his
own daughter.
29. “When Boccaccio was done listening to the accusations of these two
brothers and how they had maliciously replied to each other in their
insults, he grew bored to hear their motions and put up his pen and
wrote no more word about their fury or their erroneous discord” (my
translation).
30. Another pre-postmodernist example of ontological metalepsis can be
found in Luigi Pirandello’s (1921) play Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six
Characters in Search of an Author).
31. The ascending metalepses in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes are an exception
because they cannot be explained by the genre conventions of heroic epics.

Bibliography
Abbott, H. Porter. 2007. “Story, Plot, and Narration.” In The Cambridge

Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman, 39–51. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
—. 2008a. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. 2nd edition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2008b. “Unreadable Minds and the Captive Reader.” Style 42 (4):
448–70.
—. 2009. “Immersions in the Cognitive Sublime: The Textual Experience
of the Extratextual Unknown in García Márquez and Beckett.” Narrative
17 (2): 131–42.
—. 2012. “H. Porter Abbott.” In Narrative Theories and Poetics: Five
Questions, edited by Peer F. Bungård, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Frederik
Stjernfelt, 1–9. Copenhagen: Automatic Press/vip.
Abish, Walter. 1974. Alphabetical Africa. New York: New Directions.
Adams, Douglas. 1979. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. London: Pan
Books.
—. 1980. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. London: Pan Books.
—. 1982. Life, the Universe and Everything. London: Pan Books.
—. 1984. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. London: Pan Books.
—. 1992. Mostly Harmless. London: Heinemann.
Addison, Joseph. 1712. “On the Pleasures of the Imagination.” Spectator 411–20:
593–607.
The Adventures of a Black Coat. London: J. Williams and J. Burd, 1760.
“The Adventures of a Cat.” Westminster Magazine 2 (1774): 393–97, 459–63.
The Adventures of a Cork-Screw. London: T. Bell, 1775.
The Adventures of a Watch. London: G. Kearsley, 1788.
Aichinger, Ilse. (1949) 1979. Spiegelgeschichte. Leipzig: Kiepenheurer.
Alber, Jan. 2002. “The ‘Moreness’ or ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’ Narratology:
Samuel Beckett’s ‘Lessness’ Reconsidered.” Style 36 (1): 54–75.
257
—. 2009. “Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them.”
Storyworlds 1: 79–96.
—. 2011. “The Diachronic Development of Unnaturalness: A New View
on Genre.” In Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, edited by Jan
Alber and Rüdiger Heinze, 41–67. Berlin: De Gruyter.
—. 2012a. “Jan Alber.” In Narrative Theories and Poetics: Five Questions,
edited by Peer F. Bungård, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Frederik Stjernfelt,
11–20. Copenhagen: Automatic Press/vip.
—. 2012b. “Unnatural Temporalities: Interfaces between Postmodernism,
Science Fiction, and the Fantastic.” In Narrative Interrupted: The Plotless,
the Disturbing and the Trivial in Literature, edited by Markku Lehtimäki,
Laura Kartunen, and Maria Mäkelä, 174–91. New York: De Gruyter.
—. 2013a. “Pre-Postmodernist Manifestations of the Unnatural:
Instances of Expanded Consciousness in ‘Omniscient’ Narration and
Reflector-Mode Narratives.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
61 (2): 137–53.
—. 2013b. “Reading Unnatural Narratives.” Anglistik: International
Journal for English Studies 24 (2): 135–50.
—. 2013c. “Unnatural Narratology: The Case of the Retrogressive
Temporality in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow.” In New Approaches to
Narrative, edited by Vera Nünning, 43–56. Trier: wvt.
—. 2013d. “Unnatural Narratology: Developments and Perspectives.”
Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 63 (1): 69–84.
—. 2013e. “Unnatural Narratology: The Systematic Study of Anti-
Mimeticism.” Literature Compass 10 (5): 449–60.
—. 2013f. “Unnatural Spaces and Narrative Worlds.” In A Poetics of
Unnatural Narrative, edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian
Richardson, 45–66. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
—. 2014a. “Postmodernist Impossibilities, the Creation of New Cognitive
Frames, and Attempts at Interpretation.” In Beyond Classical Narration:
Transmedial and Unnatural Challenges, edited by Jan Alber and Per Krogh
Hansen, 267–86. Berlin: De Gruyter.
—. 2014b. “Unnatural Narrative.” In The Handbook of Narratology, Vol. II,
edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 887–95.
Berlin: De Gruyter.
—. 2015. “The Social Minds in Factual and Fictional We-Narratives of the
Twentieth Century.” Narrative 23 (2): 212–25.
Alber, Jan, and Alice Bell. 2012. “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural
Narratology.” Journal of Narrative Theory 42 (2): 166–92.
258 Bibliography
Alber, Jan, and Rüdiger Heinze, eds. 2011. Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural
Narratology. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. 2010.
“Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models.”
Narrative 18 (2): 113–36.
—. 2012. “How Unnatural Is Unnatural Narratology? A Response to
Monika Fludernik.” Narrative 20 (3): 371–82.
—. 2013. “What Really Is Unnatural Narratology?” Storyworlds 5: 101–18.
Alber, Jan, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. 2012. “Unnatural
Voices, Minds, and Narration.” In The Routledge Companion to Experimental
Literature, ed. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, 351–67.
London: Routledge.
—, eds. 2013. A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press.
Aldiss, Brian. 1967. Cryptozoic! Garden City nj: Doubleday.
Alkon, Paul K. 1990. “Gulliver and the Origins of Science Fiction.” In The
Genres of Gulliver’s Travels, edited by Frederik N. Smith, 163–78. Newark:
University of Delaware Press.
Allen, Woody. 1980. “The Kugelmass Episode.” In Side Effects, 41–55. New
York: Random House.
Alter, Robert. 1975. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Althusser, Louis. 1984. Essays on Ideology. London: Verso.
Amis, Kingsley. 1960. New Maps of Hell. New York: Ballantine Books.
Amis, Martin. (1991) 1992. Time’s Arrow or the Nature of the Offence. New
York: Vintage.
Andersen, Richard. 1981. Robert Coover. Boston: Twayne.
Antonsen, Jan Erik. 2007. Poetik des Unmöglichen: Narratologische
Untersuchungen zur Phantastik. Paderborn: Mentis.
—. 2009. “Das Ereignis des Unmöglichen: Narrative Sinnbildung als
Problem der Phantastik.” In Ambivalenz und Kohärenz: Untersuchungen
zur narrativen Sinnbildung, edited by Julia Abel et al., 127–39. Trier:
WVT.
Aristotle. 1995. Poetics. Edited and translated by Stephen Halliwell.
Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press.
Ashbery, John. 1957. “The Impossible.” Poetry 90: 250–54.
Ashline, William S. 1995. “The Problem of Impossible Fictions.” Style 29 (2):
234–51.
Asimov, Isaac. 1958. “Lastborn.” Galaxy Magazine 16 (5): 6–44.
Bibliography 259
—. 1976. “That Thou Art Mindful of Him.” The Bicentennial Man and
Other Stories, 61–86. Garden City nj: Doubleday.
Aston, Elaine. 1997. Caryl Churchill. Plymouth, UK: Northcote House.
Atran, Scott. 2002. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Auster, Paul. 1999. Timbuktu. London: Faber.
Bachelard, Gaston. (1958) 1964. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria
Jolas. New York: Orion Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1938–73) 1981. “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in
the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael
Holquist, 84–258. Austin: University of Texas Press.
—. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl
Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bal, Mieke. (1985) 2009. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Ballard, J.G. 1964. “Time of Passage.” Science Fantasy 21 (63): 85–96.
Barnes, Julian (1989) “The Stowaway.” In A History of the World in 10½
Chapters, 1–30. London: Jonathan Cape.
Barnett, David. 2008. “When Is a Play Not a Drama? Examples of
Postdramatic Theatre Texts.” New Theatre Quarterly 24 (1): 14–23.
Barnett, Louise K. 1990. “Deconstructing Gulliver’s Travels.” In The Genres
of Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Frederik N. Smith, 230–45. Newark: University of
Delaware Press.
Barth, John. (1968) 1988. Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live
Voice. New York: Random.
—. 1984. The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. New York: G. P.
Putnam’s.
Barthes, Roland. (1968) 2001. “The Death of the Author.” In The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 1466–70.
New York: Norton.
—. 1974. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bartlett, Robert. 2008. The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle
Ages: The Wiles Lectures Given at the Queen’s University of Belfast, 2006.
Bauman, Richard. 1986. Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of
Oral Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2005. “Tall Tale.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory,
edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 582.
London: Routledge.
260 Bibliography
Beck, Ulrich. (1997) 2000. What Is Globalization? Translated by Patrick
Camiller. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Beckett, Samuel. (1954) 1977. “The Calmative.” In Four Novellas, 51–68.
London: Calder.
—. (1963) 1990. “Play.” In Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works,
305–20. London: Faber & Faber.
—. (1967) 1995. “Ping.” In Samuel Beckett. The Complete Short Prose,
1929–1989, edited by S. E. Gontarski, 193–96. New York: Grove Press.
—. (1969) 1995. “Lessness.” In Samuel Beckett. The Complete Short Prose,
1929–1989, edited by S. E. Gontarski, 197–201. New York: Grove Press.
Bellamy, Liz. 1998. Commerce, Morality, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel.
—. 2007. “It-Narrators and Circulation: Defining a Subgenre.” In The
Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-
Century England, edited by Mark Blackwell, 117–46. Lewisburg pa:
Bucknell University Press.
Benford, Gregory. 1980. Timescape. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. “Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism.” In
Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective, edited by Joyce
Appleby et al., 540–54. New York: Routledge.
Benston, Kimerley W. (2009) “Experimenting at the Threshold: Sacrifice,
Anthropomorphism, and the Aims of (Critical) Animal Studies.” PMLA
124 (2): 548–55.
Bergen, Henry, ed. 1924. Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Part I. London: Oxford
University Press.
Bernaerts, Lars, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck. 2014.
“The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators.” Narrative 22 (1): 68–93.
Bertocci, Adam. 2010. Two Gentlemen of Lebowski: A Most Excellent Comedie
and Tragical Romance. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Blackham, Harold John. 1985. The Fable as Literature. London: Athlone
Press.
Blackwell, Mark. 2007a. “Introduction: The It-Narrative and Eighteenth-
Century Thing Theory.” In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and
It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Mark Blackwell,
9–14. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press.
—, ed. 2007b. The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-
Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell
University Press.
Bibliography 261
Bode, Christoph. (2005) 2011. The Novel. Translated by James Vigus. Malden
ma: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bonheim, Helmut. 1983. “Narration in the Second Person.” Recherches
anglaises et americaines 16 (1): 69–80.
Booker, Marvin Keith, and Anne-Marie Thomas. 2009. The Science Fiction
Handbook. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Booth, Wayne C. (1961) 1983. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Borges, Jorge Luis. (1941) 1999. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In Collected
Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley, 119–28. London: Penguin.
Boyd, Brian. 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction.
Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press.
Bradbury, Ray. (1952) 1976. “A Sound of Thunder.” In The Golden Apples of the
Sun, 135–50. Westport ct: Greenwood Press.
Brenton, Howard. 1980. The Romans in Britain. London: Eyre Methuen.
Breuer, Miles J. 1931. “The Time Flight.” Amazing Stories 6 (3): 274–81.
Brewer, Derek. 1980. Symbolic Stories: Traditional Narratives of the Family
Drama in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2001. “A Supernatural Enemy in Green in Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight.” In Supernatural Enemies, edited by Hilda Ellis Davidson and
Anna Chaudhri, 61–70. Durham nc: Carolina Academic Press.
Brewster, Scott, et al., eds. 2000. Inhuman Reflections: Thinking the Limits of
the Human. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Bridgeman, Teresa. 2007. “Time and Space.” In The Cambridge Companion
to Narrative, edited by David Herman, 52–65. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bridges, Thomas. 1770. The Adventures of a Bank-note. Vols. 1 and 2. London:
Davies.
Brier, Søren. 2011. “Cybernetics.” In The Routledge Companion to Literature
and Science, edited by Bruce Clark and Manuela Rossini, 89–100. London:
Routledge.
Brinker, Menachem. 1995. “Theme and Interpretation.” In Thematics: New
Approaches, edited by Claude Bremond, Joshua Landy, and Thomas Pavel,
33–44. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Brontë, Charlotte. (1849) 2006. Shirley. Edited by Jessica Cox. London:
Penguin Books.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. 1981. A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and
Structure, Especially the Fantastic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 1986. Xorandor. Manchester, UK: Carcanet.
262 Bibliography
Buchanan Bienen, Leigh. 1983. “My Life as a West African Gray Parrot.” In
Prize Stories 1983: The O. Henry Awards, edited by Ed. William Abrahams,
173–88. Garden City nj: Doubleday.
Buchholz, Laura. 2013. “Unnatural Narrative in Postcolonial Contexts: Re-
reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” Journal of Narrative
Theory 42 (3): 332–51.
Buchholz, Sabine, and Manfred Jahn. 2005. “Space in Narrative.” In Routledge
Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn,
and Marie-Laure Ryan, 551–55. London: Routledge.
Budrys, Algis. (1960) 1977. Rogue Moon. Boston: Gregg Press.
Bunia, Remigius. 2011. “Diegesis and Representation: Beyond the Fictional
World, on the Margins of Story and Narrative.” Poetics Today 31 (4): 679–720.
Butler, Andrew M. 2003. “Postmodernism and Science Fiction.” In The
Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward Jones and
Farah Mendlesohn, 137–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, Robert Olen. 1996. “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot.”
In Tabloid Dreams, 71–81. New York: Henry Holt.
Butts, Richard. 1987. “The Analogical Mere: Landscape and Terror in
Beowulf.” English Studies 2: 113–21.
Cadden, Mike. 2005. “Children’s Stories (Narratives Written for Children).”
In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman,
Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 59–60. London: Routledge.
Calinescu, Matei. 1990. “Modernism, Late Modernism, Postmodernism.”
In Criticism in the Twilight Zone: Postmodern Perspectives on Literature
and Politics, edited by Danuta Zadworna-Fjellestad, 52–61. Stockholm:
Almqvist & Wiskell International.
Campbell, John W. Jr. (1938) 1948. “Who Goes There?” In Who Goes There?
Seven Tales of Science-Fiction, 7–75. Chicago: Shasta.
Caracciolo, Marco. 2011. “The Reader’s Virtual Body: Narrative Space and Its
Reconstruction.” Storyworlds 3: 117–38.
Carpentier, Alejo. (1944) 2002. “Viaje a la semilla.” In Guerra del tiempo, el
acoso y otros relatos, 13–28. Madrid: Siglo XXI.
Carroll, Lewis. (1865) 1994. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: Puffin
Books.
—. (1871) 1996. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.
London: Penguin.
—. (1889) 1991. Sylvie and Bruno. San Francisco: Mercury.
Carter, Angela. (1972) 1985. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman. New
York: Penguin.
Bibliography 263
—. 1986. Nights at the Circus. New York: Penguin Books.
Castle, Terry. 2005. “The Gothic Novel.” In The Cambridge History of English
Literature: 1660–1780, edited by John Richetti, 673–706. Cambridge:
Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction
and Film. Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press
—. 1990. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film.
Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1979. The Canterbury Tales. Translated into Modern
English by Nevill Coghill. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
—. 2005. The Canterbury Tales. Edited by Jill Mann. London: Penguin.
Chester, Thomas. 1966. Sir Launfal. Edited by A. J. Bliss. London: Nelson.
Churchill, Caryl. (1979) 1985. Cloud Nine. In Plays: One, 243–320. New York:
Methuen.
—. 1994. The Skriker. New York: Theatre Communications Group.
—. 1997. “Blue Kettle.” In Blue Heart, 37–69. New York: Theatre
Communications Group.
Clark, Anne. 1975. Beasts and Bawdy. London: Dent.
Clark, Stephen R. L. 1995. How to Live Forever: Science Fiction and Philosophy.
London: Routledge.
Clarke, Bruce. 2008. Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems. New
York: Fordham University Press.
Clum, John M. 1988. “ ‘The Work of Culture’: Cloud Nine and Sex/Gender
Theory.” In Caryl Churchill: A Casebook, edited by Phyllis R. Randall,
91–116. New York: Garland.
Clute, John. 2004. “ ‘Fantasy’ from The Encyclopedia of Fantasy.” In Fantastic
Literature: A Critical Reader, edited by David Sandner, 310–15. Westport
ct: Praeger.
Cohen, Ralph. 1988. “Do Postmodern Genres Exist?” In Postmodern Genres,
edited by Marjorie Perloff, 11–27. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting
Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press.
—. 1990. “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Approach.” Poetics
Today 11 (4): 775–804.
—. 1999. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Cohn, Ruby. 1973. Back to Beckett. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press.
Colombat, Jacqueline. 1994. “Mission Impossible: Animal Autobiography.”
Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 39: 37–49.
264 Bibliography
Connor, Steven. 2004. “Postmodernism and Literature.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Postmodernism, edited by Steven Connor, 62–81.
Cooper, Pamela. 1991. The Fictions of John Fowles: Power, Creativity,
Femininity. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
Coover, Robert. 1969. “The Babysitter.” In Pricksongs and Descants: Fictions
by Robert Coover, 206–30. New York: Plume.
—. 1977. The Public Burning. New York: Viking Press.
Cortázar, Julio. (1966) 2005. “The Other Heaven.” In All Fires the Fire and Other
Stories, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, 128–52. London: Marion Boyars.
—. (1967) 1985. “The Continuity of Parks.” In Blow-Up and Other Stories,
translated by Paul Blackburn, 63–65. New York: Pantheon.
Cosslett, Tess. 2006. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914.
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Cox, Katharine. 2006. “What Has Made Me? Locating Mother in the Textual
Labyrinth of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” Critical Survey 18 (2):
4–15.
Crater, Theresa L. 2000. “Septimus Smith and Charles Watkins: The Phallic
Suppression of Masculine Subjectivity.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology
