Introduction 1

Jan Alber (Freiburg) and Rüdiger Heinze (Braunschweig)

Introduction

Pictoribus atque poetis quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas.

(Horace)

In recent years, the study of ‘unnatural’ narratives and the development of an

‘unnatural’ narratology has become an exciting new research program in nar-
rative theory.1 In particular the last two decades have witnessed the produc-
tion of numerous analyses of the unnatural in all its different manifestations.2

1 Unnatural narratology is not unnatural in itself but rather a narratology of the un-
natural. We thus ask readers to consider all such instances as so specified.
2 See Richardson, Brian, “‘Time is Out of Joint’: Narrative Models and the Tem-
porality of Drama”, Poetics Today, 8, 1987, Nr. 2, 299–310; “Pinter’s Landscape and
the Boundaries of Narrative”, Essays in Literature, 18, 1991, Nr. 1, 37–45; “Beyond
Poststructuralism: Theory of Character, the Personae of Modern Drama, and the
Antinomies of Critical Theory”, Modern Drama, 40, 1997, 86–99; “Narrative
Poetics and Postmodern Transgression: Theorizing the Collapse of Time, Voice,
and Frame”, Narrative, 8, 2000, Nr. 1, 23–42; “Denarration in Fiction: Erasing the
Story in Beckett and Others”, Narrative, 9, 2001, Nr. 2, 168–75; “Beyond Story and
Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”, in: Brian Ri-
chardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Colum-
bus 2002, 47–63; Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary
Fiction, Columbus 2006; Alber, Jan, “The ‘Moreness’ or ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’
Narratology: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Lessness’ Reconsidered”, in: Style, 36, 2002, Nr. 1,
54–75; “Impossible Storyworlds – and What to Do with Them”, in: Storyworlds: A
Journal of Narrative Study, 1, 2009, Nr. 1, 79–96; “Unnatural Narratives”, in: The Lit-
erary Encyclopedia, 2009, http://www.litencyc.com; “Unnatural Narrative: Imposs-
ible Worlds in Fiction and Drama”, Habilitation, University of Freiburg, in prog-
ress; Mäkelä, Maria, “Possible Minds: Constructing – and Reading – Another
Consciousness as Fiction”, in: Pekka Tammi and Hannu Tommola (eds.), FREE
Language INDIRECT Translation DISCOURSE Narratology: Linguistic, Translatologi-
cal, and Literary-Theoretical Encounters, Tampere 2006, 231–60; Nielsen, Henrik
Skov, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction”, Narrative, 12,
2004, Nr. 2, 133–50; “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narratives”, in: Jan Alber /
Monika Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, Colum-
bus 2010, 275–302; Tammi, Pekka, “Against Narrative (‘A Boring Story’)”, in Par-
tial Answers, 4, 2006, Nr. 2, 19–40; “Against ‘Against’ Narrative”, in: Lars-Åke Ska-
lin (ed.), Narrativity, Fictionality, and Literariness: The Narrative Turn and the Study of
Literary Fiction, Örebro 2008, 37–55; Iversen, Stefan, “Den uhyggelige fortælling i
Johannes V. Jensens tidlige forfatterskab” [“The Uncanny Narrative in the Early
Works of Johannes V. Jensen”], PhD thesis, Aarhus University 2008; Heinze, Rü-

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2 Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze

The aim of this collection of essays, Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narra-

tology, is twofold. First, it presents and discusses some of the new analytical
tools that have so far been developed on the basis of unnatural novels, short
stories, and plays. Second, it extends these findings through analyses of non-
fictional testimonies, comics, graphic novels, films, and so-called ‘natural’
(i.e., oral) narratives.
Generally speaking, the term unnatural has rather negative connotations. It
is, for example, used to denounce certain types of behavior (as well as sexual
orientations or practices) which the speaker considers to be deviant or per-
verse. We would therefore like to accentuate right from the start that the term
unnatural has a decidedly positive connotation for us within the framework of
this project. More specifically, unnatural narratologists consider the unnatural
to be a fascinating object of study and argue that one can learn something by
dealing with it. The aim of an unnatural theoretical approach is to approximate
and conceptualize Otherness, rather than to stigmatize or reify it; such an ap-
proach is interested in various kinds of narrative strangeness and in particular
in texts that deviate from the mimetic norms of most narratological models.
How then can one define the term unnatural? We would like to propose
three definitions, namely a wide one (1) and two narrow ones, (2) and (3).
(1) At the most basic level, unnatural narratologists are interested in nar-
ratives that have a defamiliarizing effect because they are experimental,
extreme, transgressive, unconventional, non-conformist, or out of the or-
dinary. From this perspective, the unnatural closely correlates with Viktor
Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement (ostranenie), i.e., the argument that art
‘makes strange’:
The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to in-
crease the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is
an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the art-
fulness of an object; the object is not important. […] Art removes objects from the auto-
matism of perception in several ways.3

diger, “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction”,

Narrative, 16, 2008, Nr. 3, 279–97; Alber, Jan / Iversen, Stefan / Nielsen, Henrik
Skov / Richardson, Brian, “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond
Mimetic Models”, Narrative, 18, 2010, Nr. 2, 113–36. The Narrative conferences
in Austin, TX (2008), Birmingham, Great Britain (2009), Cleveland, OH (2010),
and St. Louis, MO (2011) (organized by the International Society for the Study of
Narrative) all featured panels on unnatural narratology. Also, Jan Alber organized
an ISSN panel on “Postmodern and Unnatural Narratives” for the 2009 MLA in
Philadelphia, PN.
3 Shklovsky, Viktor, “Art as Technique [1917]”, in: Lee T. Lemon / Marion J. Reis
(eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism, Lincoln, 1965, 12–13; italics in the original.

