Unnatural narrative across borders : transnational and comparative perspectives 9781138311305, 1138311308

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Unnatural Narrative across Borders

This book actively engages with current discussion of narratology, and unnatural narrative theory in particular. Unsatisfied with the hegemony of European and Anglo-American narrative theory, it calls for a transnational and comparative turn in unnatural narrative theory, the purpose of which is to draw readers’ attention to those periphery and marginalized narratives produced in places other than England and America. It places equal weight on theoretical exploration and critical practice. The book, in addition to offering a detailed account of current scholarship of unnatural narratology, examines its core issues and critical debates as well as outlining a set of directions for its future development. To present a counterpart of Western unnatural narrative studies, this book specifically takes a close look at the experimental narratives in China and Iraq either synchronically or diachronically. In doing so, it aims, on the one hand, to show how the unnatural narratives are written and to be explained differently from those Western unnatural narrative works, and on the other hand, to use the particular cases to challenge the existing narratological framework so as to further enrich and supplement it. The book will be useful and inspiring to those scholars working in such broad fields as narrative theory, literary criticism, cultural studies, semiotics, media studies, and comparative literature and world literature studies. Biwu Shang is Changjiang Youth Scholar and Professor of English at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He is an editor-in-chief of Frontiers of Narrative Studies (De Gruyter) and author of In Pursuit of Narrative Dynamics (Peter Lang, 2011).

China Perspectives

The China Perspectives series focuses on translating and publishing works by leading Chinese scholars, writing about both global topics and Chinarelated themes. It covers Humanities & Social Sciences, Education, Media and Psychology, as well as many interdisciplinary themes. This is the first time any of these books have been published in English for international readers. The series aims to put forward a Chinese perspective, give insights into cutting-edge academic thinking in China, and inspire researchers globally. Titles in literature currently include Beyond the Iron House Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Literary Field Sun Saiyin Literature and Literary Theory in Contemporary China Zhang Jiong An Outline of Chinese Literature I Yuan Xingpei An Outline of Chinese Literature II Yuan Xingpei Literature and Literary Criticism in Contemporary China Zhang Jiong Unnatural Narrative across Borders Transnational and Comparative Perspectives Biwu Shang

For more information, please visit www.routledge.com/series/CPH

Unnatural Narrative across Borders Transnational and Comparative Perspectives Biwu Shang

First published in English 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Biwu Shang The right of Biwu Shang to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-31130-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-45894-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

1 2

Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction: core issues and critical debates of unnatural narratology

1

Unnatural narrative: transnational and comparative perspectives

22

Unnatural narrative in contemporary Chinese time travel fiction: patterns, values, and interpretive options

38

Unnatural narratology and zhiguai tales of the Six Dynasties in China

54

Delving into impossible storyworlds of terror: the unnaturalness of Hassan Blasim’s short narrative fiction

67

6

Unnatural emotions in contemporary narrative fiction

82

7

Forward thinking: future prospects for unnatural narratology

94

3 4 5

References Index

96 106

Acknowledgments

This book is not possible without the support of many institutions and individuals. I am deeply indebted to the staff and fellows at the National Humanities Center. The nine-month fellowship enables me to concentrate on my work and devote my full energies to developing this project. This book is hard evidence of my rewarding experience working with the fellows of the class of 2015. I feel very grateful to my colleagues and students at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. It is their enthusiasm and passion for academics that enable me to endure the failing moments. They are Quansheng Hu, Kaibao Hu, Yuzhen Lin, Jie Wu, Kun Su, Cheng Li, Yili Tang, Yafei Li, Xiaomeng Wan, Yuying Chu, Ziwei Fang, and Zheng Xin. My gratitude also goes to those who have invited me to present drafts of my work, who have read some parts of the manuscripts, and who have exchanged their ideas with me on many occasions. They are Jim Phelan, Brian McHale, Robyn Warhol, Gerald Prince, Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning, Susan Stanford Friedman, Idit Alphandary, Péter Hajdu, Thomas O. Beebee, Youngmin Kim, and Zhenzhao Nie. As always, I want to thank Angel and Coco, who have brightened and enriched my life. I owe it all to them. Although no chapter in this book is a simple reprint of a previously published article, most chapters are based on the materials that appeared in some journals. I am grateful for the permission to reprint. Chapter 1 contains material from “Unnatural Narratology: Core Issues and Critical Debates”, Journal of Literary Semantics, 44.2 (2015): 169–194. Chapter 2 from “Toward a Comparative Narratology: A Chinese Perspective”, Comparative Literature Studies, 54.1 (2017): 52–69. Chapter 3 from “Unnatural Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Time Travel Fiction: Patterns, Values, and Interpretive Options”, Neohelicon, 43.1 (June 2016): 7–25. Chapter 4 from “Unnatural Narratology and Zhiguai Tales of the Six Dynasties in China”, Neohelicon 45.1 (2018): 179–190.

Acknowledgments vii Chapter 5 from “Delving into Impossible Storyworlds: The Unnaturalness of Hassan Blasim’s Short Narrative Fiction”, arcadia: International Journal of Literary Culture, 52.1 (2017): 183–200. Chapter 6 from “Unnatural Emotions in Contemporary Narrative Fiction”, Neohelicon 45.2 (2018): 445–459. The work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant Number: 17ZDA281), for which I feel very grateful.

1

Introduction Core issues and critical debates of unnatural narratology

In his celebrated article of 2003 on “Narratology or Narratologies?”, Ansgar Nünning maps the new developments and approaches in narrative studies by classifying them into eight broad categories: (1) Contextualist, Thematic, and Ideological Approaches: Applications of Narratology in Literary Studies; (2) Transgeneric and Transmedial Applications and Elaborations of Narratology; (3) Pragmatic and Rhetorical Kinds of Narratology; (4) Cognitive and Reception-Theory-Oriented Kinds of (“Meta”-) Narratology; (5) Postmodern and Poststructuralist Deconstructions of (Classical) Narratology; (6) Linguistic Approaches/Contributions to Narratology; (7) Philosophical Narrative Theories; and (8) Other Interdisciplinary Narrative Theories (Nünning 2003: 249–251). Admittedly, Nünning’s classification is as comprehensive and all-encompassing as it is insightful. But viewed from today’s vantage-point, Nünning’s map needs to be seriously updated. In my opinion, one of the newest additions to that list could be unnatural narratology, which is claimed to be “an exciting new research program in narrative theory” (Alber and Heinze 2011a: 1), and “the most exciting new paradigm in narrative theory and the most important new approach since the advent of cognitive narratology” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2013a: 1). Even those less enthusiastic about it admit that “the proposal of an ‘unnatural’ narratology is both timely and significant” (Fludernik 2012: 364), and that it “can be fruitful and lead to interesting results” (Klauk and Köppe 2013: 78). In recent years, the explosion of interest in unnatural narrative has generated a considerable number of publications. They include Brian Richardson’s groundbreaking monograph Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006), Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze’s edited collection Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology (2011), Per Krogh Hansen, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Rolf Reitan’s edited collection Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction (2011), Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson’s edited volume A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative (2013), Jan Alber and Per Krogh Hansen’s most recent edited collection Beyond Classical Narration: Transmedial and Unnatural Challenges (2014), Richardson’s Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice (2015), and Alber’s Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (2016), in addition to uncountable papers in this field of research. Given this selection, we can agree with David

2

Introduction

Herman’s observation that unnatural narratology has become “an emergent strand of work in narrative theory” (Herman 2013: ix), which is mainly due to the contributions by Jan Alber, Brian Richardson, Henrik Skov Nielsen, Maria Mäkelä, Per Krogh Hansen, Rüdiger Heinze, and Stefan Iversen. Despite its popularity, unnatural narratology is “currently a rather controversial topic” (Bundgård, Nielsen, and Stjernfelt 2012: 15). The controversies, I think, are chiefly centered on the definition of unnatural narrative, the manifestations of unnaturalness, and the interpretive strategies of unnatural narratives, which can also be regarded as the core issues of unnatural narratology. With unnatural narratology as its central concern, this chapter pursues four major goals. It begins by delineating the various definitions of unnatural narrative. In this part, I try to shed a new light on unnatural narrative by proposing the idea of an “unnatural element”, which may exist either locally or globally in a narrative text and thus makes some narratives more unnatural than others. Second, it attempts to examine the manifestations of unnaturalness on both the story level and the discourse level. I argue that an unnatural narrative text is evident not merely in the emergence of an impossible storyworld but also in the occurrence of a set of unnatural narrative acts. Third, it tries to make a comparison between two reading options offered by unnatural narratologists – naturalizing strategies and unnaturalizing strategies – and argues for their complementarity. Fourth, it tries to present some critical reflections on the core issues of and critical debates on unnatural narratology and suggests some potential issues for further investigation.

What is the unnatural? Definitions of unnatural narrative In their Handbook of Narrative Analysis, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck argue “if narratology is the theory of the narrative text, then it should first come up with a definition of narrative” (Herman and Vervaeck 2005: 11). In a similar vein, we can postulate that if unnatural narratology is the theory of unnatural narrative text, it should first come up with a definition of unnatural narrative. What is unnatural narrative? Why and how should we study unnatural narrative? These seem to be the first set of fundamental questions to be addressed. As is argued by Hansen, “To speak of ‘unnatural narratives’ and ‘unnatural narratology’ presupposes a common understanding of what is ‘natural’” (Hansen 2011: 162); or to use Nielsen’s words, “the expression ‘unnatural narratives’ first and foremost takes on meaning in relation to what it is not: natural narratives” (Nielsen 2013: 70). Therefore, to define unnatural narrative, it is wise to start from the concept of natural narrative, which is defined as “spontaneous conversational storytelling” by Monika Fludernik (1996: 13). The major function of natural narrative, in Fludernik’s opinion, is to offer a prototype to narrativity, while in the eyes of unnatural narratologists, “the unnatural can only be recognized and felt in relation to the natural” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 374). Despite the fact that natural narrative is merely one of the subcategories of narrative, traditional narrative theory “is typically based on the mimesis of actual

Introduction 3 speech situations” (Richardson 2006: 5). That is, narrative is usually considered a type of “storytelling” or “representation of events”, which more or less constitutes the basis of the canonical definition of narrative. For instance, Onega and Garcia Landa define narrative as “the semiotic representation of a series of events meaningfully connected in a temporal and causal way” (Onega and Garcia Landa 1996: 4). In a similar vein, Abbott defines narrative as “the representation of an event or a series of events” (Abbott 2008a: 13). Although the term “unnatural narrative” is frequently used by unnatural narratologists, its definitions are diverse. Alber and Heinze attribute the diversity of definitions to the hybridity of unnatural narratology, claiming it is “not a homogenous school of thought”, but “a multifarious, hybrid, and heteroglossic movement that allows for various different perspectives on and definitions of the unnatural” (Alber and Heinze 2011a: 8–9). They further 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” (Alber and Heinze 2011a: 8–9, italics original). Thus when explaining the meaning of unnatural narrative, Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson (2012) deliberately use the word “definitions” instead of “a definition” to suggest a plurality of definitions of the concept. Alber and Heinze list three basic definitions of unnatural narrative: (1) narratives that have a defamiliarizing effect because they are experimental, extreme, transgressive, unconventional, nonconformist, or out of the ordinary; (2) anti-mimetic texts that move beyond the conventions of natural narratives; (3) scenarios and events that are impossible by the known laws governing the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones, that is, impossible by accepted principles of logic (Alber and Heinze 2011a: 2–5). For the sake of clarity, I shall examine and compare four definitions of unnatural narrative: Definition 1: an unnatural narrative is one that conspicuously violates conventions of standard 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 narratives produce a defamiliarization of the basic elements of narrative. (Richardson 2011: 34) Richardson stresses unnatural narratives’ anti-mimetic nature: they are texts “that violate mimetic conventions by providing wildly improbable or strikingly impossible events; they are narratives that are not simply nonrealistic but antirealistic” (Richardson 2012b: 95). For him the quality of being anti-mimetic serves as the criterion for evaluating the unnaturalness of a narrative text: “Normally we don’t consider a work to be unnatural unless it has a significant number of antimimetic scenes” (Richardson 2012b: 97). That said, for Richardson, the unnatural is not

4

Introduction

only associated with what is opposite to the natural but also associated with what is opposite to the mimetic. In fact, the concept of mimesis contains at least two different meanings: Platonic mimesis, and Aristotelian mimesis. In Chapter 10 of The Republic, Socrates sees mimetic art as the art of imitation, which is rather illusory because it does not take us to the transcendental and perfect World of Ideas or is simply a misleading shadow of a shadow; while in the Poetics, Aristotle regards poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and dance as mimetic arts, meaning they entail the process of representation and project of simulation. In the arguments made by the unnatural narratologists, the word “mimesis” is used in the Platonic sense. To quote directly from them: From our perspective, the unnatural is clearly anti-mimetic in the sense of Plato because it does not try to imitate or reproduce the world as we know it; rather, it transcends real-world parameters. However, it is worth noting that the unnatural is quite obviously mimetic in the sense of Aristotle because it can be depicted or represented in the world of fiction. That is to say, when we speak of “anti-mimetic” or “anti-realist” components of narrative, we refer to Plato’s sense of mimesis (rather than mimesis in the Aristotelian sense). (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 378) Among all the unnatural narratologists, it is Richardson who has done the most to distinguish between “the mimetic”, “the non-mimetic”, and “the anti-mimetic” by citing a number of literary examples. From his perspective, Anna Karenina is mimetic in that it seeks to reproduce in fiction typical characters and events from the actual world; a fairy tale is non-mimetic in that it makes no sense to criticize a specimen of the genre; while the anti-mimetic displays “its own constructedness, the artificiality of many of its techniques, and its inherent fictionality”. (Richardson 2011: 31) Specifically, Richardson conceives of fictional representation as taking either a mimetic form that “attempts to provide narrators, characters, events, and settings that more or less resemble those of our quotidian experience” or an anti-mimetic form that tries to “play with, exaggerate, or parody the conventions of mimetic representation”, and “foreground narrative elements and events that are wildly implausible or palpably impossible in the real world” (Richardson 2012a: 20). He seems particularly unhappy that contemporary narrative theory focuses on the mimetic or realist tradition at the expense of the anti-mimetic or antirealistic tradition, which accounts for his enthusiasm for exploring this neglected aspect of narrative. In short, in Richardson’s conceptual framework, the term “unnatural” is used as “a synonym for ‘antimimetic’” (Richardson 2012a: 21). Unlike Richardson, Alber considers unnatural narrative as “physically impossible scenarios and events, that is, impossible by the known laws governing the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones, that is, impossible by

Introduction 5 accepted principles of logic” (Alber 2009: 80). Thus, he offers another definition of the concept. Definition 2: texts about storyworlds that contain physically, logically, or humanly impossible scenarios or events. That is to say, the represented scenarios or events have to be impossible according to the known laws governing the physical world, accepted principles of logic (such as the principle of non-contradiction), or standard human limitations of knowledge. (Alber 2013: 449) Thus Alber emphasizes the impossibility within unnatural narrative. He importantly discriminates between “unnatural scenarios and events that have already been naturalized or conventionalized” and “unnatural scenarios and events that have not yet been naturalized or conventionalized and still strike us as odd or strange” (Alber 2011a: 42). Interestingly, Alber shows his ready agreement with Richardson’s conception of unnatural narrative, so far as the anti-mimetic aspect is concerned. Alber entitles one of his most recent articles “Unnatural Narratology: The Systematic Study of Anti-Mimeticism” (2013), in which he claims straightforwardly that “Since the unnatural involves the representation of impossibilities, it is a fundamentally antimimetic feature of narratives” (Alber 2013: 450). Put another way, both Richardson and Alber stress the anti-mimetic nature of unnatural narratives. Iversen and Nielsen have produced their own conceptions of unnatural narratives: Definition 3: 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, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 373) Definition 4: a subset of fictional narratives that – unlike many realistic and mimetic narratives – cue the reader to employ interpretational strategies that are different from those she employs in nonfictionalized, conversational storytelling situations. More specifically, such narratives may have temporalities, storyworlds, mind representations, or acts of narration that would have to be construed as physically, logically, mnemonically, or psychologically impossible or implausible in real-world storytelling situations, but that allow the reader to interpret them instead as reliable, possible, and/or authoritative by cueing her to change her interpretational strategies. (Nielsen 2013: 72) Compared with Richardson and Alber, Iversen’s major interest goes specifically to what he calls “unnatural mind”, which refers to “a presented consciousness that

6

Introduction

in its functions or realizations violates the rules governing the possible world it is part of in a way that resists naturalization or conventionalization” (Iversen 2013: 97); while Nielsen’s focus moves to the reading strategies of unnatural narrative, which make him read unnatural narratives in a way that is strikingly different from the reading of “conversational storytelling situations”. In addition to offering his definition of unnatural narrative, Nielsen (2011: 85) draws distinctions between natural, unnatural, conventional, and unconventional ones in the follow diagram: Conventional

Unconventional

Natural

Oral storytelling. Conversational narration. Many autobiographies.

Unnatural

Many literary narratives. Many traditional works of realism: use of omniscient narration, homogenized thought and speech representation, etc.

Truly mimetic, unsorted, unhomogenized representations of, say, 5 minutes of thought. Unorganized, abrupt, without marked beginning and end, etc. Experimental fiction. Postmodernist narratives. Non-fictional trauma narratives?

Despite their different positions on the definitions of unnatural narrative, these unnatural narratologists believe that their approaches share three points in common: “(1) a fascination with highly implausible, impossible, unreal, otherworldly, outrageous, extreme, outlandish, and insistently fictional narratives and their structure; (2) the urge to interpret them by addressing the question of what they might potentially mean; and (3) an interest in examining the relationship between these specific narratives and all other narratives” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 380). Despite their different definitions and “a certain amount of confusion among the uninformed” because of them, they suggest the term “is now fairly well established” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 374). To me, the key point is whether these diverse definitions will prevent unnatural narrative from developing into a fully fledged sub-strand of postclassical narratology. For that reason, a unified definition seems to be rather necessary. In my opinion, the unnaturalness of a narrative text is a matter of degree and of level. With reference to degree, unnatural narrative texts may vary in their unnaturalness. Some unnatural narratives look more unnatural than others. I tentatively call the factors that cause different degrees of unnaturalness “unnatural elements”. The more unnatural elements a narrative text contains, the more unnatural it will be judged to be. Unnatural elements are distributed at a local level (giving rise to a lower degree of unnaturalness) or global level (pertaining to a higher degree of unnaturalness). However, owing to differences in literary cognition, some readers might judge a given narrative text as unnatural, while other readers might judge the same narrative text as natural (or only mildly unnatural). No matter how unnatural a narrative text is, its unnaturalness as well as the unnatural elements contained can be on display at the story level and/or the discourse level. But these

Introduction 7 do not necessarily simultaneously go together: a text can be either unnatural in discourse and natural in story or natural in discourse and unnatural in story. The extreme case would be that a narrative is unnatural on both discourse and story levels (see Alber and Heinze 2011a: 7).

The unnatural in the telling: unnaturalness on the discourse level Chatman proposed that “story is the content of the narrative expression, while discourse is the form of that expression” (1978: 23), and since then most narratologists have focused their scholarship on discourse rather than story, evidenced in the number of narratological works with “discourse” in the title, whether in the classical phase or the postclassical phase.1 As I have argued previously, In natural narratives or mimetic narratives, discourse serves as the means of concretizing story; while in unnatural narratives, discourse becomes the means of expressing itself. That is to say, in unnatural narratives, story is more or less deconstructed by discourse, which is clearly marked by a set of unnatural narrative acts. (Shang 2013: 40) Since narrative acts are mainly performed by the narrator, the studies of narrative acts need to take the narrator as a point of departure. Traditional narrative theories focus on the usual narrative acts such as thirdperson singular form or first-person singular form, but Richardson (2006) names a range of what he calls extreme narrations, and these include second-person narration, “we” narration, multiperson narration, and unreliable narration, all of which are different from traditional mimetic narratives. If those narrators examined by Richardson still possess a certain amount of human-like quality, then we shall see that the narrators in some radical unnatural narrative texts even lose that quality and thus turn into nonhuman-like narrators. For instance, in Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad (1967), the narrator is a machine; in Ian McEwan’s “Reflections of a Kept Ape” (1978), the narrator is an ape; in John Hawkes’s Sweet William: A Memoir of an Old Horse (1993), the narrator is a horse; and in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), the narrator is a corpse. Most recently, Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck have examined the phenomenon of nonhuman storytelling, and they argue that “By giving voice to non-human things and animals such as a stuffed squirrel, a lump of coal, or a dog, these narratives may highlight and even challenge our conception of the human” (Bernaerts, Caracciolo, Herman, and Vervaeck 2014: 68–69). As is observed by Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson, there is “a move ever further away from the single, self-consistent human-like narrator toward more unlikely, decentered, and impossible narrators” (Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 356). They attribute this move to the subject matter with which unnatural narratives are concerned. In their words, “extreme and unnatural events seem to

8

Introduction

call for extreme and unnatural modes of narration” (Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 356). About those unnatural narrative acts performed by narrators, diachronically speaking, some of them have already been conventionalized and turned into the common narrative strategies widely adopted; while some of them are still unconventionalized and thus generate strange voices and produce defamiliarizing effects.2 As is mentioned in the previous part of this chapter, in narratology, discourse can be considered as a means for expressing story, which is largely true in natural narratives. However, in unnatural narrative texts, the unnatural narrative acts on the discourse level somehow make it impossible to build up a stable storyworld. Ontologically speaking, in some radical cases, even a roughly built-up storyworld contains quite a few unnatural elements, which make it seemingly unnatural and impossible.

The unnatural of the told: unnaturalness on the story level In Richardson’s opinion, “narration, story, and ontological consistency” are considered as the three basic and “foundational components of narrative theory” (Richardson 2011: 24). After taking a close look at the unnaturalness of narration, this section proceeds to examine unnaturalness on the story level. To a large extent, worldbuilding is one of the most basic elements and fundamental functions of narrative. For instance, in Fludernik’s opinion, a narrative is “a representation of a possible world in a linguistic and/or visual medium, at whose center there are one or several protagonists of an anthropomorphic nature who are existentially anchored in a temporal and spatial sense and who (mostly) perform goal-directed actions (action and plot structure)” (Fludernik 2009: 6). In Basic Elements of Narrative (2009), Herman lists four basic elements of narrative, which he states in abbreviated form as: “(i) situatedness,(ii) event sequencing, (iii) worldmaking/ world disruption, and (iv) what it’s like” (Herman 2009: xvi). So from Herman’s perspective, the third basic element of narrative is worldbuilding, the core concept of which is storyworld. In a certain storyworld, there must be such constituents as characters, time, space, and events. In mimetic narratives, it is very likely that these elements can contribute to the building up of a storyworld; while in unnatural narratives, these elements become logically, physically, or humanly impossible. In “Impossible Worlds” (2012), Marie-Laure Ryan examines impossible storyworlds from five aspects: contradictions, ontological impossibility, impossible space, impossible time, and the impossible text. In my opinion, the unnaturalness of a storyworld can mainly be accounted for by three aspects: (1) in terms of the discourse, discourse no longer serves as a means for representing the storyworld but rather for representing itself, (2) in terms of the micro-level of the story, one, some, or all of those basic elements such as character, time, space, and events are unnatural or impossible, and (3) in terms of the macro-level of the story, the built-up storyworlds are physically or logically impossible in the sense that the boundaries of the storyworlds are transgressed, which in turn produces the phenomenon known as “ontological metalepsis”.

Introduction 9 Since unnaturalness on the discourse level has been examined previously, in what follows, I shall mainly focus on the second and third aspects. First, the unnaturalness of the character. In mimetic narratives, character is usually defined as “any entity, individual or collective normally human or humanlike – introduced in a work of narrative fiction” (Margolin 2007: 66). However, in unnatural narratives, the mimetic component of character or the anthropomorphic and human-like feature of character is missing. The character is no longer considered as a person or human being but appears increasingly nonhuman-like. For example, in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, Gregor turns into an insect; in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus (1991), the main characters are mice; in Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone (1999), the main character is an elephant. Second, unnaturalness in relation to time. In natural or mimetic narratives, time usually goes forward and takes on the feature of being linear; in unnatural narratives, time sometimes goes backwards and is non-linear. For instance, in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), time goes backwards; in Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922), Benjamin is born as an old man, and gets younger and younger, eventually passing away as a baby. In “Unnatural Temporalities: Interfaces between Postmodernism, Science Fiction, and the Fantastic” (2012), Alber examines three types of unnatural time in postmodernist works: (1) the fusing of distinct historical periods in Ishmael Reed’s novel Flight to Canada (1976) as well as (2) the reversed causality and (3) the impossibly quick aging of characters in D. M. Thomas’s novel The White Hotel (1981). Alber (2012: 183–184) even draws up the following chart to reveal the difference between our real-world knowledge about time and unnatural temporality. Our real-world knowledge about time

Unnatural temporality

The borders between the past, the present, and the future are fixed and impenetrable. Causes always precede their effects.

Time travel stories or “chronomontages” that yoke chronological incompatibles together. Reversed causality (in which the present is caused by the future). Characters age at a different speed (or in a different way) than other inhabitants of the storyworld. Retrogressive temporality (time objectively moves backward at the story level). Circular temporality or eternal loop; the narrative’s ending is also its beginning (and vice versa). Ontological pluralism (the projection of logically incompatible storylines). The immobilization of temporal progression at the level of the story.

The flow of time cannot be sped up or slowed down. Time moves forward (the directionality of time). Time resembles a line or stream (the linearity of time). It is impossible for an event to happen and not happen at the same point in time. We cannot interrupt the flow of time.