21 (3–4): 191–202.
Crimp, Martin. 1997. Attempts on Her Life. London: Faber and Faber.
Cross, Roseanna. 2008. “ ‘Heterochronia’ in Thomas of Erceldoune,
Guingamor, ‘The Tale of King Herla,’ and The Story of Meriadoc, King of
Cambria.” Neophilologus 92: 163–75.
Crossley, Robert. 2005. “The Grandeur of H. G. Wells.” In A Companion to
Science Fiction, edited by David Seed, 353–63. Malden ma: Blackwell.
Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the
Study of Literature. Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press.
—. 2004. “Omniscience.” Narrative 12 (1): 22–34.
Currie, Gregory. 2010. Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories.
Currie, Mark. 2007. About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of
Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
—. (1998) 2011. Postmodern Narrative Theory. New York: St. Martin’s
Press.
Danielewski, Mark Z. 2000. House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon Books.
—. 2006. Only Revolutions. New York: Pantheon Books.
Dannenberg, Hilary P. 1998. “Hypertextuality and Multiple World
Construction in English and American Narrative Fiction.” In
Bibliography 265
Bildschirmfiktionen: Interferenzen zwischen Literatur und neuen Medien,
edited by Julika Griem, 265–94. Tübingen: Narr.
—. 2008. Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in
Narrative Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Davenport, Guy. (1975) 1979. “The Haile Selassie Funeral Train.” In Da Vinci’s
Bicycle: Ten Stories by Guy Davenport, 108–13. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
—. (1976) 1979. “The Invention of Photography in Toledo.” In Da Vinci’s
Bicycle: Ten Stories by Guy Davenport, 121–30. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Dawson, Paul. 2009. “The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction.”
Narrative 17 (2): 143–61.
—. 2014. The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and
Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press.
Defoe, Daniel. (1722) 1995. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll
Flanders. London: Everyman.
De Jong, Irene J. F. 2005. “Epic.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan,
138–40. London: Routledge.
Delany, Samuel R. (1974) 1996. Dhalgren. With a Foreword by William
Gibson. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
DelConte, Matt. 2003. “Why You Can’t Speak: Second-Person Narration,
Voice, and a New Model for Understanding Narrative.” Style 37 (2): 204–19.
Dennis, Abigail. 2008. “ ‘The Spectacle of Her Gluttony’: The Performance of
Female Appetite and the Bakhtinian Grotesque in Angela Carter’s Nights
at the Circus.” Journal of Modern Literature 31 (4): 116–30.
Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).”
Critical Inquiry 28 (2): 369–418.
De Villo, Sloan. 1988. “The Self and Self-less in Campbell’s Who Goes There?
and Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Extrapolation 29 (2): 179–88.
Dick, Bruce, and Amritjit Singh, eds. 1995. Conversations with Ishmael Reed.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Dick, Philip K. 1966. Now Wait for Last Year. Garden City nj: Doubleday.
—. (1968) 1996. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Del Rey.
—. (1968) 2002. Counter-Clock World. New York: Vintage.
—. (1975) 1987. “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts.” In The Collected
Stories of Philip K. Dick. Volume 5: The Little Black Box, 404–16. Los
Angeles: Underwood-Miller.
266 Bibliography
Dickens, Charles. (1866) 2009. “The Signal-Man.” In Three Ghost Stories, 7–26.
Rockville md: Serenity.
Diderot, Denis. 1981 (1748). Les bijoux indiscrets. Edited by Jacques Rustin.
Paris: Gallimard.
Diedrick, James. 1995. Understanding Martin Amis. Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press.
Dilley, Frank. 1982. “Multiple Selves and Survival of Brain Death.” In
Philosophers Look at Science Fiction, edited by Nicholas D. Smith, 105–16.
Chicago: Nelson-Hall.
Docherty, Thomas. 1983. Reading (Absent) Character: Towards a Theory of
Characterization in Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
—. 1991. “Postmodern Characterization: The Ethics of Alterity.” In
Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction, edited by Edmund J. Smyth,
169–88. London: Batsford.
Doležel, Lubomír. 1990. Occidental Poetics: Tradition and Progress. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
—. 1998. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
—. 2010. Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Donaldson, A. K., ed. 1895. Melusine. London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trübner.
Douglas, Aileen. 2007. “Britannia’s Rule and the It-Narrator.” In The Secret
Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century
England, edited by Mark Blackwell, 147–61. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell
University Press.
Dowell, Coleman. 1976. Island People. New York: New Directions.
Durst, Uwe. (2001) 2007. Theorie der phantastischen Literatur. Berlin: lit.
—. 2008. Das begrenzte Wunderbare: Zur Theorie wunderbarer Episoden
in realistischen Erzähltexten und in Texten des “magischen Realismus.”
Berlin: lit.
Eco, Umberto. 1983. Postscript to “The Name of the Rose.” San Diego: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.
—. 1990. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Eddison, E. R. 1922. The Worm Ouroboros. London: Jonathan Cape.
Elick, Catherine L. 2001. “Animal Carnivals: A Bakhtinian Reading of C. S.
Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew and P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins.” Style 35
(3): 454–71.
Bibliography 267
Eliot, George. (1859) 2001. Adam Bede. Edited by Carol A. Martin. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
—. (1874) 1986. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Edited by David
Carroll. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Englert, Hilary Jane. 2007. “Occupying Works: Animated Objects and
Literary Property.” In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-
Narratives in Eighteenth- Century England, edited by Mark Blackwell,
218–41. Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press.
The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in
Akkadian and Sumerian. Translated and with an introduction by Andrew
George. London: Penguin, 1999.
Escoda Agustí, Clara. 2005. “ ‘Short Circuits of Desire’: Language and Power
in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life.” Ariel 36 (3–4): 103–26.
Evans, Walter. 1985. “The English Short Story in the Seventies.” In The English
Short Story 1945–1980: A Critical History, edited by Dennis Vannatta, 120–
72. Boston: Hall.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual
Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Federman, Raymond. 1971. Double or Nothing. Chicago: Swallow Press.
—, ed. 1975a. Surfiction: Fiction Now . . . and Tomorrow. Chicago: Swallow
Press.
—. 1975b. “Surfiction—Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction.” In
Surfiction: Fiction Now . . . and Tomorrow, edited by Raymond Federman,
5–15. Chicago: Swallow Press.
Festa, Lynn. 2007. “The Moral Ends of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century
Object Narratives.” In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-
Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Mark Blackwell, 309–28.
Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press.
Fforde, Jasper. 2001. The Eyre Affair. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
—. 2002. Lost in a Good Book. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
—. 2003. The Well of Lost Plots. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
—. 2004. Something Rotten. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
—. 2007. First among Sequels. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
—. 2011. One of Our Thursdays Is Missing. London: Hodder &
Stoughton.
—. 2013. The Woman Who Died a Lot. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Fielding, Henry. (1749) 1974. The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling.
Introduction by Alan Pryce-Jones. London: Collins.
268 Bibliography
Finlayson, John. 2005. “Reading Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale: Mixed Genres
and Multi-Layered Worlds of Illusion.” English Studies 86 (6): 493–510.
Finney, Brian. 2003. “A Worm’s Eye View of History: Julian Barnes’s A
History of the World in 10½ Chapters.” Papers on Language and Literature
39 (1): 49–70.
Finney, Jack. (1955) 1976. The Body Snatchers. Boston: Gregg Press.
Fitch, Brian T. 1991. Reflections in the Mind’s Eye: Reference and Its
Problematizations in Twentieth-Century French Fiction. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Fitzgerald, Robert F. 1988. “Science and Politics in Swift’s Voyage to Laputa.”
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 87 (2): 213–339.
Fletcher, Alan J. 2000. “Sir Orfeo and the Flight from the Enchanters.”
Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society
22: 141–77.
Flint, Christopher. 1998. “Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in
Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction.” pmla 113 (2): 212–26.
Fludernik, Monika. 1994a. “Introduction: Second-Person Narrative and
Related Issues.” Style 28 (3): 281–311.
—. 1994b. “Second-Person Narrative as a Test Case for Narratology: The
Limits of Realism.” Style 28 (3): 445–79.
—. 1996. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge.
—. 2001. “New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization, and New
Writing.” New Literary History 32 (3): 619–38.
—. 2003a. “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters.” In Narrative
Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, edited by David Herman, 243–67.
Stanford: csli.
—. 2003b. “Scene Shift, Metalepsis and the Metaleptic Mode.” Style 37 (4):
382–400.
—. 2008. “Narrative and Drama.” In Theorizing Narrativity, edited by
John Pier and José Ángel García Landa, 355–83. Berlin: De Gruyter.
—. 2010. “Naturalizing the Unnatural: A View from Blending Theory.”
Journal of Literary Semantics 39 (1): 1–27.
—. 2011. “The Category of ‘Person’ in Fiction: You and We Narrative-
Multiplicity and Indeterminacy of Reference.” In Current Trends in
Narratology, edited by Greta Olson, 101–41. Berlin: De Gruyter.
—. 2012. “How Natural Is ‘Unnatural Narratology’; or, What Is Unnatural
about Unnatural Narratology?” Narrative 20 (3): 357–70.
Fokkema, Aleid. 1991. Postmodern Characters. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Bibliography 269
Forman, Maurice Buxton, ed. 1935. The Letters of John Keats. London: Oxford
University Press.
Forster, E. M. (1927) 1954. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World.
Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the
Century. Cambridge ma: mit Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1966) 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon.
Fowler, Alastair. 1987. A History of English Literature: Forms and Kinds from
the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fowles, John. (1969) 2004. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London:
Vintage.
Franzen, Jonathan. 2002. “Mr. Difficult.” In How to Be Alone, 238–69. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Frayn, Michael. 1998. Copenhagen. New York: Anchor Books.
Frow, John. 2006. Genre. London: Routledge.
Fry, Stephen. 1996. Making History. New York: Random House.
Frye, Northrop. (1957) 2006. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Edited by
Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Füger, Wilhelm. 1978. “Das Nichtwissen des Erzählers in Fieldings Joseph
Andrews: Baustein zu einer Theorie negierten Wissens in der Fiktion.”
Poetica 10 (2–3): 188–216.
Fuller, David. 2004. “Shakespeare’s Romances.” In A Companion to Romance
from Classical to Contemporary, edited by Corinne Saunders, 160–76.
Malden ma: Blackwell.
Gagnier, Regenia. 2003. “Individualism from the New Woman to the
Genome: Autonomy and Independence.” Partial Answers 1 (1): 103–28.
Gale, Steven H. 1984. “Harold Pinter’s Family Voices and the Concept of
Family.” In Harold Pinter: You Never Heard Such Silence, edited by Alan
Bold, 146–65. London: Vision Press.
Galvan, Jill. 1997. “Entering the Posthuman Collective in Philip K. Dick’s Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Science Fiction Studies 24 (3): 413–29.
Gatten, Brian. 2009. “The Posthumous Worlds of Not I and Play.” Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 51 (1): 94–101.
Genet, Jacqueline. 1991. “Yeats’s Purgatory: A Re-assessment.” Irish University
Review 21 (2): 229–44.
Genette, Gérard. (1972) 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method.
Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press.
270 Bibliography
—. (1983) 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin.
Gibson, Andrew. 1996. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books.
Gildon, Charles. 1709. The Golden Spy. London: J. Woodward and J. Morphew.
Glanvill, Joseph. 1681. Saducismus Triumphatus: or, Full and Plain Evidence
Concerning Witches and Apparitions. London: J. Collins.
Glaz, Adam. 2006. “The Self in Time: Reversing the Irreversible in Martin
Amis’s Time’s Arrow.” Journal of Literary Semantics 35: 105–22.
Goetsch, Paul. 1998. “Der koloniale Diskurs in Beowulf.” In New Methods
in the Research of Epic—Neue Methoden der Epenforschung, edited by
Hildegard L. C. Tristram, 185–200. Tübingen: Narr.
Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis. New York: Harper & Row.
Gomel, Elana. 2010. Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination.
London: Continuum.
—. 2014. Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in
Literature. London: Routledge.
Good, Maeve. 1987. W. B. Yeats and the Creation of a Tragic Universe. Totowa
nj: Barnes & Noble.
Gordon, Robert. 2003. “Family Voices: Pirandello and Pinter.” Pirandello
Studies 23: 22–34.
Grahame-Smith, Seth. 2009. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Philadelphia
pa: Quirk Books.
Greer, Joanne Marie. 2002. “Return of the Repressed.” In The Freud
Encyclopedia: Theory, Therapy, and Culture, edited by Edward Erwin, 496–97.
New York: Routledge.
Greimas, Algirdas-Julien. (1966) 1983. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at
a Method. Translated by Danielle McDowell et al. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Gribbin, John. 1984. In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and
Reality. Toronto: Bantam.
Griffin, Dustin. 1994. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky.
Griffin, Robert, ed. 1995. Fascism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grishakova, Marina. 2011. “Narrative Causality Denaturalized.” In Unnatural
Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, edited by Jan Alber and Rüdiger
Heinze, 127–44. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Bibliography 271
Gross, George E., and Isaiah A. Rubin. 2002. “Clinical Theory.” In The Freud
Encyclopedia: Theory, Therapy, and Culture, edited by Edward Erwin, 87–94.
Guérin. (1756) 1890. Du chevalier qui fist parler les cons. Paris: Librairie des
Bibliophiles.
Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich. 2004. Production of Presence: What Meaning
Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gurnah, Abdulrazak. 2007. “Themes and Structures in Midnight’s Children.”
In The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, edited by Abdulrazak
Gurnah, 91–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guy of Warwick. Edited by Helen Moore. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2006.
Hagena, Katharina. 1999. “Phantastische Räume in Pamela L. Travers’ Mary
Poppins.” Inklings: Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik 17: 70–83.
Hainsworth, Bryan. 1991. The Idea of Epic. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Hale, Edward Everett. 1881. “Hands Off.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 62
(371): 556–73.
Hall, Stuart. 1985. “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the
Post-Structuralist Debates.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (2):
91–114.
Hamburger, Käte. 1973. The Logic of Literature. Translated by Marilynn J.
Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hamilton, Natalie. 2008. “The A-Mazing House: The Labyrinth as Theme and
Form in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” Critique 50 (1): 3–15.
Harrison, Bernard. 1991. Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of
Theory. New Haven ct: Yale University Press.
Hassan, Ihab. 1987. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and
Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Hawkes, John. 1993. Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse. New York: Penguin.
Hawkesworth, John. 1752. “Unnamed.” Adventurer 5: 25–30.
Hawking, Stephen. 1988. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black
Holes. Toronto: Bantam Books.
Hawking, Stephen, and Leonard Mlodinow. 2005. A Briefer History of Time.
New York: Bantam Books.
—. 2010. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam Books.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
272 Bibliography
Hayman, David. 1987. Re-forming the Narrative: Toward a Mechanics of
Modernist Fiction. Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press.
Heaney, Seamus. 2000. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Heath-Stubbs, John. 2001. “Lamias.” In Supernatural Enemies, edited by
Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri, 73–78. Durham nc: Carolina
Academic Press.
Heinlein, Robert A. 1951. The Puppet Masters. Garden City nj: Doubleday.
—. (1959) 1987. Starship Troopers. New York: Ace Book.
Heinze, Rüdiger. 2008. “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person
Narrative Fiction.” Narrative 16 (3): 279–97.
Heise, Ursula K. 1997. Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism.
Heng, Geraldine. 2003. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of
Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press.
Henke, Suzette A. 1981. “Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Smith: An Analysis of
‘Paraphrenic’ and the Schizophrenic Use of Language.” Literature and
Psychology 31 (4): 13–23.
Herman, David. 1998. “Limits of Order: Toward a Theory of Polychronic
Narration.” Narrative 6 (1): 72–95.
—. 2001. “Spatial Reference in Narrative Domains.” Text 21 (4): 515–41.
—. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
—. 2005. “Storyworld.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory,
edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 569–70.
London: Routledge.
—. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden ma: Wiley-Blackwell.
—. 2011a. Introduction to The Emergence of Mind, edited by David
Herman, 1–40. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
—. 2011b. “Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic
Narratives.” SubStance 140 (1): 156–81.
Herman, Luc, and Bart Vervaeck. 2005. Handbook of Narrative Analysis.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Hirakawa, Sukehiro. 1996. “The Divine Comedy and the Nō Plays of Japan:
An Attempt at a Reciprocal Elucidation.” Comparative Literature Studies
33 (1): 35–58.
Historia Meriadoci and De Ortu Waluuanii: Two Arthurian Romances of the
XIIIth Century in Latin Prose. Edited by J. Douglas Bruce. Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913.
Bibliography 273
The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes: Written by
Themselves. 1754. London: M. Cooper.
History of a French Louse; or the Spy of a New Species in France and England.
1760. London: T. Becket.
Hite, Molly. 1983. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press.
Hollinger, Veronica. 2005. “Science Fiction and Postmodernism.” In A