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Introduction 3

Like, for example, the notion of “queer” for David Halperin, the unnatural
[…] acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. There is no-
thing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence
[…] [and] demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative.4
In this volume, Johannes Fehrle opts for a broad and transmedial definition
of the term unnatural which closely correlates with the unconventional and
involves Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement.5 Also, in her essay, Caroline
Pirlet defines unnatural narratives as odd or strange texts which “require the
reader to consciously revert to level IV of Fludernik’s model, i.e., the readerly
process of narrativization.”6
However, many unnatural narratologists have a narrower (or more spe-
cific) notion of the unnatural. (2) For example, Brian Richardson and Hen-
rik Skov Nielsen argue that unnatural narratives are anti-mimetic texts that
move beyond the conventions of natural narratives, i.e., “the mimesis of ac-
tual speech situations.”7 In this context, the term ‘natural narrative’ denotes
spontaneous conversational storytelling in the sense of William Labov,8 and

4 Halperin, David M., Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, Oxford and New
York 1995, 62.
5 In his contribution, Per Krogh Hansen looks at narratives that break generic con-
ventions through temporal disruptions. He defines the term unnatural as follows:
“when the representation of the events is disrupted, reordered or fragmented – we
experience the narrative as unnatural – at least until the broken convention is
repeated a sufficient number of times to form a new convention.” For a similar
notion of the unnatural, see the contributions by Stefan Iversen and Marina Gris-
hakova.
6 Monika Fludernik argues that whenever readers are confronted with unreadable
texts, they look for ways of recuperating them as narratives. In the process of nar-
rativization, something is made a narrative by the sheer act of imposing narrativity
on it. The process of narrativization (at Fludernik’s level IV) is based on the fol-
lowing types of cognitive frames: pretextual schemata that involve our real-world
knowledge and parameters used to parse events as intentional acts (level I); frames
of narrative mediation such as “telling” (narratives focusing on a teller figure),
“experiencing” (narratives that are focalized through the consciousness of a pro-
tagonist), “viewing” (the witnessing of events), and “reflecting” (the projection of
a reflecting consciousness in the process of rumination) (level II); and criteria per-
taining to genre as well as to narrative as a general mode of discourse (level III).
See Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London and New York
1996, 43–46.
7 Richardson, Unnatural Voices, 2006, 5. At the same time, Richardson and Nielsen
remain alert to the potential unnaturalness of conventional, realistic and mimetic
ways of telling.
8 See Labov, William / Waletzky, Joshua, “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Per-
sonal Experience”, in: June Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, Seattle

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4 Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze

an example of an unnatural narrative in this sense is John Hawkes’s novel

Sweet William (1993): the text differs from natural narratives in so far as the
narrator is a sophisticated horse rather than a human being.9 Furthermore,
Brian Richardson argues that unnatural narratives violate the “‘mimetic
contract’ that had governed conventional fiction for centuries” as well as the
“established boundaries of realism.”10 His use of the term ‘realism’ is not re-
stricted to the nineteenth-century movement of Realism but rather refers to
a (mimetic) narrative
[…] which appears to provide an accurate, objective, and confident description or
authentic impression of reality. This semiotic effect, which rests on the assump-
tion that language is an undistorted mirror of, or transparent window on, the ‘real,’
is based on a set of literary conventions for producing a lifelike illusion.11
Virginia Woolf ’s novel Orlando (1928) is an example of an unnatural narrative
in this sense because “the eponymous hero ages at a different rate than the
people that surround him (her),”12 which would of course never happen in a
realist text. In his contribution to this volume, Brian Richardson offers the
following definition:
[…] an unnatural narrative is one that conspicuously violates conventions of stan-
dard narrative forms, in particular the conventions of nonfictional narratives, oral
or written, and fictional modes like realism that model themselves on nonfictional
narratives. Unnatural narratives furthermore follow fluid, changing conventions
and create new narratological patterns in each work. In a phrase, unnatural nar-
ratives produce a defamiliarization of the basic elements of narrative.
(3) Finally, Jan Alber restricts the use of the term unnatural to “physically im-
possible scenarios and events, that is impossible by the known laws govern-
ing the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones, that is, impossible

1967, 12–44, and Labov, William, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black Eng-
lish Vernacular, Philadelphia 1972. In his contribution to this volume, Henrik Skov
Nielsen defines unnatural narratives as narratives that “transgress the rules of
everyday storytelling practices.” At the same time, ‘natural’ (i.e., oral) narratives
can also contain unnatural elements. See Andrea Moll’s essay in this collection.
9 Brian Richardson argues that “if a narrative is, as commonly averred, someone re-
lating a set of events to someone else, then this entire way of looking at narrative
has to be reconsidered in the light of the numerous ways innovative authors prob-
lematize each term of this formula, especially the first one.” Richardson, Unnatural
Voices, 5.
10 Ibid., 1, 138.
11 Palmer, Alan, “Realist Novel”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure
Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London 2005, 491.
12 Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse”, 50.