10

Introduction

Third, unnaturalness in terms of space. In a mimetic storyworld, the characters usually dwell in a certain stable space, somewhat like a container; while in some unnatural narratives, container-like space is impossible. For instance, in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), the story happens in an impossible house. Specifically, the interior of the house is larger than the exterior of the house, and it is expanding. Fourth, the unnaturalness of events. Unnatural narratives are filled with paradoxical and impossible events, which deconstruct each other. For instance, in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1955), “it is raining” and “the sun is shining” outside simultaneously; in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), there are several contradictory endings of the novel. In one ending, Sarah and Charles are married and stay together; while in the other, they are separated. In Robert Coover’s “Babysitter” (1969), 108 chapters of the work tell various versions of the events that are mutually contradictory, saying the babysitter was seduced by Mr. Tucker, Mr. Tucker was at a party and not at home, the babysitter was murdered, the babies were drowned in the bathtub, and the babysitter ran away, etc.; in Toni Morrison’s The Song of Solomon (1977), there are stories about flying negroes. Fifth, ontological metalepsis. In unnatural narratives, the scarcely built-up storyworlds very often transgress the boundaries of the worlds that natural narratives try to maintain. These boundary-transgressions are known as metalepsis in narrative studies (Ryan 2012: 371). For instance, in Julio Cortázar’s short story “Continuity of Parks” (1967), a reader is immersed in the novel, and the characters of the novel come to life and murder the reader. Thoss lists three subcategories: transgressions between a storyworld and another (imaginary) world; feigned transgressions between a storyworld and reality; and transgressions between story and discourse (Thoss 2011: 190). Bell and Alber classify it into three patterns: ascending metalepsis, descending metalepsis, and horizontal metalepsis, and try to conceptualize ontological metaleptic jumps as “(1) vertical interactions either between the actual world and a storyworld or between nested storyworlds, or as (2) horizontal transmigrations between storyworlds” (Bell and Alber 2012: 166). Ontological metalepsis has been explored in Kukkonen and Klimek (2011). In Richardson’s opinion, almost all narratives, in one way or another, try to represent the world we dwell in. What matters is the manner of representation, which “may be conventional or unconventional, stylized or straightforward, unmarked or outrageous, clumsy or artistic; it is always constructed. Mimetic narratives typically try to conceal their constructedness and appear to resemble nonfictional narratives, while antimimetic narratives flaunt their artificiality and break the ontological boundaries that mimetic works so carefully preserve” (Richardson 2012a: 20). In other words, in Richardson’s theory, metalepsis is impossible compared with the real world; while in a fictional world, it is rather possible, and the purpose of metalepsis is to highlight the fictional nature of literature. Characters, space, time, and events that would be impossible in real worlds but are possible in fictional worlds not only “challenge readers to devise new strategies for making

Introduction 11 sense of texts, even if meaning does not arise from the version of fully imaginable situations”, but also draw “the readers’ attention to the textual origin of the storyworld” (Ryan 2012: 369, 378).

Why unnatural narratology? A short note on the heuristic value of the unnatural narratives Since unnatural narrative is unusual on both the story level and the discourse level, why should we trouble ourselves studying it? Along with the existing classical narratology, and such sub-strands of postclassical narratology as feminist narratology, rhetorical narratology, and cognitive narratology, why should we develop a new narrative theory – unnatural narratology? Why do we claim that the emergent unnatural narratology is an exciting new paradigm? Above all, what is the significance of studying unnatural narratives? Generally speaking, there could be five major reasons for studying unnatural narratives. First, it enriches contemporary narrative theory and reveals the unnatural nature of many narratives. I agree with Alber, who argues that “Existing narratological frameworks suffer from a mimetic bias and focus far too extensively on the idea that narratives are modeled on the actual world and consequently ignore the many unnatural or impossible elements of the worlds created via stories” (Alber 2011a: 46). Or, to use Brian Richardson’s words, the real value of unnatural narratives is to “provide an interrogation of the basic elements of narrative, a critique of overused narrative conventions, a challenge to official public narratives, an original vehicle for the self-representation of the oppressed, an exceptional way to express extraordinary events, and a different, challenging kind of aesthetic experience” (Shang and Richardson 2012: 112). More specifically, Richardson claims that the primary value of unnatural narratives is “to draw attention to the way narratives are constructed and point to the desires that such constructions serve” (Richardson 2011: 38). When these arguments are combined, they drive Nielsen’s point home: the explorations of unnatural narrative exert “a profound impact on the way we think about storyworlds, about experientiality, about the relation between story and discourse, and about representations and narratives that resist description based on linguistic understandings of natural, oral communication” (Nielsen 2011: 87). Second, it reveals the fictional nature of literature. As is said by Alber, the unnatural “sheds new light on the distinctiveness of fiction”, and he even suggests that “the possibility of representing the impossible is the most crucial difference between the world of fiction and other modes of discourse. It is only in fictional worlds that we can experience and ponder unnatural manifestations such as physically or logically impossible narrators, characters, temporalities, settings, and events, and that we can gain access to the thoughts and feelings of ‘others’” (Alber 2011a: 62). In addition, he argues that the unnatural answers “the question of how literature differs from other discursive modes” (Alber 2011b: 228). Third, it has heuristic values for the rewriting of literary history. In the eyes of unnatural narratologists, unnatural narrative has been a continuous momentum

12

Introduction

for the development of a new genre. To borrow from unnatural narratologists, the unnatural is a “neglected driving force behind the creation of new generic configurations and thus the development of literary history” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 373). To a large degree, the importance of the unnatural narrative lies in its breaking existing narrative conventions and innovating new narrative strategies. “The inclusion of unnatural narratives is essential if narrative theory is to produce a thorough, comprehensive account, rather than a partial, incomplete account” (Shang and Richardson 2012: 111). Fourth, unnatural narrative is rather useful for realizing some ideological purposes. To Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson, unnatural narratives “provide an interrogation of the basic elements of realistic narrative practices and a critique of overused narrative conventions. Such narratives offer original vehicles for representation, including, as we have seen, the self-representation of marginalized or colonized peoples” (Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 365). Given that, unnatural narrative seems to be particularly beneficial for reading and writing about ethnic literature, minority literature, postcolonial literature, and popular literature as well as some non-fictional works. As a matter of fact, by adopting and practicing those unusual forms, unnatural narrative makes readers more openminded and flexible to deal with “radical forms of otherness or strangeness”; nothing can be more important “for a democratic system than the competence to deal with radical and complex forms of alterity” (Alber 2011b: 230). Fifth, unnatural narratives have positive effects upon human cognition. As Alber points out, “Unnatural scenarios and events significantly widen the cognitive horizon of human awareness; they challenge our limited perspective on the world and invite us to address questions that we do not normally address” (Alber 2011a: 61–62). In short, with reference to narratology itself, unnatural narratology, first and foremost, is rather significant both for narrative theory and for narrative practice. That is to say, it not only enriches the existing narrative theory but also offers a new approach to reading postmodern and avant-garde narratives. Even in the realm outside narratological inquiries, the unnatural narrative is also suggestive for writing literary history and revealing the ideology of literary works. When encountering the unusual discourse and impossible storyworlds in unnatural narratives, readers who are used to natural narratives or mimetic narratives might not only feel strange and defamiliar but also wonder about the very interpretive strategies for them. In the next section, I attempt to look at two contrastive approaches (naturalizing strategies and unnaturalizing strategies) and try to reveal their complementary relations.

Naturalizing vs. unnaturalizing: interpretive options for unnatural narratives Hansen argues that “if our experience of a given narrative as ‘natural’ is grounded on its confirmation of the conventions for the mode or genre the narrative belongs to, then the task for an ‘unnatural narratology’ is to investigate the exceptions, that is, cases where conventions are broken and perhaps reformulated”

Introduction 13 (Hansen 2011: 162). Or to use the words of Alber and Heinze, one of the major tasks of unnatural narratology is “to approximate and conceptualize Otherness, rather than to stigmatize or reify it; such an approach is interested in various kinds of narrative strangeness and in particular in texts that deviate from the mimetic norms of most narratological models” (Alber and Heinze 2011a: 2). At issue is how exactly we are supposed to approach unnatural narratives. According to unnatural narratologists, there are multiple ways to approach unnatural narratives (Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 365). Currently, there exist two major contrastive approaches to unnatural narrative, the naturalizing reading (the cognitive approach proposed by Marie Laure-Ryan, Monika Fludernik, and Jan Alber) and the unnaturalizing reading (the strategy of Henrik Skov Nielsen and Maria Mäkelä).3 Comparatively speaking, the cognitive approach seems to play a dominant role at present. According to Ryan, “The mental strategies for making sense of impossible worlds must be measured against the procedure by which readers construct standard fictional worlds, whether realistic or fantastic” (Ryan 2012: 376). She names these strategies the “principle of minimal departure”, previously introduced in Ryan (1992). With the aim of preserving the logical integrity of the fictional world, Ryan explicates a set of naturalizing strategies: (1) mentalism, which explains the inconsistencies away as dream, hallucination, or the dementia of an unreliable narrator; (2) figural interpretation, which conceives of the inconsistencies not as facts but as only ways of describing certain phenomena; and (3) many-worlds and virtualization, which sees the mutually incompatible elements not as a part of the same world but as a part of different possible worlds (Ryan 2012: 377). Unlike Ryan, who tries to explain the unnatural narrative from the perspective of possible world theory, Fludernik intends to naturalize the unnatural using blending theory. Specifically, she tries to use blending theory as “an explanation for how we are able to understand naturally impossible storytelling scenarios, and to account for why they are so easily accommodated by readers once the original oddity has worn off through repeated exposure to the new form” (Fludernik 2010b: 15). Her major argument is that the unnatural storytelling frames usually derive from the blending of previously familiar natural or naturalized storytelling scenarios, which in turn help to make the resultant blend cognitively readable and may possibly result in its eventual naturalization as “a new prototype once the new form has been reused sufficiently often to become a recognizable frame, a frame to which the reader then resorts subconsciously when encountering a new text or narrative” (Fludernik 2010b: 15). To illustrate this argument, Fludernik applies the blending theory to reading such unnatural scenarios as omniscient narration and second-person narration. On the one hand, Fludernik stresses blending theory’s effects of mapping the possible mechanism of naturalization; on the other hand, she admits that it does not give any scientific authority to that process. What she really intends to do is to enrich her theoretical framework of natural narratology by providing “a possible explanation for the development of new nonnaturally occurring storytelling scenarios” (Fludernik 2010b: 21).

14

Introduction

Influenced by Fludernik, Alber refers to the natural parameters of natural narratology to naturalize unnatural narratives. In Towards a “Natural” Narratology, Fludernik defines naturalization processes as “reading strategies which familiarize the unfamiliar, and . . . therefore reduce the unexpected to more manageable proportions, aligning it with the familiar” (Fludernik 1996: 34). In order to “familiarize the unfamiliar”, Alber, through synthesizing the natural narratology and cognitive narratology, proposes five reading strategies, which have later been expanded into nine, namely: (1) the blending of frames, which requests readers to create frames that transcend their real-world knowledge (such as that of the unborn narrator, the dead character, the retrogressive temporality, or the shapeshifting house) by recombining, extending, or otherwise altering pre-existing cognitive parameters; (2) generification (evoking generic conventions from literary history), which asks readers to see the impossible element by identifying it as belonging to a particular literary genre; (3) subjectification (reading as internal states), which helps to explain the physically, logically, or humanly impossible elements as parts of internal states (of characters or narrators) such as dreams, fantasies, visions, or hallucinations; (4) foregrounding the thematic, which intends to make unnatural elements more readable by looking at them from a thematic angle and seeing them as exemplifications of themes rather than mimetically motivated occurrences; (5) reading allegorically, which suggests that readers see impossible elements as parts of abstract allegories that say something about Everyman or Everywoman, i.e., the human condition or the world in general (as opposed to particular individuals); (6) satirization and parody, which considers unnatural scenarios or events as a satirization or mockery of certain psychological predispositions or states of affairs; (7) positing a transcendental realm, which asks readers to explain some projected impossibilities by assuming that they are part of a transcendental setting (such as heaven, purgatory, or hell); (8) do it yourself, which helps to explain the logically incompatible storylines of some narratives by assuming that they are only materials for readers to create their own stories; and (9) the Zen way of reading, which assumes that readers can sometimes repudiate all the possible explanations and accept both the strangeness of unnatural scenarios and the feelings of discomfort, fear, worry, and panic created (Alber 2009: 82–93, 2013: 451–455). Clearly, Alber’s naturalizing reading, which is derived from Culler’s naturalization and Fludenrik’s narrativization, is very similar to the strategy of familiarization. Although all of them can be put under one umbrella term as the cognitive approach, if we examine the reading strategies proposed by Ryan, Fludernik, and Alber, we can see some of their fundamental differences. Ryan starts from possible world theory, which mainly deals with the unnaturalness on the story level; Fludernik departs from blending theory, which mainly deals with the unnaturalness on the discourse level; integrating natural narratology and cognitive narratology, Alber deals with the unnaturalness both on the story level and on the discourse level. Unlike Ryan, Fludernik, and Alber, who steadfastly argue for naturalizing reading strategies, Nielsen proposes unnaturalizing reading strategies. In

Introduction 15 Nielsen’s opinion, the unnaturalizing reading strategies are “a more appropriate choice than applying the principles of naturalization and familiarization” (Nielsen 2013: 67). He claims that, as an interpretive option, unnaturalizing reading strategies are different from naturalizing reading strategies, because they do not assume that “real world conditions and limitations have to apply to all fictional narratives when it comes to logic, physics, time, enunciation, framing etc.” (Nielsen 2014: 241). Instead of resorting to the interpretive frameworks drawn from real-world knowledge, Nielsen focuses on the fictional nature of the literary narrative. Taking Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” (1842) as a case study, he demonstrates what he calls unnaturalizing reading. In particular, Nielsen argues that the short story under discussion “deals with relations between life and art in many ways and stages the encounter between life and art on many levels” (Nielsen 2014: 244). Specifically, he examines these relations from four angles: (1) reference to Pygmalion myth and Orpheus myth about the relation between life and art, (2) an encounter with another Poe text “Life in Death”, which reveals “the treatment of relations between original and copy, life and portrait in this very transgression and across this configuration of texts”, (3) frame and framing of the relation between life and art, and (4) the significance of the relation both in the storyworld and at the level of narration and of the narrator (Nielsen 2014: 244–254). Nielsen’s unnaturalizing reading strategies have been reiterated by Mäkelä, who argues that the reader should not be seen as “a mere sense-making machine but as someone who might just as well opt for the improbable and the indeterminate” (Mäkelä 2013: 145). Given that, the cognitive or naturalizing approach is not the only option for reading unnatural narratives. It is very likely that the reader will opt for “the improbable”, “the indeterminate”, and “the unnatural”. In this sense, Mäkelä emphasizes that unnatural reading is “a more tenable footing for unnatural narratology” (Mäkelä 2013: 164). One might still be unclear about the fundamental difference between naturalizing and unnaturalizing reading. The essence of the naturalizing reading is to eliminate the unnaturalness of unnatural narratives by resorting to cognitive frameworks of real-world knowledge so as to make them more readable; while the purpose of unnaturalizing reading is to preserve the unnaturalness of unnatural narratives and to read it from the perspective of fictionality and artifice. It is for this reason that Brian McHale speaks highly of the unnaturalizing reading strategies proposed by Nielsen. In an interview, McHale says that “I think Nielsen’s account is more radical than Richardson’s and Alber’s, and that, unlike them, Nielsen may actually be developing a new, distinct theory of narrative. The best way of thinking about Nielsen’s approach may be as an extension of classic deconstruction to the categories of the poetics of narrative. Let me put it this way (perhaps a bit harshly): I am rarely surprised by Richardson’s or Albers’ analyses of narrative texts, but I am often surprised by Nielsen’s” (Shang and McHale 2014: 8). Inside the camp of unnatural narratologists, both the definitions and the reading strategies of unnatural narrative are diversified and non-consistent. Turning

16

Introduction

our eyes to the critical conversations between unnatural narratologists and those working in different theoretical modes, we can find an even more interesting picture.

Critical debates about unnatural narratology, or different perspectives in conversation If unnatural narratology is considered as one type of postclassical narratology, how do those working other sub-strands of postclassical narratology respond to it? In the following, I shall mainly examine the responses made from such postclassical perspectives as rhetorical narratology, cognitive narratology, feminist narratology, and natural narratology.4 As for the connection between unnatural narratology and feminist, cognitive, and rhetorical narratologies, Phelan and Rabinowitz argue that the latter aim at developing a “Narrative as X” approach, such as “Narrative as a Site of Feminist Politics, Narrative as Worldmaking, and Narrative as Rhetoric”, the theories and interpretive practices of which are based on the foundation of their “respective views of what narrative is and does”. In contrast to these postclassical approaches, unnatural narratology offers a “Theory of X” (X in Richardson’s case being anti-mimetic narrative) that “focuses on a particular type or aspect of narrative” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2012: 186, italics in original). For her part, Warhol argues that almost all contemporary narrative theories benefit from Richardson’s exploration of postmodernist fiction. She goes further to claim that the lexicon and insights brought forward by unnatural narratology are helpful to readings of postmodernist fiction such as Midnight’s Children (Warhol 2012: 211). But she rejects a simple distinction between realism as mimetic and postmodernism as anti-mimetic: “realist novels have been indulging in antimimetic practices for as long as realist novels have been written” (Warhol 2012: 213–214). Among realism’s anti-mimetic effects, she cites Lucy Snowe’s explicit refusal to bring Villette to narrative closure; metaleptic passages in Jane Eyre directly addressed to the Reader; the unsettling effect of the constant switching between first- and third-person narrators and past- and present-tense narration in Bleak House; and the narrator’s pesky references to his characters as puppets in Vanity Fair. In contrast to these moderately enthusiastic welcomes, Herman’s response is more critical, in that he does not think that anti-mimetic narratives require a different analytic framework, one that “downplays the complexity of mimesis itself” (Herman 2012: 223). Herman suggests that Richardson’s unnatural narratology also exaggerates the opposition between mimetic and anti-mimetic narratives and the importance of other binary distinctions (Herman 2012: 222–225). Abbott also expresses doubts about whether unnatural narratologists have identified a genuine opposition. In his opinion, unnatural narratives depend for their effects on natural expectations, already noted by, e.g., Robert Scholes and Brian McHale. His verdict is that “though the band of Unnaturals will continue to come up with valuable limit cases of form and effect, I doubt that their efforts will result in an unnatural

Introduction 17 narratology if by that is meant a narrative theory of unnatural narrative” (Abbott 2012: 8). So far, the most thorough and sharp critique of unnatural narratology comes from Fludernik, responding to unnatural narratologists’ opposition toward her own natural narratology conception, and its corollary, experientiality. According to natural narratology, narrative always contains some cognizable experientiality. But for Iversen this argument is problematic, since narrated minds and experiences “defy or destabilize conventional mind-and consciousness-parameters”, producing “crises of experientiality” (Iversen 2011: 90). Against this background, Fludernik suggests that one of the most appealing features of unnatural narratology is “its avowed desire to preserve the oddity of the strange and illogical in otherwise realistic texts”, as well as its emphasis upon the “transgression of realist norms” (Fludernik 2012: 364). Fludernik’s critical responses to unnatural narratology can be briefly summarized in four points: (1) about the very target of unnatural narratologists’ project, Fludernik fears that there is a possible risk of anti-mimetic reductionism as well as a mimetic reductionism in the framework proposed by unnatural narratologists; (2) about the reading strategies of unnatural narratology, Fludernik doubts whether these readings (e.g., Alber et al.’s reading of Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter”) are truly different from postmodernist approaches or from those of natural narratology; (3) about the status of the mimetic in relation to naturalization, Fludernik argues that unnatural narratology needs to contemplate its relationship to fictionality and mimesis in a less dichotomous manner; and (4) about the distinction between conventionalization and naturalization, Fludernik detects the unnatural narratologists’ problematic use of the term “naturalization” exclusively as an interpretive process, which needs to be placed on a different level from conventionalization. She suggests that unnatural narratologists note “naturalization metaphoric quality of the term naturalization as I have used it: not merely explaining away inconsistencies by recourse to ‘natural’ mimetic frames but also reducing the feeling of impossibility or strangeness in a non-natural constellation” (Fludernik 2012: 367). When addressing the issues raised by Fludernik, unnatural narratologists claim that they try to uncover “the various ways in which some narratives deviate from real-world frames”, and then “try to interpret these deviations” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 375). “Our efforts to account for unnatural narratives do lead us to propose revisions to basic concepts of narrative theory such as story (fabula), time, space, character, narrator, and narration, and these revisions inevitably challenge some tenets of other theories” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 375). What was formerly an opposition seems to have become, in their response to Fludernik’s critique, a complementarity: “For us, the unnatural and the natural are equally important” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson, 2012: 380). It needs to be added that equally complementary to unnatural narratology are classical structural narratology, rhetorical narratology, cognitive narratology, feminist narratology, and other sub-strands of postclassical narratology. Similarly, Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe also challenge the basic concepts and theoretical framework of unnatural narratology by focusing, as Fludernik had

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Introduction

done, on the target essay “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models” (2010) co-authored by Alber, Iversen, Nielsen and Richardson. Klauk and Köppe mainly point out three problems concerning unnatural narratology: (1) about the existence of unnatural narrative texts and the definition of the concept of the unnatural, Klauk and Köppe argue that there are terminological impasses caused by unnatural narratologists’ diversified definitions of unnatural narrative: one strand emphasizes impossibilities in some strong sense, while the other focuses on any aberration from the usual; (2) about the interpretation of unnatural narrative texts, Klauk and Köppe think that unnatural narratology fails to answer such questions as “How should we deal logically with (seeming) contradictions in fiction? How do interpreters actually make sense of impossible scenarios? How should one decide if a text describes one or more scenarios? How do fictional texts contribute to conceptual change?” (Klauk and Köppe 2013: 93); and (3) about developing unnatural narratology as a new type of (or direction/ paradigm for) narratology, Klauk and Köppe do not think it is necessary to develop a new sub-strand of narrative theory focusing on some narratives’ departure from the normal or the usual, since narratology, in their opinion, is concerned with the theory of all narratives, not with the interpretation of individual texts. Compared with Fludernik, Klauk and Köppe’s critique of unnatural narratology is much sharper, not only questioning the core concepts of unnatural narrative but also raising doubts about the necessity of developing unnatural narratology as a new type of narrative theory. In their response to Klauk and Köppe, Alber and his colleagues, first of all, delineate their different definitions and interpretations of unnatural narrative, and then proceed to clarify the methodology and interpretation of unnatural narratology. Doing so, they emphasize once again that existing narrative theory is partial, one-sided, and incomplete because it largely accounts for mimetic texts and does not test the narrative against non- and anti-mimetic texts, and their project means to “examine the relevant texts so that existing concepts of narratology, such as the narrator, characters, time, space, and other notions, can be extended and revised to do the comprehensive job they were intended to do” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2013b: 113). The critical conversations examined in this chapter enhance the scholarly attention to unnatural narratology and help it to make a substantial contribution. In my opinion, if unnatural narratology is not completely new in the field of narrative studies, it at least brings us some fresh perspectives to look at contemporary avant-garde, experimental narratives as well as those ancient narratives from before the era of realism. If we take narratology as a critical enterprise that is still under development, existing theories should not bar the way to new approaches and research paradigms. Instead, those new approaches could enrich and replenish the existing schools of narrative theory, which will in turn add momentum to the development and flourishing of narratology in general. In other words, the newly emergent unnatural narratology and other schools of narratological thoughts can enjoy a complementary relationship instead of being exclusive of each other. To end this section, let me quote Richardson’s words: “There is no reason why rhetorical, structuralist, or cognitivist narrative theory must necessarily

Introduction 19 exclude unnatural events and texts. Why not construct a rhetoric of the unnatural to complement existing formulations?” (Richardson 2011: 29). Indeed, looking forward, I think unnatural narratology is about embracing both the challenges and opportunities in the future. This book actively engages with current discussions of narratology, and unnatural narrative theory in particular. Unsatisfied with the hegemony of European and Anglo-American narrative theory, it calls for a transnational and comparative turn in unnatural narrative theory, the purpose of which is to subvert the hegemony of Western narrative theory and to draw readers’ attention to those periphery and marginalized narratives produced in places other than England and America. It places equal weight on theoretical exploration and critical practice. The book, in addition to offering a detailed account of current scholarship of unnatural narratology, examines its core issues and critical debates as well as outlining a set of directions for its future development. To present a counterpart of Western unnatural narrative studies, this book specifically takes a close look at the experimental narratives in China and Iraq either synchronically or diachronically. In doing so, it aims, on the one hand, to show how the unnatural narratives are written and to be explained differently from those Western unnatural narrative works, and on the other hand, to use the particular cases to challenge the existing narratological framework so as to further enrich and supplement it. Hopefully, the book will be useful and inspiring to those scholars working in such broad fields as narrative theory, literary criticism, cultural studies, semiotics, media studies, and comparative literature and world literature studies. The current chapter, “Introduction: core issues and critical debates of unnatural narratology”, has delineated various definitions of unnatural narrative and proceeded to discuss unnaturalness, interpretive strategies, heuristic values, and the interrelations between unnatural narratology and other schools of narratological thought, so as to investigate the core issues of unnatural narratology and the critical debates on it. The second chapter, “Unnatural narrative: transnational and comparative perspectives”, as a rejoinder to Susan Stanford Friedman’s call for a transnational turn in narrative theory, attempts to draw attention to a comparativist turn in current narrative studies. It tries to address three broad questions: Why to compare? What to compare? And how to compare? Acknowledging the efforts made by such narratologists as José Angel García Landa, Susana Onega, François Jost, Wilhelm Schernus, Eyal Segal, Sylvie Patron, John Pier, and Marina Grishakova, it argues that in the wake of the second phase of postclassical narratology, transdisciplinary, transmedia, transgeneric, and transnational perspectives provide an intersectional potential for the in-depth and rapid developments of narratology in its various strands, which in turn offers us a rare opportunity or rather a necessity to examine narrative and narrative theory in a global light. A comparative narratology is expected to decolonize and to subvert the hegemony of European and Anglo-American narrative theory, and thus both paves the way for the rise of those marginalized narrative theories and draws attention to those neglected and periphery narratives. That said, a comparative narratology not only compares narratives

20

Introduction

produced in different geographical locations, cultures, nations, or strands but also compares narrative theories developed in those areas and fields. To exemplify a comparative study of this kind, the chapter presents a Chinese counterpart of the Western narrative theory, focusing on its traditions and recent innovations. In addition, it tries to specifically engage with newly developed unnatural narrative theory by analyzing Chinese ghost stories, a particular type of unnatural narrative in Chinese literature, so as to display their unnatural features as well as their challenges to the existing Western unnatural approaches. The third chapter, “Unnatural narrative in contemporary Chinese time travel fiction: patterns, values, and interpretive options”, observes the upsurge and flourishing of time travel fiction in China in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a subject that is physically, logically, and/or humanly impossible. It argues that the boom of this new narrative genre has been fueled in no small part by the “postmodernist turn” coupled with the “historiographical turn”, to the degree that it is no longer possible to read it along the lines of traditional narrative theory. With contemporary Chinese time travel fiction as its central concern, this chapter pursues four major goals: (1) to uncover this type of fiction’s dominant unnatural patterns and means of time travel, (2) to reveal its unnaturalness from such perspectives as metalepsis, prolepsis, self-contradictory narration, and multiperson narration, (3) to examine its consequences and values of being unnatural, and (4) to offer a way of naturalizing it by suggesting the intersection of unnatural narratology with ethical narratology. The fourth chapter, “Unnatural narratology and Zhiguai tales of the six dynasties in China”, continues to discuss unnatural narrative across borders and unnatural narrative in the national literatures other than English. With Zhiguai tales of the Six Dynasties in China as its central concern, it pursues four major goals: (1) to revisit the much debated conception of unnatural narrative and to call for a diachronic and transnational perspective, (2) to reveal the unnaturalness of the impossible storyworlds in Zhiguai tales by taking a close look at such elements as unnatural characters, unnatural space, and unnatural time at the local level, (3) to further examine the unnaturalness of this genre by investigating the storyworld boundary transgression at the global level, and (4) to go beyond the current naturalizing and unnaturalizing readings by proposing an ethical interpretive option. The fifth chapter, “Delving into impossible storyworlds of terror: the unnaturalness of Hassan Blasim’s short narrative fiction”, deals with the unnaturalness of Hassan Blasim’s short narrative fiction. It, first of all, attempts to reveal such unnatural worldmaking strategies adopted by Blasim as dead narrators, conflicting events, and ontological metalepsis. Second, it tries to analyze a set of unnatural acts closely related to characters’ death and their consequential corporeal impairments. Third, it examines the mentality of Blasim’s characters by focusing on a particular type of unnatural mind – paranoia mind, which in radical cases involves two conflicting minds simultaneously emergent in one character. By resorting to unnatural narratives, Blasim makes his short stories anti-mimetically impossible but nightmarishly real, which not only generates effects of defamiliarity

Introduction 21 and horror but also forces us to ponder what is now happening in the seemingly remote parts of the world and raises our common concerns for human existence. The sixth chapter, “Unnatural emotions in contemporary narrative fiction”, goes with an “affective turn” in literary criticism. In the current scholarship of emotion studies, critics mainly focus on the mimetic aspects of emotion from a cognitive perspective while neglecting its anti-mimetic aspects. The chapter argues that not all stories are created by the normal and usual emotions. Instead, there exist socalled unnatural emotions in contemporary avant-garde and anti-mimetic narratives, which are physically, logically, or humanly impossible. Through presenting unnatural emotions, contemporary avant-garde narratives not only foreground the fictionality of unnatural narratives but also generate defamiliarizing effects. Taking Ian McEwan’s “Dead as They Come” as an example, the chapter proposes a synthetic approach to unnatural emotions by combining both naturalizing reading strategies and unnaturalizing reading strategies, so as to make the text readable without losing its unnaturalness. The book ends with a sort of “forward thinking”, attempting to outline the future directions of unnatural narratology. The final chapter suggests that, to create a better future for unnatural narratology, such correlations should be carefully dealt with, such as the relation between unnatural narratology and classical narratology, the relation between unnatural narrative and postmodern narrative, and the relation between unnaturalness and narrativity.

