Narrative

I AM GRATEFUL TO JAN ALBER AND BRIAN RICHARDSON for their attentive and generous reading of my article “Unnatural Narratology and the Return of the Repressed Reader,” and for their serious consideration of its suggestions. Below I explicate my terminology, then address the points they made together and those they made separately.

I appreciate this opportunity to clarify my terms. For me, the unnatural is very strange for somebody.¹ In effect, my relational model pins the label “unnatural” not onto a textual element, such as a speaking cross, but onto the ribbon connecting a textual element in a particular text to the authorial audience of that text. That audience finds that element very strange.

More broadly, in my communication model, the implied author uses textual elements to communicate with the implied reader (in fiction, comprised of both the narrative audience and the authorial audience).² The implied author and the authorial audience are often, but not always, subsets of their real counterparts.³ Real readers can come to recognize the positions of the implied author and the authorial audience by making inferences based on the textual elements and, when necessary, drawing on relevant biographical and cultural knowledge. So to understand the authorial audience, it can help to examine not only direct evidence inside the text but also extratextual evidence.⁴

Alber and Richardson express wariness about “simple oppositions between Western and non-Western cultures and beliefs” (102). I share their wariness and did not mean to imply that all Western cultures are alike, nor that all non-Western cultures [End Page 106] are alike, nor that any single culture is homogeneous. I would have done better to replace “Western” and “secular” with a phrase like Alber’s “rationalist-scientific and empirically-minded worldview” (104).

This modification, however, might still be open to the criticism that I am using another simple opposition, between having and lacking that worldview. I am indeed using an opposition, but it need not be simple, for there are degrees between those two poles. Furthermore, in a given culture, even if most people exist at a given point along the spectrum, some individuals will be at other points, and some people might move along it over time. The situation is further complicated by what Alber and Richardson rightly call “the hybrid nature of cross-cultural contact”: I agree on the significance of “the often complex negotiations that animate works where indigenous beliefs are presented to multiple audiences, some of whom do not share those [minority] beliefs” (102). A text can have multiple authorial audiences (as well as multiple real audiences, or both—with various degrees of matching between authorial and real). The presence of multiple authorial audiences may involve an opposition between them (e.g., sharing minority beliefs or not), but that opposition is by no means simple.

Richardson accepts my revision of his position, “namely that impossible means perceived as impossible by the authorial audience” (103). I concur with his further observation that, “in many instances, all audiences will generally agree on the status of numerous [flagrantly] impossible acts and events” (103). He concludes: “Concerning conventionalization, however, I am content to retain my revised position, that the fact that a practice has become conventionalized does not alter its status as unnatural” (103). I would add, “in relation to the authorial audience of a particular text.” This addition underlines the points that (a) the authorial audience, like the implied author, is itself located in history, and (b) real readers can often distinguish between the beliefs of the authorial audience (“that’s unnatural”) and their own beliefs (“that’s conventional”).

Alber makes a more detailed argument, to which I will make a more detailed reply. Compared to him, I have more confidence in the efficacy of studying authorial audiences, and less in that of studying real readers. Before addressing those points, I want to say something about epistemology more generally.

I think we cannot “Know” anything but can “know” things, admittedly to varying degrees, depending on the obviousness of the thing and the competence of the knower. We should not...