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Introduction 5

by accepted principles of logic.”13 The retrogressive temporality in Martin

Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow (1991) is physically impossible because intradieg-
etic time (time within the story) moves backward, and this defies our knowl-
edge about the flow of time in the real world. Furthermore, the co-existence
of mutually exclusive situations in Robert Coover’s short story “The Baby-
sitter” (1969) is logically impossible because the represented storyworld
violates the principle of non-contradiction. Alber places a major focus on
postmodernist literature but he also shows that physically or logically im-
possible scenarios or events play a crucial role in earlier types of literature.
The basic insight of scholars working within the framework of unnatural
narratology is that narratives do not only mimetically reproduce the world as
we know it. Many narratives confront us with strange narrative worlds which
rely on principles that have very little to do with the actual world around us.
Indeed, in the words of Thomas Pavel, “fictional discourse allows for any
imaginable kind of confabulation.”14 Similarly, Mark Currie argues that “the
impossible object, and even the impossible world, is of course the very possi-
bility of fiction.”15 Unnatural narratologists also point out that narrative the-
ory has had a mimetic bias ever since the times of Aristotle and the unities of
time, place, and action.16 And this real-world orientation has lead to the mar-
ginalization of the unnatural. It should not surprise, then, that unnatural nar-
ratology is directed against what one might call ‘mimetic reductionism,’ i.e.,
the argument that all aspects of narrative can be explained on the basis of the
real world. Brian Richardson puts this as follows:

13 Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 80. See also the contributions by Caroline Pirlet,
Martin Hermann, Jeff Thoss, Johannes Fehrle, and Andrea Moll in this volume.
Some of the denaturalized types of causality discussed by Marina Grishakova are
also either physically or logically impossible.
14 Pavel, Thomas, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, MA 1986, 2.
15 Currie, Mark, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, Edinburgh
2007, 85.
16 Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and transl. Stephen Halliwell, Cambridge, MA 1999, V, XVII,
XVIII. See also Orr, Leonard, Problems and Poetics of the Nonaristotelian Novel, Lewis-
burg 1991. Interestingly, Aristotle’s teacher Plato bans art from his ideal state be-
cause according to him, art only imitates the empirical world and not the perfect
World of Ideas. And since the empirical world is only the shadow of the World of
Ideas, art is just the shadow of this shadow: it is “an imitation of a phantasm.”
Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes: The Republic II, Books VI–X, ed. and transl. Paul Sho-
rey, Cambridge, MA, 1970, 431 (598B). Obviously, Plato was only familiar with
mimetic art that imitates the empirical world. We would like to suggest that if Plato
had been familiar with more abstract types of art (such as unnatural narratives) he
might perhaps have argued that art can take the citizens of his ideal state to the
World of Ideas.

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6 Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze

Since the time of Aristotle, narrative theory has had a pronounced mimetic bias.
Fictional works are largely treated as if they were lifelike reproductions of human
beings and human actions and could be analyzed according to real world notions
of consistency, probability, individual and group psychology, and correspondence
with accepted beliefs about the world. […] An insistently mimetic narrative the-
ory, however, is largely useless when faced with the rich tradition of works by non-
or antimimetic authors.17
What does unnatural narratology do? Unnatural narrative theory can be
characterized as a subdomain of postclassical narratology.18 At issue are cat-
egories for narrative analyses that build on the work of structuralist narratol-
ogists but supplement that work with concepts and ideas that were unavail-
able to structuralists such as Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, A.J. Greimas,
Franz Karl Stanzel, and Tzvetan Todorov. Unnatural narratologists develop
new analytical tools that help describe the fact that many narratives deviate
from real-world frames in a wide variety of different ways. More specifically,
they show that unnatural narratives may radically deconstruct the anthropo-
morphic narrator,19 the traditional human character, and the minds associ-
ated with them,20 or they may move beyond real-world notions of time and
space,21 thus taking us to the most remote territories of conceptual possibil-

17 Richardson, Brian, “Theses on Unnatural Narratology”, 2009, http://www.nor

disk.au.dk/forskningscentre/nrl/unnatural/brtheses (last accessed July 15, 2009).
18 David Herman defines postclassical narratology as follows: “Postclassical narra-
tology (which should not be conflated with poststructuralist theories of narrative)
contains classical narratology as one of its ‘moments’ but is marked by a profu-
sion of new methodologies and research hypotheses: the result is a host of new
perspectives on the forms and functions of narrative itself. Further, in its post-
classical phase, research on narrative does not just expose the limits but also ex-
ploits the possibilities of the older, structuralist models. In much the same way,
postclassical physics does not simply discard classical Newtonian models, but
rather rethinks their conceptual underpinnings and reassesses their scope of ap-
plicability.” Herman, David, “Introduction”, in: David Herman (ed.), Narratol-
ogies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, Columbus 1999, 2–3. See also Alber,
Jan / Fludernik, Monika (eds.) Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, Col-
umbus 2010.
19 For an overview on the narrator figure see Phelan, James / Booth, Wayne C.,
“Narrator”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Rout-
ledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, 2005, 388–92.
20 An overview on characters in narrative is provided by Margolin, Uri, “Character”,
in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclo-
pedia of Narrative Theory, London, 52–57.
21 See the following two overviews on narrative time and space: Fludernik, Monika,
“Time in Narrative”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.),