Notes 1 In the earliest explorations, see Genette (1983, 1990); while most recently, see Hogan (2013b). 2 For strange voices in fictions, see Hansen, Iversen, Nielsen, and Reitan (2011). 3 Admittedly, there also appeared some non-dominant approaches to unnatural narrative. For instance, James Phelan’s rhetorical approach, and Caroline Pirlet’s hybrid approach. See Phelan (2013: 167–184) and Pirlet (2011: 104–126). 4 Here, I mainly talk about the unnatural narratology practiced by Brian Richardson.

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Unnatural narrative Transnational and comparative perspectives

Paradigm shifts in narrative industry, or a necessity for a comparative turn? By the end of the twentieth century, David A. Hyman notoriously claimed that “Narrative is a boom industry” (Hyman 1998: 798). Hyman’s statement has been confirmed and consolidated by Vera Nünning, who argues that it is “even more true today. Not only have narratives been a more or less ubiquitous phenomenon in the history of human culture but their importance as both an object of study and a means of presenting results has been acknowledged in a growing number of fields of research” (Nünning 2013: 1). Hyman’s statement and Nünning’s consolidation remind us of what Shilomith Rimmon-Kenan has reflected on the development of narratology two decades after the first edition of her oft-quoted Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics: “I still find narratology a valuable, even indispensable enterprise” (Rimmon-Kenan 2002: 140). The boom and flourish of narratological industry or enterprise in the first decade of the twenty-first century are largely due to the rise of postclassical narratology. In Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (1999), David Herman draws a distinction between classical narratology and postclassical narratology, claiming that Postclassical narratology (which should not be conflated with poststructuralist theories of narrative) contains classical narratology as one of its “moments” but is marked by a profusion 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 postclassical phase, research on narrative does not just expose the limits but also exploits the possibilities of the older, structuralist models. (Herman 1999: 2–3) As a result, we have witnessed not only a renaissance of narratology but also the emergence and diversification of new approaches to narrative. For instance, in his “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Developments, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term” (2003), Ansgar Nünning classifies these approaches into eight big categories (Nünning 2003:

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249–251). The rise of postclassical narratology raises two questions. The first issue is concerned about the correlation between classical narratology and postclassical narratology, which has been addressed by Dan Shen and Gerald Prince, who have argued for their complementary relations;1 the second issue is concerned about the interrelations among different strands of postclassical narratologies, which has been, in a similar vein, addressed by Herman and Biwu Shang, Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, and Biwu Shang.2 Herman attempts to perceive postclassical narratology in two phases of its development. Herman postulates that if postclassical narratology in a first phase involves incorporating ideas that fall outside the domain of structuralist theory, in order to reassess the possibilities as well as the limitations of classical models, new challenges emerge in a second phase. What is now required is to bring into closer dialogue the full variety of postclassical approaches – feminist, transmedial, cognitive, and other. (Herman and Shang 2009: 99) Herman’s argument has been picked up and emphasized by Alber and Fludernik (Alber and Fludernik 2010: 1–23), and Biwu Shang (Shang 2015a: 363–377). In a nutshell, what Herman, Alber, Fludernik, and Shang have called for regarding the second phase of postclassical narratology is the intersection of and conversation between different postclassical approaches. Along this trend, a typical example is Narrative Theory: Core Issues and Critical Debates (2012) by David Herman, James Phelan, Brian Richardson, Robyn Warhol, and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Though rather broad in its scope of conversations among different postclassical approaches, Narrative Theory: Core Issues and Critical Debates does not offer a critical conversation among practitioners of the same strand of postclassical narratology. Viewed in this light, “more conversation among narratologists working in the same strand should be encouraged” (Shang 2015a: 374). Most recently, feminist narratology seems to be developing in this direction, which is typically evidenced by Robyn Warhol and Susan Lanser’s Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (2015). It is delightful to see narratology flourishing in almost all branches of humanities, the process of which reveals the important roles played by paradigm shifts in its various stages, particularly the contextualist turn or postclassical turn. However, against this background, one couldn’t help producing mixed feelings of applauding for the stable boom of narrative studies and the frequent paradigm shifts involved, on the one hand, and regretting the dominance of European and Anglo-American narrative theories and the absence of narrative contributions by those in marginalized countries and regions, on the other hand. A brief survey of contemporary narrative scholarship reveals that the discussions of narratives are largely carried out within the Western hemisphere, leaving the rich narrative resources in the rest of the world almost unexplored, which does not do adequate

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justice to the ubiquity of narrative. In his groundbreaking article “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”, Roland Barthes argues that narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. (Barthes 1977: 79) Given the current state of narrative studies, it would be a misconception if one attempted to draw a direct line between narrative theory and Western narrative theory, as well as between narrative and Western narrative. That said, insufficiently treated is Barthes’s observation that narrative can be “shared by men with different, even opposing cultural backgrounds”, and “narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural” (Barthes 1977: 13). At issue is how to do justice to all narratives and narrative theories despite their national, historical, and cultural differences. A comparative approach seems to be a timely option. To avoid the aforementioned hemisphere blindness and the existent “imperialist” paradigm, I would like to suggest a comparativist turn and to propose a comparative narratology. Despite the prevailing tendency that “comparison is an ever-expanding necessity in many fields, including literary studies, where the intensification of globalization has encouraged comparative analysis of literature and culture on a transnational, indeed planetary, scale” (Friedman 1996: 25), comparison has rarely occurred in the field of narrative studies, with a few noticeable exceptions. As a specific term, “comparative narratology” was coined by Susana Onega and José Angel García Landa. In Narratology: An Introduction (1996), they try to see comparative narratology through the lens of comparative literature, arguing that “A ‘comparative narratology’ – in the sense of ‘comparative literature’ – addresses such matters as the structural differences of given narrative genres or sub-genres, the phenomenological difference between narrative and other literary and artistic phenomena, and the comparative poetics of different cultures and traditions” (Onega and García Landa 1996: 25). In other words, Onega and García Landa’s projection of comparative narratology encompasses three major aspects: comparative studies between narrative and its sub-genres, comparative studies between narratives and non-narratives, and comparative studies between poetics of different cultures. Onega and García Landa’s efforts to build up comparative narratology are continued by François Jost. In “The Look: From Film to Novel; An Essay in Comparative Narratology” (2004), Jost defines comparative narratology as “less a matter of pointing up resemblances or differences between two semiotic systems than of deploying the cinema–literature shuttle in order to forge more precise and productive concepts” (Jost 2004: 71). Jost attempts to bring in the sights of narratological toolkits in literary narratives,

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focalization in particular, for the analysis of cinematic narratives. In other words, in Jost’s conceptual system, comparative narratology more or less falls into the broad category of cinematic narrative studies or transmedia narrative studies. Compared with Jost, Susan Stanford Friedman seems to have moved closer to comparative narratology. In her 2011 article “Towards a Transnational Turn in Narrative Theory: Literary Narratives, Traveling Tropes, and the Case of Virginia Woolf and the Tagores”, Friedman cites Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura (1938) as her example to illustrate the difficulties or limits of current narrative theory, since the narrative poetics of the novel “are not Aristotelian, do not fall into a neat structure of beginning/middle/end, do not center on actions following principles of causality, and do not develop characters related to those actions in any ordinary way” (Friedman 2011: 2). Owing to the interpretive difficulties caused by this novel, Friedman prompts us to think about the expansion of narrative across national borders. She specifically intends to address the following questions: Is it possible to develop a transnational narrative theory that can incorporate the many forms that literary narrative has taken across space and through time? Or should we reconceptualize the project of narrative theory? How would such a newly formulated transnational framework relate to the narratological project of identifying “universal” principles or components of literary narrative that transcend or undergird vast cultural differences? (Friedman 2011: 2) To deal with these questions, Friedman grandly proposes reflecting on “universalism versus difference in narrative theory” (Friedman 2011: 2). Specifically, she coins the term “the implied story”, which is used as a traveling trope in her analysis of the works by Virginia Woolf and by Rabindranath Tagore. About the belatedness of the transnational turn in narrative theory, Friedman first of all blames it on narrative theorists’ preoccupation with two other turns, namely the “ethical turn” of the 1980s and the “interdisciplinary turn” of the 1990s. However, compared with these two turns, in Friedman’s opinion, “the profound, ongoing, and richly productive influence of structuralist narratology” (Friedman 2011: 3) and the consequential “new universalism in narrative theory” are more to blame, since they show “little or no interest in the geohistorical rootedness of narratives, that is, in the way that the production, structures, and reception of narrative are thoroughly inflected by the particularities of the times and spaces in which they appear” (Friedman 2011: 4). Among the new forms of universalism in narrative theory, Friedman argues, is cognitive narratology, which is inspired by such relevant disciplines as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. At the turn of the second decade of the twenty-first century, more narratologists attempt to invest more energy into cognitive narratology. For instance, Monika Fludenik is rather optimistic (though “cautious” in her words) about the future development of narratology from a cognitive perspective, arguing that “It may take breakthroughs in the interdisciplinary field of cognitive studies to achieve a modicum of consensus and

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develop a theory and paradigm that are suited to literary implementation” (Fludernik 2010a: 927). However, in the age of globalization dominated by unprecedented homogenizing power, it seems to be all the more significant to uncover the particularities of narrative and narrative theory. I agree with Friedman, who argues that narrative theory can benefit from its neighbor discipline comparative literature, “which began in the affirmation of the commonalities of world literature, has moved ever more toward an emphasis on the differences among world literatures. The focus on the local, the particular, and the historically situated in narrative studies has produced work from many geohistorical locations – thus helping to break the Eurocentric mold of universalist theory” (Friedman 2011: 4). Similarly, by proposing a comparative narratology, I intend to draw narratologists’ attention to the differences and particularities of narratives and narrative theories of different cultures, geopolitics, and nations. That said, it might be well for narratology to move beyond the Eurocentric and Anglo-American model by expanding its scope of toolkits and archives of analysis. It needs to be pointed out that, though benefiting from the insights of Friedman’s proposal for the transnational turn, my proposed comparativist turn differs from it in the scope of analysis. Compared with what Friedman has done in her work, my proposed comparative narratology is broader in scope. In her article, Friedman mainly intends to make a survey of narratives produced in different cultures and historical backgrounds and seeks their shared trope of “implied story”; while what I propose for a comparative narratology targets not only narratives of specific cultures and historical backgrounds but also the relevant narrative theories. In other words, a comparative narratology should be concerned with both areas of analysis: narratives of different regions, countries, cultures, and histories, and narrative theories produced about them. If Friedman’s work is one-sided in the aspect that she mainly investigates the narrative works produced by writers of different historical periods and backgrounds and seeks their shared trope of “the implied story”, the works done by John Pier and others are equally one-sided in the aspect that they are mainly concerned about the narrative theories of their own national traditions. When observing “a tendency for non-American scholars to reflect on inflections of and influences on ‘local’ narratological developments”, Monika Fludernik and Greta Olson hope that it will develop into “a comparative narratology” (Fludernik and Olson 2011: 4). They believe that the comparative studies will “make the very differences between local schools’ or linguistic communities’ approaches to narrative theory the basis for fruitful comparison and critical self-appraisal” (Fludernik and Olson 2011: 4). Viewed in this light, the third part of their edited collection Current Trends in Narratology is titled “Local and National Approaches in Diachronic Perspective: Towards a Comparative Narratology”, which is considered as “the basis for a future comparative narratology – the histories of developments in various schools and linguistic communities” (Fludernik and Olson 2011: 4). Under the broad umbrella term “comparative narratology”, this section contains Eyal Segal’s elaboration of the Tel Aviv School of narrative theory, and Sylvie Patron and John Pier’s respective reflection of French narratology.3

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In “State of the Discipline: Towards Comparative Narrative Studies” (2012), Marina Grishakova proposes a narrative approach as a new model for comparative literature. In the theoretical framework formulated by Grishakova, comparative narratology is expected to investigate the following aspects related to narrative works: “various traditions and conventions of storytelling, typology of plots and characters, migration of stories across cultures and their impact on cultural sensibilities”, “storytellers, storytelling acts and the communal values they epitomize”, “the difficult concept of fictionality and its variegation across cultures”, and “various forms of narrativity and user-engagement across various media” (Grishakova 2012). Seemingly comprehensive and insightful as it is, Grishakova’s conceptualized comparative narratology is still one-sided in that it largely focuses on narratives across culture and media, excluding the narrative theories developed in different cultures and regions. Comparative narratology in my conception is to acknowledge and to continue the important work done by François Jost, Susan Stanford Friedman, Monika Fludernik, Greta Olsen, Eyal Segal, Sylvie Patron, John Pier, and Marina Grishakova, on the one hand, and to place equal emphasis on looking at both the narratives and narrative theories of different locations, cultures, nations, histories, and linguistic communities, on the other hand. In doing so, comparative narratology could at least contain the following two grand heuristic values. First, it will significantly enrich, expand, or even revise the current narrative theories. Comparative narratology does not mean to replace the current narrative theories. Instead, it values and relies on their toolkits of analysis and aims to supplement them by looking at those narratives and narrative theories outside the Western sphere. The uncovering of those neglected narrative theories will be a new addition to the existent corpora of narratology and make it more insightful and comprehensive. In addition, the particularities of narratives will further testify to the applicability of current narrative theories and will force them to modify and revise the toolkits and conceptual systems accordingly, so that the narrative theories will thus become more encompassing and explanatory. Second, comparative narratology offers a rare opportunity for the rise of narrative theories of those marginalized regions and brings those periphery narrative works to light, and thus it is expected to do justice to narratives and narrative theories of all histories, cultures, and nations. In other words, a comparative perspective will give narratologists of those marginalized areas an equal opportunity to import and to share the narratological scholarship as well as narratives of their own tradition, which will help to subvert the hegemony of Western narratives and narrative theories. To demonstrate what I have proposed for the construction of comparative narratology, in the following sections, I shall first of all present a Chinese counterpart of the Western narrative theory, focusing on its traditions and recent innovations. In addition, I will also try to specifically engage with the newly developed unnatural narrative theory by analyzing Chinese ghost stories, a particular type of unnatural narrative in Chinese literature, so as to display their unnatural features as well as their challenges to the existing Western unnatural approaches.

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Chinese narrative theory: traditions and innovations In Narrative: The Basics (2016), Browen Thomas observes that “While narrative theory largely started out as European and an American affair, today scholars from China and Australia are helping to redefine the field, and also to challenge the tendency to focus on Anglo-American narratives” (Thomas 2016: 6). It is true that Chinese narrative theory has been influenced and inspired by its Western counterpart, yet its particular contributions to narratology are beginning to catch the eyes of Western academia and helping to “redefine the field”. Among those insightful works are Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu’s From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (1994), Henry Y. H. Zhao’s The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern (1995), Mingdong Gu’s Chinese Theories of Fiction: A Non-Western Narrative System (2006), and most recently Dan Shen’s Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions behind Overt Plots (2014). To a large degree, the works by Lu, Zhao, Gu, and Shen represent more or less three general types of narrative theories engaged by Chinese narratologists: (1) application of Western narratological toolkits into the analysis of Chinese narrative texts, which in turn enriches the Western narrative theories by offering new test cases; this is shown in Zhao’s work; (2) exploration of traditional Chinese narrative theories, which typically deal with the genre of narrative fiction; this is exemplified by Lu’s and Gu’s work; and (3) revision of Western narrative theories by directly engaging with Western narrative works and Western narratologists; this is particularly done by Shen. In particular, Shen’s admirable work draws a large amount of attention from Western academia. In her recent work Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions behind Overt Plots (2014), Shen tries to revise and update the model of the rhetorical theory of narrative by paying attention to what she calls “covert-progression”, which either subverts the covert progression or supplements it. The work has been well received by Western academics, and it is praised as “a shining example for 21st-century narrative theory in the forceful and comprehensive way it insists on binding the craft of interpretation to the craft of fiction” (Abbott 2013: 558). Regrettably, a brief survey reveals that only those Chinese narratological contributions written in English are becoming known by Western scholars, while those Chinese narrative theories written in Chinese have been largely neglected. In addition to the excellent works done by Lu, Zhao, Gu, and Shen, there are a number of Chinese narratologists working respectively in those aforementioned three broad areas. Among them, Yi Yang (杨义) and Xiuyan Fu (傅修延) deserve our special notice. Their works typically represent how Chinese narratologits intend to use the insights from Western narratology and develop different versions of narrative theories by relying and focusing on their own national narrative traditions and works. It is noteworthy that both Yang and Fu have published monographs entitled Chinese Narratology, which makes our critical refection, assessment, and comparison more convenient and interesting. Yang attempts to construct and to illuminate Chinese narratology from five aspects: structure, time, point of view, imagery, and commentary. As is argued by

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Luc Herman and Bart Vervack, “If narratology is the theory of the narrative text, then it should first come up with a definition of narrative” (Herman and Vervaeck 2005: 11). Similarly, to conceptualize his theoretical framework, Yang first of all traces the meaning of narrative in Chinese language and literary history. According to his observation, in ancient Chinese, the Chinese character 叙 (narrate) is similar to the word 序 (order), which gradually carries the meaning of 绪 (clue). That said, 叙事 (narrative) more or less equals 序事 (order of events) and 绪事 (clues of events), which not only suggests the meaning of telling but also implies the temporal and spatial order. Yang argues that, in the Chinese context, narratology equals the science of order or clues (Yang 1997: 10–11). To build up a Chinese narrative theory, Yang suggests a four-step procedure: regression (还原), reference (参照), connection (贯通), and integration (融合). Unlike most narratological works in the West, which mainly focus on the binary structure of story and discourse, in Yang’s conceptual system, a Chinese narratology is mainly composed of structure, time, point of view, imagery, and commentary. In terms of structure, Yang examines the techniques of order, connection, contrast, potentials, and themes in Chinese literary narratives; in terms of time, he explores such notions as human experience, historical time and narrative time, and time and cultural codes; in terms of point of view, he deals with such issues as the relations between point of view and author, the fluidity of point of view, and omniscience and limited omniscience; in terms of imagery, he examines the prototypes of imagery, the selection and combination of imagery, and the typology, functions, and referential meanings of imagery. What needs to be particularly mentioned is Yang’s investigation of Chinese commentary. In Yang’s opinion, in the history of Chinese literature, commentary can be seen as one of the most distinctive genres of Chinese narrative. Yang argues that “A Chinese narratology would hardly carry any Chinese peculiarities if it does not examine the commentaries” (Yang 1997: 331). Specifically, Yang points out that by writing commentaries on drama and fiction, critics such as Li Zhuowu (李卓吾), Jin Shengtan (金圣叹), Mao Chonggang (毛崇岗), and Zhang Zhuopo (张竹坡) have created a world of “theoretical thinking” (理论思考) and aesthetic experience (审美感悟), which pertain only to themselves and to Chinese narratology. In fact, Yang’s investigation of commentary reveals the nature of his critical departure in constructing Chinese narratology. That is, to investigate those narratives that are produced only in the Chinese cultural context and contained in Chinese literature, which provide counterpoints to Western narratives. Yang’s effort to build up a Chinese narratology by focusing on those narratives pertaining to Chinese culture and literary history in particular has been significantly continued and consolidated by Xiuyan Fu. Fu has been working in the field of Chinese narrative studies for more than two decades and has produced a number of important works, among which are The Secrets of Storytelling (1993), Studies of Pre-Qing Narratives (1999), Narrative: Meanings and Strategies (1999), Science of Text (2004), and most recently Chinese Narratology (2015). In Fu’s conceptual system, Chinese narratology can be defined as “a study of Chinese narratives” (Fu 2015: 16). With this definition in his mind, Fu attempts to address

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three interrelated questions: When did Chinese narratives begin? How did Chinese narratives develop? And how are Chinese narratives represented? As for the emergence and development of Chinese narrative, Fu traces it far back to the meta-narrative of solar myth, which is mainly concerned with the circling of the sun from east to west. In Fu’s opinion, the circling of the sun provokes the ancient Chinese people to develop the notion of “valuing the circle” (以圆为贵). One of the major reasons for ancient Chinese to repeat telling the stories about the sun is that they firmly believe in the stable order, which gives them the strength to take control of the world. That said, “in a world where sun rises every day and brightness conquers the darkness, human beings should have no reasons to lose confidence in their fates” (Fu 2015: 34). According to Fu’s observation, the genuine Chinese narrative tradition did not begin until the preQin era. In his view, it is in the pre-Qin narratives that narrative elements go from fuzziness to clarity, that fictional elements in narrative get increased and pave the way for the separation of historical narrative and literary narrative, that it has far-reaching influence on Chinese people’s mode of narrative thinking, and that its narrative paradigms have been accepted and enriched in later Chinese narratives. To draw a brief configuration of the development of Chinese narrative, Fu associates it with a particular Chinese literary genre – Fu (赋), which is known for its rhyming tradition. Unlike Yang, who is mainly interested in Chinese literary narratives, Fu goes beyond literary narratives and embarks upon transgeneric and transmedial narratives. Particularly, in terms of the representation of Chinese narratives, Fu mainly examines four types of narrative forms: (1) material Chinese culture, about which Fu discusses pre-narratives in Chinese bronze and porcelain; (2) classical Chinese literature, about which he not only probes into the narratives of Four Big Classics (四大古典名著) of Chinese literature including The Dream of the Red Mansion (红楼梦), All Men Are Brothers (水浒传), Three Kingdoms (三国演 义), and A Journey to the West (西游记), but also takes a close look at the narratives of ancient Chinese folk tales including The Legend of the White Snake (白蛇传), Butterfly Lovers (梁山伯与祝英台), Meng Jiangnu Bringing Down the Great Wall with Her Tears (孟姜女哭长城), and The Story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl (牛郎织女); (3) visual and audial Chinese culture, about which he examines the narrative semantics of characters’ appearance description in Chinese literature, and most significantly he tries to develop a audial narratology by exploring acoustic narratives in ancient Chinese literature and culture; and (4) local Chinese culture, about which he makes a narrative analysis of two folk tales in his hometown, Jiang Xi province: Xu Xun Legend (许逊传说) and Swan Maiden Tale (羽衣仙女传说). Given what I have presented here, it is apparent that both Yang and Fu, when attempting to build up Chinese narratology, rely heavily upon the corpus of traditional Chinese narrative works that have hardly been known to Western narratologists. In doing so, they not only reveal the distinctive features of China’s national narratives but also develop a specific narratological framework to make a descriptive analysis. In other words, about the subtitle of this section, “traditions

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and innovations”, I mean Chinese narratologists turn to their rich and resourceful narrative traditions, on the one hand, and try to examine them from a new narratological light so as to construct a new theory of interpreting Chinese narrative works. Similar work has also been done by some other Chinese narratologists such as Shijun Zhang, Junqiang Tan, Diyong Long, and many others. However, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to introduce them all.