Companion to Science Fiction, edited by David Seed, 232–47. Malden ma:
Blackwell.
Homer. 2015a. The Iliad. Translated by Peter Green. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
—. 2015b. Odyssey. Translated with introduction and notes by Barry B.
Powel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horace. 2011. Satires and Epistles. Translated by John Davie. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Horkheimer, Max, and, Theodor W. Adorno. (1944) 2002. Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr.
Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hunter, J. Paul. 2003. “Gulliver’s Travels and the Later Writings.” In The
Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, edited by Christopher Fox, 216–40.
Hurley, Kelly. 2002. “British Gothic Fiction, 1885–1930.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, 189–207.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction.
Huyssen, Andreas. (1984) 1986. “Mapping the Postmodern.” In After the Great
Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, 178–221. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Irwin, W. R. 1976. The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
Iser, Wolfgang. 1996. “Why Literature Matters.” In Why Literature Matters:
Theories and Functions of Literature, edited by Rüdiger Ahrens and
Laurenz Volkmann, 13–22. Heidelberg: Winter.
Iversen, Stefan. 2011. “ ‘In Flaming Flames’: Crises of Experientiality
in Non-Fictional Narratives.” In Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural
Narratology, edited by Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze, 89–103. Berlin:
De Gruyter.
274 Bibliography
—. 2013. “Unnatural Minds.” In A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative,
edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson, 94–112.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Jahn, Manfred. 2005. “Cognitive Narratology.” In Routledge Encyclopedia
of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-
Laure Ryan, 67–71. London: Routledge.
Jahn, Manfred, and Sabine Buchholz. 2005. “Space in Narrative.” In Routledge
James, Henry. (1898) 1966. The Turn of the Screw. Edited by Robert
Kimbrough. New York: Norton.
—. (1903) 1984. The Ambassadors. Edited by Allan W. Bellringer. London:
Allen & Unwin.
Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act. London: Methuen.
—. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham nc: Duke University Press.
Jencks, Charles. 1992. “The Post-Modern Agenda.” In The Post-Modern
Reader, edited by Charles Jencks, 10–39. London: Academy Editions and St.
Martin’s Press.
Jernigan, Daniel. 2004. “Traps, Softcops, Blue Heart, and This Is a Chair:
Tracking Epistemological Upheaval in Caryl Churchill’s Shorter Play.”
Modern Drama 47 (1): 21–43.
Joffe, Phil. 1995. “Language Damage: Nazis and Naming in Martin Amis’s
Time’s Arrow.” Nomina Africana 9 (2): 1–10.
Johnson, B. S. 1973a. “Broad Thoughts from a Home.” In Aren’t You Rather
Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs?, 91–110. London: Hutchinson.
—. 1973b. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. London: Collins.
Johnson, Samuel. 1810. The Works of Samuel Johnson ll.d. Vol. 2. London:
Luke Hansard & Sons.
—. 1824. The Works of Samuel Johnson ll.d, with an Essay on His Life
and Genius by Arthur Murphy, Esq. Vol. 4. London: Thomas Tegg et al.
—. 1825. The Lives of the English Poets. London: Jones.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. 1983. Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science
of Language, Inference, and Consciousness. Cambridge ma: Harvard
University Press.
Johnstone, Charles. (1760– 64) 1794. Chrysal; or, the Adventures of a Guinea.
4 vols. London: T. Cadell.
Bibliography 275
Jones, Edward, and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. 2003. The Cambridge Companion
to Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, Gwyneth. 2003. “The Icons of Science Fiction.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward Jones and Farah
Mendlesohn, 163–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, Sara Gwenllian. 2005. “Fantasy.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-
Josipovici, Gabriel. (1974) 1990. “Mobius the Stripper.” In Steps: Selected
Fiction and Drama, 133–52. Manchester: Carcanet.
Joyce, James. (1916) 1993. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by
R. B. Kershner. Boston: Bedford Books.
—. (1922) 1984. Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. 3 vols. Prepared
by Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York: Garland.
—. (1939) 1976. Finnegans Wake. New York: Penguin.
Kacandes, Irene. 1993 “Are You in the Text? The ‘Literary Performance’ in
Postmodernist Fiction.” Text and Performance Quarterly 13: 139–53.
—. 1994. “Narrative Apostrophe: Reading, Rhetoric, Resistance in Michel
Butor’s La modification and Julio Cortázar’s ‘Graffiti.’ ” Style 28 (3): 329–49.
Kafka, Franz. 1915. Die Verwandlung. Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag.
Kane, Sarah. 1995. Blasted. London: Methuen.
—. (1998) 2001. Cleansed. In Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, 105–51. London:
Methuen.
Kasten, Madeleine. 2005. “Allegory.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Kearns, Katherine. 1996. Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the
Looking Glass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kelly, Douglas. 1992. The Art of Medieval French Romance. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Kennedy, Thomas E. 1992. Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction. New
York: Twayne.
Kennedy, William. 1983. Ironweed. New York: Viking Press.
Kenner, Hugh. 1973. A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. London: Thames
and Hudson.
Kieckhefer, Richard. (1989) 2000. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge:
Kilgore, Chris. 2014. “From Unnatural Narrative to Unnatural Reading: A
Review of A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative.” Style 48 (4): 629–36.
276 Bibliography
Kilgour, Maggie. 1995. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge.
Kilner, Dorothy. 1781. The Adventures of a Hackney Coach. Dublin: C. Jackson
and P. Byrne.
—. (1783) 1851. The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse. Philadelphia:
Appleton.
King Horn. Edited by Rosamund Allen. New York: Garland, 1984.
Klauk, Tobias, and Tilmann Köppe. 2013. “Reassessing Unnatural
Narratology: Problems and Prospects.” Storyworlds 5: 77–100.
Kline, Barbara. 1995. “Duality, Reality, and Magic in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight.” In Functions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the
Thirteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by
Joe Sanders, 107–23. Westport ct: Greenwood Press.
Kneale, James. 1996. “Lost in Space? Exploring Impossible Geographies.”
In Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity, Extrapolation, Speculation, edited
by Derek Littlewood and Peter Stockwell, 147–62. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Knight, Damon. (1959) 1965. a for Anything. New York: Walker.
Knowlson, James. 1997. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London:
Bloomsbury.
Kotzwinkle, William. 1976. Doctor Rat. Nuffield: Ellis.
Krell, Jonathan F. 2000. “Between Demon and Divinity: Mélusine Revisited.”
Mythosphere 2 (4): 375–96.
Kristof, Ágota. 1986. Le grand cahier. Paris: Éditions de Seuil.
Kyd, Thomas. 1970. The Spanish Tragedy. Edited by J. R. Mulryne. New York:
Hill and Wang.
Kyng Alisaunder. Edited by G. V. Smither. London: Oxford University Press, 1952.
Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English
Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lai de Guingamor. In Lais Féeriques des XIIe et XIIIe siècles. Edited by A.
Micha. Paris: GF Flammarion, 1992.
Lamb, Jonathan. 2011. The Things Things Say. Princeton nj: Princeton
University Press.
Laskaya, Anne, and Eve Salisbury. 1995. “Sir Orfeo.” In The Middle English
Breton Lays, edited by Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, 15–59. Kalamazoo
mi: Medieval Institute.
Lau, Kimberley J. 2008. “Erotic Infidelities: Angela Carter’s Wolf Trilogy.”
Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 22 (1): 77–94.
Lawley, Paul. 1994. “Stages of Identity: From Krapp’s Last Tape to Play.” In
The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, edited by John Pilling, 88–105.
Bibliography 277
Le Goff, Jacques. 1984. The Birth of Purgatory. Translated by Arthur
Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Le Guin, Ursula. 1971. The Lathe of Heaven. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
—. (1975) 1989. “Direction of the Road.” In The Wind’s Twelve Quarters,
267–74. London: VGSF.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1969. Philosophical Papers and Letters. Vol. 2.
Edited and translated by Leroy E. Loemker. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Leinster, Murray. (1934) 1974. “Sidewise in Time.” In Before the Golden Age,
edited by Isaac Asimov, 537–83. Garden City nj: Doubleday.
Lem, Stanislaw. 1985. Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Edited by Franz Rottensteiner. London: Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. 1974. Werke: Sechster Band. Kunsttheoretische
und kunsthistorische Schriften. Munich: Carl Hanser.
Levecq, Christine. 2002. “Nation, Race, and Postmodern Gestures in Ishmael
Reed’s Flight to Canada.” Novel 35 (2–3): 281–98.
Lewis, Matthew. (1796) 1998. The Monk: A Romance. Edited by Christopher
MacLachlan. London: Penguin.
Lewis, W. S., et al., eds. 1980. Horace Walpole’s Miscellaneous Correspondence.
Leyner, Mark. 1992. Et Tu, Babe. New York: Vintage.
Lifton, Robert Jay. 1986. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killings and the Psychology
of Genocide. New York: Basic Books.
Lightman, Alan. 1993. Einstein’s Dreams. New York: Pantheon Books.
Link, Viktor. 1980. Die Tradition der außermenschlichen Perspektive in der
englischen und amerikanischen Literatur. Heidelberg: Winter.
Lipking, Lawrence. 1996. “Frankenstein, the True Story; or Rousseau Judges
Jean-Jacques.” In Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, edited by J. Paul Hunter,
313–31. New York: Norton.
Littlewood, Derek, and Peter Stockwell, eds. 1996. Impossibility Fiction:
Alternativity, Extrapolation, Speculation. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Lola rennt (Run Lola Run). Dir. Tom Tykwer. X-Filme Creative Pool, 1998.
Luckhurst, Mary. 2003. “Political Point-Scoring: Martin Crimp’s Attempts on
Her Life.” Contemporary Theatre Review 13 (1): 47–60.
Ludwig, Sämi. 1999. “Grotesque Landscapes: African American Fiction,
Voodoo Animism, and Cognitive Models.” In Mapping African America:
History, Narrative Formation, and the Production of Knowledge, edited by
Maria Diedrich, Carl Pedersen, and Justine Tally, 189–202. Hamburg: lit.
—. 2002. Pragmatist Realism: The Cognitive Paradigm in American
Realist Texts. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
278 Bibliography
Lyotard, Jean-François. (1979) 1997. The Postmodern Explained. Translated by
Don Barry et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mäkelä, Maria. 2013a. “Cycles of Narrative Necessity: Suspect Tellers and
the Textuality of Fictional Minds.” In Stories and Minds, edited by Lars
Bernaerts et al., 129–53. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
—. 2013b. “Realism and the Unnatural.” In A Poetics of Unnatural
Narrative, edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson,
142–66. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Malory, Sir Thomas. (1485) 1983. Caxton’s Malory: A New Edition of Sir
Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. Based on the Pierpont Morgan Copy
of William Caxton’s Edition of 1485. Edited by James W. Spisak. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Mangum, Teresa. 2002. “Dog Years, Human Fears.” In Representing Animals,
edited by Nigel Rothfels, 35–47. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mann, David A. 2002. “Repetition Compulsion.” In The Freud Encyclopedia:
Theory, Therapy, and Culture, edited by Edward Erwin, 477–78. New York:
Routledge.
Map, Walter. 1983. De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles. Edited and
translated by M. R. James. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Marcus, Amit. 2012. “Resolving Textual Discrepancies in Fictional Story
Worlds: Two Approaches and Further Suggestions.” Journal of Literary
Semantics 41: 1–24.
Margolin, Uri. 1984. “Narrative and Indexicality: A Tentative Framework.”
Journal of Literary Semantics 13: 181–204.
—. 1986. “The Doer and the Deed: Action as a Basis of Characterization
in Narrative.” Poetics Today 7 (2): 205–25.
—. 1994. “Narrative ‘You’ Revisited.” Language and Style 23 (4): 1–21.
—. 2005. “Character.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory,
London: Routledge.
Marlowe, Christopher. 1993. Doctor Faustus: A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616).
Edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Marshall, Ashley. 2005. “Gulliver, Gulliveriana, and the Problem of Swiftian
Satire.” Philological Quarterly 84 (2): 211–39.
Martin, Heather C. 1986. W. B. Yeats: Metaphysician as Dramatist. Waterloo,
Canada: Wilfried Laurier University Press.
Mather, Cotton. 1689. Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and
Possessions. Boston: R.P.
Bibliography 279
McCaffrey, Anne. 1969. Decision at Doona. New York: Ballantine Books.
McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen.
—. 1992a. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
—. 1992b. “Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk.” Critique 33 (3): 149–75.
—. 2001. “Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry.”
Narrative 9 (2): 161–67.
—. 2005. “Postmodern Narrative.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
McInerney, Jay. 1984. Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage.
McLaughlin, Robert. 2012. “Post-Postmodernism.” In The Routledge
Companion to Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons,
and Brian McHale, 212–23. London: Routledge.
McNamara, Kevin R. 1997. “Blade Runner’s Post-Individual Worldspace.”
Contemporary Literature 38 (3): 422–46.
Memento. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Summit Entertainment, 2000.
Miéville, China. 2004. “Marxism and Fantasy: An Introduction.” In Fantastic
Literature: A Critical Reader, edited by David Sandner, 334–43. Westport
ct: Praeger.
Mikics, David. 2007. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. New Haven ct: Yale
University Press.
Mikkonen, Kai. 1999. “The Metamorphosed Parodical Body in Philip Roth’s
The Breast.” Critique 41 (1): 13–44.
Miller, D. A. 1988. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Minsky, Marvin. (1975) 1979. “A Framework for Representing Knowledge.”
In Frame Conceptions and Text Understanding, edited by Dieter Metzing,
1–25. New York: De Gruyter.
Moody, Rick. 1995. “The Grid.” In The Ring of Brightest Angels around
Heaven: A Novella and Stories, 29–37. Boston: Little Brown, and Company.
—. 2005. The Diviners. New York: Little, Brown.
Moraru, Christian. 2005. Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in
Postmodernism. Madison nj: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Morgan, Richard. 2002. Altered Carbon. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Morrison, Kristin. 1983. Chronicles and Canters: The Use of Narrative in the Plays
of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Müller, Günther. 1948. “Erzählzeit und erzählte Zeit.” In Festschrift für P.
Kluckhohn und H. Schneider, edited by their students from Tübingen,
195–212. Tübingen: Mohr.
280 Bibliography
Nabokov, Vladimir. 1962. Pale Fire. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
—. 1975. Look at the Harlequins. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Nagel, Thomas. 1979. Moral Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nahin, Paul J. (1997) 2011. Time Travel: A Writer’s Guide to the Real Science of
Plausible Time Travel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Nealon, Jeffrey T. 1993. Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction.
Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. 2009. “Metanarration and
Metafiction.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et al.,
204–11. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Newman, Bernard. (1948) 2010. The Flying Saucer. Yardley pa: Westholme
Publishing.
Nicol, Bran. 2009. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction.
Nielsen, Henrik Skov. 2004. “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative
Fiction.” Narrative 12 (2): 133–50.
—. 2010. “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration.” In Postclassical
Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, edited by Jan Alber and Monika
Fludernik, 275–301. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
—. 2011a. “Fictional Voices? Strange Voices? Unnatural Voices?” In
Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction, edited by Per Krogh Hansen et al., 55–
82. Berlin: De Gruyter.
—. 2011b. “What’s in a Name? Double Exposures in Lunar Park.” In Bret
Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park, edited by Naomi
Mandel, 129–42. London: Continuum.
—. 2013. “Naturalizing and Unnaturalizing Reading Strategies:
Focalization Revisited.” In A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, edited by Jan
Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson, 67–93. Columbus: Ohio
State University Press.
Nieuwland, Mante S., and Jos J. A. van Berkum. 2006. “When Peanuts Fall
in Love: n400 Evidence for the Power of Discourse.” Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience 18 (7): 1098–111.
Niven, Larry. (1968) 1971. “All the Myriad Ways.” In All the Myriad Ways, 1–11.
New York: Ballantine Books.
Niven, Larry, and Jerry Pournelle. 1985. Footfall. New York: Del Rey Books.
Noe, Marcia. 1998. “(Mis)Reading the Region: Midwestern Innocence in the
Fiction of Jay McInerney.” Midamerica 25: 162–74.
Nünning, Ansgar. 1996. “Zwischen der realistischen Erzähltradition und der
experimentellen Poetik des Postmodernismus: Erscheinungsformen und
Bibliography 281
Entwicklungstendenzen des englischen Romans seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg
aus gattungstheoretischer Perspektive.” In Eine andere Geschichte der
englischen Literatur, edited by Ansgar Nünning, 213–40. Trier: wvt.
—. 2003. “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent
Developments, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the
Term.” In What Is Narratology?, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald
Müller, 239–75. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Nünning, Ansgar, and Roy Sommer. 2008. “Diegetic and Mimetic
Narrativity: Some Further Steps towards a Narratology of Drama.” In
Theorizing Narrativity, edited by John Pier and José Ángel García Landa,
331–54. Berlin: De Gruyter.
O’Brien, Flann. (1939) 1967. At Swim-Two-Birds. London: Penguin Books.
—. (1967) 2001. The Third Policeman. London: Flamingo.
Ochs, Elior, and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in
Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press.
Olsen, Lance. 1986. “A Guydebook to the Last Modernist: Davenport on
Davenport and Da Vinci’s Bicycle.” Journal of Narrative Technique 16 (2):
148–61.
—. 1987. Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy.
New York: Greenwood Press.
Olsen, Stein Haugom. 1987. The End of Literary Theory. Cambridge:
Orr, Leonard. 1991. Problems and Poetics of the Nonaristotelian Novel.
Lewisburg pa: Bucknell University Press.
Ovid. 1998. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville, with introduction
and notes by E. J. Kenney. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oyeyemi, Helen. 2009. White Is for Witching. London: Picador.
Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
—. 2005. “Realist Novel.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory,
London: Routledge.
—. 2010a. “Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch.” In Postclassical
Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, edited by Jan Alber and Monika
Fludernik, 83–104. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
—. 2010b. Social Minds in the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University
Press.
Pamuk, Orhan. (1998) 2011. My Name Is Red. London: Faber.
Pavel, Thomas. 1975. “ ‘Possible Worlds’ in Literary Semantics.” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (2): 165–76.
282 Bibliography
—. 1986. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press.
Peake, C. H. 1977. James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Edited and
Introduction by Justus Buchler. New York: Dover.
Perloff, Marjorie. 1985. “Postmodernism and the Impasse of Lyric.” In The
Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition, edited by
Marjorie Perloff, 172–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Petitjean, Tom. 1995. “Coover’s ‘The Babysitter.’ ” Explicator 54 (1): 49–51.
Petterson, Bo. 2012. “Beyond Anti-Mimetic Models: A Critique of Unnatural
Narratology.” In Rethinking Mimesis: Concepts and Practices of Literary
Representation, edited by S. Isomaa et al., 73–92. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge Scholars.
Pfister, Manfred. (1977) 1988. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge:
Phelan, James. 1989. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression,
and the Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—. 1996. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
—. 2005. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character
Narration. Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press.
—. 2011. “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Narrative Communication: Or, from
Story and Discourse to Authors, Resources, and Audiences.” Soundings 94
(1–2): 55–75.
Phelan, James, and Wayne C. Booth. 2005. “Narrator.” In Routledge
Pierce, John J. 1994. Odd Genre: A Study in Imagination and Evolution.
Westport ct: Greenwood Press.
Pinter, Harold. 1967. The Lover, Tea Party, The Basement: Two Plays and a Film
Script. New York: Grove Press.
—. 1979. Betrayal. New York: Grove Press.
—. 1981. Family Voices. In Pinter Plays: Four, 279–96. London: Methuen.
Pirandello, Luigi. (1921) 1998. Six Characters in Search of an Author. New
York: Dover Thrift.
Plato. 1970. Plato in Twelve Volumes: The Republic II Books VI–X. Edited and
translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press.
Popper, Karl. (1934) 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic
Books.
Bibliography 283
Pountney, Rosemary. 1988. Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama
1956–1976. Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe.
Powers, Richard. 1989. Gain. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
—. 2003. The Time of Our Signing. London: Heinemann.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 1977. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Price, Martin. 1983. Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the
Novel. New Haven ct: Yale University Press.
Priest, Graham. 1997. “Sylvan’s Box: A Short Story and Ten Morals.” Notre
Dame Journal of Formal Logic 38 (4): 573–82.
—. 1998. “What Is So Bad about Contradictions?” Journal of Philosophy
95 (8): 410–26.
Propp, Vladimir. (1928) 1958. Morphology of the Folktale. Edited by Svatava
Pirkova-Jakobson. Translated by Laurence Scott. Bloomington: Indiana
Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore and Linguistics.
The Purple Rose of Cairo. Dir. Woody Allen. Orion Pictures, 1985.
Pynchon, Thomas. 1973. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking.
Ramayana. Translated by William Buck, with introduction by B. A. van
Nooten. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Rand, Ayn. (1968) 1971. Night of January 16th. New York: Plume.
Readings, Bill, and Bennet Schaber, eds. 1993. Postmodernism across the
Ages: Essays for a Postmodernity That Wasn’t Born Yesterday. Syracuse ny:
Syracuse University Press.
Real, Josef Hermann. 2005. “Satiric Narrative.” In Routledge Encyclopedia
Reed, Ishmael. 1969. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. London: Allison &
Busby.
—. 1972. Mumbo Jumbo. New York: Avon Books.
—. 1976. Flight to Canada. New York: Random House.
Ricardou, Jean. 1971. Pour une theorie du nouveau roman. Paris:
Seuil.
Richardson, Brian. 1987. “ ‘Time Is Out of Joint’: Narrative Models and the
Temporality of Drama.” Poetics Today 8 (2): 299–310.
—. 1989. “ ‘Hours Dreadful and Things Strange’: Inversions of
Chronology and Causality in Macbeth.” Philological Quarterly 68 (3):
283–94.
—. 1994. “I etcetera: On the Poetics and Ideology of Multipersoned
Narratives.” Style 28 (3): 312–28.
284 Bibliography
—. 1997a. “Beyond Poststructuralism: Theory of Character, the Personae
of Modern Drama, and the Antinomies of Critical Theory.” Modern Drama
40: 86–99.
—. 1997b. “Remapping the Present: The Master Narrative of Modern
Literary History and the Lost Forms of Twentieth-Century Fiction.”
Twentieth Century Literature 43 (3): 291–309.
—. 2000. “Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression: Theorizing
the Collapse of Time, Voice, and Frame.” Narrative 8 (1): 23–42.
—. 2002. “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern
and Nonmimetic Fiction.” In Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot,
Closure, and Frames, edited by Brian Richardson, 47–63. Columbus: Ohio
State University Press.
—. 2005. “Causality.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory,
London: Routledge.
—. 2006. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and
Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
—. 2007. “Plot after Postmodernism.” Drama and/after Postmodernism,
edited by Christoph Henke and Martin Middeke, 55–66. Trier: wvt.
—. 2011. “What Is Unnatural Narrative Theory?” In Unnatural
Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, edited by Jan Alber and Rüdiger
Heinze, 23–40. Berlin: De Gruyter.
—. 2015. Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press.
Richardson, Brian, and David Herman. 1998. “A Postclassical Narratology.”
pmla 113 (2): 288–90.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. (1983) 2002. Narrative Fiction. London: Routledge.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1965. La maison de rendez-vous. Paris: Minuit.
The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune. Edited by James A. H.
Murray. Early English Text Society, o.s., 61. London: Trübner, 1875.
Ronen, Ruth. 1986. “Space in Fiction.” Poetics Today 7 (3): 421–38.
—. 1994. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rooke, Leon. 1983. Shakespeare’s Dog. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Roth, Philip. 1972. The Breast. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Rowling, J. K. 1999. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London:
Bloomsbury.
—. 2000. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury.
—. 2007. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. London: Bloomsbury.
Bibliography 285
Royle, Nicholas. 1990. Telepathy and Literature. Cambridge ma: Basil
Blackwell.
—. 2003a. “The ‘Telepathy Effect’: Notes toward a Reconsideration of
Narrative Fiction.” In Acts of Narrative, edited by Carol Jacobs and Henry
Sussman, 93–109. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
—. 2003b. The Uncanny. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Rushdie, Salman. 1981. Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape.
—. 1985. “Midnight’s Children and Shame.” Kunapipi 7 (1): 1–19.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative
Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
—. 1992. “The Modes of Narrativity and Their Visual Metaphors.” Style
26 (3): 368–87.
—. 2001a. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in
Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
—. 2001b. “The Narratorial Function: Breaking Down a Theoretical
Primitive.” Narrative 9 (2): 146–52.
—. 2003. “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space.” In
Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, edited by David Herman,
214–42. Stanford ca: csli.
—. 2005a. “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology.”
In Narratology beyond Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, edited by Jan-
Christoph Meister, 1–23. Berlin: De Gruyter.
—. 2005b. “Possible-Worlds Theory.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of
—. 2006a. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
—. 2006b. “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological
Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative.” Poetics Today 27 (4): 633–74.
—. 2009a. “Space.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter
Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 420–33. Berlin: De
Gruyter.
—. 2009b. “Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative.” Style 43 (2): 142–64.
—. 2012. “Impossible Worlds.” In The Routledge Companion to
Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian
McHale, 368–79. London: Routledge.
Ryder, Mary Ellen. 2003. “I Met Myself Coming and Going: Co(?)-Referential
Noun Phrases and Point of View in Time Travel Stories.” Language and
Literature 12 (3): 213–32.
286 Bibliography
Salomon, David A. 1994. “The Brotherhood of Unfulfilled Early Promise:
Tommy Wilhelm in Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day and ‘You’ in Jay McInerney’s
Bright Lights, Big City.” Saul Bellow Journal 12 (2): 37–43.
Sanchez, Reuben. 2007. “Mark Twain, Hank Morgan, and Menippean Satire
in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” Studies in American
Humor 3 (15): 19–43.
Saunders, Corinne. 2009. “Religion and Magic.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Arthurian Legend, edited by Elizabeth Archibald and Ad
Putter, 201–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2010. Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance.
Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer.
Saunders, Graham. 2002. “Love Me or Kill Me”: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of
Extremes. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Saunders, Marshall. (1893) 1920. Beautiful Joe: A Dog’s Own Story. New York:
Grosset & Dunlap.
Savage, Sam. (2006) 2008. Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife.
London: Phoenix.
Sawyer, Andrew. 2002. “ ‘Backward, Turn Backward’: Narratives of Reversed
Time in Science Fiction.” In Worlds Enough and Time: Explorations of
Time in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Gary Westfahl, George
Slusser, and David Leiby, 49– 62. Wesport ct and London: Greenwood
Press.
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. (1999) 2010. Why Fiction? Translated by Dorrit Cohn.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, and Ioana Vultur. 2005. “Mimesis.” In Routledge
Schank, Roger C. 1986. Explanation Patterns: Understanding Mechanically
and Creatively. Hillsdale nj: Erlbaum.
Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals and
Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge. Artificial Intelligence
Series. Hillsdale nj: Erlbaum.
Schlobin, Roger C. 1979. The Literature of Fantasy: A Comprehensive,
Annotated Bibliography of Modern Fantasy Fiction. New York: Garland.
Schmid, Wolf. 2005. “Defamiliarisation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of
Laure Ryan, 98. London: Routledge.
Schneider, Ralf. 2001. “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The
Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction.” Style 35 (4): 607–40.
Bibliography 287
Scholes, Robert, James Phelan, and Robert Kellogg. 2006. The Nature of
Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schwab, Gabriele. 1994. “Nonsense and Metacommunications: Reflections on
Lewis Carroll.” In The Play of the Self, edited by Ronald Bogue and Mihai I.
Spariosu, 157–79. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Schwarz, Daniel. 1989. “Character and Characterization: An Inquiry.” Journal
of Narrative Technique 19 (1): 85–105.
Schweitzer, Darrell. 2005. “Ghosts and Hauntings.” In The Greenwood
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders,
edited by Gary Westfahl, 338–40. Westport ct: Greenwood Press.
Scott, Helenus. 1782. The Adventures of a Rupee. London: J. Murray.
Scott, Kim. 1999. Benang: From the Heart. Fremantle: Fremantle Press.
Searle, John R. 1975. “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.” New Literary
History 6 (2): 319–32.
—. 1980. “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences
3: 417–57.
Sebold, Alice. 2002. The Lovely Bones. Boston: Little, Brown.
Seed, David, ed. 2005. A Companion to Science Fiction. Malden ma:
Blackwell.
The Sege off Melayne and the Romance of Duke Rowland and Sir Otuell of
Spayne. Edited by Sidney J. Herrtage. London: Trübner, 1880.
Sell, Roger D. 2000. Literature as Communication: The Foundations of
Mediating Criticism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sewell, Anna. (1877) 1945. Black Beauty. New York: Dodd, Mead.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. (1818) 1823. Frankenstein: Or, the Modern
Prometheus. London: Thomas Davison.
—. 1826. The Last Man. London: Henry Colburn.
Sherzer, Dina. 1987. Representation in Contemporary French Fiction. Lincoln:
Shklovsky, Viktor. (1921) 1965. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist
Criticism, edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 3–24. Lincoln:
Sidney, Sir Philip. (1580) 1974. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: The Old
Arcadia. Edited by Jean Robertson. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
—. (1595) 2001. “An Apology for Poetry.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 326–62. New York: Norton.
Sim, Stuart, ed. 2011. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. 3rd
edition. London: Routledge.
288 Bibliography
Simmons, Dan. 1990. The Fall of Hyperion. Garden City nj: Doubleday.
Sims, Christopher A. 2009. “The Dangers of Individualism and the Human
Relationship to Technology in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?” Science Fiction Studies 36 (1): 67–86.
Slocombe, Will. 2005. “ ‘This Is Not for You’: Nihilism and the House that
Jacques Built.” Modern Fiction Studies 51 (1): 88–109.
Slusser, George E., and Robert Heath. 2002. “Arrows and Riddles of
Time: Scientific Models of Time Travel.” In Worlds Enough and
Time: Explorations of Time in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by
Gary Westfahl, George Slusser, and David Leiby, 11–24. Westport ct:
Greenwood Press.
Slusser, George E., and Eric S. Rabkin, eds. 1987. Intersections: Fantasy and
Science Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Smetacek, Victor. 2002. “Balance: Mind-Grasping Activity.” Nature 415
(January 31, 2002): 481.
Smollett, Tobias. (1769) 1989. The History and Adventures of an Atom. Edited
by O. M. Brack Jr. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 2006. Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-
Century English Fiction. New Haven ct: Yale University Press.
Spark, Muriel. 1973. The Hothouse by the East River. London: Macmillan.
Spaulding, A. Timothy. 2005. Re-forming the Past: History, the Fantastic,
and the Postmodern Slave Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University
Press.
Spolsky, Ellen. 2002. “Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory as a
Species of Post-Structuralism.” Poetics Today 23 (1): 43–62.
Sprague de Camp, L. (1939) 1941. Lest Darkness Fall. New York: Henry Holt
and Company.
Springer, Mary Doyle. 1978. A Rhetoric of Literary Character: Some Women of
Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stableford, Brian M. 2006. Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia.
—. (2005) 2009. The a to z of Fantasy Literature. Lanham ma: Scarecrow
Press.
Stanley, E. G. 1956. “Old English Poetic Diction and the Interpretation of The
Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Penitent’s Prayer.” Anglia 73: 413–66.
Stanzel, Franz Karl. 1984. A Theory of Narrative. Translated by Charlotte
Goedsche. Preface by Paul Hernadi. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Bibliography 289
Starke, Sue P. 2005. “Romance.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Stastny Konec (Happy End). Dir. Oldrich Lipsky. Filmové Studio Barrandov,
1968.
Stefanescu, Maria. 2008. “World Construction and Meaning Production in the
‘Impossible Worlds’ of Literature.” Journal of Literary Semantics 37: 23–31.
Sternberg, Meir. 1978. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
—. 1982. “Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of
Reported Discourse.” Poetics Today 3 (2): 107–56.
—. 2007. “Omniscience in Narrative Construction: Old Challenges and
New.” Poetics Today 28 (4): 683–794.
Sterne, Laurence (1759–67) 1980. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman. New York: New American Library.
Stevenson, Randall. 2005. “Modernist Narrative.” In Routledge Encyclopedia
Stockwell, Peter. 1996. Introduction to Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity,
Extrapolation, Speculation, edited by Derek Littlewood and Peter
Stockwell, 3–9. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
—. 2005. “Science Fiction.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory,
London: Routledge.
Stoker, Bram. (1897) 2011. Dracula. Edited by Andrew Elfenbein. Boston:
Longman.
Stoppard, Tom. 1968. The Real Inspector Hound. London: Faber and Faber.
—. (1972) 1973. “Artist Descending a Staircase.” In Artist Descending a
Staircase and Where Are They Now?, 7–54. London: Faber & Faber.
Sung, Hae-Kyung. 1996. “The Poetics of Purgatory: A Consideration of Yeats’s
Use of Noh Form.” Comparative Literature Studies 35 (2): 107–15.
Suvin, Darko. 1979. Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary
Genre. New Haven ct: Yale University Press.
Swift, Jonathan. (1726) 2003. Gulliver’s Travels. Edited by Robert Demaria Jr.
London: Penguin.
Szalay, Edina. 2005. “Gothic Novel.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
290 Bibliography
Tammi, Pekka. 2006. “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’).” Partial Answers
4 (2): 19–40.
—. 2008. “Against ‘Against’ Narrative.” In Narrativity, Fictionality,
and Literariness: The Narrative Turn and the Study of Literary Fiction,
edited by Lars-Åke Skalin, 37–55. Örebro, Sweden: Örebro University
Press.
Taylor, Holly A., and Barbara Tversky. 1992. “Spatial Mental Models Derived
from Survey and Route Descriptions.” Journal of Memory and Language
31 (2): 261–92.
—. 1996. “Perspective in Spatial Descriptions.” Journal of Memory and
Language 35 (3): 371–91.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. (1848) 2001. Vanity Fair: A Novel without
a Hero. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by John Carey. London:
Penguin.
Thomas, D. M. 1981. The White Hotel. London: Victor Gollancz.
Todorov, Tzvetan. (1966) 2008. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” In
Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, edited by David Lodge and Nigel
Wood, 226–32. London: Longman.
—. 1973. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.
Translated by Richard Howard. Cleveland oh: Press of Case Western
Reserve University.
—. (1978) 1990. Genres in Discourse. Translated by Catherine Porter.
Toker, Leona. 1993. Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional
Narrative. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1937) 1966. The Hobbit. New York: Ballantine Books.
—. 1966. “On Fairy-Stories.” In The Tolkien Reader, edited by J. R. R.