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Introduction 7

ities.22 It is worth noting that the unnatural may occur at the level of the fabula
or story (the what? of narrative) or the level of the sjuzhet or narrative dis-
course (the how? of narrative), or it may concern both the level of the telling
and the level of the told.
For instance, in unnatural narratives, the narrator may be an animal
(Hawkes’s novel Sweet William), a corpse (Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones
[2002]), an impossibly eloquent (and also burning) child (John Hawkes’s
novel Virginie: Her Two Lives [1982]) an ‘omniscient’ first-person narrator
(Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children [1981], various narrators in Italo
Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight [1962]),23 or otherwise impossible.24 Fur-
thermore, characters can do numerous things that would be impossible in
the real world. For example, they may display mutually incompatible features
(Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud Nine [1979]); they can torture their author be-
cause they consider him to be a bad writer (Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-
Two-Birds [1939]; they may turn into other entities (Franz Kafka’s short story
“The Metamorphosis” [1915] and Sarah Kane’s play Cleansed [1998]); or their
minds can get ‘infected’ by the words “blue” and kettle” with the result that
these words inexplicably destroy the narrative as a whole (Caryl Churchill’s
play Blue Kettle [1997]).25 Also, fictional narratives can radically deconstruct
our real-world notions of time and space. According to Ursula K. Heise,
“representation […] exists in a temporality of its own which is not depend-
ent on the time laws of the ‘real’ world.”26 Indeed, as Brian Richardson has
shown,27 fictional temporalities may be circular (Gabriel Josipovici’s short
story “Mobius the Stripper” [1974])28; contradictory (Caryl Churchill’s play

Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, 608–12; Buchholz, Sabine /

Jahn, Manfred, “Space in Narrative”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-
Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, 551–55.
22 See Alber / Iversen / Nielsen /Richardson, “Unnatural Narratives”, and, for a
discussion of French fiction, Sherzer, Dina, Representation in Contemporary French
Fiction, Lincoln/London 1987.
23 See also Nielsen, “The Impersonal Voice” and Heinze, “Violations of Mimetic
Epistemology” as well as Henrik Skov Nielsen’s essay in this volume.
24 Numerous other examples can be found in Richardson, Unnatural Voices.
25 See also the discussions of unnatural minds by Stefan Iversen and Caroline Pirlet
in this collection.
26 Heise, Ursula K., Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism, Cambridge
1997, 205.
27 See Richardson, “Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression”, 25–28, and
Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse”, 48–52. See also the denaturalized
cause-and-effect patterns that Marina Grishakova discusses in her article in this
collection.
28 See also Martin Hermann’s analysis of time-loop films in this volume.

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8 Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze

Traps [1978])29; antinomic or retrogressive (Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow)30; dif-

ferential (when characters age at a different rate than other inhabitants of the
storyworld, as in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando); conflated (when apparently dif-
ferent temporal zones begin to merge, as in Guy Davenport’s short story
“The Haile Selassie Funeral Train” [1975])31; or multiple (when plotlines that
begin and end at the same moment take different periods of time to unfold,
as in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream [1594–96]). Most narrative
theorists presuppose that it is always possible to retrieve or deduce a consist-
ent story (fabula) from the narrative discourse (sjuzhet). However, with regard
to numerous unnatural narratives, “this simply is not the case.”32 Settings
and locations can of course also be ontologically unstable and may suddenly
get transformed (Harold Pinter’s play The Basement [1967] and Bret Easton
Ellis’s novel Lunar Park [2005]), or they can be otherwise impossible (like the
unimaginable universe in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “El Aleph” [1949]
or the architecturally impossible house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel The
House of Leaves [2000]).33
Even though all unnatural narrative theorists have an interest in texts that
are odd, strange, or unusual, unnatural narratology is not a homogenous
school of thought. Unnatural narrative theory has an international orien-
tation, and it is a multifarious, hybrid,34 and heteroglossic35 movement that