Strange tales revisited: a Chinese counterpart of unnatural narrative Chinese narrative works are as rich as they are diversified. For the sake of a handy comparison and to offer a non-Western perspective, I would like to choose the so-called genre of unnatural narrative, which has been one of the hot topics in narrative studies in recent years. In Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and in Drama (2016), Jan Alber claims that “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” (Alber 2016: 3). Mainly centering on the type of impossibility and the anti-mimetic nature of narrative, unnatural narratology is considered as “the most exciting new paradigm in narrative theory and the most important new approach since the advent of cognitive narratology” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen and Richardson 2010: 1). Even though the definitions of the unnatural narrative are diversified and nonunanimous, I agree with Jan Alber, who attempts to define the unnatural as “physically, logically, and humanly impossible scenarios and events”, or specifically, “the represented scenarios and events have to be impossible given the known laws governing the physical world, accepted principles of logic (such as the principles of noncontradiction), or standard anthropomorphic limitations of knowledge and ability” (Alber 2016: 25). Regrettably, what Western unnatural narratologists including Richardson and Alber have been investigating are merely the unnatural narrative works in English, while overlooking a vast amount of unnatural narrative texts produced in other languages and other geographical and cultural locations, Chinese unnatural narrative works included. Since I have already investigated the unnatural narrative in contemporary Chinese fictional works (Shang 2016), I will mainly focus on traditional Chinese unnatural narrative in this chapter. In fact, compared with the European and Anglo-American unnatural narrative works, Chinese unnatural narrative enjoys a much longer history, which can be traced far back to 286 B.C. and be found in such works as Zhuangzi, Liezi, and Gui Cang. It needs to be pointed out that traditional Chinese unnatural narrative is typically written in the genre of ghost tales, among which is Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi, 2007 (1679)). To better illuminate the impossibility and unnaturalness of this classical work, I shall mainly refer to the narrative parameters concerning character, events, space, and ontological metalepsis. In Pu’s work, the impossibilities are largely created by nonhuman characters such as fox-fairies, snake-fairies,

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ghosts, and corpses; unnatural space such as the world of murals on the wall and a house transformed from a grave; unnatural events such as a dead man returning to life again, one man’s soul going into another man’s body, and a dead person’s soul getting reincarnated in another life; and ontological metalepsis such as the boundary-crossing between the world of the fox-fairy and the world of the human beings, or between the world of the dead and the world of the living. First of all, Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio creates impossible storyworlds with nonhuman characters, who mainly fall into the following four major categories: (1) Ghost. For instance, in “Wang, The Sixth”, there is a ghost who drinks the wine given by the fisherman Xu, and thus he befriends Xu and helps him to drive the fish into the net; in “Nie Xiaoqian”, a female ghost named Nie Xiaoqian is used to seduce a man and helps a demon to drink the blood of human beings. (2) Demon. For instance, in “Painted Skin”, a demon paints human skin and wears it, and its purpose is to take away the heart of human beings; in “Jiaona”, male scholar Xueli fights against a demon with a pointed mouth and long paws. (3) Fox-fairy. For instance, in “The Fox-Fairy Marries Off His Daughter”, the fox-fairy marries off his daughter, and takes away the golden cup from a locked truck thousands of miles away; in “Fox-Girl Qingfeng”, scholar Geng meets and stays together with a beautiful girl, who is a fox. Geng still chooses to stay with her, though he is aware of her true identity as a fox; in “Drinking Pal”, a fox likes to drink liquor and becomes Chen’s drinking pal. To repay Chen’s kindness and hospitality, the fox uses its ability to predict and to help Chen get rich; in “Yingning”, Yingning is a girl born as a fox because her mother is a fox-fairy loved by her father, and later Yingning also gives birth to a son. (4) Corpse. In “The Corpse”, there is a female corpse standing up, walking to the travelers, and blowing breaths into their faces, which takes their lives away. Second, the impossibility in Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio is generated by its presentation of events, which are physically, humanly, or logically impossible. For instance, in “The Taoist Priest of Laoshan”, the priest cuts off a piece of paper, which turns into a bright moon, and in a party, Chang’e (the Chinese Moon Goddess) is invited to dance for them. Following the priest’s direction, a man named Wang learns to walk on the wall. In “The Monk from Changqing”, the old monk passes away and his soul bumps into a young man’s body. In a similar vein, in “Wang Lan”, Wang Lan attaches his soul to his friend Zhang’s body. Together, they make a fortune by curing other people’s diseases, owing to Wang’s ability of getting their lost souls back. Zhang’s friend He Chai, a greedy and vicious man, also attaches his soul to Zhang’s body when he dies. Given that, there are three souls in Zhang’s single body. In “The Theft of a Peach”, in front of the public, a man creates a rope and asks his son to climb into heaven along the rope and takes out the peach from heaven. In “Reincarnated Three Times”, a man named Liu remembers all the things from his former lives. After his death, he has been turned into a horse, a dog, and a snake by the King of hell. When he eventually returns to the world as a man, he could know how to talk at birth, and could recite essays and books after one reading. In “Precious”, a scholar named Su Zichu falls in love with a beautiful girl named Precious. Su’s soul leaves his

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body and follows Precious to her home, and they make love at night. Once his soul returns to his body, Su finds that Precious’s family is still unwilling for him to marry her, so he turns into a parrot and stays at the side of the girl. In doing so, the girl is moved by his affection and agrees to marry him. Hearing the girl’s promise, the parrot flies back, and it becomes Su again. Third, the unnatural narrative of Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio also features impossible space, which particularly involves the house or mansion changed from a grave or wilderness. There are many instances of this kind of unbelievable transformation. In “The Bridegroom”, on his wedding day, a man named Sun finds his bride walking in quick steps toward the back of his house, and thus he follows her to her house and is asked to stay with his in-laws. In fact, his genuine bride is still in the chamber, and he is missing and could be nowhere. Six months later, when he is about to leave his so-called parents-in-law, he finds that all the house and courtyard are gone, and there is merely a tall grave. Consider “Taoist Priest” as another example. In this tale, there is a Taoist priest, who often shows up at Han’s banquet. One day, he invites Han and another man named Xu for meals in his temple, where they have all the exotic wines, foods, and fruits. They even embrace and sleep with two beautiful girls. However, when waking up the next day, Han finds himself lying at the bottom of a flight of stone steps and embracing a long slab of stone. Looking around, both Han and Xu cannot see the magnificent temple but only the wild grass and two shabby huts. Fourth, Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio is also saliently marked by its ontological metalepsis concerned with boundary-crossing between different worlds, which can be categorized into three types: (1) The boundary-crossing between the world of the dead and the world of the living. For instance, in “Candidate for the Post of City God”, Master Song is dead and has passed an examination in hell, for which he has been appointed as a City God. He says he needs to fulfill his responsibility to take care of his mother, and he is given another nine years’ life by an emperor-like deity. Therefore, Song comes to life again after being dead for three days. Nine years later, when he finishes making his mother’s funeral arrangements, he dies, and he is seen riding a horse with engraved harness and crimson trappings by his in-laws. Only then does his family realize that he has been a ghost. In some other tales, such as “Painted Skin”, “Zhang Cheng”, and “Jiaona”, the characters travel between the world of the dead and the world of the living, dead but back to life again. (2) The boundary-crossing between the world of art and the world of reality. For instance, in “The Mural”, when a man named Zhu pays a visit to a monastery, he gets fascinated with a girl with beautiful long hair in a mural. In his trance, his body floats up and gets inside the mural, where he meets the girl and makes love to her. When his friend and the monk talk about his sudden disappearance, Zhu appears in the mural on the wall and seems to listen to them. When Zhu floats off the mural and back to the ground, he finds the girl on the mural has changed her hair style just exactly as he had suggested when they were together inside the world of the mural. (3) The boundarycrossing between the world of the sprits and the world of human beings. This type of ontological metalepsis typically happens in the tales about the fox-fairy, who

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frequently travels between the world of the fox-fairy and the world of human beings. For instance, in “Fox-Girl Qingfeng”, the fox-fairy named Qingfeng goes from the world of the sprits to the world of human beings, where she meets and stays together with scholar Sickness-Free; in “Qiaoniang”, both a ghost named Qiaoniang and a fox named Sanniang fall in love with a man named Lian, and Qiaoniang even gives birth to a boy. That said, Qiaoniang goes from the world of the ghost to the world of human beings, while Sanniang goes from the world of the fox-fairy to the world of human beings. When approaching unnatural narrative, Western unnatural narratologists pay particular attention to the unnatural narrative forms and try either to naturalize them or to keep their unnaturalness. At issue is the end for which the unnatural narrative forms serve. Unlike my Western colleagues who either propose naturalizing reading strategies (Jan Alber) (Alber 2016: 47–48) or propose unnaturalizing reading strategies (Henrik Skov Nielsen) (Nielsen 2014: 39–260) for unnatural narrative texts, I attempt to suggest an ethical interpretive option. So far as Chinese ghost tales are concerned, instead of paying much attention to their fictionality and defamiliarizing effects, Chinese audiences are more interested in the moral values conveyed by them, among which is the idea that the virtues will be rewarded, while the vices will be punished. Noteworthy are the commentaries given at the end of the tales in this work, most of which are about the ethical judgments of the characters and their deeds. According to Wai-Yee Li, these comments sometimes “assert the analogy, or even identity, between the human world and the fantastic realm, or seek to ‘naturalize’ the latter by establishing its moral, metaphorical, or allegorical connection with the former”, and sometimes “make playful twists on what strangeness is: rare virtues and vices, inexplicable motives, or departures from social norms may be singled out as stranger than supernatural occurrences” (Li 2010: 233). Consider “Wang, the Sixth” as an example of a tale about virtue being rewarded. In this tale, Wang is a ghost, and he drinks the wine of the fisherman Xu. To repay Xu’s kindness and hospitality, Wang helps Xu to catch fish. Though the ghost could have had an opportunity to return to the world of human beings as he knows that there will be a woman drowned dead in the river as his replacement, he chooses to set her free and remains as a ghost when he sees the drowning woman with an infant in her arms. Owing to his good virtue, the ghost has been promoted to a position of the Landlord God, and he always responds to people’s good wishes. The Chronicler of the Tales comments that he is a God because he never forgets those who are poor and of lower class, though he is high above the sky. To connect it with this story, we can easily identify the benevolent acts performed by the characters. For instance, Xu as a man alive never forgets those who are dead and pours the wine for the ghosts whenever he drinks; Wang as a ghost never forgets Xu’s hospitality and tries his best to repay him; though he is eager to return to the world of human beings, he is unwilling to let a woman with an infant die as his replacement; Wang, though being promoted to the Landlord God, still cares about the ordinary people and gratifies their wishes.

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Equally illuminating are some tales that are about the idea of vice being punished. Consider “Painted Skin” as an example. In this tale, a scholar named Wang meets a beautiful girl and keeps her in his study. Suspecting that the girl might be a concubine of a rich man as part of the bride’s dowry, Wang’s wife suggests that Wang should send her away, but he won’t listen. In fact, the girl is nobody but a demon wearing a painted human skin. Wang finds a Taoist priest to help him, who gives him a fly whisk to frighten the demon away. However, seeing the fly whisk hanging over the doorway, the demon becomes mad and unwilling to give up its desire for human life, and thus it tears open Wang’s chest and takes his heart away. In the end, the demon is forced to change into smoke and sucked into a gourd by the Taoist priest, while Wang’s heart is given back by a madman in a market place. Apparently, both Wang and the demon are punished for their vicious desires and acts. The Chronicler of the Tales comments that “How foolish humans are to take a demon for a beautiful woman, and how muddle-headed a foolish man can be to regard sincere admonishment as a fabricated tale” (Pu 2007: 179). To connect the comment with this story, we can easily identify the vicious motivations and acts performed by the characters. Wang is greedy for beauties in spite of his wife’s warnings; while the demon desires to take the meat and life of human beings and ignores the warnings given by the Taoist priest. Consequently, both of them pay the price of their lives for their foolish and vicious deeds. In “What Does the Comparative Do for Theory?” (2013) Ming Xie argues that “comparativity is about what comparison can reveal and conceal” (Xie 2013: 676). To extend Xie’s argument into the realm of narrative studies, a comparative narratology not only maps and remaps the narrative works in the world, but also challenges and revises the existing narratological frameworks. A brief account of Chinese ghost tales, and Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio in particular, reveals that many of their unnatural narrative features are shared by Western unnatural narratives. However, Chinese unnatural narrative, in its particular cultural context, also challenges the existing reading strategies offered by Western unnatural narratologists.

Conclusion For most of its history, not only has narratology been an almost exclusively European or Anglo-American, or by extension Western, concern, but the discussion on narratives has also almost exclusively been conducted in just a few major European languages. A timely proposal for a comparative narratology is expected to change the binary oppositions of the center and the periphery. About future narrative studies from a transnational perspective, Friedman suggests a double move that engages simultaneously both the global and the local, the abstract and the particular. On the one hand, I ask that we continue to theorize about narrative, that is, explore the narratives we study for their significance in understanding narrative in general. To simply read non-Western narratives is not enough; we need to think about their implications for narrative theory.

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Unnatural narrative On the other hand, I ask that we widen the archive out of which we theorize about narrative, that is, move outside our comfort zones, engage with narratives and narrative theories from around the world. (Friedman 2011: 24)

Friedman’s suggestion is insightful and suggestive for the development of comparative narratology, which actively engages with narratives and narrative theories from around the world. The purpose of knowing the particular is for the ultimate aim of knowing and engaging the world, and of arriving at the universal narrative theory. As for the future development of comparative narratology, I would like to put particular emphasis on the following two aspects. First, a comparative narratology does not aim to replace the existing narrative theories. Instead, it tries to enrich and to supplement them by importing a new narrative corpus as well by updating or revising the narratological toolkits. That said, the future of a comparative narratology lies in its intersections with other strands of narrative theory, such as structuralist narratology, cultural-historical narratology, feminist narratology, rhetorical narratology, cognitive narratology, feminist narratology, postcolonial narratology, unnatural narratology, etc. Second, a comparative narratology might well adopt the methods of comparative literature and world literature so as to read narratives and narrative theories across time, across cultures, and in translations as well as going abroad and going global.4 In particular, translation is supposed to play an irreplaceable role in the development of comparative narratology. About four decades ago, in his Foreword to Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays (1977), Cyril Birch comments with much regret that “The study of Chinese narrative is greatly inhibited by the lack of adequate translations. With only one or two exceptions the versions of novels to which we must direct our students and our literary colleagues are incomplete, flat, and unreliable; many works of at least the second rank are completely inaccessible in English” (Birch 1977: xii). To our regret, up till today, translations of Chinese narrative are still inadequate. Worse than that, the translations of Chinese narrative theories remain even more inadequate. In other words, to develop a full-fledged comparative narratology, the dynamic function of translating both narratives and narrative theories should never be underestimated.

Notes 1 See Gerald Prince, “Classical and/or Postclassical Narratology”, L’Esprit Créateur 48, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 115–123; Dan Shen, “Why Contextual and Formal Narratologies Need Each Other”, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 35, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 141–171. 2 About the interrelations among different strands of postclassical narratologies, see David Herman and Biwu Shang, “New Developments in the Study of Narrative: An Interview with David Herman”, Foreign Literature 5 (2009): 97–105; Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, “Introduction”, in Postclassical Narratologies: Approaches and Analysis, eds. Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 1–31; Biwu Shang, “Toward a Second Phase of Postclassical Narratology”, Style 49, no. 3 (2015): 363–377.

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3 See Sylvie Patron, “Enunciative Narratology: A French Speciality”, in Current Trends in Narratology, ed. Great Olsen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 312–335; John Pier, “Is There a French Postclassical Narratology”, in Current Trends in Narratology, ed. Great Olsen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 336–367; Eyal Segal, “The ‘Tel Aviv School’: A RhetoricalFunctional Approach to Narrative”, in Current Trends in Narratology, ed. Great Olsen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 297–311. 4 See David Damrosch, How to Read World Literature (Malden: Blackwell, 2009).

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Unnatural narrative in contemporary Chinese time travel fiction Patterns, values, and interpretive options

Leif Frenzel keenly observes that “Time travel is undeniably an ingredient in our popular culture. There is a seemingly endless chain of novels and short stories, movies and TV programs using it, in one of its many forms, as a dramatic device” (Frenzel 2008: 1). In the history of American literature, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) can be seen as one of the earliest forms of time travel fiction, which has received worldwide recognition. Regrettably, though Chinese time travel fiction enjoys a longer history, it remains rarely known by Western academics. Thus, it seems to be rather necessary to embark upon this fertile field of research in the age of globalization and world literature. At issue is how we are going to talk about contemporary Chinese time travel fiction. In Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative (2013), David Wittenberg argues that time travel fiction is a “narratological laboratory”, in which “many of the most basic theoretical questions about storytelling, and by extension about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity, are represented in the form of literal devices and plots, at once both convenient for criticism and fruitfully complex” (Wittenberg 2013: 2). Seen in this light, contemporary Chinese time travel fiction can be fruitfully examined from a narratological perspective. Along this line of thinking, I attempt to pursue four major goals in this chapter: (1) to uncover the dominant unnatural patterns and means of contemporary Chinese time travel fiction, (2) to reveal its unnaturalness from such perspectives as metalepsis, prolepsis, self-contradictory narration, and multiperson narration, (3) to examine its consequences and values of being unnatural, and (4) to offer a way of naturalizing it by suggesting the intersection of unnatural narratology with ethical narratology.

Writing backwards: unnatural travels In fact, Chinese time travel writing came into existence as early as the Tsin Dynasty (266–420) – for instance, Tao Yuanming’s (365–427) The Peach Blossom Spring, which reveals an ancient Chinese utopian dream of looking for an earthly paradise. However, the genuine forms of modern Chinese time travel fiction did not take shape until the early twentieth century. Among these works are Wu Yanren’s New Diaries of the Stone (1909), in which Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu,

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the two major characters in Cao Xueqin’s The Dream of the Red Mansion (1791), have traveled abroad, experiencing Western civilization, and Chen Leng’s New Journey to the West (1909), in which Xuanzang and his disciples, the Monkey King included, have traveled to twentieth-century Shanghai. However, contemporary Chinese time travel fiction was mainly spurred by Xi Juan’s Love in Another Life (1995) and Huang Yi’s A Step into the Past (1994– 1996). In one sense, Xi’s and Huang’s works represent two major forms of traveling, namely, spiritual traveling and physical traveling. Specifically, in Love in Another Life, Yang Yiliu dies in a traffic accident, yet her spirit is transported by her mother, a lady with magic power, to the Song Dynasty (960–1279), where she embodies a female character, Su Huan’er, the wife of a man named Shi Wuji. Thus begins a love affair between an ancient man and a modern girl. In A Step into the Past, Xiang Shaolong is a soldier in the special forces. He is asked to participate in an experiment with a time machine, which accidently transports him to the Qin Dynasty (221 B.C.–207 B.C.), where he makes full use of his special training, wisdom, and knowledge to win unaccountable fights and battles as well as the love of many beautiful women, and finds Zhao Pan and helps him become the Emperor of Qin. In addition, Love in Another Life and A Step into the Past point in two possible directions for the development of Chinese time travel fiction: either along the lines of love or along the lines of Kung Fu. Yet, as is shown by the practices of later travel writers, the category of Kung Fu has been lost; while the category of love seems to be rather prevalent. The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed an explosion in Chinese time travel fiction, which included Jin Zi’s A Dream of the Qing Dynasty (2006), Tong Hua’s Step by Startling Step (2006), Li Xin’s Have Ever Promised (2007), Bo Bo’s Combing the Hair (2007), and others. In 2007, with a royalty of 12 percent China Writers Publishing House bought the copyright for Xiaoyue Tingfeng’s The Youth (2007), Hai Piaoxue’s The Twin Sisters (2007), Tian Xi’s The Phoenix: First Half of My Life, and Second Half of My Life (2008), and Ye An’s Lost (2008), which are considered to be the “Big Four” in the arena of contemporary Chinese time travel narratives. Given its unprecedented popularity and wide readership, Chinese time travel fiction entered its golden age in the twenty-first century and has garnered a certain amount of scholarly attention, most of which explores its ideology and characterization. For instance, Yangquan Li investigates its genealogy, paradoxical themes, and narcissism. In Li’s opinion, there are three traveling patterns in contemporary Chinese time travel fiction: traveling in real history, traveling in fake history, and rebirth (Li 2013: 34–45). The problem with Li’s classification, in my view, lies in the inconsistency of its criteria. As far as the temporal setting is concerned, the most salient feature of Chinese time travel fiction produced in the new millennium is writing backwards. A brief survey shows that almost all major historical periods have been covered by contemporary Chinese time travel fiction. The most popular period seems to be the Qing Dynasty (1636–1912). Typical examples are Jin’s A Dream of the Qing Dynasty, Tong’s Step by Startling Step, Xiao’s The Youth, and Tian’s The Phoenix: First Half of My Life, and Second Half of My Life.

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Compared with the temporal parameter, the patterns and means of traveling seem to be as interesting as they are unnatural. Generally speaking, there are six major patterns of traveling into the past: (1) a sudden death – for instance, in Step by Startling Step, owing to a car accident, Zhang Xiao, a white-collar lady, at the age of 25 travels to the Qing Dynasty and becomes Ruo Xi, a girl of 13; (2) overuse of medication – for instance, in Jie Yu’er’s Bricks of the Tang Dynasty (2012), Yun Ye finds himself in the Tang Dynasty after overdosing on Houhui Yao (regret medicine); (3) natural/supernatural power – for instance, in Chang Huanle’s Becoming Lv Bu in Next Life: Unifying the Three Kingdoms (2013), Lu Pu, a college student addicted to computer games, after being struck by thunder becomes spiritually embodied in Lv Bu, a general of the Han Dynasty; (4) modern technology – for instance, in A Step into the Past, Xiang Shaolong, a soldier in the special forces in the twenty-first century, is transported to the Qin Dynasty by a time machine; and in The Youth, Yan Er, a girl living in the thirtyfirst century who is eager to meet Ci Xi, the empress dowager, with the help of a time-and-space machine travels to the Qing Dynasty and becomes Ci Xi herself; (5) a visit to places of interest – for instance, in Jin’s A Dream of the Qing Dynasty, Qiang Wei, an office lady working in Beijing, travels to the Qing Dynasty and becomes Ming Wei, a daughter of a general, when she loses herself in the Forbidden City; and in Li’s Have Ever Promised, A Bu, a photographer for an expedition, when exploring an ancient tomb travels to the Qing Dynasty and becomes a princess named Buxi Ya Mala, the owner of the tomb she was exploring; and (6) a touch of antiquity – for instance, in Tian’s The Phoenix: First Half of My Life, and Second Half of My Life, with the help of a fan used by the Emperor Kang Xi, Ye Mo’er, a female agent of an investment company, travels to the Qing Dynasty and becomes Suma Lagu, a lady who had helped Kang Xi to become the emperor. Undeniably, these six major means of traveling denote “physically impossible scenarios and events, that is, impossible by the known laws governing the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones, that is, impossible by accepted principles of logic” (Alber 2009: 80). Viewed in this light, contemporary Chinese time travel fiction can be labeled with the popular term “unnatural narrative”, the study of which “has developed into one of the most exciting new paradigms in narrative theory” (Alber, Iversern, Nielsen, and Richardson 2010: 113). To me, these unnatural events reveal their fictional nature and counterfactuality. To put it another way, though they are impossible in real worlds, they can be possible in fictional worlds. I agree with Hilary P. Dannenberg, who argues that “plot and character are inextricably intertwined” (Dannenberg 2008: 1). “The plots of coincidence and counterfactuality”, she continues, “are configurations of characters’ life journeys across narrative worlds” (Dannenberg 2008: 1). Admittedly, the identities and fates of characters undergo tremendous changes after they travel to certain historical pasts. Consider Xiang Shaolong from A Step into the Past, for example. Xiang, who is a soldier in the special forces in the twenty-first century, becomes a hero capable

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of anything after traveling to the Qin Dynasty, acting like a Jack-of-all-trades. He is a man of letters, an expert in war, and a wise state consultant. What is more, he is incredibly smart and charming so as to draw every woman’s attention and to win over her heart, no matter whom she is or what class she is from, be she peasant, prostitute, queen, princess, or widow. In the twenty-first century, he does not have the ability to even win the favor of a bartender; while in the ancient world, he takes firm control over everything, including the enthronement of the emperor, the unification of the country, the fate of the state, the life of the people, the development of history, etc. Jin Zi’s A Dream of the Qing Dynasty is another example. Before traveling to the Qing Dynasty, Qiang Wei is “a white-collar woman who cannot be more ordinary, running errands through every corner of Beijing, busy with various routine works” (Jin 2010: 1). However, after her time travel, she becomes a daughter in a noble family, a rare beauty pursued by all the princes, and a favorite court chamberlain of the emperor. She has the ability to lighten the mood of the emperor, and to save the lives of the ministers, chamberlains, and princes. In short, she is a woman of vital importance in a royal family in the historical period; while in the twenty-first century, she is just as oblivious as she is unimportant. In the worlds created in time travel fiction, the new identities of the characters equip them with many exclusive advantages, and they are thus enabled to do many things that they could not do in reality. However, they are also placed in ethical dilemmas because of their new identities and their posthistorical knowledge, hesitating to make proper choices. Along with examining this type of ethical consequence, time travel fiction also matters a lot in terms of the ideology and culture in contemporary China. Nevertheless, the functions and consequences of time travel fiction cannot be separated from its unnaturalness generated by both impossible story and unusual discourse.