Tolkien, 3–84. New York: Ballantine Books.
—. (1975) 1986. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo.
Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Translated by J. R. R. Tolkien. London:
Unwin.
Tolkien, J. R. R., and E. V. Gordon. 1967. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
2nd edition. Revised by Norman Davis. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Tomashevsky, Boris. (1921) 1965. “Thematics.” In Russian Formalist Criticism,
edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 61–95. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Traill, Nancy H. 1991. “Fictional Worlds of the Fantastic.” Style 25 (2):
196–210.
Bibliography 291
—. 1996. Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in
Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Travers, P. L. 1934. Mary Poppins. New York: Harcourt.
—. 1935. Mary Poppins Comes Back. New York: Harcourt.
—. 1943. Mary Poppins Opens the Door. New York: Harcourt.
Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
—. 2002. “The Cognitive Study of Art, Language, and Literature.” Poetics
Today 23 (1): 9–20.
—. 2003. “Double-Scope Stories.” In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive
Sciences, edited by David Herman, 117–42. Stanford ca: csli.
Turner, Michael. 1999. The Pornographer’s Poem. Toronto, ON: Doubleday
Canada.
Twain, Mark. (1889) 1983. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Edited by Bernard L. Stein. Berkeley: University of California Press.
The Vedas. Edited by Friedrich Max Müller. Calcutta: Susil Gupta, 1956.
Vint, Sherryl. 2010. Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the
Animal. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press.
Virgil. 2008. The Aeneid. Translated by Sarah Ruden. New Haven ct: Yale
University Press.
Voltaire. 1913. Correspondance de Voltaire. Edited by Lucien Foulet. Paris:
Hachette.
Walker, Steven F. 2005. “Myth.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Wallace, David Foster. 1989. “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.”
In Girl with Curious Hair, 231–373. New York: Norton.
Walpole, Horace. (1764) 1966. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. 2nd
edition. Mineola ny: Dover.
Walsh, Richard. 2007. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the
Idea of Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the
Representational Arts. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press.
Warf, Barney, and Santa Arias, eds. 2009. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives. London: Routledge.
Warhol, Robyn. 1986. “Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest
Interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot.” pmla 101 (5): 811–18.
Waters, Steve. 2006. “Sarah Kane: From Terror to Trauma.” In A Companion
to Modern British and Irish Drama: 1880–2005, edited by Mary Luckhurst,
371–82. Malden ma: Blackwell.
292 Bibliography
Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and
Fielding. London: Chatto & Windus.
Watzlawick, Paul. 1976. How Real Is Real? Confusion, Disinformation,
Communication. London: Souvenir Press.
Waugh, Patricia. 1984. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self- Conscious
Fiction. London: Routledge.
Weil, Kari. 2012. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New York:
Columbia University Press.
Weiss, Katherine. 2001. “Perceiving Bodies in Beckett’s Play.” In Samuel
Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui: An Annual Bilingual Review/Revue Annuelle
Bilingue 11: 186–93.
Wells, H. G. (1895) 2005. The Time Machine, edited by Patrick Parrinder.
London: Penguin.
—. (1933) 1980. “Preface to The Scientific Romances.” In H. G. Wells’s
Literary Criticism, edited by Patrick Parrinder and Robert M. Philmus,
240–45. New York: Barnes & Noble.
Wells, Lynn. 2003. Allegories of Telling: Self-Referential Narrative in
Contemporary British Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Wessel, Johann. 1785. Anno 7603. Copenhagen: P. Horrebow.
Wheale, Nigel. 1991. “Recognising a ‘Human-Thing’: Cyborgs, Robots, and
Replicants in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.” Critical Survey 3 (3): 297–304.
Wiest, Ursula. 1993. “ ‘The Refined though Whimsical Pleasure’: Die you-
Erzählsituation.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 18: 75–90.
—. 1999. Messages from the Threshold: Die You-Erzählform als Ausdruck
liminaler Wesen und Welten. Bielefeld, Germany: Aisthesis.
Williamson, Jack, and John Campbell. 1942. “Minus Sign.” Astounding
Science-Fiction 30 (3): 43–79.
Wilson, Ann. 1997. “Hauntings: Ghosts and the Limits of Realism in Cloud Nine
and Fen by Caryl Churchill.” In Drama on Drama: Dimensions of Theatricality
on the Contemporary British Stage, 152–67. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan.
Wilt, Judith. 1981. “The Imperial Mouth: Imperialism, the Gothic and Science
Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture 14 (4): 618–28.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1922) 1955. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
—. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wolf, Werner. 1993. Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der
Erzählkunst: Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem
illusionsstörenden Erzählen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Bibliography 293
—. 2005. “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon:
A Case Study of the Possibilities of ‘Exporting’ Narratological Concepts.”
In Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, edited
by Jan Christoph Meister et al., 83–108. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Woolf, Virginia. (1925) 2000. Mrs. Dalloway. Edited by David Bradshaw.
Wright, Ronald. 1997. A Scientific Romance. London: Anchor.
Wurlitzer, Rudolph. 2008. The Drop Edge of Yonder. Columbus, OH: Two
Dollar Radio.
Wyndham, John. (1956) 1959. “Opposite Number.” In The Seeds of Time, 121–
39. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
—. (1961) 1965. “Random Quest.” In Consider Her Ways and Others, 131–
73. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Yacobi, Tamar. 1981. “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem.”
Poetics Today 2 (2): 113–26.
—. 1988. “Time Denatured into Meaning: New Worlds and Renewed
Themes in the Poetry of Dan Pagis.” Style 22 (1): 93–115.
—. 2001. “Package Deals in Fictional Narrative: The Case of the
Narrator’s (Un)Reliability.” Narrative 9 (2): 223–29.
Yeats, W. B. (1939) 1953. “Purgatory.” In The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats,
429–36. New York: Macmillan.
Zeifman, Hersch. 1984. “Ghost Trio: Pinter’s Family Voices.” Modern Drama
27 (4): 486–93.
Zoran, Gabriel. 1984. “Toward a Theory of Space in Narrative.” Poetics Today
5 (2): 309–35.
Zunshine, Lisa. 2008. Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
294 Bibliography
Index
Abbott, H. Porter, 18, 37, 150, 154, 198 Althusser, Louis, 135, 248n30
Abelson, Robert, 48 Amis, Kingsley, 184
Abish, Walter, Alphabetical Africa, Amis, Martin, 25, 32, 51, 152–57, 159,
254n15 221, 249nn4–5; Time’s Arrow, 25,
Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s 32, 51, 152–59, 184, 221
Guide to the Galaxy series, 247n21 anachrony (Genette): analepsis, 171;
Addison, Joseph, 41 prolepsis, 171; co-occurrence, 171
Adorno, Theodor W., 139, 167 Andersen, Richard, 176
The Adventures of a Black Coat, 74, animalness, 62, 69, 70, 102, 107, 116, 117
77 anthropomorphic limitations of
“The Adventures of a Cat,” 67 knowledge and ability, 6, 12, 25, 36
The Adventures of a Cork-Screw, 74, anti-illusionism (Wolf), 21, 22; and
75, 77 the unnatural, 6, 7, 42
Adventures of an Ostrich Feather of antinomic temporality (Richardson),
Quality, 74 158, 159, 221. See also unnatural
Adventures of a Pin, 74 temporalities
Adventures of a Watch, 74 Antonsen, Jan Erik, 30
Aesop, 10, 65, 68, 102 Aristotle, 22, 27–28, 33, 122, 215,
Aichinger, Ilse, “Spiegelgeschichte,” 254n18
152 Armah, Ayi Kwei, Two Thousand
Aldiss, Brian, Cryptozoic!, 158–59, 221 Seasons, 88, 101, 241n18
Alkon, Paul K., 254n19 Ashbery, John, 238n20
allegory, 49, 53, 77, 78, 80, 111, 115–17, Asimov, Isaac, 128, 250n11; “The
119, 130, 132–33, 136, 162–63, 189, Lastborn,” 250n11
195, 201, 238nn17–18, 241n11; Aston, Elaine, 180
definition of, 52 Atran, Scott, 38–39
Allen, Woody, 204, 210, 221, 222, 225, Auster, Paul, Timbuktu, 239n1
254n20; “The Kugelmass Episode,” author: death of (Barthes), 54,
204–5, 210, 211, 221, 222, 225; The 240n10; vs. omniscient narrator,
Purple Rose of Cairo, 254n20 92–93, 254n22
295
Bachelard, Gaston, 185–86, 197 230, 241n11; definition of, 49; input
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 147–48, 185 spaces, 69, 110
Bal, Mieke, 19, 104, 105 Bodin, Jean, 202
Ballard, J. G., “Time of Passage,” 152, Bonheim, Helmut, 84
159 Booth, Wayne C., 92–93, 242n23
Barnes, Julian, “The Stowaway,” 64, Borges, Jorge Luis, “El jardín de
239n2 senderos que se bifurcan,” 251n15
Barnett, David, 134 Boyd, Brian, 218
Barnett, Louis K., 234n8 Bradbury, Ray, “A Sound of
Barth, John, 10, 46, 249n7; Lost in the Thunder,” 250n13
Funhouse, 249n7 breastness, 79
Barthes, Roland, 54, 104–5, 130 Brenton, Howard, The Romans in
Bartlett, Robert, 40, 106, 243n2 Britain, 250n10
Bauman, Richard, 16, 150 Breuer, Miles J., “The Time Flight,”
beast fable, the, 8, 10, 14, 21, 43, 45, 251n14
50, 53, 61, 65–66, 68–70, 102–3, 220, Bridgeman, Teresa, 29
224, 237n14, 238n18, 239nn4–5; Bridges, Thomas, The Adventures of a
definition of, 65 Bank-note, 74–76, 78
Beck, Ulrich, 135, 248n29 Brontë, Charlotte, Shirley, 206
Beckett, Samuel, 10, 53, 159, 160, 162, Brooke-Rose, Christine, 47, 133;
163, 164, 165, 184, 246n15, 249n3; Xorandor, 133
“The Calmative,” 246n15; “Ping,” Buchholz, Laura, 241n15
42; Play, 53, 159–63; “Lessness,” Buchholz, Sabine, 185
249n3 Budrys, Algis, Rogue Moon, 139–41
Benford, Gregory, Timescape, 251n16 Bunia, Remigius, 236n3
Benhabib, Seyla, 234n6 Butler, Andrew M., 11
Bernaerts, Lars, et al., 235n13, 236n5, Butler, Robert Olen, “Jealous
239n23 Husband Returns in Form of
Bertocci, Adam, Two Gentlemen of Parrot,” 62–64, 69–71, 220, 222,
Lebowski, 15 224–25, 239n2
Bhabha, Homi K., 83 Butts, Richard, 200–201
Bienen, Leigh Buchanan, “My Life
as a West African Gray Parrot,” Cadden, Mike, 68, 157
239n1 Campbell, John W., “Minus Sign”
Blackham, Harold John, 10, 65 (with Jack Williamson), 250n11;
blending (Turner) (reading strategy “Who Goes There?,” 132
1), 12, 45, 47, 48–49, 50, 62, 69, 75, Caracciolo, Marco, 212, 252n2
77, 79, 101, 105, 107, 110, 113–16, 126, Carpentier, Alejo, “Viaje a la
147, 171, 212, 213, 219, 224, 227, 229, semilla,” 152
296 Index
Carroll, Lewis, 11, 157, 221, 249n6; cognitive balance, 43–44
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, cognitive disorientation, 13, 36, 44,
157–58, 236n9; Sylvie and Bruno, 86, 158, 216
157–59, 184, 221; Through the cognitive mechanisms, 9, 39, 50, 55,
Looking Glass, 157 214. See also navigational tools;
Carter, Angela: The Bloody reading strategies
Chambers, 116, 243n3; The Infernal cognitive narratology, 14, 15, 17, 20,
Desire Machines of Doctor 44
Hoffman, 4, 6, 193–95, 198; Nights cognitive stance vs. aesthetic stance,
at the Circus, 107–10, 116, 225 47
Castle, Terry, 146–47 Cohen, Ralph, 102
character: definition of, 104; flat vs. Cohn, Dorrit, 22, 33, 34, 80, 88, 150,
round (Forster), 143; static vs. 242n21, 249n2
dynamic (Pfister), 143; unnatural Cohn, Ruby, 159
characters, 104–48 common sense, 38
Chatman, Seymour, 185 Connor, Steven, 143
Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales, Cooper, Pamela, 172
65; “Franklin’s Tale,” 197; “Nun’s Coover, Robert: “The Babysitter,” 25,
Priest’s Tale,” 65–66 53–54, 174–78, 184, 223; The Public
Chestre, Thomas, Sir Launfal, 244n8 Burning, 254n20
children’s stories, 10, 11, 21, 43, 61, Cortázar, Julio: “El otro cielo,”
65, 68–71, 102–3, 149, 157, 183, 250n10; “La continuidad de los
187, 192–93, 217, 220, 224, 234n9; parques,” 254n20
definition of, 68 Cosslett, Tess, 68
chronomontage (Yacobi), 165–67, Cox, Katharine, 191
171, 184, 199, 250n10. See also Crater, Theresa L., 98
polychronic narration; unnatural Crébillon, Claude, The Sopha,
temporalities a Moral Tale, 73–74
chronotope (Bakhtin), 185 Crimp, Martin, Attempts on Her Life,
Churchill, Caryl: Blue Kettle, 123–25, 133–39
129; Cloud Nine, 4, 6, 179–82, 184, critical animal studies, 71
222, 224, 246n15; The Skriker, 46, Cross, Roseanna, 181, 252n21
246n15 Culler, Jonathan, 45, 81, 93, 94,
circulation novel, the, 10, 11, 21, 43, 242n25
61, 65, 66–70, 73–80, 102–3, 217, Currie, Gregory, 91
220, 222, 238n18, 239n4, 240n8; Currie, Mark, 3, 150
definition of, 66
Clark, Stephen L., 140 Dalí, Salvador, 194
Clum, John M., 179 Dampier, William, 114
Index 297
Danielewski, Mark Z.: House of direct thought, 43, 97, 100. See also
Leaves, 30, 187–93, 221, 224; Only interior monologue
Revolutions, 231, 250n7 Docherty, Thomas, 133, 139
Dannenberg, Hilary P., 173, 176 do it yourself (reading strategy 8), 48,
Dante Alighieri, 49 53–54, 173–75, 213
Davenport, Guy: “The Haile Selassie Doležel, Lubomír, 25–26, 29, 31, 43,
Funeral Train,” 199–200, 203, 223; 48, 55, 106, 234n10
“The Invention of Photography in Dowell, Coleman, Island People,
Toledo,” 254n15 254n20
Dawson, Paul, 91–92, 94 Duke Roland, 244n8
death-in-life, 119, 122, 162–63
defamiliarization (Shklovsky), 8, Eco, Umberto, 13, 31, 69
14–15, 20, 42, 86, 225; definition of, Eddison, E. R., The Worm Ouroboros,
233n3. See also estranging effect; 250n8
ostranenie Elick, Catherine L., 192
Defoe, Daniel, 75, 82, 114, 146, 240n8; Eliot, George: Adam Bede, 206–7;
Moll Flanders, 82; Robinson Middlemarch, 90–91
Crusoe, 114 Ellis, Bret Easton, Lunar Park, 235n15
deictic markers, 75, 156, 186 encyclopedia (Doležel), 13, 43, 45, 144,
Delaney, Samuel R., Dhalgren, 225; definition of, 234n10; actual-
250n9 world vs. fictional, 48–49
DelConte, Matt, 86 epic, the, 7, 10, 12, 20, 21, 43, 50, 106,
Dennis, Abigail, 108 110–11, 115, 145, 148, 187, 200–201,
Derrida, Jacques, 220, 239n5 202, 208, 221, 230, 234n9, 243n28,
Dick, Philip K.: Counter-Clock 254n18, 255n31; definition of, 244n7
World, 158–59, 184, 221, 247n21; Do Epic of Gilgamesh, 243n28, 244n7
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, essentializing, 140
126–27; “A Little Something for Us estranging effect (Shklovsky),
Tempunauts,” 250n9; Now Wait for 6–7, 12–13, 14, 42, 224, 225, 228,
Last Year, 251n16 233n3. See also defamiliarization;
Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations, ostranenie
231; “The Signal-Man,” 11 event: definition of, 233n1; deliberate
Diderot, Denis, Les bijoux indiscrets, actions vs. accidental or non-
240n6 volitional happenings, 233n1
Diedrick, James, 152, 155 experientiality (Fludernik), 36, 46;
differential temporality embodiedness, 40; embodiment,
(Richardson), 179, 182, 183, 222, 39–40
251nn18, 20. See also unnatural extreme forms of exaggeration (in
temporalities postmodernism), 220, 222–23
298 Index
fairies, 40, 120–21, 244; definition of, focalizer (Bal), 100
246n16 Fokkema, Aleid, 105
fantastic, the (Todorov), 22, 56, foregrounding the thematic (reading
105–6; vs. the marvelous, 105–6, strategy 4), 48, 51–52, 80, 83, 87,
234n9; vs. the uncanny, 105, 234n9 156, 167, 179, 181, 195, 199, 213,
fantasy novel, 10, 21, 50, 106, 131–32, 238n16
145, 149, 169, 187, 192–93, 196–98, Forster, E. M., 185
221, 224; definition of, 147 Fowles, John, The French Lieutenant’s
Federman, Raymond, 46, 144, 234n6; Woman, 172–73, 178, 184, 205–6,
Double or Nothing, 46 211, 222–23
Fforde, Jasper, 15, 231, 254n20; frames, 3, 9, 15, 20, 26, 27, 32, 44, 45,
The Eyre Affair, 254n20; First 47–50, 62, 65, 69, 80, 100, 101, 106,
among Sequels, 254n20; Lost in a 213, 215, 219, 230, 234n11, 235n2; vs.
Good Book, 254n20; One of Our scripts, 235n2
Thursdays Is Missing, 254n20; frame theory, 17
Something Rotten, 254n20; The Franzen, Jonathan, 231–32
Well of Lost Plots, 231, 254n20; The Frayn, Michael, Copenhagen, 251n15
Woman Who Died a Lot, 254n20 free indirect discourse, 43, 97, 100
fictional, the, 6, 17, 22, 32–34, 73, 81, Freud, Sigmund, 124, 164, 176, 195
199, 218; radicalization of, 23, 215; Fry, Stephen, Making History, 250n13
the unnatural as a signpost of, Frye, Northrop, 145–46, 148
32–34 Füger, Wilhelm, 242n24
Fielding, Henry, 146, 240n8; Tom Fuller, David, 229
Jones, 89, 91, 94, 254n21
Filmer, Robert, 202 Gagnier, Regenia, 244n4
Finlayson, John, 66 Gale, Steven H., 117
Finney, Jack, The Body Snatchers, gap (Iser), 161
248n28 Gatten, Brian, 163
Fitzgerald, Robert P., 202 generification (reading strategy 2),
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, 47, 49–50, 213, 237n12
204 Genette, Gérard, 81, 86, 89, 96, 100,
Fletcher, Alan J., 121 165, 171, 185, 203, 205
Flint, Christopher, 74, 77, 79 genre, 6, 10, 12, 13, 21, 22, 23, 43, 50,
Fludernik, Monika, 6, 20, 22, 27, 39, 65, 66, 69, 71, 80, 101–3, 106, 116,
44, 45, 46, 81, 84, 93, 95, 101, 107, 122, 131, 146, 147, 148, 168, 173, 178,
203, 255n24 183, 184, 193, 200, 220, 221, 225, 227,
focalization (Genette): external, 76, 228, 229, 230, 234n7, 238n21, 239n4,
89; internal, 86, 89, 96; zero, 81, 244n8; definition of, 6; generic
89, 100 conventions, 43, 47, 49–50,
Index 299
genre (cont.) Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich, 19, 22,
53, 61, 70, 102, 116, 144, 145, 158, 183, 56–57, 217
212, 222, 238n21, 255n31; historical Gurnah, Abdulrazak, 82
vs. theoretical genres, 234n7; vs. Guy of Warwick, 244n8
mode, 53, 233n4, 238n18
ghost play, 10, 149, 163, 183, 234n9; Hale, Edward Everett, 255n11; “Hands
definition of, 250n8 Off,” 250n11
Gibson, Andrew, 21 Hall, Stuart, 135
Gibson, William, Neuromancer, Hamilton, Natalie, 191
247n21 Hamilton, Theresa, 255n24
Gildon, Charles, The Golden Spy, 73, Harrison, Bernard, 37, 57
78 Hassan, Ihab, 10
Glanvill, Joseph, Saducismus Hawkes, John, Sweet William, 239n1
Triumphatus, 236n6 Hawking, Stephen, 34, 168
Glaz, Adam, 149 Heath, Robert, 168
globalization, 134–39, 143; definition Heath-Stubbs, John, 112
of, 248n29 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 176
Goetsch, Paul, 111 Heinlein, Robert A.: Starship
Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich, 53, 72–73, Troopers, 115–16; The Puppet
94; “The Nose,” 72; “The Overcoat” Masters, 245n14
94 Heinze, Rüdiger, 81, 234n11
Gomel, Elana, 11, 252n3 Heise, Ursula K, 150
Gordon, Robert, 119 Herman, David, 20, 22, 34–36, 44, 46,
Gothic novel, 5, 7, 10, 43, 50, 106, 112, 69, 99, 129, 165, 186, 218, 229
115, 121, 122, 125, 131, 145, 146–48, Herman, Luc, 104, 143, 182
221, 224, 234n9, 240n8; definition Hirakawa, Sukehiro, 250n8
of, 245n10 Historia Meriadoci, 252n21
Grahame-Smith, Seth, Pride and The History and Adventures of a
Prejudice and Zombies, 15 Lady’s Slippers and Shoes, 74, 78
grandfather paradox, 168 History of a Pin, as Related by Itself,
Greimas, Algirdas-Julien, 74
243n1 Hite, Molly, 143
Gribbin, John, 249n1 Hobbes, Thomas, 202
Gricean cooperative principle, 46 Hollinger, Veronica, 11
Griffin, Dustin, 230 Homer, Iliad, 244n7; Odyssey, 244n7
Gross, George E., 124 Horace, 33
Guérin, Du chevalier qui fist parler Horkheimer, Max, 139, 167
les cons, 240n6 Hunter, J. Paul, 114–15, 245n12
Guingamor, 252n21 Hutcheon, Linda, 8, 226–27
300 Index
Huysen, Andrew, 219 Johnson-Laird, P. N. 22, 28
hybridity (Bhabha), 83, 199–203, Johnstone, Charles, Chrysal; or the
241n16 Adventures of a Guinea, 73, 74,
76, 77
ideology (Althusser), 87, 116, 135–36, Jones, Sara Gwenllian, 193
156, 216, 224, 248n30; definition Josipovici, Gabriel, “Mobius the
of, 135 Stripper,” 250n7
imagination, 32, 38, 40, 41, 96, 215–16, Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist
218, 254n20 as a Young Man, 96; Finnegans
implied author (Booth), vs. Wake, 46, 249n7; Ulysses, 96,
omniscient narrator, 92–93 98–99
impossibility: physical, 25, 30, 62,
72, 75, 106, 115, 124, 154, 186, 201, Kafka, Franz, 15, 33, 53, 72–73; Die