29 For logically impossible temporalities see also Ryan, Marie-Laure, “From Parallel
Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and
Narrative”, in: Poetics Today, 27, 2006, Nr. 4, 633–74, and Dannenberg, Hilary P.,
Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction, Lincoln
2008.
30 See also Chatman, Seymour, “Backwards”, in: Narrative, 17, 2009, Nr. 1, 31–55,
and Per Krogh Hansen’s essay in this collection.
31 David Herman refers to such temporalities in terms of polychronic narration. He
argues that polychronic “situations and events root themselves in more than one
place in time.” Herman, David, “Limits of Order: Toward a Theory of Poly-
chronic Narration”, in: Narrative, 6, 1988, Nr. 1, 75.
32 Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse”, 52.
33 For unnatural worlds and events see the contributions by Jeff Thoss, Johannes
Fehrle, and Andrea Moll in this volume.
34 The notion of hybridity plays a crucial role in postcolonial criticism and was first
used by Homi K. Bhabha, who argues that an “interstitial passage between fixed
identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains dif-
ference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.” Bhabha, Homi K., The Location
of Culture, London 1994, 5. Bhabha sees all cultural identities as being “doubled
[…] or unstable”; he celebrates “hybridity and ‘cultural polyvalency,’ that is, the
situation whereby individuals and groups belong simultaneously to more than one

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Introduction 9

allows for various different perspectives on and definitions of the unnatural.

In fact, one can argue that an unnatural narratology has to allow for various
different perspectives on and definitions of the unnatural, not least because
any understanding of the unnatural must consider its cultural context in
order to avoid hemispheric blindness. As Andrea Moll illustrates in her essay,
narrative scenarios that might seem unnatural to, say, most Western readers
will seem perfectly natural and ordinary to Australian aborigines from New
South Wales. In what follows, we would like to exemplarily outline one par-
ticular debate that takes place within unnatural narratology and relates to the
role of cognitive parameters in discussions of the unnatural.36
Brian Richardson and Henrik Skov Nielsen are wary of the use of cogni-
tive parameters in the analysis of unnatural narratives, especially insofar as
such an approach tends to explain unnatural narratives in terms of ordinary
cognition or familiar experiences. They argue that we simply have to accept
the fact that the unnatural transcends real-world situations. Richardson and
Nielsen point out that unnatural narratives foreground a resistance to real-
world descriptions, and they highlight the inventive power of fictional tech-
niques. From this perspective, unnatural narratologists describe deviations
but respect the polysemy of literary creations, and a crucial aspect of this
polysemy is the unnatural construction of recalcitrant texts. To put this
slightly differently, they argue that we need to resist impulses to deny the
unnatural its protean essence and unexpected effects. Hence, they prefer
to explain the unnatural through narratological concepts that emphasize
non-representational readings.37 Also, they accept the fundamental strange-
ness of unnatural scenarios and the feelings of disorientation that they might
evoke.
By contrast, Jan Alber argues that if we want to make sense of the unnatu-
ral, there is no way around our cognitive architecture, i.e., the frames and

culture.” Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory,
Manchester 2005, 196–99.
35 ‘Heteroglossia’ denotes the existence of a “multiplicity of […] voices.” Bakhtin,
Mikhail M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, transl. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin 1981, 263.
36 See also the beginning of Caroline Pirlet’s essay in this volume. For an overview on
cognitive narratology, see Herman, David, “Cognitive Narratology”, in: Peter
Hühn / John Pier / Wolf Schmid / Jörg Schönert (eds.), Handbook of Narratology.
Berlin/New York 2009, 30–43.
37 While Richardson attempts to uphold the possibility of a multiplicity of interpre-
tations, Nielsen is particularly interested in investigating the consequences of the
differences between different types of narrative.

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10 Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze

scripts that are stored in our minds.38 Alber is particularly interested in ex-
plaining the unnatural on the basis of the process of naturalization.39 The
term ‘naturalization’ was coined by Jonathan Culler in 1975: according to
Culler, readers attempt to recuperate inexplicable elements of a text by tak-
ing recourse to familiar interpretive patterns.40 Monika Fludernik has ex-
tended this notion; she argues that in the process of “narrativization,” which
is “a reading strategy that naturalizes texts by recourse to narrative sche-
mata,”41 readers use parameters that are based on real-world experience and
their exposure to literature to grasp textual oddities. On the basis of the con-
cept of narrativization, Alber has developed five reading strategies which are
designed to help readers come to terms with the unnatural, for example
by reading events as internal states, by foregrounding the thematic, or by
seeing unnatural scenarios as parts of allegorical structures.42 Furthermore,
impossible scenarios urge us to create new frames43 by combining or extend-
ing parameters. Readers may, for example, generate new frames by blending
pre-existing ones or they can engage in processes of ‘frame enrichment’
until the parameters include the strange phenomenon with which they are
confronted.44 To paraphrase David Herman, in such cases, the reader’s task
becomes a Sisyphean one: he or she has to conduct seemingly impossible
mapping operations to orient him- or herself within storyworlds that refuse
to be organized with the help of pre-existing cognitive parameters.45
What is at issue in this debate within unnatural narratology is the larger
question of whether all narratives (no matter how bizarre) are ultimately “the

38 “Frames basically deal with situations such as seeing a room or making a promise
while scripts cover standard action sequences such as playing a game of football,
going to a birthday party, or eating in a restaurant.” Jahn, Manfred, “Cognitive
Narratology”, in: David Herman / Manfred Jahn / Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), The
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London 2005, 69.
39 In his contribution to this volume, Henrik Skov Nielsen draws an important dis-
tinction between naturalization and conventionalization.
40 He argues that “the strange, the formal, the fictional must be recuperated or natu-
ralized, brought within our ken, if we do not want to remain gaping before monu-
mental inscriptions.” Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics,
and the Study of Literature, Ithaca 1975, 134. For attempts to naturalize the unnatu-
ral, see the contributions by Caroline Pirlet and Jeff Thoss in this volume.
41 Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 34.
42 Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 82–3.
43 On this point, see also Fludernik, Monika, “Natural Narratology and Cognitive
Parameters”, in: David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences,
Stanford 2003, 256.
44 Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”, 82–3.
45 Herman, David, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, Lincoln 2002, 289.