Unnatural features: metalepsis and strange voices In Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978), Seymour Chatman takes a dualist and structuralist position by following Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gerard Genette. In particular, he draws a distinction between a what and a way in a narrative text, arguing that “The what of narrative I call its ‘story’; the way I call its ‘discourse’” (Chatman 1978: 9). Chatman’s story/ discourse distinction has been widely adopted in the practice of narrative studies, whether in the “classical phase” or the “postclassical phase”.1 In what follows, I will examine the unnaturalness of contemporary Chinese time travel fiction on both the story level and the level of discourse. I should point out that Chatman’s term “story” designates more or less the same concept as the term “world” used by other narratologists. I agree with Monika Fludernik, who claims that a narrative is “a representation of a possible world in a linguistic and/or visual medium, at whose center there are one or several protagonists of an anthropomorphic nature who are existentially anchored in a temporal and spatial sense and who (mostly) perform goal-directed actions (action and plot

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structure)” (Fludernik 2009: 6, emphasis mine). In a similar vein, David Herman considers “world-making” to be one of the basic elements of narrative (Herman 2009: xvi). In traditional realistic fiction, it is expected that possible worlds will be presented; while in unnatural narrative fictions, what readers are going to encounter are “impossible storyworlds” (Alber 2009) or “impossible worlds” (Ryan 2012). In contemporary Chinese time travel fiction, the unnaturalness on the story level is saliently marked by its use of metalepsis. A term first identified by Gérard Genette (1980: 234–235), “metalepsis” refers to “a deliberate transgression between the world of the telling and the world of the told” (Pier 2014: 326). Or, to use Marie-Laure Ryan’s words, the “manifestations of ontological impossibility are known in narratology as metalepsis” (Ryan 2012: 371). Contemporary Chinese time travel fiction deliberately transgresses the boundaries of the worlds of the telling in the twenty-first century and the worlds of the told in ancient times. For instance, in A Step into the Past, Xiang Shaolong, a soldier in the twenty-first century, travels thousands of years back to the Qin Dynasty, marrying several women, finding and rescuing Prince Zhaopan, and training him to be the emperor. Very interestingly, he finds his life more interesting in ancient time and never travels back to the twenty-first century. In A Dream of the Qing Dynasty, Qiang Wei, a white-collar lady in the twenty-first century, travels several hundred years back to the Qing Dynasty, where she gets a new name, Ming Wei, and experiences a series of extraordinary events, such as falling in love with the Emperor Kang Xi and his sons, quarreling with the wives of other princes, marrying the Thirteenth Prince, and giving birth to a girl. However, unlike Xiang Shaolong, who remains in the ancient world, Qiang Wei travels back to the twenty-first century when she is just about to be poisoned to death by the empress dowager. The difference between metalepsis in contemporary Chinese time travel fiction and metalepsis in some Western experimental novels is noteworthy, although both types contain three subcategories distinguished by Jeff Thoss, namely, “transgressions between a story world and another (imaginary) world”; “feigned transgressions between a story world and reality”; and “transgressions between story and discourse” (Thoss 2011: 190). In some Western narrative works featuring metalepsis, it is usually the fictional characters who take the initiative to come from the fictional world to live and mingle with people of the real world. For instance, in Julio Cortázar’s short story “Continuity of Parks” (1967), a reader is immersed in the novel, and the characters of the novel come to life and murder the reader. However, in contemporary Chinese time travel fiction, people of the real world happen to enter into the historical world or the imaginary world. While they are in the ancient world, those characters from the twenty-first century still miss and think about the world they are from. For instance, in A Dream of the Qing Dynasty, when Ming Wei serves as a female attendant in the palace of Queen Defei, she is very excited about seeing and touching priceless porcelains. In her words, “all these vases and porcelains are much better than those fake products in the Forbidden City. I cannot be more excited about touching these priceless artifacts with my own hands. If only I could take a few of them back to

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the contemporary world, I would make a big fortune” (Jin 2010: 45). When Ming Wei travels to Chengde to go hunting in the winter, she misses all those modern conveniences such as air conditioners, trains, airplanes, etc. As a matter of fact, coming from the twenty-first century, Ming Wei is rather aware of her traveling into another world and looks for every possibility of returning to the world she comes from. On her way to taking part in a concubine selection, she becomes very hesitant. The narrator says: Relying on the window of the carriage heading for the Forbidden City, looking up at the blue sky, I could not help regretting that Beijing could hardly have clear air like this. However, I very much want to go back. It is the first time since my arrival here that I have been thinking of my family and my life in the twenty-first century. I don’t know what it means to me. My future is like the blue sky above my head, clear but unforeseeable. (Jin 2010: 24) Staying longer in the ancient world, Ming Wei gets more homesick and starts missing all those things in the world she is from. Throughout her stay in the Qing Dynasty, she has made constant comparisons between the ancient society and the one of the twenty-first century, transgressing the world of the real and the world of the imagined both physically and spiritually. To a large extent, the unnaturalness on the story level is concretized by the unnaturalness on the discourse level, in which the narrator plays the biggest role. In contemporary Chinese time travel fiction, most of the time, narrators are “character-narrators” (Phelan 2005: 1–8) who play the dual role of characters in the storyworld and narrators in the discourse world. They become unnatural owing to their “strange voices”,2 which is first of all exemplified by their frequent use of words and expressions or even songs from the twenty-first century. For instance, in A Dream of the Qing Dynasty, when informed that a man older than 70 has succeeded in passing the national exam for officials, Ming Wei comments that, “Given his old age, he can at most offer no suggestions to the Emperor but a request for his own retirement. However, he has once been an official of the Emperor’s court, and that will be enough to make him a retired high-ranking official” (Jin 2010: 75, emphasis mine). “Retired high-ranking official” is a proper name used in contemporary Chinese society, referring to those retired government officials who have enjoyed comparatively high social status and privilege. It is no wonder that the Thirteenth Prince is rather perplexed when he hears Ming Wei using this expression. In the Qing Dynasty, Ming Wei is particularly noted for her use of other unusual expressions and commentaries, such as mentioning names like Rong Momo and Xiao Yanzi, both of whom are characters in a popular TV play Princess Huan Zhu (2005), and comparing the Crown Prince to Prince Charles, who is getting old but cannot be enthroned. She even sings popular songs such as Fish Leong’s “Loving You for More Than a While” (2000). Similarly, in Step by Startling Step, Ruo Xi sings “Jasmines”, a popular contemporary Chinese folk song.

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In addition to the strange voices and defamiliarizing effects produced by the neologisms brought from the twenty-first century, the unnaturalness of the discourse is also created by the novels’ frequent use of prolepsis. As a type of anachronism, prolepsis refers to “any narrative maneuver that consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later” (Genette 1980: 40). Or, to use Gerald Prince’s definition, it is “an anachrony going forward to the future with respect to the ‘present moment’, an evocation of one or more events that will occur after the ‘present moment’” (Prince 2003: 79). Prolepsis seems to be abundant in almost all contemporary Chinese time travel narratives. In the world of the past, while all the other historical characters are struggling with their fate, the character-narrators coming from the twenty-first century know very well what is going to happen next, and somehow serve as witnesses of the historical events that are about to occur. For instance, in A Dream of the Qing Dynasty, when Ming Wei meets a boy of around 15 who says that he is going to have her as his woman, she does not pay much attention. She even considers what he says to be a joke, despite the fact that she remembers every word he says. However, the boy is doomed to be the one who will be involved in her life. The narrator says, “But I don’t know that I will meet him again in the forthcoming incident” (Jin 2010: 23, emphasis mine). The forthcoming incident refers to the annual concubine selection held in the Forbidden City, and with the Thirteenth Prince’s help, Ming Wei pretends to be sick and thus is not selected by the Emperor Kang Xi, which makes it possible for her to later marry the Thirteenth Prince. Concerning the fate of historical characters, the character-narrators demonstrate their surprising ability to predict and to foretell. Consider A Dream of the Qing Dynasty as an example again. Meeting Nalan Rongyue, Ming Wei says that “Several years later, when the First Prince falls down, all fortunes of the Nalan family will be gone” (Jin 2010: 30). With regard to the future of the Fourth Prince, she could not help thinking of “the conflicts between him and his mother, when he becomes the Emperor and his mother becomes Empress Dowager in the future” (Jin 2010: 50). Regarding the conflicts between Empress Defei and Empress Nalan, she silently comments that the son of the former will become the emperor; while the son of the latter will be imprisoned. As for the Eighth Prince, Ming Wei thinks of his tragic end, which lessens her hatred toward him. About the Fourteenth Prince’s love for her, Ming Wei feels rather guilty, which is further consolidated by her knowledge of his tragic fate in the future. As a narrator, Ming Wei even knows the date and the time when Emperor Kang Xi will pass away. At Emperor Kang Xi’s birthday celebration, Ming Wei wonders, “Is it really Emperor Kang Xi’s sixty-fifth birthday? Even though he is the greatest emperor of the Qing Dynasty, he has to abide by natural law and will pass away three years from now” (Jin 2010: 476). The unnaturalness of the discourse in contemporary Chinese time travel fiction is also betrayed by its use of self-contradictory narration and multiperson narration, both of which are considered to be forms of “extreme narration” (Richardson 2006). Paradoxically, in contemporary Chinese time travel fiction, the characternarrators seem to know all and play an authoritative role in the ancient world, on

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the one hand; while on the other, they do not know everything, and in particular, they have no idea what is going to happen to them. More interesting are the narrators’ contradictory attitudes toward their experience of traveling to the ancient world in their reporting. For instance, in A Dream of the Qing Dynasty, Ming Wei confesses that she has always longed for a life in ancient society; while in the world of the past, she wants to go back to the present. At the very beginning of the novel, Qiang Wei (Ming Wei’s name before her time travel) confesses: My name is Qiang Wei, a white-collar woman who can not be more ordinary, running errands through every corner of Beijing, busy with various kinds of routine work. My biggest interest is to visit all the architecture at edifice of historical interest. Every time I walk to a historical place marked with the glory of the past, I always feel something different and want to go back to the past, wondering what these palaces and buildings were like in the past and how ancient people lived? (Jin 2010: 1) Doing monotonous work and bored with her life in the twenty-first century, Qiang Wei dreams of experiencing a different type of life in ancient times. To use her words, “Everyday, I’m repeating the boring and cumbersome work. When can I experience an entirely different kind of life, free from the boring financial statements and analysis?” (Jin 2010: 1). Qiang’s long time desire is fulfilled when she mysteriously runs into a yard of the Forbidden City and falls unconscious. When she wakes up, she realizes that she has traveled back more than 300 years to the reign of Emperor Kang Xi in the Qing Dynasty. She is no longer a 25-year-old girl from an ordinary family. Instead, her new identity is a 15-year-old girl named Ming Wei, a daughter of a high official. Falling in love with the Thirteenth Prince, Ming Wei marries him and later becomes the mother of his daughter. However, feeling that she has made her home in the ancient world, Ming Wei becomes homesick. For example, when she is with other family members of the Thirteenth Prince, Ming Wei starts to feel homeless, about which the narrator says: At this moment, the whole family is getting rather harmonious. All of a sudden, I realize that my home is here, for which I feel surprised. I have never thought that my home is here, no matter whether I stayed with the Thirteenth Prince inside or outside the Forbidden City. Even though I decorated this place, I have never felt close to it, because I have always believed that my real home is in the twenty-first century, with my parents beside me. (Jin 2010: 250–251) That said, the narrator appears to contradict herself: on the one hand, she says that she wants to stay in the ancient time to have a new life; while on the other, she confesses that she never feels at home there and wants to go back to the twentyfirst century.

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Inconsistency and narrational contradictions have acquired more weight by the use of multiperson narration. In Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006), Richardson identifies three major types of multiperson narrative texts: “works that move back and forth between different narrative positions”, “those whose narration remains fundamentally ambiguous”, and “those strange texts that employ unnatural narrational stances that are impossible in nonfictional discourse” (Richardson 2006: 62). In many contemporary Chinese time travel works, multiperson narration is widely used in the first type, which moves back and forth between different narrative positions, producing “centrifugal” effects and “an irreducible galaxy of different, heterogeneous or antithetical, perspectives” (Richardson 2006: 62). Consider A Dream of the Qing Dynasty and Step by Startling Step as two examples. Though consistently written in the form of first-person narration, the first 540 pages of A Dream of the Qing Dynasty are narrated from the perspective of Qiang Wei in the twenty-first century and Ming Wei in the Qing Dynasty; while the rest of the novel is respectively narrated from the perspectives of the Thirteenth Prince, the Fourth Prince, the Eighth Prince, the wife of the Fourth Prince, and the servant named Qing Quan’er. In Step by Startling Step, the entire first volume and first 20 chapters of the second volume are written in the form of first-person narration from the perspective of Ruo Xi; the 21st chapter is written in diary form from the third-person perspective; the first four chapters of the supplements of the novel are written in the form of thirdperson omniscient narration; the last chapter of the supplements is written in the form of first-person narration from the Fourth Prince’s perspective.

Consequences and values of the unnatural At issue is why and how contemporary Chinese time travel fiction matters, since it is unnatural both on the story level and on the discourse level. In Richardson’s opinion, the value of unnatural narratives is that they “provide an interrogation of the basic elements of narrative, a critique of overused narrative conventions, a challenge to official public narratives, an original vehicle for the self-representation of the oppressed, an exceptional way to express extraordinary events, and a different, challenging kind of aesthetic experience” (Shang and Richardson 2012: 112). More specifically, he claims that the primary value of unnatural narratives is “to draw attention to the way narratives are constructed and point to the desires that such constructions serve” (Richardson 2011: 38). Seen in this light, contemporary Chinese time travel fiction, first of all, matters in that it reveals the fictional nature of literature, or to use Jan Alber’s words, it sheds a “new light on the distinctiveness of fiction” (Alber 2011a: 62). In the real world, it is physically, humanly, and logically impossible for people to travel hundreds or thousands of years back to the ancient world, to manipulate the historical characters, to fall in passionate love with them or even to marry them, and to witness groundbreaking historical events. However, in fictional works of an imaginative nature, all these unnatural scenarios are possible. In A Dream of the Qing Dynasty, when Qiang Wei travels back to the twenty-first century, she considers

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what she has experienced in the Qing Dynasty to be a dream, and she decides to write it down in fictional form. She claims that “The dream belongs to me, and I can write it down in whatever way I want. Perhaps, I cannot meet them in reality, but I can meet them in my dream. Thus, my happiness will continue” (Jin 2010: 540). Given their fictional nature, I would like to borrow Alber’s argument, which claims that unnatural narratives suggest that “the possibility of representing the impossible is the most crucial difference between the world of fiction and other modes of discourse” (Alber 2011a: 62). In this regard, I trust that further studies of contemporary Chinese time travel fiction along the lines of unnatural narratology will also be suggestive for the current discussion and debate on the issue of “fictionality”.3 Second, contemporary Chinese time travel fiction matters in that it suggests a strong cultural and ideological connotation of contemporary China. In particular, it sheds new light on the living and working conditions of contemporary Chinese women. In fact, at the turn of the century, there emerged a new group of women in China who are now commonly addressed as Sheng Nv (the leftover women). This neologism was officially recognized by China’s Ministry of Education to refer to white-collar women, who are well-educated and well-paid but have difficulty in finding mates because of their high standards for selecting husbands. Despite a few exceptions, in most contemporary Chinese time travel narratives, the protagonists are female. In contrast to their embarrassment because they can’t find suitable mates in reality, they have become extremely popular with men in the ancient world they have traveled to. Acquiring new identities as girls from noble families, they are fascinated by all the men who have fulfilled women’s criteria for rich, handsome, and powerful mates. Among them are generals, princes, and even the emperor. This is exactly what Zhang Xiao and Qiang Wei experience in the Qing Dynasty when they travel several hundred years back to that historical period. That said, time travel fiction typically satisfies these women’s unfulfilled desires and pursuits in the real world by imaginatively transporting them back to another world, where they seem to be capable of handling everything, including love and marriage. In addition, while in the ancient world, these female protagonists try to bring in and enhance the proper values identified and practiced in modern society, particularly equality and ethics. Enjoying the privileges endowed by their families and their comparatively high social status, these female protagonists criticize the inequality between men and women in ancient China. For instance, in A Dream of the Qing Dynasty, there is a private voice, lamenting the unfair fate of ancient Chinese women, who are always controlled by men. Qiang Wei observes that “the women in this society are rather pitiful, and they enjoy fewer rights than what is said by the book. Even though some of them were born into a rich family, they are still considered as men’s belongings and property” (Jin 2010: 6). However, unlike women who passively accept their fates arranged by men, the time travel female characters play a big role in enhancing such values as equality, independence, and ethics. For instance, in Step by Startling Step, Ruo Xi refuses marriage to the Fourteenth Prince arranged by Emperor Kang Xi, so as

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to be faithful to her love for the Fourth Prince. While all princes compete for power and enthronement, Ruo Xi highly values their brotherhood and kinship. It is mainly for this reason that she kneels down in front of Emperor Kang Xi to appeal to him to pardon the Thirteenth Prince, who is accused of plotting against the emperor. When the Fourth Prince, her lover, becomes the new emperor, Ruo Xi tries her best to save the lives of other princes he plans to punish, imprison, and kill. Between power and kinship, Emperor Kang Xi and his sons have all chosen power, while Ruo Xi, as a woman, chooses to value kinship. From an ethical perspective, her actions and behavior have shamed all those renowned historical characters, including the emperor and the princes. In “Temporal Tourism: Time Travel and Counterfactuality in Literature and Film”, Rüdiger Heinze claims that “the manner of travel, the time and place of travel, and the conception of time in time travel narratives have serious consequences for their ideological investment and the precise nature of their counterfactual ruminations” (Heinze 2011: 218). As far as contemporary Chinese time travel fiction is concerned, it deliberately makes use of unnaturalness not only for the ideological investment but also to expand the scope of time travel narratives’ consequences by embedding relevant cultural and ethical values.

Naturalizing the unnatural: interpretive options The abundance and popularity of contemporary Chinese time travel fiction have been fueled in no small part by the “postmodernist turn” coupled with the “historiographical turn”, to the degree that it is no longer possible to read it along the lines of traditional narrative theory. To deal with impossible stories and unnatural narratives, Alber proposes five reading strategies: reading events as internal states, foregrounding the thematic, reading allegorically, blending scripts, and frame enrichment (Alber 2009: 82–93). Later on, Alber expands this corpus into eight reading strategies, namely, blending/frame enrichment, generic conventions, themes, allegories, satire, transcendental realm, do it yourself, and the Zen way of reading (Alber 2014). Similarly, Ryan argues that “the mental strategies for making sense of impossible worlds must be measured against the procedure by which readers construct standard fictional worlds, whether realistic or fantastic” (Ryan 2012: 376). In order to preserve the logical integrity of the fictional world, she suggests such naturalizing interpretive strategies as mentalism, figural interpretation, manyworlds and virtualization, dream-like reality, Swiss-cheese world, metatextualism, and do it yourself (Ryan 2012Ryan 2012: 376–378). Unlike Alber and Ryan, who suggest naturalizing reading strategies from a cognitive perspective, Henrik Skov Nielsen proposes an unnaturalizing approach, which tries to maintain the unnaturalness and fictionality of unnatural narratives (Nielsen 2013, 2014). Concerning the other possible approaches to unnatural narrative, Alber proposes an intersection between unnatural narratology and rhetorical narratology. He argues that it will be very fruitful if the unnatural is investigated from “the perspective of the rhetorical approach to narrative, and the place of implied authors behind representations of impossibilities and the question of what is to

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be understood by the authorial audience should be determined” (Alber 2014: 893). As I have argued in “Toward a Second Phase of Postclassical Narratology” (2015), it will be fruitful to integrate the strengths of different strands of postclassical narratology when reading a narrative text (Shang 2015a). As far as an unnatural narrative like contemporary Chinese time travel fiction is concerned, I prefer reading it by intersecting unnatural narratology with ethical narratology.4 Specifically, I regard the unnaturalness of contemporary Chinese time travel fiction as a narrative means for an ethical end. Traveling back to ancient China in different historical periods, the characters of time travel fiction are endowed with new identities, serving as both witnesses and participants of history. Though their knowledge of history enables them to predict what is going to happen in the storyworld, they are aware of the fact that they could not prevent those historical events or even historical tragedies and disasters from happening. Consequently, they are presented with an ethical dilemma: they could not bear to witness good people meeting their tragic fate, which is against their moral principles if they stand by and do nothing; on the other hand, they have an ethical responsibility to maintain history as it is, which cannot bear even the slightest of alterations or changes. Consider A Step into the Past as an example. As a man from the twenty-first century, Xiang Shaolong knows what is going to happen in the Qin Dynasty more than any of his contemporaries living in that historical period. Paradoxically, the advantage offered by his knowledge of history constantly presents him with an ethical dilemma. Xiang knows that Zhao Pan will turn out to be a cold-blooded and tyrannical ruler of the Qin Dynasty who is going to slaughter as many people as possible in order to hide his identity as a fake prince, to unify the whole country, and to consolidate his kingdom. Given that, Xiang, on the one hand, should take action to save many people’s lives, including those he loves most, by preventing Zhao from doing this; while on the other, he should not change historical events that have already happened and have been recorded in history books; otherwise, history will not be as it is today. Either of these choices is impossible for him to take easily, though he is finally determined to choose to respect historical facts. This accounts for his agreement with his son Xiang Bao’er, who is going to change his name to Xiang Yu, the hero who will later on overthrow the Qin Dynasty but meet with a tragic end. To continue thinking along these lines, I will offer an ethical reading of two other time travel narratives: A Dream of the Qing Dynasty and Step by Startling Step, both of which were printed in 2006 before their publication online, and are about protagonists who travel back to the Qing Dynasty. More importantly, both novels tell a similar story about Emperor Kang Xi’s nine sons competing for the throne. When adapted for TV, both of them were warmly received by audiences and became immediate hits. These similarities led me to read them together. In the Qing Dynasty, both Ming Wei and Ruo Xi attempt to adopt an ethical criterion to view historical events and try to take a neutral position. In Ming Wei’s words, “About these historical characters, I feel rather nonchalant and consider their lives as a show before me, since I already know their fate. I try to avoid

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getting involved with their lives and warn myself against affecting history” (Jin 2010: 28). However, Ming Wei is always presented with the ethical dilemma of either changing history or saving a character’s life. When she is informed that Xiao Chun, her attendant, has met the First Prince, Ming Wei hesitates: “Is this what we call fate? Can’t we stop history from occurring? It’s apparent that she and the First Prince are doomed to tragic deaths. But can I help her?” (Jin 2010: 41). However, in some circumstances, Ming Wei could not stop herself from interfering with history and saving the lives of other characters. But she does not admit to her interference. For instance, regarding her marriage to the Thirteenth Prince and her rescue of the Fourth Prince, Ming Wei attributes her actions to coincidence. She says: I at most happen to be a traveler from another space and time. If there is anything changed, it could be my marriage to the Thirteenth Prince. My rescue of the Fourth Prince is not really a rescue, since the history book does not say anything about his involvement with that matter. It is due to my worry about whether something will be changed by my arrival that I am always very careful. As a result, it happens as the history book says. (Jin 2010: 276) It should be noticed that both Ming Wei and Ruo Xi are not professional historians, and their limited knowledge of Qing Dynasty history is derived from some popular history books and historical TV plays. Therefore, they doubt what they know about what is going to happen next in the ancient world. That said, these time travel protagonists are both constrained and liberated by their knowledge of history, which gives them a reason to either interfere with history or abstain from interfering with history. In both cases, they feel uneasy about their choices, which is clearly evidenced in Ming Wei’s confession. She admits that “The longer I stay here, the more worried I become, which I cannot explain. Looking at the person who smiles at me today, I don’t know how he is going to meet his fate tomorrow. My mind has been too constrained by history” (Jin 2010: 276). I think that time travelers’ uneasiness with their new “ethical environment”5 is mainly attributable to their unselfish concern for the best interest and benefit of other characters, and particularly the ones they love most. This is a sharp contrast to Emperor Kang Xi’s nine princes, who betray their kinship and try to punish and kill their brothers for power and enthronement. It is against this backdrop that Ming Wei’s decision to choose to do what seems ethically right is all the more rare and respectful. In Step by Startling Step, Ruo Xi (whose real name is Zhang Xiao), an office worker coming from the twenty-first century, seems to know the fate of all these historical characters, including the Emperor Kang Xi. However, the paradox is that she has no idea what her own fate will be. When the First Prince asks Emperor Kang Xi to let him marry her, Ruo Xi has this kind of feeling, which makes her rather sad and depressed. She confesses, “I know everyone’s fate but have no idea of my own. Is my destiny fixed by God? I could not help feeling sad and crying

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on my bed” (Tong 2011: 289). On second thought, it is rather understandable, since the history books document the lives and fates only of important figures and neglect those of minor or unimportant ones. It is for this reason that Ruo Xi does not know her own fate or the fate of her attendant Yu Tan. However, like Ming Wei, Ruo Xi cares less about her own fate than the fate of others. As Ming Wei claims, “Even though the details vary from what is described by the history books, the bulk remains the same. Given that, I am getting even more scared” (Jin 2010: 276). What are Ming Wei and Ruo Xi truly frightened of? The answer lies in the disadvantage and the potential danger that their loved ones are going to encounter. Against this background, they choose not to change history, on the one hand; while on the other, they try their best to do something for those they love, with the help of their historical knowledge. For example, in Step by Startling Step, Ruo Xi is struggling between two impossible choices: either to assist her lover in his enthronement but disrespect history or to respect history but neglect her lover’s misfortune and potential danger. The dilemma is that if she chooses to respect history by doing nothing, she will have to witness the tragedy occurring to those she loves; if she chooses to assist her lover with her knowledge of history, those whom she loves are about to meet their tragic fate owing to her interference with history. Throughout her residence in the Qing Dynasty, Ruo Xi has been in love with two characters: the Eighth Prince and the Fourth Prince, both of whom make it impossible for her to maintain a balance between her respect for history and her faith in love. Informed by the history books and historical TV plays, she knows from the very beginning the result of Emperor Kang Xi’s nine sons’ competition for the throne: the Fourth Prince is going to succeed Emperor Kang Xi and become the new emperor. When she is in love with the Eighth Prince, she tries by every means possible to stop him from joining the competition and giving up his hope of being enthroned. Failing to persuade the Eighth Prince to give up his ambition for power, Ruo Xi, out of her love for him, reminds him of the potential dangers from the Fourth Prince and his followers, including her close friend the Thirteenth Prince. In doing so, she believes that if she cannot be in love with the Eighth Prince and avoid what is about to happen in history, she can at least be of some assistance to him in one way or another, so that he might avoid meeting a tragic end. However, when she is later in love with the Fourth Prince, he is falsely accused of plotting against Emperor Kang Xi. Though the Fourth Prince has been pardoned by the emperor, it is at the price of the Thirteenth Prince being the scapegoat and being imprisoned for a decade. Later, when the Fourth Prince comes to power, Ruo Xi is informed that it was due to the information she gave the Eighth Prince that the Fourth Prince had been trapped and the Thirteenth Prince imprisoned. Thus, the ethical tragedy is that although she values love and friendship more than power, the more she helps these princes in the name of love, the more tragic their fate is. In his article “The Ethical Implications of Unnatural Scenarios” (2011), Alber postulates that “literary fiction always involves ethical questions” (Alber 2011b: 211). The ethical questions in literary fiction, in the words of Zhenzhao Nie, are

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generally about how “to offer moral examples for human beings to follow, to enrich their material and spiritual life with moral guidance, and to achieve their self-perfection with moral experience” (Nie 2015: 88). If we regard the unnaturalness of contemporary Chinese time travel fiction as an aspect of “the ethics of the telling” (Phelan 2007: 11, 2014: 531), it effectively enhances the value of “the ethics of the told” (Phelan 2007: 11, 2014: 531).