204, 235n1; logical, 25, 26, 30–32, Verwandlung, 15, 33, 72
150, 151, 171, 186, 194, 199, 252n2; Kane, Sarah: Blasted, 246n15;
human, 25–26, 30, 81, 88, 93, 96, Cleansed, 52, 129–31, 133, 222,
111. See also unnatural, the 246n15, 247nn22, 24
impossible blend (Turner), 45, 48, 49, Kearns, Katherine, 236n4
71, 105, 212, 219, 229 Keats, John, 54
interior monologue, 86. See also Kelly, Douglas, 243n26
direct thought Kennedy, Thomas E., 175
interpretation, 14, 18–19, 22, 54, 55, 57, Kennedy, William, Ironweed,
234n11, 235n15 246n15
intertextuality, 9, 13, 70, 72, 225–27 Kenner, Hugh, 161
Irwin, W. R., 147 Kieckhefer, Richard, 40, 106
Iser, Wolfgang, 217 Kilgour, Maggie, 245n10
Ishiguro, Kazuo, 231 Kilner, Dorothy: The Adventures of
Iversen, Stefan, 14, 15, 17, 234n11, a Hackney Coach, 74, 75; The Life
235n14 and Perambulations of a Mouse,
67–68
Jahn, Manfred, 20, 44, 185 King Horn, 244n8
James, Henry: The Ambassadors, 96; Kline, Barbara, 41, 196–97
The Turn of the Screw, 56, 105 Knight, David, A for Anything, 139,
Jameson, Fredric, 227 141
Jencks, Charles, 226 Kotzwinkle, William, Doctor Rat,
Johnson, B. S., “Broad Thoughts from 239n1
a Home,” 173–74; Christie Malry’s Krell, Jonathan F., 111
Own Double-Entry, 254n20 Kristóf, Ágota, Le grand cahier,
Johnson, Samuel, 245n11 246n19
Index 301
Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy, 224, 228, 244n8, 248nn26–27,
246n18 250n9, 253n6, 253n14; black magic,
Kyng Alisaunder, 244n8 113, 131, 133, 196; white magic, 131,
132, 196, 197, 248n27, 253n14. See
Labov, William, 16 also sorcery
Lamb, Jonathan, 77 Mäkelä, Maria, 14, 16–17, 18, 234n11,
Le Guin, Ursula: “Direction of the 235n16
Road,” 79, 80, 240n6; The Lathe of Malory, Thomas, Le Morte Darthur,
Heaven, 251n16 95, 131, 145, 222, 244n8
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 30 Mangum, Theresa, 239n4
Leinster, Murray, “Sidewise in Time,” many-worlds cosmology, 176–78, 184,
251n16 251n16
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 185 Map, Walter, De Nugis Curialium, 5,
Lewis, Matthew, The Monk, 5, 121–22 180–82, 184, 222, 224
Leyner, Mark, Et Tu, Babe, 254n20 Marcus, Amit, 237n10
liar sentence, 178, 251n17 Margolin, Uri, 104–5
life-in-death, 162–63 Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor
Lifton, Robert Jay, 249n5 Faustus, 252n20
Lightman, Alan, Einstein’s Dream, Marx, Karl, 176
251n16 master narrative (Lyotard), 176,
Lipking, Lawrence, 126 178–79, 184, 223
Lipsky, Oldrich, Stastny Konec, 152 Mather, Cotton, Memorable
literariness, 17, 218 Providences, 236n6
lived space (Bachelard), 186, 187 McCaffrey, Anne, Decision at Doona,
logical principles, 3, 6, 7, 12, 36, 37, 245n14
217; principle of noncontradiction, McEwan, Ian, 231
25, 30, 149, 172, 186, 188 McHale, Brian, 7, 11–12, 20, 35, 47, 187,
logocentrism, 21 228, 229, 242n20
Luckhurst, Mary, 134 McInerney, Jay, Bright Lights, Big
Ludwig, Sämi, 29 City, 32, 85–87
Lydgate, John, Fall of Princes, 208–9, Melusine, 111–12
211, 255n31 Memoirs of the Shakespear’s Head in
Lyotard, Jean-François, 176, 203, Covent Garden, 74
234n6 mental model (Johnson-Laird), 22,
28, 32, 75, 95, 146, 212, 215–16, 229,
magic, 11, 12, 38, 40–41, 43, 50, 83, 231; natural vs. unnatural, 28, 95,
95, 101, 105–6, 113, 120, 126, 131–33, 212, 215, 216, 229
145, 147, 149, 157, 168, 180, 183, 187, metafiction (Waugh), 7, 20, 22,
192–93, 196–98, 200–201, 212, 222, 72–73, 125, 165, 183, 227, 233nn2–3;
302 Index
and the unnatural, 6, 7, 8, 13, narration (Genette): heterodiegetic,
42–43, 86, 184, 218, 220, 224, 86, 89, 91, 96, 100, 242n21, 254n22;
227, 231, 233n5; definition homodiegetic, 80–81, 100, 241n13
of, 233n3; historiographic narrative: definition of, 35; novels,
metafiction (Hutcheon), 8; shorts stories and plays as
“muted” metafiction, 7, 224; narratives, 34–37
vs. metanarrative, 208. See also narrative components (Phelan), the
self-reflexivity mimetic, the thematic, and the
metalepsis (Genette), 187, 203–11, synthetic, 51–52, 105
221, 225, 254n20, 254n22, 255n23, narrative discourse vs. story, 32, 63,
255nn30–31; metaphorical 85, 150–51, 154
(authorial or rhetorical), 203, 206, narrativehood, 22; and the
208; ontological (ascending or unnatural, 34–37
descending), 203–6, 208–9, 210, narrative levels (Genette):
211, 221, 255n23, 255n30; definition extradiegetic, 91, 203, 206, 208,
of, 203 209, 254n20; intradiegetic, 152,
Mikkonen, Kai, 72 206, 208–10; hypodiegetic,
Miller, D. A., 243n27 209–10
mimesis as imitation (Plato), 22, narrative situation (Stanzel):
27–28 authorial, 88–92, 94–96, 101, 206;
mimesis as representation (Aristotle), figural, 88, 96, 100, 101
22, 27–28, 215 narrativity, 22; and the unnatural,
mind reading, 80, 84, 87–88, 91, 34–37; diegetic vs. mimetic
93–94, 96–97, 99, 101, 222 narrativity (Sommer/Nünning),
Mlodinow, Leonard, 34, 168 36; weakened narrativity
mode, definition of, 233n4 (McHale), 35
modernism, 10, 62, 88, 95, 100, 103 narrativization (Fludernik), 45
modernist novel, 21, 53, 95–98, 100, narrator: covert, 84, 96, 98, 100,
228; definition of, 242n20. See also 101; authorial, 88–91, 94–96, 101,
stream-of-consciousness novel 172–73, 205–7, 242n22; definition
Moody, Rick, The Diviners, 231–32; of, 61; embedded, 65; first-person,
“The Grid,” 241n13 4, 25, 30, 62, 67, 68, 71, 80, 81, 82,
Moraru, Christian, 73, 226–27 88, 93, 94, 100, 103, 113, 141, 157,
Morgan, Richard, Altered Carbon, 241n14, 246n15; overt, 95–96, 101,
247n21 242n22; peripheral first-person,
Müller, Günther, 150 207; personalized (Stanzel),
95; unnatural narrators and
Nabokov, Vladimir, 249n4, 251n15; storytelling scenarios, 61–103
Pale Fire, 251n15 natural (oral) narrative (Labov), 16
Index 303
natural (real-world) parameters, 3, Olsen, Lance, 234n9
4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 15, 17, 20, 26–27, 32, 36, omniscient narration, 10, 21, 61, 62,
38–39, 44–45, 47–48, 56, 62, 85, 88, 87, 88–95, 96, 100–103, 173, 206,
103, 113, 147, 149, 212, 215, 224–26, 212, 222–23, 241n14, 242nn24–25,
228–29, 231, 234n11; as a foil to 243n27; definition of, 88–89;
measure the unnatural, 3, 15–16, omnimentality, 43, 88–89,
26, 38, 39; definition of, 26 93–95, 100, 103, 241n14; and the
natural cognition of the world, 8, unnatural, 93–95, 96, 100–103
9, 34 ostranenie (Shklovsky), 20, 22. See
naturalization (Culler), 45 also defamiliarization; estranging
naturalization (reading strategy effect
3), 51, 238n21; as neutralizing Ovid, Metamorphoses, 246n20
the unnatural, 51, 213, 238n21; Oyeyemi, Helen, White is for
vs. conventionalization, 237n14, Witching, 79, 240n6
238n21. See also subjectification
navigational tools, 22, 45, 55–56, Palmer, Alan, 22, 91
213–14, 237nn10, 15, 238n21. See also Pamuk, Orhan, My Name is Red,
cognitive mechanisms; reading 239n1
strategies paranormal, the, 11
Newman, Bernard, The Flying paratext (Genette), 92
Saucer, 254n19 pastiche (Jameson), vs. parody,
Nicol, Bran, 47 227
Nielsen, Henrik Skov, 14, 16, 17, 18, 81, Pavel, Thomas, 44
234n11, 235n12, 235nn15–16 Peake, C. H., 98–99
Nieuwland, Mantes S., 49–50 Perloff, Marjorie, 10, 73
Niven, Larry, 176; and Jerry Petitjean, Tom, 175
Pournelle, 245n15; “All the Myriad Phelan, James, 51, 92, 105
Ways,” 176–78, 184; Footfall, physical laws, 6, 7, 12, 34, 36, 217
245n14 Pinter, Harold: The Basement, 252n5;
Noe, Marcia, 242n19 Betrayal, 151, 154; Family Voices, 4,
Noh drama, 250n8 6, 117–19, 122, 224
Nolan, Christopher, Memento, 151, Pirandello, Luigi, Sei personaggi in
154 cerca d’autore, 255n30
Nünning, Ansgar, 19, 36 Plato, 22, 27–28, 216
plot, 150–51, 185, 243n1, 249nn2–3;
O’Brien, Flann: At Swim-Two-Birds, definition of, 249n2
254n20; The Third Policeman, Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Tell-Tale
252n3 Heart,” 235n15
Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps, 16 poetic justice (Rymer), 157, 169
304 Index
polychronic narration (Herman), Price, Martin, 105
165. See also chronomontage; Priest, Graham, 30, 31, 178; “Sylvan’s
unnatural temporalities Box,” 30
Popper, Karl, 27 principle of maximal departure
positing a transcendental realm (Pavel), 44
(reading strategy 8), 48, 53, 156, principle of minimal departure
162, 213 (Ryan), 44
possible-worlds theory, 15, 17, 20, 30, 44 Propp, Vladimir, 243n1
posthuman age, the, 133, 139, 142 psychonarration, 43, 97, 99
posthumanism, 223, 247n23 Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity’s Rainbow,
postmodern agenda, 184, 203, 220, 133, 222, 246nn15, 19, 247n23
223–24
postmodernism, 6–13, 20–23, qualia (“what it is like”), 7, 35, 36, 71,
42–44, 47, 50, 61, 70, 73, 74, 79, 217
102, 103, 131, 143–44, 146–47, 149,
165, 171, 176, 182–83, 184, 193, Radcliffe, Ann, 105
198, 206, 211, 212, 218, 219–32, Ramayana, 243n28
233n2; and architecture, 226; and Rand, Ayn, Night of January 16th,
the marvelous, 234n8; and the 251n15
radicalization of the unnatural, 8, reading allegorically (reading
43, 85, 149, 171, 184, 198, 220, 221– strategy 5), 48, 52, 108, 119, 148,
22, 225, 229; conventionalization 162, 213
of, 50, 237n13; definitions of, reading strategies, 8, 19, 21, 22,
225–28; sister genres of, 229–30; 32, 44, 45, 47–57, 144, 213–14,
stereotypical understanding of, 9, 219, 227, 237nn10, 14, 238n21;
230, 234n6; vs. the postmodern, as provisional explanations, 8,
233n2 255–56; “unnaturalizing” reading
postmodern understanding of strategies (Nielsen), 18; unnatural
the human subject, 178, 223–24, response, 213. See also cognitive
247n23 mechanisms; navigational tools
post-postmodernism, 231–32 realism, 22, 27, 225; literary realism,
poststructuralism, 21, 104, 189 27, 212, 236n4
Pountney, Rosemary, 161 realist novel, 61, 75, 87–88, 94,
Powers, Richard, 231–32; Gain, 232; 100–102, 197, 243n26; definition of,
The Time of Our Singing, 232 242n20
Pratt, Marie-Louise, 46 Reed, Ishmael: Flight to Canada,
presence effects (Gumbrecht), 19, 22, 166–67, 171, 184, 221, 225; Mumbo
56–57, 214, 217; vs. meaning effects, Jumbo, 167, 250n10; Yellow Back
19, 22, 56–57 Radio Broke-Down, 250n10
Index 305
reflector-character, 96, 239n1 Rushdie, Salman, 16, 25, 30, 51, 81–84,
reflector-mode narrative, 62, 222, 241n14; Midnight’s Children,
86–88, 95–96, 100–101, 103, 239n1; 16, 25, 30, 51, 81–84, 88, 94, 100, 222
definition of, 96 Russian formalism, 20, 104
repetition compulsion (Freud), Ryan, Marie-Laure, 20, 31, 36, 39,
164–65 44, 53, 88, 149, 173, 174, 175, 186,
return of the real, the, 232 237nn12, 15, 238n17
return of the repressed (Freud), the,
124–25 Salomon, David A., 242n19
revenge tragedy, 246n18 satire, 12, 21, 52–53, 66, 69, 74, 80,
Richardson, Brian, 14–15, 17, 18, 29, 104, 107, 187, 200, 228, 230, 238n18;
61, 86, 94, 105, 136, 149, 151, 152, 171, definition of, 52; Menippean
179, 215, 219, 234n11, 235nn1, 16, satire, 113, 147–48, 169, 238n18
237n13, 250n8 satirization and parody (reading
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 47 strategy 6), 48, 52–53, 64, 73, 147,
Robbe-Grillet, Alain: Dans le 173, 204, 213
labyrinthe, 133; La maison de Saunders, Corinne, 131, 253nn11, 14
rendez-vous, 251n15 Saunders, Marshall, Beautiful Joe, 5
romance, 10, 12, 21, 43, 50, 94–95, 106, Savage, Sam, Firmin, 239n1
111–12, 115, 120, 131, 133, 145–46, Sawyer, Andrew, 154
148, 169, 187, 196–98, 208, 221, 224, scenario, definition of, 233n1
229–30, 234n9, 242n20; definition Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 33, 217
of, 243n26; types of romance, Schank, Roger, 48
244n8 Schlobin, Roger C., 147
Ronen, Ruth, 3, 29, 31, 32, 186 Schmid, Wolf, 225
Rooke, Leon, Shakespeare’s Dog, Schwab, Gabriele, 11, 249n6
239n1 Schwarz, Daniel, 105
Roth, Philip, 4, 53, 71, 72, 222, 240n6; science fiction, 10, 12, 13, 14, 21, 43, 50,
The Breast, 3, 6, 8, 53, 71–73, 79, 80, 104, 107, 115, 116, 125–29, 131–33, 139,
222 140, 143–44, 148–49, 157–58, 168,
Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the 171, 176, 178, 183–84, 224, 228–29,
Deathly Hollows, 197–98; Harry 247n21, 250n9, 251n16, 254n19;
Potter and the Goblet of Fire, definition of, 148, 184
192–93, 221; Harry Potter and the Scott, Helenus, The Adventures of a
Prisoner of Azkaban, 169; Harry Rupee, 73, 75, 76
Potter series, 147, 169, 193, 197–98, Scott, Kim, Benang, 241n13
221, 248n27 scripts, 3, 15, 26, 27, 44, 45, 47, 48, 154,
Royle, Nicholas, 81, 82, 93, 242n25 219, 221; vs. frames, 235n2
Rubin, Isaiah A., 124 Searle, John, 216
306 Index
Sebold, Anne, The Lovely Bones, 122, spatial turn, 252n1
246n15 Spaulding, Timothy, 167
self-reflexivity, 7, 10, 12, 13, 63, 79, Spolsky, Ellen, 213
94, 129, 153, 163, 183–84, 206, 227, Sprague de Camp, L., Lest Darkness
233n2. See also metafiction Fall, 169, 221
Sell, Roger D., 236n8, 237n11 Springer, Mary Doyle, 105
Sewell, Anne, Black Beauty, 68–69 Stableford, Brian, 148
Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Stanley, E. G., 200
246n18 Stanzel, Franz K., 88, 96, 207,
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 125–26, 242n22
128; The Last Man, 250n14 Stein, Gertrude, 238n20
Shklovsky, Viktor, 14, 20, 22, 42, Sternberg, Meir, 19, 92, 93, 95, 242n25
233n3 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy,
Sidney, Sir Philip, Old Arcadia, 42, 82
208 Stockwell, Peter, 39
Sim, Stuart, 223 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 112–13, 131
Simmons, Dan, The Fall of Hyperion, Stoppard, Tom: Artist Descending a
247n21 Staircase, 151; The Real Inspector
Sims, Christopher A., 127 Hound, 254n20
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 41, story vs. narrative discourse, 32, 63,
196–97, 244n8 85, 150–51, 154
Sir Orfeo, 120–21, 122, 145, 244n8 storyworld (Herman), 3, 4, 15, 30,
Slocombe, Will, 189 34–36, 42, 46–48, 52, 55, 63, 75,
Slusser, George, 168 85, 100, 104, 106, 124–26, 129, 139,
Smetacek, Victor, 43–44 147, 151–53, 158–59, 166, 176, 179,
Smollett, Tobias, The History and 182, 185–86, 194, 202–6, 208, 212,
Adventures of an Atom, 74, 78 219, 225, 228, 231, 234n9, 238n21,
social mind (Palmer), 91 241n14, 254n22, 255n23; definition
Sommer, Roy, 36 of, 233n1
sorcery, 196, 212, 253n8. See also stream-of-consciousness novel, 10,
magic 61, 96, 102. See also modernist
space: definition of, 185; story space novel
vs. discourse space (Chatman), structuralism, 104; structuralist
185; setting, 186; spatial frames, narratology, 21
186; story space, 187; unnatural subjectification (reading strategy
spaces, 185–214 3), 47, 51, 125, 134, 155, 172, 173, 213.
Spacks, Particia Meyer, 240n8 See also naturalization (reading
Spark, Muriel, The Hothouse by the strategy 3)
East River, 246n15 Sung, Hae-Kyung, 250n8
Index 307
supernatural, the, 11, 40–41, 56, 83, Traill, Nancy H., 11, 183, 234n9
94–95, 104–7, 110–16, 121, 131–33, transcendental realms, 48, 53, 116,
144–47, 181, 183, 187, 201–3, 212, 145, 156, 162, 164, 183, 213, 238n19;
220–22, 228–30, 234n9, 237n12, heaven, 53, 122, 238n19; hell, 53,
243nn2, 26, 244n8, 245n10, 246n16, 110–11, 113, 116, 157, 238n19, 252n20;
250n8, 254n18; definition of, 105; purgatory, 53, 162–65, 183, 238n19
demotion of (in postmodernism), Travers, P. L.: Mary Poppins, 192,
220, 221–22 253n6; Mary Poppins Comes Back,
surfiction (Federman), 144 192; Mary Poppins Opens the Door,
Swift, Jonathan, 6, 11, 33, 43, 72, 192
73, 113–15, 122, 147, 201, 202, 222, Turner, Mark, 48–49, 219
240n8, 245n11; Gulliver’s Travels, Turner, Michael, The Pornographer’s
6, 33, 72, 113–15, 117, 122–23, 147, Poem, 250n7
201–2, 222, 240n8, 245n11; and Tversky, Barbara, 186
postmodernism, 234n8 Twain, Mark, 43, 169–70, 183, 222;
A Connecticut Yankee in King
tall tale (Bauman), 16 Arthur’s Court, 169–70, 183, 222
Tammi, Pekka, 234n11 Tykwer, Tom, Lola rennt, 251n15
Taylor, Holly, 186
telepathy, 11, 25, 51, 80–84, 93–94, unnatural, the: as a driving force
98–99, 126, 241nn12, 18 behind new genres, 9, 23, 102,
Thackeray, William, Vanity Fair, 229; cognitive approach to, 17–18;
89–90, 207 conventionalized instances of, 6–7,
theme, definition of, 51 9–10, 13, 23, 40, 42–43, 45, 49–50,
thingness, 75, 79 64–70, 73–80, 87–99, 102–3, 106,
“Third Space” (Bhabha), 83–84 110–17, 120–23, 125–28, 131–32, 139–
Thomas, D. M., The White Hotel, 42, 147–48, 157–59, 163–65, 166–71,
251n20 176–78, 180–82, 192–93, 196–98,
Thomas of Erceldoune, 252n21 200–202, 206–11, 212, 220, 225, 227,
time: story time vs. discourse time, 230, 237n12; cultural variability
150, 154, 182, 185, 252n22; unnatural of, 37–39; definitions of, 3, 14–17,
time lines, 149–84 25–26; diachronic approach to,
time travel, 27, 45, 50, 168–71, 184, 221 19–20, 235n18; historical variability
Todorov, Tzvetan, 22, 56, 105, 106, of, 39–41; in relation to story
234n9 vs. discourse level, 32; narrative
Toker, Leona, 242n24 potential of, 37; nonactualizability
Tolkien, J.R.R., 132, 147, 198; The of, 3, 16, 29, 32, 187, 199, 200, 218;
Hobbit, 132 not yet conventionalized instances
Tolstoy, Leo, 42 of postmodernism, 8, 21–22, 42,
308 Index
62–64, 71–73, 81–87, 107–10, 117–19, boundaries, 203–11 (see also
123–25, 129–31, 133–39, 152–57, metalepsis); the unnatural
159–63, 165–68, 172–76, 179–80, extension of space, 187–93
187–92, 193–96, 199–200, 204–6, unnatural temporalities, 149–84;
218; qualitative radicalization coexisting story times, 179–82
of earlier modes of, 220–21, 225; (see also differential temporality);
quantitative radicalization of, 220, contradictory time lines, 171–79;
221, 225; vs. the natural, 3, 26–28. eternal temporal loops, 159–65,
See also impossibility 250n9; the fusing of distinct
unnatural characters, 104–48; animal temporal realms, 165–71 (see also
figures, 107–23, 243n3, 245n14; chronomontage; polychronic
character transformations/ narration); retrogressive time line,
metamorphoses, 15, 52, 53, 72, 73, 25, 45, 51, 151–59, 183, 215, 221 (see
129–33, 145, 202, 240n7, 247n23, also antinomic temporality)
248n26; dead characters, 117–23,
246nn15, 18; robot-like humans vacancy (Iser), 161
and human-like robots, 123–29; van Berkum, Jos J. A., 49–50
multiple versions of characters, Vedas, 243n28
133–43 Vervaeck, Bart, 104, 143, 182
unnatural narratology, 14; Virgil, 203, 244n7; Aeneid, 244n7
definition of, 234n11; as a form of Voltaire, 245n11
postclassical narratology, 19
unnatural narrators and storytelling Wallace, David Foster, “Westward
scenarios, 61–103; nonhuman the Course of Empire Takes its
narrators, 71–80, 236n5, 239n23, Way,” 232
240n6; object narrators, 11, 43, Walpole, Horace, 105, 146, 248n32;
73–80, 103, 241n11; speaking body The Castle of Otranto, 146–47,
parts, 71–73; talking animals, 248n32
62–71, 239n1; telepathic narrators, Walsh, Richard, 91–92
80–84, 93–94, 241n18; you- Walton, Kendall L., 22, 33
narratives, 32, 62, 84–87, 93, 103, Warhol, Robyn, 208
241n17 Watt, Ian, 80, 240n8
unnaturalness and realism, Watzlawick, Paul, 26
coexistence of, 28, 225–26 Waugh, Patricia, 7, 22, 42, 227, 233n3
unnatural spaces, 185–214; the Weil, Kari, 71
external materialization Weiss, Katherine, 159, 163
of internal states, 193–98; Wells, H. G., 148, 170, 221, 245n14,
geographical impossibilities, 250n14; The Time Machine, 170,
198–203; transgressing storyworld 221, 245n14, 250n14
Index 309
we-narratives, 88, 100–101 Wurlitzer, Rudolph, The Drop Edge of
Wessel, Johann, Anno 7603, 250n10 Yonder, 251n15
Williamson, Jack, and John Wyndham, John: “Opposite
Campbell, “Minus Sign,” 250n11 Number,” 141–42, 251n16;
Wilson, Ann, 179 “Random Quest,” 251n16
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 27
Wolf, Werner, 20–21, 22, 42–43, 215 Yacobi, Tamar, 237nn12, 15, 238nn16,
Woolf, Virginia: Orlando, 251n18; 21
Mrs. Dalloway, 97–98 Yeats, W. B., 163–65, 183, 184, 250n8;
worldview: rationalist-scientific Purgatory, 163–65, 184
and empirically minded
worldview, 236n5; respect for other Zen way of reading, the (reading
worldviews, 39 strategy 9), 48, 54–56, 213, 214
Wright, Ronald, A Scientific Zoran, Gabriel, 186
Romance, 251n14 Zunshine, Lisa, 9, 20, 37, 62, 125, 140,
213–14, 216
310 Index
In the Frontiers of Narr ative Series:
Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Handbook of Narrative Analysis