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Introduction 11

result of somebody’s subjective experience,”46 and can be defined in terms

of Monika Fludernik’s notion of experientiality, i.e., “the quasi-mimetic
evocation of ‘real-life experience.’”47 In other words, the question at stake is
whether all narratives (including unnatural ones) somehow reflect human
problems and/or concerns, or whether we can explain unnatural narratives
on the basis of other (non-human, non-representational, textual, artificial, or
synthetic48) considerations.49
One might argue that, taken to an extreme, the cognitive outlook poten-
tially simplifies and trivializes the unnatural, or perhaps even imposes a nor-
malizing strategy on the deviant: from this perspective, it might be better to
simply let the unnatural speak for itself. On the other hand, in extreme mani-
festations, the non-representational approach sees unnatural narratives as
monumental inscriptions that are so transcendent that theoreticians have to
remain gaping before them and cannot even begin to make sense of them.
The articles collected here all try to avoid the potential pitfalls of these two
extreme positions, and attempt to do justice to the unnatural. More specifi-
cally, our contributors seek to get the balance right between the uniqueness
of the unnatural and our attempts to make sense of it.
This collection looks at a wide variety of different unnatural narratives.
It places a major focus on the unnatural in postmodernist50 novels, short
stories, and plays (Richardson, Nielsen, Pirlet, Grishakova) but our contribu-
tors also deal with Modernist texts (Richardson, Alber, and Grishakova),

46 Ludwig, Sämi, “Grotesque Landscapes: African American Fiction, Voodoo Ani-

mism, and Cognitive Models”, in: Maria Diedrich / Carl Pedersen / Justine Tally
(eds.), Mapping African America: History, Narrative Formation, and the Production of
Knowledge, Hamburg 1999, 195.
47 Fludernik, Monika, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, London and New York 1996,
12. For discussions of the limits of experientiality, see also the contributions by
Caroline Pirlet and Stefan Iversen in this collection. For the mind-boggling prob-
lem of a definition of narrative that covers both natural and unnatural manifes-
tation see Henrik Skov Nielsen’s article.
48 According to Jim Phelan, “responses to the synthetic component [of narrative] in-
volve an audience’s interest in and attention to the characters and to the larger nar-
rative as artificial constructs.” Phelan, James, Living To Tell about It: A Rhetoric and
Ethics of Character Narration, Ithaca, NY 2005, 20.
49 On this question, see also Alber, “The ‘Moreness’ or ‘Lessness’ of ‘Natural’ Nar-
ratology.”
50 According to Brian McHale, “the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontologi-
cal.” That is, postmodernist fiction self-reflexively problematizes the existence of
the projected fictional world. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, New York/Lon-
don 1987, 10.

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12 Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze

non-fictional testimonies (Iversen),51 comics and graphic novels (Thoss

and Fehrle), films (Hermann and Hansen), and oral narratives (Moll). Alber
looks at earlier manifestations of unnaturalness and investigates the develop-
ment of the unnatural in English literary history.
Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology is based on thoroughly revised
papers that were given at a conference called “Unnatürliches Erzählen, Un-
natural Narratives,” which was organized by Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze
and took place at the new Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS)
in Freiburg (Germany) between November 11 and November 13, 2008.52
The contributions deal with different aspects of unnatural narrative theory
and fall into the following four categories: (1) synchronic and diachronic
perspectives; (2) unnatural narrators and minds; (3) unnatural time; and (4)
unnatural worlds and events.53
(1) The first part of the collection concerns synchronic and diachronic
perspectives on the unnatural. It follows Lawrence Krader’s basic argument
that one may “analyze a social phenomenon by tracing its passage from
one point in time to another, or how it came, at the later point, to be; al-
ternatively, we may focus on its relations in a particular society at a given
time.”54 Part 1 of this volume thus outlines the research program of unnatu-
ral narratology from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, and ad-
dresses manifestations of the unnatural in postmodernist fiction as well as
the historical development of unnaturalness.