Conclusion I agree with Richardson, who argues that “The unnatural is located in specific events, characters, settings, and frames. Different incarnations of the unnatural can, however, produce extremely disparate effects at the level of the narrative as a whole; thus, a text’s calling attention to its own fictionality can produce varying degrees of unnaturalness” (Richardson 2015: 7). In this light, an examination of the specific events, characters, settings, and frames in contemporary Chinese time travel fiction not only reveals its unnatural patterns and means of time travel, but also helps us to see its unnaturalness in terms of the typical usage of metalepsis, prolepsis, self-contradictory narration, and multiperson narration. It should be pointed out that contemporary Chinese time travel fiction was not born out of a vacuum. Instead, it is closely related to contemporary China’s cultural and social context in the wake of the “postmodernist turn” coupled with the “historiographical turn”, and its unnaturalness helps to draw readers’ attention to its ideological and cultural pursuits. With unnaturalness as its salient feature, contemporary Chinese time travel fiction presents a challenge not only for readers’ cognition but also for existing narrative theory. What I have attempted to do in this chapter is to naturalize it from an ethical perspective through the intersection of unnatural narratology and ethical narratology. However, I am open to other interpretive options and will be more than happy to join the conversation on analyzing and reading this genre of writing from multiple perspectives. David Wittenberg observes that, from a more expansive view, “literature itself might be viewed as a subtype of time travel, rather than the other way around, and time traveling might be considered a fundamental condition of storytelling itself, even its very essence” (Wittenberg 2013: 1). Seen in this way, time travel fiction – particularly the insufficiently studied contemporary Chinese time travel fiction – deserves more scholarly attention and in-depth exploration. Specifically, I would like to see more studies of contemporary Chinese time travel fiction in two broad directions. First, within the framework of narratology, it would be helpful to examine it through the intersection of unnatural narratology with some other strands of postclassical narrative theory, such as feminist narratology, cultural narratology, and cognitive narratology. I agree with Alber, who argues for the fusion of the study of the unnatural with “feminist, queer, and/or postcolonial approaches” so as to reveal “the ideological underpinnings and/or political implications of represented impossibilities” (Alber 2014: 893). If contemporary Chinese time travel fiction is explored from the combined perspectives of unnatural narratology and feminist,

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queer, and postcolonial approaches, its ideological and political values will be more saliently disclosed. Second, beyond the framework of narratology, it is necessary to explore contemporary Chinese time travel fiction as a part of world literature in a global context.6 World literature, as keenly observed by Ning Wang, “along with the issue of cosmopolitanism, has become more and more attractive to comparatists and literary theorists both in the East and the West” (Wang 2014: 419), which, to my knowledge, is largely due to contributions by such eminent scholars as David Damrosch and Ning Wang.7 In his rejoinder to Damrosch, Marshall Brown reconsiders world literature in terms of encounter rather than ambition or situation. I agree with Brown when he argues that “the text must be experienced as richly as possible in its inherent tensions and conflicts” (Brown 2011: 363). Given the specific case of contemporary Chinese time travel fiction, I think that its inherent tensions and conflicts and their consequent unnaturalness make it rather distinctive in the arena of world literature. When analyzing contemporary Chinese time travel fiction in the broad context of globalization and world literature, we not only can see the literary and cultural interaction between East and West, but also will come to understand how contemporary Chinese literature is becoming world literature.

Notes 1 For the distinction between classical narratology and postclassical narratology, cf. Herman (1999: 1–30). 2 For more on strange voices in fiction, cf. Hansen, Iversen, Nielsen, and Reitan (2011). 3 For recent discussion and debate on fictionality, cf. Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh (2015a, 2015b) and Dawson (2015). 4 For significant contributions to ethical narratology, cf. Berning (2013), Müller (2015), Newton (1995), and Phelan (2014). 5 In regard to the concept “ethical environment”, cf. Nie (2015: 91). 6 For globalization and world literature, cf. Miller (2011). 7 Cf. Damrosch (2003, 2009) and Wang (2011).

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Unnatural narratology and zhiguai tales of the Six Dynasties in China

Recent years have witnessed an explosive interest in unnatural narrative, which has led to a rapid rise of unnatural narratology. In parallel to other sub-strands of postclassical narratology such as feminist narratology, rhetorical narratology, and cognitive narratology, unnatural narratology is now considered as “the most exciting new paradigm in narrative theory and the most important new approach since the advent of cognitive narratology” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2013a: 1), “one of the most prominent recent developments in narrative theory” (Herman and Vervaeck 2016: 514), and “a thriving new field of narrative theory” (Contzen 2017: 1). Even those scholars who are less enthusiastic about it admit that “the proposal of an ‘unnatural’ narratology is both timely and significant” (Fludernik 2012: 364), and that it “can be fruitful and lead to interesting results” (Klauk and Köppe 2013: 78). Or, to better use Gerald Prince’s words, unnatural narratology is “spirited, wide-ranging, and thoughtprovoking” (Prince 2016: 691). This chapter continues my previous work on unnatural narrative across borders and unnatural narrative in national literatures other than English.1 In particular, I attempt to reveal the unnatural narrative tradition in ancient Chinese literature exemplified by Zhiguai (“records of anomalies”, or “accounts of the strange”). Seen as the “birth of Chinese fiction”, Zhiguai gives an account of “supernatural phenomena, exotic locales, and fantastic flora and fauna” (Tian 2010: 202). The elements of Zhiguai, according to Hu Ying, “dot the pages of Chinese literary history, from prehistoric legends to contemporary literature” (Hu 2001: 542). In Xiaofei Tian’s view, as a genre of writing, Zhiguai “parallels what Western classical scholars call ‘paradoxography’, writings about marvels. This new genre came into maturity in the Eastern Jin, with Gan Bao’s In search of the supernatural (Soushen ji) as its representative work” (Tian 2010: 202). With Zhiguai tales, in particular Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang’s edited volume The Man Who Sold a Ghost: Chinese Tales of the 3rd-6th Centuries (1974) and Karl S. Y. Kao’s edited collection Chinese Classical Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic: Selections from the Third to the Tenth Century (1985) as its central concern, this chapter pursues four major goals: (1) to revisit the much debated conception of unnatural narrative and to call for a diachronic and transnational perspective, (2) to reveal the unnaturalness of the impossible storyworlds in Zhiguai tales by taking a close

Zhiguai tales of the Six Dynasties in China 55 look at such unnatural elements as unnatural characters, unnatural space, and unnatural time at the local level, (3) to further examine the unnaturalness of this genre by investigating the storyworld boundary transgression at the global level, and (4) to go beyond the current naturalizing and unnaturalizing readings by proposing an ethical interpretive option.

Revisiting unnatural narrative: diachronic and transnational perspectives Despite its popularity, unnatural narratology is a rather controversial field, particularly in terms of defining unnatural narrative. In Brian Richardson’s conceptual system, unnatural narrative is defined as “one that contains significant antimimetic events, characters, settings, or frames” (Richardson 2015: 3). By “antimimetic”, Richardson means “representations that contravene the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, violate mimetic expectations and the practices of realism, and defy the conventions of existing, established genres” (Richardson 2015: 3). Unlike Richardson, Jan Alber defines unnatural narrative as “physically, logically, and humanly impossible scenarios and events” (Alber 2016: 14). According to Henrik Skov Nielsen, unnatural narratives are “a subset of fictional narratives that may have temporalities, storyworlds, mind representations, or acts of narration that would have to be construed as physically, logically, mnemonically, or psychologically impossible or implausible in real-world storytelling situations” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2013a: 6). Stefan Iversen considers the unnatural narrative as one that presents the reader with “clashes between the rules governing the storyworld in the narrative and events producing or taking place inside this storyworld, in other words, clashes that defy naturalization” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2013a: 6–7). In Maria Mäkelä’s view, “the unnatural does not only emerge from broken conventions or impossible scenarios; it must also be recognized as a fundamental feature of any fictional representation of human life” ((Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2013a: 7). Given these contesting definitions of unnatural narrative/the unnatural, unnatural narratologists claim that they are happy “to leave the differences in a productive tension, a normal enough situation at the birth of a new theoretical approach” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2013a: 12). Though I do not aim to argue against Richardson and other unnatural narratologists with regard to their different conceptions of unnatural narrative, I would still like to reiterate my argument in “Unnatural Narratology: Core Issues and Critical Debates” (2015) that the unnaturalness of a narrative text is influenced by the unnatural elements it contains (Shang 2015b: 175). By “unnatural elements”, I embrace such parameters as unnatural narrators, unnatural events, unnatural time, unnatural space, and unnatural character. I agree with Eva von Contzen, who claims that unnatural narratologists “have drawn our attention to narratives and narrative elements that tended to be largely ignored by narrative scholars precisely because of their otherness in terms of both form and content” (Contzen 2017: 1). Viewed in this light, exploring unnatural narrative is

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suggestive for the work of rewriting literary history. To use the words of unnatural narratologists, the unnatural is a “neglected driving force behind the creation of new generic configurations and thus the development of literary history” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2012: 373). As is suggested by the subtitle of Richardson’s Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary British Fiction (2006), most unnatural narratologists have been mainly concerned with contemporary and postmodern narrative works. Alber admits that “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” (Alber 2016: 19). However, as is observed by Contzen, postmodernism is but “one narrative mode prevalent in contemporary literature, just as there were various kinds of literature in Antiquity and the Middle ages” (Contzen 2017: 9). Thus, a diachronic perspective on unnatural narrative is much needed. About a decade ago, Monika Fludernik regretted that “there has been comparatively little interest on a theoretical level in the history of narrative forms and functions” (Fludernik 2003: 331), and stated that “the lack of emphasis on historical developments in the realm of cultural studies narratology is surprising” (Fludernik 2003: 331). To take up a diachronic turn in narrative studies, unnatural narratologists begin to pay increasing attention to the unnatural tradition before postmodern narratives. For instance, Richardson examines the unnatural narrative in Aristophanes’s plays, in classical Sanskrit dramas, in works by Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, and Diderot, and in works by Romanticists (Richardson 2015: 91–120). Contzen tries to develop a historical approach to the unnatural in premodern narratives, in particular, ancient and medieval narratives, so as to see “the unnatural as the history of a form” (Contzen 2017: 17). I am delighted to read Richardson’s observation that “unnatural narratives have a rich, varied, and extensive history, having been in existence for at least two and a half millennia” (Richardson 2015: 91). Regrettably, when Richardson, Alber, and Contzen take a diachronic perspective on the unnatural, they merely focus on the premodern Western narrative, with a large number of unnatural narrative works produced in East Asia neglected. I subscribe to Werner Wolf’s argument that “the natural and unnatural are not stable, transhistorical, and transcultural essences but historically and culturally variable” (Wolf 2013: 136). To couple with the diachronic perspective on the unnatural, I would like to call for transnational and comparative perspectives. In “Toward a Comparative Narratology” (2017), I call for a comparativist turn to narrative theory, which will give “narratologists of marginalized areas an equal opportunity to import and to share the narratological scholarship as well as narratives of their own traditions, which will help to subvert the hegemony of Western narratives and narrative theories” (Shang 2017b: 57). To uncover unnatural narrative tradition in Chinese literature, I have taken the genre of ghost tales, especially Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi, 2007 (1679), as a case of examination. As I have already pointed out, compared with Anglo-American unnatural narrative works, “Chinese unnatural narrative enjoys a much longer history, which

Zhiguai tales of the Six Dynasties in China 57 can be traced as far back as 286 BCE and can be found in such works as Zhuangzi, Liezi, and Gui Cang” (Shang 2017b: 61). Among all these ancient Chinese unnatural narrative works, the most typical genre is Zhiguai produced during the Six Dynasties, roughly from the third to the sixth century C.E. Considered as the birth of Chinese fiction, Zhiguai exerts a great impact on Tang Chuanqi (Tang tales) and later Chinese fictional works. I feel very sympathetic toward what Contzen has argued is one of the premises of unnatural narratology – that “it can also account for earlier ‘unnatural’ narrative scenarios” (Contzen 2017: 1). In what follows, I attempt to examine the unnaturalness of Zhiguai with a particular reference to the parameters of unnatural characters, unnatural space, and unnatural time.

Impossible storyworlds and unnaturalness at the local level In Basic Elements of Narrative (2009), David Herman argues that Over the past couple of decades, however, one of the most basic and abiding concerns of narrative scholars has been how readers of print narratives, interlocutors in face-to-face discourse, and viewers of films use textual cues to build up representations of the worlds evoked by stories, or storyworlds. Such worldmaking practices are of central importance to narrative scholars of all sorts, from feminist narratologists exploring how representations of male and female characters pertain to dominant cultural stereotypes about gender roles, to rhetorical theorists hypothesizing about the kinds of assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes that must be adopted by readers if they are to participate in the multiple audience positions required to engage fully with fictional worlds, to analysts (and designers) of digital narratives interested in how interactive systems can remediate the experience of being immersed in the virtual worlds created through everyday narrative practices. (Herman 2009: 106) It is true that “storymaking practices are of central importance to narrative scholars of all sorts” (Herman 2009: 106), including unnatural narratologists, who are mainly concerned with the unnatural elements of narrative, or to use Alber’s words, the “nonactualizable elements” of narrative (Alber 2016: 3). Alber claims that “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” (Alber 2016: 3). Nonactualizable elements, in Alber’s conceptual system, include unnatural narrator, unnatural character, unnatural time, and unnatural space. Largely referring to parameters of unnatural characters, unnatural space, and unnatural time, I will try to examine impossible storyworlds contributed by the unnatural elements in Zhiguai tales. The unnaturalness of Zhiguai tales is, first of all, shown in the nonhuman characters. When elaborating the worldmaking/world disruption function of narrative, Herman places much weight on the human or human-like agents, claiming that

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the events represented in narrative 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.” (Herman 2009: 105, emphasis mine). In other words, in Herman’s view, characters in narrative works must be either human or human-like, which relies much on the illusions of realism and mimesis. As a matter of fact, Herman is not alone in relating character with its anthropomorphic traits. For instance, in A Dictionary of Narratology (2003[1987]), Gerald Prince defines character as “an existent endowed with anthropomorphic traits; an actor with anthropomorphic attributes” (Prince 2003: 12). However, in many unnatural narrative texts, characters lose their anthropomorphic traits and become nonhuman-like. Alber classifies unnatural characters into five general categories: blends of humans and animals, dead characters, robot-like humans and humanlike robots, metamorphoses and transforming figures, and multiple coexisting versions of the same character (Alber 2016: 104–148). The nonhuman characters in Zhiguai tales fall into four broad categories: ghosts, animals, material objects, and fairies. A large number of supernatural tales feature ghost characters. For instance, in “Ji Kang and the Headless Ghost”,2 the main character is a dead man who has been dead for thousands of years. However, as a ghost, he still loves music as he used to. Once he hears sweet and harmonious music, he cannot help coming out and listening to it. The ghost even teaches Ji Kang to play Guang Ling San, one of the best musical compositions in ancient China. In “The Man Who Sold a Ghost”, Zong Dingbo meets a ghost as he walks one night. He plays tricks on the ghost by saying that he is a new ghost. The ghost carries Zong for some distance and gets very tired. When the ghost changes into a goat, it is spat and sold by Zong in the market. Consider “Sister Ding” as another example. In this story, Ding has been dead for many years. When Ding was alive, she had been tortured a lot by her mother-in-law. As a ghost, she has a strong sympathy for young wives and tries to make 9 September a holiday for women, on which day they will be free from work. One day when she tries to take a ferry across the river, she is refused and jeered by two young men at first and is kindly ferried by an old man later. For this reason, she punishes the two young men by drowning them and rewards the old man by pushing thousands of fish ashore for him. The romantic part about the ghost is that, very often, in many Zhiguai tales, ghosts marry human beings. For instance, in “The Daughter of a Prince of Sui Yang”, a man named Tan marries a girl of about 16, who is actually a deceased daughter of the prince of Sui Yang. When Tan, out of his curiosity, takes a look at the girl one night, he is surprised to find that “From the waist up she was flesh like any other women, but from the waist down she was nothing but dry bones!” (Yang and Yang 1974: 7). A second type of nonhuman character in Zhiguai tales is animals, who often take on the forms of foxes, dogs, cats, rats, monkeys, snakes, etc. For instance, in “The Brindled Fox at the Ancient Zomb”, the main character is a fox, who takes on the form of a scholar and pretends to be very learned. It pays a visit to Chang Hua, talking about literature, history, and philosophy. Owing to its incomparable

Zhiguai tales of the Six Dynasties in China 59 wisdom and knowledge, it makes Chang suspicious of its identity, and is seized and revealed to be a fox. In another story, “Catching the Old Fox”, the station house in the west suburb of Nan Yang is troubled and haunted by a ghost who has actually changed from an old fox. When Song Daxian stays there one night, the ghost shows up and tries to frighten him by taking a dead man’s head from the market before he attempts to wrestle with Song, who seizes it by the waist and kills it eventually. The next morning, it is found that the pretended ghost is an old fox, and the trouble in the station house is brought to an end. In quite a few Zhiguai tales, not only the foxes often change into humans, the cats and dogs also take on human forms. For instance, in “The Old Cat”, a spirit takes on the form of a man and often scolds and beats his two sons. When the man realizes that a sprit has taken on his form, he suggests that his sons draw their swords and kill it next time they see it. Mistakenly, the two sons kill their own father, who is assumed to be a spirit when the man is out in the fields looking for them, while the spirit goes to their home in their father’s form. This has been going on for years till it is found out by a priest. Eventually, the spirit changes to its own real identity of an old cat. Similarly, in “The Wild Cats”, the women who are captivated by the wild cats also change into cats accordingly. In “The Dog from the Village Tavern”, an old man passes away and is buried by his children. However, he suddenly appears, giving instructions to his family and punishing the slaves. When he is drunk one night, he is revealed to be an old dog from the village tavern. More strangely, there is a story about marriage between a girl and a dog. In “The Dog Called Pan Hu”, the protagonist is a dog named Pan Hu, who kills the enemy of the King. As a reward, he marries the daughter of the King. Three years later, the dog and the girl have given birth to six boys and six girls. In some Zhiguai tales, the characters are serpents. For example, in “The Serpent Sacrifice”, there is a serpent who demands villagers to send their daughters as sacrifice, and it is later killed by a brave girl, Chi. In a similar vein, in “The Great Serpent”, the protagonist is a big serpent who has swallowed lots of men and is finally killed by Li Ji. Additionally, there are some stories about nonhuman characters as fish and rats. For example, “Woman into Carp” is mainly about a carp who changes into a beautiful woman and seduces men to sleep with it. In “The Rat in Human Dress”, the protagonist is a rat who wears human dress. It comes out several times a day to announce the death of a man named Zhou Nan, who simply ignores its warning. As a result, the rat falls down and dies, with its human dress disappearing. In some other Zhiguai tales, nonhuman characters appear as horses (“Horse into Silkworm”), ants (“The King of the Ants”), birds (“The Bird That Could Speak”, “The Yellow Bird”), and monkeys (“The Mother Monkey and Its Son”, “The Mountain Ogre”). In some Zhiguai tales, a transformed human being eventually changes back into human form. For instance, in “Man into Tiger”, a man named Xie Taoshun first changes into a tiger and later changes back into a man. Xie catches a strange disease and loses his mind. When taking some drugs, he runs completely wild and turns into a tiger, who eats a countless number of people. One day, when he finishes eating a woman plucking mulberry leaves, he turns into a man again. Similarly, in “Huang Miao Transformed into a Tiger”, a man named Huang Miao is taken by spirits to

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the deepest part of the mountain forests, where he is transformed into a tiger. After devouring 30 people, he resumes human form. The third type of nonhuman character in Zhiguai tales is fairies from heaven, who come to the human world to help those in need and sometimes marry men of virtue. For instance, in “The Jade Maiden”, a man named Xuan Chao dreams of a girl who tells him that she is a fairy from heaven and will marry him. One day, the girl does visit him in person and marries him. Being together for several years, Xuan reveals the secret of Jade Maiden’s immortal identity, which leads to their separation. In “Dong Yong, the Filial Son”, the central character is a weaving maid from heaven. Sympathetic for Dong Yong’s uprightness and honesty, the fairy marries him and helps him to pay for his debt. When the mission is completed and Dong is set free, the maid leaves him and disappears into the air. The fourth type of nonhuman character in Zhiguai tales is nonhuman-like material objects, such as trees, gold, silver, and copper. For instance, in “The Haunted House”, characters are silver, gold, copper, and pestle, and have been haunting a house for many years. In “Tree God Huang”, the central character is an old tree, which has an incredible predictive power, fulfilling people’s wishes to have rain and to avoid war, etc. In “Han Ping and His Wife”, two great catalpa trees spring up from the graves of two lovers, with their branches, roots, and twigs all intertwined once the two lovers are buried. In unnatural narrative works, there exists a kind of space that can be either physically or logically impossible (Alber 2016: 186). In Zhiguai tales, there exist two kinds of unnatural space: physically nonexistent space and space with exceeding capacity, both of which contribute to the impossibility of the storyworld. In physically nonexistent space, characters accidentally arrive and spend some time. For instance, in “Huang Yuan”, a man is led by a black dog to a physically nonexistent place of the mountain and then gets married to a fairy. Similarly, in “Two Hunters”, Yuan Xiang and Gen Shuo get lost on their way to hunting. Then, they scale a sheer red precipice named Red Wall Mountain. Going inside, they find a physically nonexistent plain and meet two girls, whom they take as wives. The most well-known tale of unnatural space of this kind is “Tao Hua Yuan Ji” (“record of the peach blossom spring”). The story tells of a fisherman who rows up a stream and finds an entire grove of peach trees in bloom, which leads him to a cave. It opens up to a little village perfect in every respect, yet hidden from the rest of the world. Once they have gotten out of the grove, despite repeated efforts by the fisherman and numerous others to return, they could never find the way. A more radical type of unnatural space in Zhiguai tales is one with exceeding capacity. “A Foreign Master” is a typical example. In this story, a magician can perform many impossible acts, such as swallowing knives, belching fire, and spitting out pearls, jade, gold, and silver. One day, when tired of walking, he sits in a basket of a bearer, which is much smaller than him. Incredibly, when the magician steps into the basket, the basket is not getting bigger, nor is he getting smaller. Upon lifting the load, the bearer feels that the basket is not heavier than before. On their way, the bearer stops for meals, while the magician takes out many good foods inside the basket and invites the bearer to eat with him. Then, the magician

Zhiguai tales of the Six Dynasties in China 61 intends to invite his wife to have meals together with him in the basket, so he produces her from his mouth; she is an attractive woman in her 20s. When they have almost finished the meal, the magician falls asleep. Then, the woman produces her lover from her mouth to have meals with her in the basket. Though there are now three people in the basket, it is no wider than before. When the magician is about to wake up, the woman puts the young man back into her mouth before the magician puts the woman back into his mouth. When they arrive at the capital, the magician plays a trick upon a rich and high-ranking family. He first puts the family’s treasured horse inside a five-peck earthenware vessel, and then puts the parents of the family in a vase. In all the events narrated in this tale, characters have exceeded the capacity of the space that holds them. It is physically impossible for a man to sit in a small basket. It is also physically impossible for a man to produce a woman from his mouth, for a produced woman to produce a young man from her mouth, for three people to gather in a small basket, for a horse to be put into a small vessel, and for two adults to stay in a small vase. The unnaturalness of Zhiguai tales also lies in their unnatural time, which is typically shown in the different speed of time experienced by characters. Teresa Bridgeman argues that “Narratives unfold in time, and the past, present, and future of a given event or action affect our interpretation of that action” (Bridgeman 2007: 52). As one of the basic elements of narrative, time plays an important role in the making of the storyworld. In “Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative” (2009), Marie-Laure Ryan lists four principles of narrative time: “1. Time flows, and it does so in a fixed direction. 2. You cannot fight this flow and go back in time. 3. Causes always precede their effects. 4. The past is written once for all” (Ryan 2009: 142). In particular, she examines a number of narratives that violate these principles. What I want to add here is a kind of temporal paradox that characters experience different speeds of time, which can be found in a number of Zhiguai tales. For instance, in “Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao”, two men go into the deep mountain to gather mulberry bark. Staying in the mountain for 13 days, they have completely used up their provisions and are starving to death. Then, they happen to enter a place where girls dwell, and they marry two of them. Half a year later, both Liu and Ruan get very homesick, and they go back home. Upon returning home, they are surprised to find everything changed. By inquiry they finally know that seven generations have gone since the time they entered the mountain, while to them it has been only half a year. Similarly, in “Cypress Pillow”, a merchant, Tang Lin, enters a temple to pray for good fortune. The curate of the temple has a pillow made of cypress, in which there is a small crack. The curate asks Tang to sleep beside the crack if he is not married. Entering the pillow, Tang sees a big jade palace, where he meets Marshall Zhao. Zhao arranges a good marriage for him. During the time he is in the pillow, Tang raises six children, four boys and two girls, and is promoted to Attendant within the Yellow Gates by the Assistant Director of the Imperial library. Running into trouble and adversity in his career, Tang is asked by the curate to get out of the pillow. Though Tang has spent quite a long time inside the world of the pillow, only an instant has passed in the world outside the pillow.