Worlds in Fiction and Drama by Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck
by Jan Alber
Affective Narratology:
Useful Fictions: The Emotional Structure of Stories
Evolution, Anxiety, and by Patrick Colm Hogan
the Origins of Literature
by Michael Austin Spaces of the Mind:
Narrative and Community
Stories and Minds: in the American West
Cognitive Approaches by Elaine A. Jahner
to Literary Narrative
edited by Lars Bernaerts, Dirk The Storyworld Accord:
De Geest, Luc Herman, and Bart Econarratology and
Vervaeck Postcolonial Narratives
by Erin James
Telling Children’s Stories:
Narrative Theory and Talk Fiction: Literature
Children’s Literature and the Talk Explosion
edited by Mike Cadden by Irene Kacandes
Refiguring Minds in Ethos and Narrative Interpretation:

Narrative Media The Negotiation of Values
by David Ciccoricco in Fiction
by Liesbeth Korthals Altes
Coincidence and Counterfactuality:
Plotting Time and Space in Contemporary Comics Storytelling
Narrative Fiction by Karin Kukkonen
by Hilary P. Dannenberg
The Imagined Moment:
The Emergence of Mind: Time, Narrative,
Representations of Consciousness and Computation
in Narrative Discourse in English by Inderjeet Mani
edited by David Herman
Storying Domestic Violence:
Story Logic: Problems Constructions and Stereotypes
and Possibilities of Abuse in the Discourse of
of Narrative General Practitioners
by David Herman by Jarmila Mildorf
New Narratives: Stories and Narrative across Media:
Storytelling in the Digital Age The Languages of Storytelling
edited by Ruth Page and edited by Marie-Laure Ryan
Bronwen Thomas
Storyworlds across Media:
Fictional Minds Toward a Media-Conscious
by Alan Palmer Narratology
edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and
Writing at the Limit: The Novel in Jan-Noël Thon
the New Media Ecology
by Daniel Punday Fictional Dialogue: Speech and
Conversation in the Modern
Narrative Beginnings: and Postmodern Novel
Theories and Practices by Bronwen Thomas
edited by Brian Richardson
Transmedial Narratology and
Opening Acts: Narrative Contemporary Media Culture
Beginnings in Twentieth-Century by Jan-Noël Thon
Feminist Fiction
by Catherine Romagnolo
To order or obtain more information on these or other University of