51 As Iversen shows in his contribution to this volume, horrific and/or sublime

events, which can occur in the natural world, may call for unnatural techniques
across the fiction/non-fiction divide.
52 The FRIAS is the international research college of the University of Freiburg.
It was established after Freiburg’s success in the Federal Excellence Initiative in
October 2007. We would like to thank Werner Frick, the Director of the School
of Language and Literature and Speaker of the Directorate, Gesa von Essen, the
Scientific Coordinator, as well as Dorothee Birke, Michael Butter, and Tilmann
Köppe, the School’s three Junior Fellows, for having been given the opportunity
to organize this FRIAS conference. Prior to the conference, Alber and Heinze had
co-won a competition for a Junior Research Group, initiated by the School of Lan-
guage and Literature at FRIAS.
53 Many of the contributors to this collection have an anglophone bias. Although
this does influence the selection of examples, we see this project as an invitation
and opening for discussion and thus hope that specialists from other fields will
join to broaden the spectrum and scope of this project.
54 Krader, Lawrence, “Beyond Structuralism: The Dialectics of the Diachronic and
Synchronic Methods in the Human Sciences”, in: Ino Rossi (ed.), The Unconscious in
Culture: The Structuralism of Lévi-Strauss in Perspective, New York 1974, 336.

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Introduction 13

Brian Richardson opens this volume by discussing three foundational

concepts of narrative theory that are transgressed by unnatural narratives:
(a) voice, or the identity of the narrator; (b) story, that is, a logically consistent
event sequence that is retrievable from the discourse; and (c) epistemic con-
sistency, or the idea that a character cannot know the contents of the mind
of another character. Richardson then moves to a discussion of the mimetic
bias of narratology and suggests that the field open itself to the unnatural.
Finally, he discriminates between mimetic, non-mimetic, and anti-mimetic
texts, and, on the basis of an analysis of the history of English literature,
Richardson points out that only the third type qualifies as being unnatural.
In his paper, Jan Alber takes a closer look at earlier manifestations of
unnaturalness, and investigates the development of physically or logically
impossible scenarios and events through literary history from a cognitive
perspective. He focuses on unnatural segments that have already been natu-
ralized or conventionalized and thus no longer strike us as odd or strange. As
a thesis he proposes that the development of new literary genres often goes
hand in hand with the naturalization of the unnatural. In other words, new
genres are frequently created as physical or logical impossibilities are con-
verted into new perceptual frames. Examples of such new frames are the
speaking animal in beast fables, the many supernatural elements in medieval
fairy tales (and, later on, in Gothic novels and other fantasy literature), the
speaking objects that narrate the circulation novels of the eighteenth century
(anticipated by the speaking cross in the Old English poem “The Dream of
the Rood”), the telepathic narrator in much realist fiction, the impossible
renderings of character interiority in Modernist fiction, and the numerous
projected impossibilities (e.g., time travel) in science fiction.
(2) The second part of this volume deals with unnatural narrators and
minds. Henrik Skov Nielsen begins his contribution by comparing his
and Rüdiger Heinze’s views on ‘omniscient’ first-person narrators, i.e.,
homodiegetic narrators that know more than they could if they were human
beings.55 Nielsen argues that the two approaches converge in so far as they
both argue that readers arrive at inadequate interpretations if they simply
deem such narrators unreliable, insane, or wrong whenever they transcend
the limits of natural storytellers: in such cases something else happens which
has to do with the unnatural. In a second step, Nielsen then addresses the
question of whether it is possible to come up with a definition of narrative
that covers fictional, non-fictional, natural, and unnatural texts. In the final

55 See Nielsen, “The Impersonal Voice”, and Heinze, “Violations of Mimetic Epis-
temology.”

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14 Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze

part of his essay, he makes an important distinction between naturalization

on the one hand, and what he calls ‘conventionalization’ on the other, and
he develops a new taxonomy that combines the conventional, the unconven-
tional, the natural, and the unnatural.
In his essay, Stefan Iversen addresses the question of how testimonies
by Holocaust survivors challenge Monika Fludernik’s notion of experiential-
ity. His findings urge Iversen to modify and extend the notion of experien-
tiality as follows: he argues that traumatic events such as the Holocaust may
lead to representations in which the mediating consciousness is unable to
properly grasp the recounted event. In a sense, such narratives have too
much life but too few signs. Iversen refers to these instances in terms of “un-
mediated experientiality.” On the other hand, there are also narratives which
have too few or perhaps even contradictory human anchoring-points (like
Samuel Beckett’s prose texts). Such narratives, which have too many signs
but too little life, are referred to in terms of “demediated experientiality.”
In her contribution, Caroline Pirlet develops a hybrid approach to the
unnatural. More specifically, she fuses Fludernik’s ‘natural’ narratological ap-
proach with Peter Brooks’s ideas of desire for closure, the dynamics of the
psyche, and repetition as binding.56 This fusion aspires to concretize the dy-
namics of consciousness and the process of narrativization. In a second step,
she applies her theoretical models to Beckett’s television play Quad (1982)
and Caryl Churchill’s play Heart’s Desire (1997) (in both plays repetitions play
an important role). Pirlet’s interpretations closely correlate with Alber’s read-
ing strategies 1, 2, and 3 (“reading events as internal states”; “foregrounding
the thematic”; “reading allegorically”) but they also highlight the idea of rep-
etition as a means to master psychological trauma. Pirlet closes her essay by
suggesting that “a truly anthropocentric, reader-oriented cognitive approach
like ‘natural’ narratology must sooner or later acknowledge readers’ affective
responses to literature.”
(3) Part 3 of Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology addresses unnatu-
ral time lines, i.e., experiments with our knowledge about time in the real
world. Marina Grishakova looks at complex types of causality that de-
naturalize our stereotyped thought patterns about the connection between
event sequences. She discriminates between the following five unnatural
forms of narrative causality: (a) fuzzy causality concerns highly improbable
links between causes and effects; (b) the term zero-degree causality describes a

56 See Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Cambridge
1992, and Brooks, Peter, “Narrative Desire”, in: Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative
Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, Columbus 2002, 130–37.