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Transgressing storyworld boundaries and unnaturalness at the global level When examining the unnaturalness of Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio, I draw a distinction among three types of boundary-crossing between different worlds: boundary-crossing between the world of the dead and the world of the living, boundary-crossing between the world of art and the world of reality, and boundary-crossing between the world of sprits and the world of human beings (Shang 2017b: 63–64). To continue working along this line of distinction, I attempt to investigate three major categories of boundary-crossing in Zhiguai tales: boundary-crossing between the world of the dead and the world of the living, boundary-crossing between the world of spirits and the world of human beings, and boundary-crossing between the world of animals and the world of human beings, all of which are physically and humanly impossible. The impossibility of boundary-crossing in Zhiguai tales is exemplified, first of all, in boundary-crossing between the world of the dead and the world of the living. For instance, in “Li Chu”, a man dies of an epidemic, and his wife stays with the corpse, but at midnight, the corpse gets up and takes away a golden ring from her and dies again. His wife is surprised to find out that the man comes to life again by daybreak. Recalling his experience in the world of the dead, he says that when he was in the other world, he noticed the officials taking bribes from others. Therefore, he promised that he would give them the golden ring from his wife, so they let him come back to the world of living temporarily to take it. Once the officials in the hell have the golden ring, they set him free, and thus he comes back to life again. Similarly, in “Zhao Tai and His Experiences in Hell”, there is a man who also has experienced death and comes to life again later. When he is 35 years old, Zhao feels a sudden pain in his heart and dies later. After his death, his corpse remains very warm and his body flexible. He has been placed on the ground for ten days, and then he comes to life after making a noise in his throat like rain one morning. Zhao narrates his experience in hell, where he serves as an inspector of waterworks. Vividly, he tells others how he has witnessed those sinners being punished in hell, some of whom are poked through their tongues with needles, while others are bare-headed or cooked in huge cauldrons over hot stoves. When the overseer finds out that Zhao still has another 30 years to live, he sends Zhao back to life again, asking him to tell those who are living to do good. A similar story of death and revival is also written in “Cheng Daohui’s Return from Hell”. In this tale, Cheng Daohui is a man who has been dead and is revived several days later. Recalling his experience after death, he narrates what he has witnessed and experienced in hell, in particular how sinners are punished: they are snapped by dogs, bitten into several hundred pieces, flesh fallen off and scattered, mouths pierced, sinews and bones broken apart and fallen off. There are also many other tales about boundary-crossing between the world of the dead and the world of the living in Zhiguai tales, such as “Tong Feng’s Miracles”, “Shu Li, the Shaman”, and “The Girl Who Sold Ceruse”. The second type of boundary-crossing in Zhiguai tales is attributed to boundarycrossing between the world of spirits and the world of human beings, which is

Zhiguai tales of the Six Dynasties in China 63 typically shown in marriage between a human being and a ghost or marriage between a human being and a fairy. For instance, in “Lu Chong”, when a man hunts outside, he is led to a settlement, which is just like a government office. He is invited in and introduced to Privy Treasurer Cui, who arranges a marriage between his daughter and Lu. Married for three days, Lu is informed that his wife is pregnant. When he gets back home, Lu is told that Cui has been dead; the place Lu visited is nowhere but Cui’s tomb. In other words, Lu has married a ghost. Unexpectedly, three years later, Lu meets his ghost wife, who is now the mother of his son and sends the boy to his side. There are some other stories, in Zhiguai tales, about marriage between human beings and ghosts, such as “The Daughter of Li Chongwen” and “The Daughter of King Wu”. In addition, boundary-crossing between the world of spirits and the world of human beings is also shown in marriage between human beings and fairies. For instance, in “The Pure Maiden of the White Waters”, a fairy from the Milky Way goes down to the earth, cooking for a young man named Xie Rui. In “River God”, a man gets married to the daughter of the River God. In “The Jade Maiden from Heaven”, Xuan Chao meets and gets married to a Jade Maiden, who is sent by the King of Heaven. “Dong Yong, the Filial Son” also tells a similar story of marriage between a human being and a fairy. In this tale, the very filial man, Dong Yong, when his father dies sells himself as a slave for a funeral. When his mourning comes to an end and he is ready to return to his master to serve his unfilled obligation, he meets and marries the Weaving Girl of Heaven sent by the Emperor of Heaven to repay the debt. The third type of boundary-crossing in Zhiguai tales is caused by boundarycrossing between the world of animals and the world of human beings. Consider “The Dog Called Pan Hu” as an example. In this story, there is an old woman in the emperor’s palace who has had an ear infection. A doctor extracts a big earwig from her and places the insect in a gourd. Sometime later, the head insect has turned into a dog, which is called Pan Hu and raised as a pet. During the time when the state is troubled by Rong barbarians under General Wu, the king declares that anyone who obtains the head of General Wu could marry his youngest daughter. As it turns out, Pan Hu goes to the royal chambers with General Wu’s head between his teeth. Though the ministers are strongly against the king’s decision to marry his youngest daughter to Pan Hu, the youngest daughter herself persuades the king to keep his words. Therefore, the dog Pan Hu has married the youngest daughter of the king and taken her to the Southern Mountains. Three years later, the dog and the girl have given birth to six boys and six girls. Unnatural elements such as unnatural characters, unnatural space, and unnatural time contribute to the impossibility of storyworlds in Zhiguai tales at the local level, while the three types of boundary-crossing elaborated here contribute to the impossibility of the storyworld of Zhiguai tales at the global level, all of which reveal the unnaturalness and fictionality of Zhiguai tales as a particular genre. Combined, the impossible storyworlds and the transgressing of storyworld boundaries, to some degree, bring us up against “the unknown and unaccountable” (Hu 2001: 542).

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Beyond naturalizing and unnaturalizing readings: toward an ethical interpretive option When dealing with unnatural narrative, unnatural narratologists propose two competing interpretive options: naturalizing reading strategies proposed by Jan Alber (Alber 2016: 47–48) and unnaturalizing reading strategies proposed by Henrik Skov Nielsen (Nielsen 2013: 239–260). About the differences between them, I want to reiterate what I have argued in “Unnatural Narratology: Core Issues and Critical Debates” (2015): the “essence of the naturalizing reading is to eliminate the unnaturalness of unnatural narratives by resorting to cognitive frameworks of real world knowledge so as to make them more readable; while the purpose of unnaturalizing reading is to preserve the unnaturalness of unnatural narratives and to read it from the perspective of fictionality and artifice” (Shang 2015b: 185). As an alternative to these two competing approaches, I would like to call for an intersection and synthesis of unnatural narratology with ethical narratology.3 I agree with Contzen, who argues that “The transgressions unnatural narrative elements induce are never neutral. . . . As a political strategy, the unnatural is never an end in itself, and hence absolutely requires that we as critics pay close attention to the historical and cultural circumstances within which any unnatural narrative operates” (Contzen 2017: 20). As far as Zhiguai tales are concerned, unnatural narrative, in Chinese historical and cultural context, can be seen as a means for an ethical end. When examining Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio, I have pointed out that “instead of paying much attention to their fictionality and defamiliarizing effects, Chinese audiences are more interested in the moral values conveyed by them, among which is the idea that virtue will be rewarded, while vice will be punished” (Shang 2017b: 64). To a large extent, Zhiguai tales also endorse the idea of “virtue rewarded, and vice punished”. Consider “The King of the Ants” as an example of a tale about virtue being rewarded. In this story, the central character is an ant who has been helped by a man named Tong Chaozhi to go across a river. In his dream, Tong meets a stranger who claims to be a king of ants saved by him and states that if he were in difficulties, the ant would help him out. More than ten years later, when Tong is imprisoned because of a false accusation during the war, he remembers the king of ants and spreads the news of his trouble to the ants. One night, he dreams of the king of ants, who encourages him to escape to the Yuhang Mountains so as to receive a general amnesty to be issued by the emperor soon. Waking up from his dream, Tong finds the wooden pillory of the jail bitten by the ants. Following the suggestion given by the king of ants, Tong escapes to the mountains and receives the amnesty. In other words, Tong is saved by his kindness to the ants. “Dong Yong, the Filial Son” is another example of virtue being rewarded. Dong’s filialness deeply touches the Heavenly Emperor’s heart, who sends the Weaving Maiden from Heaven to marry him and to help him to repay his debt. Other handy examples can be found in “The Lady of the White Stream” and “The Man Who Risked His Life for His Friend”. Equally illuminating are Zhiguai tales about vice being punished, among which “Zhao Tai and His Experiences in Hell” is a typical example. Returning from hell,

Zhiguai tales of the Six Dynasties in China 65 Zhao Tai recalls what he has experienced there, in particular his impression of how sinners are punished in their next life. He vividly narrates that There were several hundred bureau officials who were examining and collating documents, saying that those who had engaged in killing were to become mayflies which are born in the morning and die in the evening; those who engaged in stealing and robbery were to become pigs and sheep, to be butchered and cut up by others; those who engaged in sexual wantonness were to become cranes, ducks, and deer; the double-tongued were to become owls; those who did not repay their debts were to become donkeys, mules, oxen, and horses. (Kao 1985: 170) To put it another way, once in hell, almost all sins committed will be measured, and sinners will be punished accordingly. To avoid being punished, living people are advised to do good and to behave properly. Upon Zhao’s return to the world of the living, the overseer suggests: You have now seen just what the retribution for sins in hell is like; you should tell this to the people of the world, and advise them to do good. The effects of good and evil committed by a person follow him like the shadow of his body and the echo of his voice. Shouldn’t one be careful?! (Kao 1985: 170–171) From the perspective of rhetorical narratology, the unnaturalness of Zhao’s traveling to hell and returning to the world of the living (or, more specifically, the unnatural boundary-crossing between the world of the dead and the world of the living) can be largely seen as an ethics of the telling, which serves a larger purpose of relating an ethics of the told if viewed from Jams Phelan’s rhetorical theory of narrative (Phelan 2014: 531–546). In a similar vein, “Cheng Daohui’s Return from Hell” is another example of vice being punished. In this tale, when Cheng is dead and traveling in hell, he witnesses how those committing sins have received retributions. In particular, all scenes he has encountered stress the point of vice being punished and sins being measured. For instance, returning to the world of the living, Cheng vividly recalls that He passed many cities, all of which were hells. There were crowds of many millions of people, all receiving retribution for their sins. He saw dogs snapping at the sinners, biting them into a hundred pieces. Their flesh fell off and was scattered; their flowing blood covered the ground. And there were also flocks of birds with beaks like sharp pointed spears. They flew very swiftly, venomously attacking the sinners, as if thirsty for their blood. They pierced their mouths, pecking holes all the way through their bodies, the people so tormented writhed and screamed, and their sinews and bones broke apart and fell off. (Phelan 2014: 173)

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Both “Zhao Tai and His Experiences in Hell” and “Cheng Daohui’s Return from Hell” place much emphasis on their didactic function, which according to Nie Zhenzhao is not only “the basic function of literature but also demonstrates the ethical values of literature” (Nie 2014: 14). I assume that it has much to do with China’s particular historical and cultural context. Given the constant wars and political instability in the Six Dynasties, Hu Ying is right in arguing that Zhiguai tales, “in their fantastic imagination, may have . . . rendered a creative response to the fear and anxiety of the age” (Hu 2001: 554).

Conclusion Though a brief account of Zhiguai tales of the Six Dynasties in China reveals that many of their unnatural narrative features are shared by Western unnatural narratives, Chinese unnatural narrative, in its particular cultural context, also challenges the existing reading strategies offered by Western unnatural narratologists. In this chapter, I try to go beyond naturalizing and unnaturalizing readings by proposing an ethical interpretive option to emphasize the didactic and instructive function of Zhiguai tales, which echoes what Nie Zhenzhao argues in “Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism” (2015): “The primary purpose of literature is not to provide entertainment but to offer moral examples for human beings to follow, to enrich their material and spiritual life with moral guidance, and to achieve their self-perfection with moral experience” (Nie 2015: 88). As I have pointed out previously, “For most of its history, narratology has been not only an almost exclusively European or Anglo-American, or by extension Western, concern, and the discussion on narratives has also almost exclusively been conducted in just a few major European languages” (Shang 2017b: 66). To subvert the hegemony of Western narrative theory, a call for a transnational and comparative turn in narrative studies is much needed. In doing so, we can not only draw readers’ attention to those periphery and marginalized narratives produced in places other than England and America, but also demonstrate how the narratives in those places are written and to be explained differently from their Western counterparts. Zhiguai tales of the Six Dynasties in China analyzed in this chapter are just one of the examples demonstrating a different unnatural narrative tradition in East Asia, and more work in this line remains to be done in the future.

Notes 1 For my previous work on unnatural narrative in national literatures other than English, cf. Shang (2016, 2017a, 2017b). 2 This tale as well as other tales analyzed in this chapter are taken from Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang’s edited volume The man who sold a ghost: Chinese tales of the 3rd6th centuries (1974) and Karl S. Y. Kao’s edited collection Chinese classical tales of the supernatural and the fantastic: Selections from the third to the tenth century (1985). 3 For contributions to ethical narratology, cf. Berning (2013), Müller (2015), Newton (1995), and Phelan (2005, 2007, 2014).

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Delving into impossible storyworlds of terror The unnaturalness of Hassan Blasim’s short narrative fiction

On contemporary Iraqi literature and arts, Ferial J. Ghazoul comments with much regret that “Literature and the arts have been marginalized in the discourse on contemporary Iraq, particularly in the last three decades. They are overshadowed by political and economic discussions” (Ghazoul 2009: 233). However, Ghazoul happily notices that “in reality, literature and the arts continue to be of relevance in Iraqi culture despite the series of catastrophes that have beset Iraq in the last half-century” (Ghazoul 2009: 233). Ghazoul’s argument reminds us of what he has claimed earlier about Iraqi fictional writings: The collective Iraqi experience in the second half of the twentieth century – when modem sensibilities were being formed – has been characterized by upheavals, wars, revolutions, violence and sanctions amounting to a historical nightmare and a horror serial. The social and psychological effects of such sharp turns and devastating changes have been insufficiently studied, but they were imprinted in the poetics of fiction, albeit obliquely. (Ghazoul 2004: 1) Today’s Iraq remains much the same as it was a decade ago, continuously troubled by “upheavals, wars, revolutions, violence and sanctions” (Ghazoul 2004: 1). To register this historically nightmarish experience, a number of Iraqi writers have started to experiment with “strange” and “unhomely” discourses,1 among whom Hassan Blasim is particularly noteworthy: he is the first Arabic writer to win the U.K.’s International Foreign Fiction Prize2 and has been labeled “the best writer of Arabic fiction alive”.3 In fact, as it is sharply observed by Lane Ashfeldt, Blasim has “come to English-speaking readers via an unusual route: self-published online in Arabic and collected in book form only upon English translation” (Ashfeldt 2015: 10). To further extend Ashfeldt’s observation, I would like to emphasize that Blasim has caught the attention of the English-speaking world not only via the unusual route of circulation (from Arabic to English) but also via the form of unnatural narrative, which makes his short stories explicitly refer to “the conflicts of recent years in Iraq and the surrounding area, albeit in unpredictable ways” (Ashfeldt 2015: 10). Though generally seen as a writer on the Iraq war, Blasim does not directly write about the war. Instead, he attempts to depict what post-war

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Iraq is like. In his writings, the side effects of the war are more fearful and disastrous than the war itself. Many of Blasim’s short stories fall into a broad category of unnatural narrative, which “violates physical laws, logical principles, or standard anthropomorphic limitations of knowledge by representing storytelling scenarios, narrators, characters, temporalities, or spaces that could not exist in the actual world” (Alber 2014: 887). Along the lines of the most recent scholarship of unnatural narratology (Alber 2016; Alber and Heinze 2011b; Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson[eds.]. 2013; Richardson 2015), this chapter, first of all, attempts to reveal the unnatural ways of making up impossible storyworlds in Blasim’s fictional works, namely, dead narrators, conflicting events, and ontological metalepsis. Second, it analyzes a set of unnatural acts closely related to characters’ deaths and their consequential corporeal impairments. Third, it examines the mentality of Blasim’s characters by focusing on a particular type of unnatural mind – paranoia mind, which in radical cases involves two conflicting minds simultaneously emergent in one character.

Unnatural ways of worldmaking, or delving into impossible storyworlds It is generally agreed that worldmaking is one of the fundamental functions of narrative. David Herman considers “narratives as blueprints for worldmaking” (Herman 2009: 105). In his conceptual framework, “storyworlds are mental models of the situations and events being recounted – of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what manner” (Herman 2009: 105–106). Viewed in this light, storyworlds can be decomposed of such narrative elements as situations, events, narrators, characters, space, time, etc. I agree with Herman, who assumes that “worldmaking practices are of central importance to narrative scholars of all sorts” (Herman 2009: 105). However, it needs to be pointed out that classical narratologists and other strands of postclassical narratologists are mainly interested in how natural worldmaking practices contribute to building up a possible mimetic world; while unnatural narratologists are keen on how unnatural worldmaking practices contribute to building up an impossible anti-mimetic world. Many of Blasim’s stories can be properly categorized as unnatural narrative that tells impossible stories. Jan Alber restricts the use of the term “unnatural” to texts about storyworlds that contain “physically, logically, or humanly impossible scenarios or events”, which are impossible according to “the known laws governing the physical world, accepted principles of logic (such as the principle of non-contradiction), or standard human limitations of knowledge” (Alber 2013: 449). In my opinion, no matter “how unnatural a narrative text is, its unnaturalness as well as unnatural elements contained can be on display at the story level and/or the discourse level” (Shang 2015b: 175). Along this line of thinking, I shall mainly focus on the unnaturalness of Blasim’s narrators at the discourse level, and the unnaturalness of events and characters at the story level. The impossibility and unnaturalness of Blasim’s short stories are, first and foremost, featured by dead narrators; while in the real world, it is impossible for a

Delving into impossible storyworlds of terror 69 corpse or a dead person to tell stories. For instance, in “The Corpse Exhibition”, the narrator is already killed by the mortician. Despite the fact that he is dead, the narrator recounts three stories told by the mortician in addition to telling his own story about how his stomach has been thrust into a knife. In “An Army Newspaper”, a dead man is taken out of the cemetery by the writer to tell the story. Very interestingly, in the eyes of the writer, the dead man is certainly a reliable narrator. He straightforwardly argues that “There’s no need to kick him in the balls for him to tell the story honestly and impartially, because the dead are usually honest, even the bastards among them” (Blasim 2013a: 39). The corpse feels grateful to the writer, who has brushed the fly from his corpse, for the help, and for the rare opportunity for telling stories. He says, “Your Honor, ten years ago – that is, before I ended my life – I was working for an army newspaper, supervising the cultural page, which dealt with war stories and poems” (Blasim 2013a: 39). Thanks to his job as a journalist of an army newspaper, the dead man received five stories sent from a soldier. When he knew that the soldier was killed in the latest attack, the journalist published the stories in his own name. To his surprise, the stories continued to arrive in large number from the soldier though he was dead. The journalist went to the soldier’s home and confirmed that the solider was shot dead with a sniper’s bullet. The journalist even dug the solider out of the grave and burned him. However, he still received the stories from the soldier. Compared with the dead journalist who still had his corpse, the dead solider was more unnatural in the sense that he was not only dead but also lost his corpse, which had been burnt by the journalist. The use of a dead narrator is also found in “The Iraqi Christ”. In this short story, the narrator “I” is killed by friendly fire from the American force on a joint patrol. There are a few lines displaying the unnaturalness of the dead narrator: “I was shot three times in the head. I met Christ in our next world, and we were overjoyed. He told me how he was inexplicably drawn to that young man in the kebab restaurant” (Blasim 2013a: 99). Though dead, “I” tells the story about Daniel the Christ; while Daniel tells the story about how he was attracted by the young man and pressed the button of the explosive belt, despite the fact that he was already dead. How is it possible for these narrators to tell stories when they are already dead? Equally unnatural are a set of events contained in many of Blasim’s short stories, which are against the governing laws of physics and logic. For instance, in “The Green Zone Rabbit”, the narrator “I” finds an egg produced by the rabbit. The narrator says: One day, I woke up at dawn, as usual. I fetched some clean water and food and went to inspect my friend the rabbit. I opened his hutch and he hopped out into the garden. There was an egg in the hutch. I picked it up and examined it, trying to understand the absurdity of it. It was too small to be a chicken’s egg. (Blasim 2013a: 31–32) Our biological knowledge tells us that it is impossible for a rabbit to produce an egg at all. Similarly, in “The Truck to Berlin”, one of the Iraqi young men has

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turned into a wolf, who tears all the other characters apart, drinks their blood, and devours their flesh. It reminds us of Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, who wakes up and finds himself transformed into a large insect. Both stories about metamorphosis are as impossible as they are absurd. The impossibility of events is also contained in “A Thousand and One Knives”, in which there is a man named Jaafar, who has a mystical power to make knives disappear, and there is also a woman named Souad, who is able to make knives reappear. According to the narrator, when terrorists decided to cut off Jaafar’s arm in order to teach him a lesson, an unbelievable thing happened: “whenever the terrorists approached Jaafar, the swords they were holding disappeared and tears were streaming from his eyes. The terrorists didn’t have a single sword or knife left” (Blasim 2013b: 135). Supernatural power of this kind can be named unnatural literary telepathy, which has made its appearance in another short story, “The Iraqi Christ”. In this story, Daniel the Christ has the radar-like gift of predicting oncoming danger and attack. For instance, when he feels a stomach ache and leaves the trench, three bombs fall right on this site 35 minutes later. Given the boundary between the real world and the fictional world, there is another type of unnaturalness shown in Blasim’s stories: ontological metalepsis, or boundary-crossing. Take “A Wolf”, for example. In this short story, the author Hassan Blasim shows up, meeting his character Salman and listening to his story. As is known, in fictional works, characters are created by the author, and they are existents in the fictional world; while the author is an existent in the real world. How is it possible for an author to jump from the real world into the fictional world? It is equally impossible for any character to jump from the fictional world into the real world. Even though “A Wolf” does not offer information about whether it is the author Hassan Blasim or his created character Salman who has transgressed the ontological boundary, their meeting is sufficient enough to reveal the unnaturalness and impossibility of metalepsis. Like many other unnatural narrative works, Blasim’s short stories produce defamiliarizing effects and bring challenges to readers’ cognition. It should be pointed out that the literary experiments done by Blasim also serve a larger ideological purpose. In my most recent article “Unnatural Narratology: Core Issues and Critical Debates” (2015), I observe that “unnatural narrative is rather useful for realizing some ideological purposes” (Shang 2015b: 181). In the case of Blasim’s short narrative fictions, the unnatural narrative helps him to raise readers’ awareness of Iraq’s harsh reality and the unfavorable living conditions of Iraqi people, which accounts for why many of his short stories are “often disturbing to read” (Ashfelfdt 2015: 10).

Performance of unnatural acts: terror exhibition and corporeal impairments In an interview, Blasim admits that “The violence that has taken place in Iraq has reached the most extreme peaks of insanity. It is not magical realism, it is nightmarish realism”.4 The terror caused by violence is one of the most salient features

Delving into impossible storyworlds of terror 71 displayed in Blasim’s short narrative fiction. In particular, the terror is mainly related to characters’ deaths and their body impairments. At issue is whether there is any possibility for them to be free from being tortured, impaired, and slaughtered. Having been born and growing up in Iraq, which has now turned into a chaotic place, Blasim’s characters seem to have two possible alternatives: they can either choose to migrate to another country or choose to continue staying on their native soil. Regrettably, in Blasim’s writings, both alternatives do not work for his characters, whose fate is doomed to be inescapable. Though some characters are lucky enough to succeed in migrating to another country, their lives also end in tragedy. For instance, in “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”, Salim Abdul Husain is born and grows up in Iraq. Before his migration to Holland, he works in the cleaning department for the municipality, where he tries to collect valuables from the dead when he sweeps and cleans their bodies on the street in order to “buy a visa to go to Holland and escape this hell of fire and death” (Blasim 2013a: 187). To ensure his success of migration and application for asylum, Salim even changes his name to Carlos Fuentes. Once in Holland, he learns Dutch, refuses to live on welfare, works hard, and marries a Dutch woman. However, to his disappointment and fear, Fuentes has one nightmare after another, in which he cannot speak Dutch, and even plans a car bomb in the center of Amsterdam. No matter how hard he tries to avoid the nightmares, he cannot stop them from occurring. One night, in his nightmare, Fuentes comes face to face with Salim, who has been ridiculing him. Out of his anger, Fuentes shoots Salim, who jumps out of the window from the sixth floor. However, it turns out to be Fuentes who is dead on the pavement. Neither Fuentes’s wife, his brother, nor the narrator bemoan his death and poor fate. Instead, they seem to be indifferent to his death. The narrator deliberately assumes Fuentes’s perspective to view the Dutch newspaper’s report of his death and his brothers’ act of taking his corpse back to Iraq to bury it in Najaf. The narrator says, “Perhaps Fuentes would have forgiven the Dutch newspapers, which wrote that an Iraqi man had committed suicide at night by jumping from a sixth-floor widow, instead of writing that a Dutch national had committed suicide. But he will never forgive his brothers, who had his body taken back to Iraq and buried in the cemetery in Najaf” (Blasim 2013a: 195–196). The Dutch newspaper’s report and his brothers’ action of taking Fuentes’s corpse back to Iraq are for the same reason: Fuentes is an Iraqi man, Salim. Ironically, Fuentes would not forgive his brothers’ action of taking him back to Iraq as he would have forgiven the newspapers’ report of him as an Iraqi man. More ironically, the narrator does not show any sympathies for Fuentes’s death, nor does he show any interest in the story about him. On the contrary, the narrator seems to take an artistic perspective on a photo of Fuentes taken by a photographer. He says: The most beautiful part of the Carlos Fuentes story, however, is the image captured by an amateur photographer who lived close to the scene of the incident. The young man took the picture from a low angle. The police had covered the body; the only part that protruded from under the blue sheet was

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Delving into impossible storyworlds of terror his outstretched right hand. The picture was in black and white, but the stone in the ring on Carlos Fuentes’s finger glowed red in the foreground, like a sun in hell. (Blasim 2013a: 196)

Compared with Fuentes’s death, in the narrator’s opinion, the picture of his corpse seems to be more artistically beautiful. He deliberately mentions the stone in the ring on Fuentes’s finger, which glows “like a sun in hell” (Blasim 2013a: 196). The narrator’s notice of the ring just reminds us of Salim’s interest in it from a dead man’s finger when he was sweeping a street in Iraq. It is such an irony that he was not interested in the man’s dismembered corpse just exactly as the narrator is now not interested in his corpse. In addition, there is another irony in the narrator’s interest in the ring on Salim’s finger. Throughout his life, Salim had dreamt of escaping from the “hell of fire and death” (Blasim 2013a: 187), for which he tried every means possible to apply for asylum and migrate to another country, to change his name, to pay taxes, to work hard, to learn a foreign language, and to marry a foreign woman. However, his identity as an Iraqi man does not change at all, nor does he succeed in escaping from the hell-like country after his death, since his corpse is taken back and buried in the place where he came from. The red stone on the finger glows like a sun; while Salim, like the corpse from whom he took the ring, remains in hell. However, compared with many other characters of Blasim’s writings, Salim is fortunate at least in two aspects: (1) when he was alive, he did succeed in migrating to a foreign country and temporarily escaping from the “hell of fire and death” (Blasim 2013a: 187) for a period of time, while others failed to migrate; and (2) when he was dead, his corpse remained as a whole, while others’ corpses were dismembered into pieces. Consider “The Truck to Berlin” as an example. In the narrator’s opinion, the story cannot be more scary. At the very beginning, he claims that “This story took place in darkness and if I were destined to write it again, I would record only the cries of terror which rang out at the time and the other mysterious noises that accompanied the massacre” (Blasim 2008: 69). At issue is why the story took place in darkness. Why were there cries of terror? What were those mysterious noises? And what was the massacre? According to the narrator, there were 35 young Iraqis who paid $4,000 individually to a Turkish smuggler who would drive them from Istanbul to Berlin through a closed fruit truck. As agreed, the trip would last for seven days, during which the truck would drive by night and stop during the daytime, and everyone must keep silent and take no mobile phones in the truck. The Berlin truck went smoothly for the first two nights, and it came to a complete stop on the third night before it sped away from the chasing police. For hours, the truck was abandoned by the driver. Feeling frightened and scared, no one came out of the truck, despite that there were chaos, sounds, and smells. On the third day, there was suddenly a burst of resounding screaming in the truck, which “sounded like an unknown force which transformed the uproar and chaos of the truck into a cruel layer of ice” (Blasim 2008: 74). After the scream, all became quite. The Serbian police found the truck surrounded by a