Nebraska Press titles, visit nebraskapress.unl.edu.

Alber - 2016 - Unnatural Narrative

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Alber - 2016 - Unnatural Narrative

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Unnatural Narrative

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

Acknowledgments for the use of copyrighted

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Set in Minion by Westchester Publishing Services

Part 1. Concepts of the Unnatural

Part 2. Unnatural Narrative Features

“Postmodernist Impossibilities, the Creation of New Cognitive

One of the most interesting things about fictional narratives is that

I am a breast. A phenomenon that has been variously described to

Other postmodernist narratives confront us with unnatural charac-

Cloud palaces erected themselves then silently toppled to reveal

4 Concepts of the Unnatural

6 Concepts of the Unnatural

8 Concepts of the Unnatural

10 Concepts of the Unnatural

12 Concepts of the Unnatural

14 Concepts of the Unnatural

not linear. An oral narrative does not go from the beginning to

Furthermore oral narratives can also contain impossible scenarios or

16 Concepts of the Unnatural

18 Concepts of the Unnatural

20 Concepts of the Unnatural

This study is structured as follows: in chapter 1 I provide definitions of

22 Concepts of the Unnatural

1.1. The Unnatural: A Definition

1.2. The Natural and the Unnatural

26 Concepts of the Unnatural

Theorizing the Unnatural 27

28 Concepts of the Unnatural

1.3. Impossibilities in Narrative Texts

Theorizing the Unnatural 29

30 Concepts of the Unnatural

Theorizing the Unnatural 31

1.4. The Unnatural as a Signpost of Fictionality

32 Concepts of the Unnatural

Theorizing the Unnatural 33

1.5. Narrativehood and the Unnatural

34 Concepts of the Unnatural

(i) A representation that is situated in—must be interpreted in

To paraphrase: narratives centrally concern the question of what it is

Theorizing the Unnatural 35

36 Concepts of the Unnatural

1.6. The Cultural and Historical Variability of the Unnatural

Theorizing the Unnatural 37

1. There is considerable recurrence of symbolic content across

38 Concepts of the Unnatural

My own study—of fictional narratives rather than religious texts—is

Theorizing the Unnatural 39

40 Concepts of the Unnatural

Theorizing the Unnatural 41

42 Concepts of the Unnatural

1.8. Restoring the Cognitive Balance:

Theorizing the Unnatural 43

44 Concepts of the Unnatural

Theorizing the Unnatural 45

46 Concepts of the Unnatural

1. The blending of frames

Theorizing the Unnatural 47

1. The blending of frames: When we are confronted with unnatural

48 Concepts of the Unnatural

Theorizing the Unnatural 49

50 Concepts of the Unnatural