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Introduction 15

situation in which a condition that is inherently rich with causal potential-

ities and sufficient to entail causal connection fails to produce it; (c) retrograde
causality correlates with the reversal of cause and effect; (d) causal closure
closes off causality and precludes the further propagation of effects and their
causes; and (e) causal loops confront us with causes that engender effects, and
those effects reproduce the initial causes. Grishakova ends her contribution
by arguing that these unnatural forms of narrative causality restructure the
natural time order based on the relations of antecedence-subsequence and
create a new, meaningful order of experience.
In his essay, Martin Hermann analyses time-loop films in which time
skips back like a broken record and certain characters are forced to relive
parts of their past. Furthermore, Hermann develops a complex argument
with far-reaching implications. Not only does he show how Hollywood films
of the 1980s adapted the aesthetics and logic of adventure computer games
and combined these with the “traditional literary strategy of the quest;” he
also details how time-loop films are “simultaneously a conventional and ex-
ceptional type of narrative” as a result of the “double strategy of narrative
remediation.” As a consequence, Hermann provides strong evidence that
“unconventional, unnatural narratives need to be rooted in established tradi-
tions of storytelling in order to be appreciated by a wider audience.”
Per Krogh Hansen deals with cases of reversed time in which the
narrative discourse represents a (more or less) chronological sequence of
events in such a way that we gradually move backward in time, while the in-
dividual sections move forward through time. More specifically, he shows
how the episodically reversed films Memento and Irréversible “invite the spec-
tator into a game of interpretive opening and rejection.” As Hansen argues,
this reversal engages the reader in a game of post hoc ergo propter hoc that not
only entertains cognitively, but ultimately emphasizes humanity’s fundamen-
tal ability to ascribe progression and causal patterns to history and sur-
roundings and thus to make meaning in what seems meaningless, order in
what is chaos.
(4) The fourth part of our collection analyzes the projection of unnatural
storyworlds and events. For example, Jeff Thoss looks at metaleptic jumps,
i.e., jumps between different narrative levels, in Grant Morrison’s superhero
comic Animal Man (1988–90). More specifically, he analyses (a) transgress-
ions between the primary world of the story and other (embedded or imagin-
ary) worlds within the text; (b) feigned transgressions between the primary
world of the text and the (extra-textual) world of the reader; and (c) trans-
gressions between story and discourse. Thoss approaches the unnatural
from a cognitive perspective: he shows that even though metalepsis is clearly

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16 Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze

an unnatural phenomenon, narratives (such as Animal Man) also provide

ways of naturalizing or explaining metaleptic jumps.
In his contribution, Johannes Fehrle applies Alber’s concept of un-
naturalness to the storyworlds in comics and graphic novels (such as Frank
Miller’s Sin City [1993], Richard McGuire’s “Here” [2006], Robert Crumb’s
“Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics” [2005], Art Spie-
gelman’s Breakdowns [2008], and Brian Talbot’s The Tale of One Bad Rat
[2008]). Fehrle shows that comics have not suffered from as strict a ‘dicta-
torship’ of the mimetic as other forms of narrative fiction, and argues that
there is no preeminence of the natural (or realist) in comics comparable to
that in highbrow fiction. Fehrle opts for a broader, transmedial concept of
the unnatural that closely correlates with Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliariz-
ation and covers cases of “extreme narration, astonishing storyworlds, and
breaks with classical narrative models in comics.”
Finally, Andrea Moll’s essay focuses on unnatural events in oral forms
of Aboriginal storytelling. She demonstrates the importance and diverse
functions of storytelling in orally based cultures, and she also provides an in-
tercultural perspective on unnaturalness by looking at linguistic deep level
structures in Aboriginal English. Moll makes a compelling point for “taking
cultural differences into account when assessing the ‘naturalness’ or ‘unnatu-
ralness’ of narratives” because “what may seem an unnatural narrative
element or strategy to us may be fully ‘naturalized,’ that is cognitively con-
ventionalized and internalized by members of another culture living in a dif-
ferent social and cultural environment.”
Taken together, the essays in this collection develop new narratological
tools and modeling systems which are designed to capture the strangeness
and extravagance of unnatural narratives. What Unnatural Narratives, Unnatu-
ral Narratology offers is a systematic investigation of anti-mimetic techniques
and strategies that relate to different narrative parameters (narrators, char-
acters, time, space, and events), different media, and different periods within
various literary histories. For us, an unnatural narratology is a narratology
that appreciates the multifariousness of narrative because, as Brian Richard-
son puts it, “in its more innovative forms,” the convention of narrative “is to
alter convention, its essence is to elude a fixed essence, and its nature is to
seek out the unnatural.”57

57 Richardson, Unnatural Voices, 140.

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Introduction 17

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Introduction 19

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20 Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze

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