Delving into impossible storyworlds of terror 73 forest on all sides four days later. The moment when the police opened the back door of the truck, an implausible scene appeared: When the policemen opened the back door of the truck, a young man soaked in blood jumped down from inside and ran like a madman towards the forest. The police chased him but he disappeared into the vast forest. In the truck there were thirty-four bodies. They had not been torn apart with knives or any other weapon. Rather it was the claws and beaks of eagles, the teeth of crocodiles and other unknown instruments that had been at work on them. The truck was full of shit and piss and blood, livers ripped apart, eyes gouged out, intestines just as though hungry wolves had been there. Thirty-four young men had become a large soggy mass of flesh, blood and shit. (Blasim 2008: 75) Against readers’ expectations, the 34 Iraqi young men not only failed to be smuggled to Berlin but also lost their lives on this trip. Even worse is the regrettable fact that their corpses were dismembered, with their livers ripped apart and eyes gouged out. To be short, their bodies have turned into a mixed mass of “flesh, blood and shit” (Blasim 2008: 75). The narrator seems to suggest that it must be one of the 35 men who had torn all the characters apart and eaten them. The resounding scream must have come from the characters at the moment when they were scared and being slaughtered. But what kind of person was he? According to Jankovic, the Serbian policeman, the man was a wolf. He said that “As soon as the man reached the forest he started to run on all fours, then turned into a grey wolf, before he vanished” (Blasim 2008: 75). It needs to be noted that the public and the newspaper did not show any sympathies for these young men and their dismembered corpses. They cared less about the human atrocity and the terror than the disappearance of the young man, who, according to the police, “crossed the border into Hungary” (Blasim 2008: 75). Their statement is in sharp contrast to what Jankovic claims, who is considered to be a madman. The newspapers’ interview about the disappearance of the young man and the inconsistences of the answers offered by Jankovic and the police only divert people’s attention from the 34 victims, who deserve more sympathies from the public. In fact, most characters choose to stay in Iraq rather than migrate to foreign countries. In his fictions, Blasim seems to suggest that when staying in Iraq, these characters will either become killers to take away others’ lives or be victims slaughtered by the killers. In both cases, death and body impairments seem to be unavoidable. I shall illuminate this point by taking “The Corpse Exhibition” and “The Iraqi Christ” as two examples. The story of “The Corpse Exhibition” is narrated by a new “I” killed by the mortician, who is the person in charge of the truth and creativity department of the organization. “I” recounts three stories about killers told by the mortician. Throughout his narrations, the mortician implies that the cold-blooded killers will get promoted, while the humane ones will be abandoned and erased. According to the mortician, all killers of the group are required not only to kill their clients

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but also to exhibit their corpses. In his opinion, the exhibition of a client’s corpse is the final and most important step of their work. To use his words, “Every body you finish off is a work of art waiting for you to add the final touch, so that you can shine like a precious jewel amid the wreckage of this country. To display a corpse for others to see is the ultimate in the creativity we are seeking and that we are trying to study and benefit from” (Blasim 2013a: 5). From his twisted point of view, the most creative art of the work produced by the killer is their unique way of exhibiting the corpse. To better illuminate what he means by creativity, the mortician tells three specific stories. In the first story, the mortician considers an agent codenamed Satan’s Knife as a negative example. In one of his cases, Satan’s Knife cuts off the client’s limbs and hangs them from electrical wires, painting “the heart in dark blue, the intestines green, the liver and testicles yellow” (Blasim 2013a: 5). To readers, Satan’s Knife’s way of corpse exhibition is horrifying enough; while to the mortician, this method is classical and outdated. He considers Satan’s Knife as “a conceited fool” who does not understand “the poetry of simplicity” (Blasim 2013a: 5). To illuminate what he means by creativity, the mortician cites the case done by his favorite killer, Agent Deaf. Deaf has killed a fat woman and her baby, and he has exhibited their corpses under a dead palm tree in a busy street: the woman is naked, and her dead baby is naked and suckling at her left breast, without any trace of wounds or bullets. The mortician has given very high praise to the corpse exhibition work done by Deaf. In his opinion, “That’s a genius we lack in this century. You should have seen the woman’s enormous tits and how thin the baby was, like a pile of bones painted the color of bright white baby skin” (Blasim 2013a: 6). What the mortician shamelessly lacks is sympathy for the dead. He denies that the killers of his company are terrorists, since they are artists who try to exhibit artistic works for people, while terrorists try to take as many victims as possible in order to intimidate people. With his strategy of exhibiting the corpse, Deaf has been promoted to an important position of the company. Though Satan’s Knife and Agent Deaf vary in their creativity of exhibiting corpses, both of them are cold-blooded killers surviving well in the group. The difference is that Agent Deaf has been promoted, while Satan’s Knife has not been promoted. What if a killer were a humanitarian? What if a killer were not cruel enough to kill a client before exhibiting his corpse? The answer is that the killer himself would be dead. To explicate this point, the mortician cites an example of an agent whose nickname is the Nail. The Nail was supposed to kill his client and exhibit the corpse in a large restaurant, but he delayed his action. The mortician was unhappy to find that the Nail “had been infected with banal humanitarian feelings and, like any other sick man, had started to question the benefit of killing others” (Blasim 2013a: 8). Ironically, the Nail’s natural humanitarian feelings have been considered unnatural by the mortician in this ridiculous world. When he was found stealing the corpses from the mortuary for exhibition, he was taken and injected with some paralyzing drug by the mortician. Without losing his consciousness, the Nail witnessed and felt being dismembered by the mortician. As a result, on the next morning, in front of the gate of the Ministry of Justice,

Delving into impossible storyworlds of terror 75 There was a platform like the platforms on which the city’s statues stand, but made of a pulp of flesh and bones. On top of the platform stood a pillar of bronze, and from the pillar hung the Nail’s skin, complete and detached from his flesh with great skill, waving like a flag of victory. (Blasim 2013a: 10) There is no difficulty for us to assume that the mortician must have seen his own method of exhibiting the corpse as the most creative. However, the significant point is that, failing to kill the client and to exhibit the corpse, the Nail was killed, and his own corpse was exhibited. Failing to learn his lesson and to remain calm, the narrator began to shake and was thrust into a knife by the mortician accordingly. In my opinion, his death reconfirms and consolidates my assumption: in Blasim’s short narrative fiction, those living in Iraq will either become killers to take away others’ lives or be the victims killed by others. Or, there might be a worse case, in which a character living in Iraq can be both the killer and the victim of his act. Consider “The Iraqi Christ” as an example. In this short story, Daniel was once a solider fighting in the Kuwait War. Owing to his incredible ability to detect and foretell danger, he has been nicknamed Daniel the Christ. When American forces occupy the country, Daniel leaves the army and goes back home to take care of his elderly mother, refusing to migrate to Canada as his two sisters have done. Sadly, when he takes his mother to a restaurant one Sunday, he is threatened by a young man to take on an explosive belt and to explode it in the restaurant; otherwise his mother would be killed. Turning into a suicide bomber, Daniel sees that his mother is taken out of the restaurant by the young man before he presses the button. What can be undoubtedly assumed is that Daniel and the other customers will be blown into pieces. Ironically, the majority of unknown characters die from bombs and other terrorist activities in Iraq. However, there is a serious lack of sympathies on the part of living people for the dead. In “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”, Salim is a cleaner working for the cleaning department, the major mission of which is “to clear up in the aftermath of explosions” (Blasim 2013a: 187). One day, when an oil tank explodes near a street market, Salim and his colleagues sweep the street with much caution. It will be a misconception if readers assume that they respect and care for the dead when reading such a line as “They were sweeping the market slowly and cautiously for fear they might sweep up with the debris any human body parts left over” (Blasim 2013a: 187). As a matter of fact, their caution and slowness in sweeping the street are better explained in the next sentence: “But they were always looking for an intact wallet or perhaps a gold chain, a ring, or a watch that could still tell the time” (Blasim 2013a: 187). That said, the cleaners’ caution is mainly the result of their purpose of finding something valuable from the dead, afraid that they might miss anything of certain value if they sweep the street quickly. Compared with his colleagues, Salim seems less fortunate in finding valuables from the dead, though he eventually does find a silver ring on a man’s finger. If Salim and his colleagues’ lack of sympathy for the dead can be attributed to their profession and the fact that they see too much of them, the

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general public’s indifference to the dead would be perplexing. And if they are representing individual audiences who are indifferent to people’s death and their bodily dismemberment, what would be the general public’s response? Are they also as indifferent and unsympathetic as Salim is? Regrettably, the answers to these questions are affirmative. In “The Corpse Exhibition”, when people on a busy street stop by and see the corpses of a fat woman and her baby who was suckling at her left breast, they do not regret and sigh for the loss of two precious lives. They are less concerned with the death of the victims and incredible dismemberment done to their corpses than with their curiosity for the strategies used by the killer. Audiences seem to be impressed by the killers’ artistic killing skills: “No one could work out how the mother and her child were killed. Most people speculated that he used some mysterious poison that has not yet been classified” (Blasim 2013a: 6). Even though the general public has not become connoisseurs of the corpse exhibition like the mortician is, they have apparently lost their sympathy, one of the basic elements of human beings. According to Howard Sklar, sympathy mainly contains the following elements: 1 2 3 4

Awareness of suffering as something to be alleviated Frequently, the judgment that the suffering of another is undeserved or unfair “Negative” feelings on behalf of the sufferer Desire to help. (Sklar 2013: 53, italics original)

Apparently, none of these elements is shown from the audiences’ responses when they see the human corpses being displayed in the street. Numb and indifferent to the human atrocity occurring around them, the general public is alienated to a large degree. To me, the only reason accounting for their indifference and numbness to the cruelty of death and corpse dismemberments is that they have seen too much of them.5 In contrast to audiences’ indifference to terrorist incidents and victims’ body impairments in the fictional world, readers of the novel are expected to develop their sympathetic feelings for fictional characters. I agree with Sklar, who argues that “the experience of feeling sympathy for fictional characters sometimes may possess ethical implications beyond the moment of reading itself, and even lay a foundation for emotional and ethical sensitivity in real life” (Sklar 2013: 3). In many of Blasim’s short narrative fictions, the effect of terror is produced not only by the slaughtering, the killing, and the corpse exhibition but also by the human beings who eat and devour the corpses. “The Hole” and “The Virgin and the Soldier” are two typical examples. In “The Hole”, the narrator falls into a hole, where he meets a decrepit old man. In front of the narrator’s eyes, the old man pulls out his knife and cuts out chunks of flesh from a Russian soldier’s corpse before eating them, which is considered loathsome and disgusting by the narrator. However, staying in the hole for quite a while and feeling helpless after the death of the old man, the narrator begins to devour the old man’s corpse. The narrator deliberately places emphasis on the terror produced by the voices and

Delving into impossible storyworlds of terror 77 the appearances of the old man and later the narrator himself. However, in my opinion, compared with their appearance, their acts of devouring human corpses produce more terror. In a similar vein, in “The Virgin and the Soldier”, a solider named Hamid al-Sayid and a virgin girl named Fatin Qasim are accidently locked in a room in a clothes factory when they try to have an affair. Locked up in the room for seven days and feeling thirsty and hungry, Hamid cuts three fingers off Fatin and eats them even though she is still alive. The terrifying thing is that he drinks her blood and eats her flesh when she is not yet dead, though Hamid claims that he is not fully conscious and swears that she is already dead. As a solider and the lover of Fatin, Hamid should be her protector. On the contrary, he becomes the reason for her death, eating her alive, which makes the story all the more scary, sarcastic, and ironic. What are all these stories of terror and body impairments about? In my opinion, the signifying metaphor of the corporeal violation and dismemberment launches a sharp attack on the violation of the most basic human rights of people in Iraq. If they have no political rights and economic freedom, at least they should have their physical bodies, which are regrettably hurt and violently impaired no matter whether they are living or dead. The narrator of the “The Truck to Berlin” claims that “the world is very fragile, frightening and inhumane. All it needs is a little shake for its hideous nature and its primeval fangs to emerge” (Blasim 2008: 70). Indeed, post-war Iraq is depicted as a fragile, frightening, and inhumane world. However, all it needs is not “a little shake for its hideous nature and its primeval fangs to emerge” (Blasim 2008: 70) but a liberation of its people from “this hell of fire and death” (Blasim 2013a: 187). Perhaps, it is Blasim’s implied hope that identifying the inhumane terror and admitting its existence will be a next step for changing the situation. It is perhaps in this sense that we come to understand Blasim’s argument about the use of literature: “Writing isn’t an ambulance or the Red Cross, but throughout history literature has contributed much to human values and opened our eyes as humans to many facts” (Ashfeldt 2015: 12).

Projections of unnatural minds: madness narratives of paranoia and panic In Social Minds in the Novel (2010), Alan Palmer claims that “Novel reading is mind reading” (Palmer 2010: 21). However, it needs to be pointed out that not all fictional minds are readable. In the case of cognitive narratology, H. Porter Abbot examines so-called unreadable minds, which are classified into three broad categories: the opaque type, the catalyst, and the symbol (Abbott 2008b: 450–453). In unnatural narratology, the unnaturalness of narrative works is also claimed to be shown in the unnatural mind, which is defined as “a presented consciousness that in its functions or realizations violates the rules governing the possible world it is part of in a way that resists naturalization or conventionalization” (Iversen 2013: 97). In her work, Stefan Iversen examines the impossible mind, which “is biologically or logically impossible, such as a

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mindreading mind, a deceased mind, a radically metaleptic mind, or a mind running without the hardware that the human mind as we know it is nested in” (Iversen 2013: 104). Specifically, she focuses on the metamorphosed mind that is typically contained in those works about human–animal transformation such as Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (1915), William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), and Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales (1996). In Blasim’s short narrative fictions, there exists another type of unnatural mind, which can be named paranoia mind. In psychology, paranoia is defined as “a way of perceiving and relating to other people and to the world that is characterized by some degree of suspicion, mistrust or hostility” (Cromby and Harper 2009: 335); while in literature, paranoia is considered to be “a mode of perception that notes the connectedness between things in a hyperbolic metonyming reality” (O’Donnell 1992: 182). Many of Blasim’s works are about the mentalities of those characters on the verge of madness, which demonstrate such qualities as suspicion, mistrust, or hostility. Caused by characters’ fear and panic in reality, a paranoia mind is not only suspicious and hostile but also humanly, physically, and logically impossible in that it involves the mind of a character that could be in conflict with other characters’ minds, in conflict with one’s own mind in different states, or in conflict with other characters’ minds in combination with one’s own mind. Specifically, a conventional paranoia mind refers to a mind that goes abnormal in a psychological sense, involving a conflict of a character’s mind with the minds of others. A radical paranoia mind refers to two conflicting minds of the same character; a more radical paranoia mind refers to an impossibly combined mind of two characters in one body – the combination of a dead character’s mind with a living character’s mind. “The Reality and the Record”, “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”, and “Crosswords” are handy examples to illustrate these three types of paranoia mind. “The Reality and the Record” demonstrates a conventional paranoia mind. The narrator is an Iraqi hospital driver, who claims that he has been kidnapped by a group of terrorists. When driving an ambulance with six heads cut off from corpses on a late night, he is kidnapped. About a year and a half, he had been videotaped as “a treacherous Kurd, an infidel Christian, a Saudi terrorist, a Syrian Baathist intelligence agent, or a Revolutionary Guard from Zoroastrian Iran” (Blasim 2013a: 168). Again, on one late night, he is released and given six human heads to drive back to the hospital where he had been working before his kidnapping. At the end of the short story, it is revealed that the man had not been away for a year and a half at all, since he returned the next morning after working that night. According to the professor and other characters, the story told by the narrator is not true. What is the truth? And what is the reality? As suggested by the title, the short story assumes that there are two stories for everyone asking for asylum at the refuge center: the real story and the story for record. However, both stories merge, and “it becomes impossible to distinguish between them” (Blasim 2013a: 157). I think that paranoia is the major reason for the narrator to be sent to the psychiatric hospital three days after his telling the story. Staying long in the world of terror, the narrator does not trust those people around him, including his

Delving into impossible storyworlds of terror 79 wife and children, and he even suspects them as killers. Putting much emphasis on horror, the narrator persistently claims that They are all killers and schemers – my wife, my children, my neighbors, my colleagues, God, his prophet, the government, the newspapers, even the professor who I thought an angel, and now I have suspicions that he cameraman with the terrorist groups was the Professor himself. (Blasim 2013a: 169) He could hardly draw a distinction between the real and the imaginary. What the narrator tells can be better considered as a story of paranoia and panic rather than a story of terror. In his eyes, everyone in his country is a killer and schemer, including those who are close to him. In this light, we come to understand what he says to the immigration officer: “What matters to you is the horror” (Blasim 2013a: 167). Unlike “The Reality and the Record”, “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” demonstrates a radical paranoia mind. Salim Abdul Hasin is an Iraqi young man who changes his name to Carlos Fuentes for the purpose of migration. After migrating to Holland, he works hard, learns the Dutch language, and marries a Dutch woman. When Carlos just begins to feel good in his life, he experiences one nightmare after another. Especially in his last nightmare, his mind is split into two conflicting parts: the mind of Salim (or, the mind of his former self) and the mind of Carlos (or, the mind of his current self). In the dream, Carlos is a cold-blooded killer who kills everyone inside the building, including the children. However, “Fuentes’s nerves snapped and he panicked” (Blasim 2013a: 195) when he confronted Salim, in whose mind Fuentes is a fool to be ridiculed, and he is nobody but Salim – “Salim the Dutchman, Salim the Mexican, Salim the Iraqi, Salim the Frenchman, Salim the Indian, Salim the Pakistani, Salim the Nigerian” (Blasim 2013a: 195). Unhappy with Salim’s insult and interference with his life, Fuentes pulls a gun to shoot him, and he jumps out of the window from the sixth floor. However, it turns out to be Fuentes who has fallen dead on the floor. Terrified of being taken back to Iraq and scared of losing his immigrant status in Holland, Fuentes intends to wipe out the existence of Salim, not realizing that he and Salim are the same person, though they have different minds in contradiction. “Crosswords” demonstrates a more radical paranoia mind: an impossibly combined mind of two characters in one body. Marwan is a crosswords writer who survives double bomb explosions. He is not only traumatized and suffering from the shock but also controlled by the mind of a policeman who died from the bomb explosion. In other words, Marwan lives with two minds – the mind of the dead policeman and his own mind, both of which are always in conflict. For instance, the voice of the dead policeman inside him disturbs Marwan when he is asleep and when he is drinking; it asks him to go to the toilet and asks him to visit the dead policeman’s family, etc. Despite what Marwan does in accordance with the request made by the dead policeman, including a visit to his family and grave, the spirit of the dead policeman is still inside Marwan’s body and reluctant to

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leave, which makes him very upset and unable to work properly. Owing to this reason, Marwan “was struggling to deal with the disaster”, and “was on the verge of madness” (Blasim 2013a: 59). When Marwan, the narrator, and the prostitute nicknamed “the drunken boat” with whom they had been having sex in their high school days have been reunited once again in accordance with Marwan’s wish, Marwan dies “in the pool of blood he had vomited” (Blasim 2013a: 65), which brings an end to the co-existence of the two conflicting minds in his body. However, to the narrator’s anger and disappointment, when “the drunken boat” dies in a traffic accident while she is with the narrator on their way to an art exhibition, her mind goes into the narrator’s body. Just like what Marwan had experienced, the narrator is tortured by the existence of two conflicting minds in his body – the mind of the dead prostitute and his own mind. Whatever the narrator is going to say, the voice of the dead woman would respond promptly, which makes him unbearably tired and causes him to panic. The story ends with both minds’ impossible and desperate hope of separation: Enough, God keep you. What, you’re tired! I want to sleep awhile. Okay, let’s sleep. I hope that when I wake up I can’t hear you anymore and you’re completely out of my life. Me too, you fuck. (Blasim 2013a: 65–66) The narrator seems to repeat the fate of his Marwan, who had been constantly troubled and annoyed by two conflicting minds till the day when he passed away. Along this line of thinking, it is very unlikely for the narrator to get rid of the two conflicting minds while he is alive. Patrick O’Donnell argues that “the representation of paranoia in the artificial plots of fiction can, indeed, be seen as a site where epistemology and ideology meet” (O’Donnell 1992: 182). The question is what ideology the implied Blasim tries to convey through depicting the paranoia minds. In my opinion, by writing unnatural ways of worldmaking and unnatural acts, the implied Blasim intends to present the harsh reality of Iraq as a world of terror, which is impossible for characters to escape; while by depicting characters’ unnatural minds, he attempts to interrogate characters’ inner worlds, which are equally disturbing: living constantly in fear and panic, characters are on the verge of being torn apart by their paranoia minds, which are constantly in unresolvable conflicts.

Conclusion Blasim claims that “Literature is one form of human cognitive defiance. It’s like life, which violence cannot stop, however vicious it might be. We can’t just sit around watching and waiting. We have to get on with it” (Ashfeldt 2015: 10).

Delving into impossible storyworlds of terror 81 To get on with hard life and vicious violence in Iraq, Blasim takes on his due responsibility as an Iraqi writer, by deliberately resorting to unnatural narratives. In doing so, Blasim makes his short stories anti-mimetically impossible but nightmarishly real, which not only generates effects of defamiliarity and horror but also forces us to ponder what is now happening in the seemingly remote parts of the world and raises our common concerns for human existence. Blasim’s faith in the power of writing provokes us to approach and affirm the value of the novel, about which I would like to close this chapter by quoting Peter Boxall: Under contemporary conditions, in which we are all summoned into new forms of community that are as potentially democratizing as they are potentially tyrannical, it is the novel we need, more than ever, to help us to understand such communities and to live with them. It is the novel that might help us to come, while also preserving forms of withdrawal in which the thing that is not might live on, darkly lighting our way. (Boxall 2015: 144)

Notes 1 About contemporary Iraqi writers’ “strange” and “unhomely” discourse, please see Ghazoul (2004: 1–24). 2 In 2014, Blasim won this award for his short story collection The Iraqi Christ. He shared the £50,000 prize with his translator Jonathan Wright. 3 See Yassin-Kassab (2010). 4 See Fassler (2014). 5 It is reported that there were at least 62 terrorist incidents related to bombings in Iraq in 2014, from which thousands of civilians lost their lives. See “Terrorist Incidents in Iraq in 2014”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_incidents_in_Iraq_in_2014 (accessed 15 October 2015).

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Unnatural emotions in contemporary narrative fiction

Affective turn in narrative studies In recent years, emotion has become one of the most central issues in contemporary literary criticism. However, as a productive concept, emotion is as rich as it is complicated. In 2015, when editing the October issue of PMLA on the special topic of “emotions”, Katharine Ann Jensen and Miriam L. Wallace deliberately invited their contributors to address the following questions: How emotions have been valued as a form of knowledge or refinement or, alternatively, rejected or associated with failed education. How and why have emotions been gendered or racialized? In what ways have emotions been understood to influence the imagination? Or conceptualized as disembodied or as excessively embodied? What are emotions’ epistemological, aesthetic, political, or moral implications? Prior to these questions, however, lies a simpler but still difficult one: What are emotions? How do we understand them today? (Jensen and Wallace 2015: 1249) I agree with Jensen and Wallace when they point out that among all the questions concerning the complexity of emotion, the most essential ones can be “What are emotions? How do we understand them today?”, both of which remain insufficiently explored. Etymologically speaking, the word “emotion” comes from the Old French esmovoir, which is derived from the Latin emovere, meaning “to remove, displace”. In the field of literary criticism, we need to admit that emotion is an ageold issue. For instance, in Poetics, Aristotle claims that the purpose of drama is to arouse in the audience feelings of pity and fear, and to purge these emotions (catharsis), thereby making people stronger emotionally. So far as modern literary criticism is concerned, with the constant change of critical climate, the concept “emotion” has experienced ups and downs. In the 1920s, I. A. Richards argued that “a theory of feeling, or emotion, of attitudes and desires, of the affectivevolitional aspect of mental activity, is required at all points of our analysis” (Richards 2001[1924]: 81). About two decades later, Richardson’s statement was

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challenged by the New Critics. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley sought to promote an “objective criticism” and tried to give an account of the artifact as the cause of an emotion, rather than of the emotion expressed or effected by a poem (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946: 21–39). In the 1950s, the Chicago School critics revisited the Aristotelian notion of the form and structure of a literary work. For instance, R. S. Crane saw the form of a literary work as the “dynamics”, the particular “working” or “emotional ‘power’” that the composition is designed to effect, which functions as its “shaping principle” (Crane 1953). In the 1980s, with the rise of cognitive sciences, emotion received unprecedented attention. In her introduction to a special issue of Poetics Today devoted to “Narrative and the Emotions”, Suzanne Keen observes that Today’s efflorescence of interest in the emotions occurs in many disciplines: beyond the psychologists and philosophers mentioned so far, emotion researchers can be found among neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, legal theorists, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, medical educators, linguists, and computer scientists, among others. (Keen 2011: 7) However, compared with other strands of postclassical narratology, coverage of affective narratology seems to be much belated. In Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories (2011), Patrick Colm Hogan argues that “story structures are fundamentally shaped and oriented by our emotion systems” (Hogan 2011: 1). Specifically, he postulates that emotion systems govern “not only goals but also the ways in which stories are developed, what sorts of things protagonists do or encounter, how trajectories of goal pursuits are initiated, what counts as a resolution, and so on” (Hogan 2011: 2). To his disappointment, emotion has been insufficiently explored in existing narrative theory (Hogan 2011: 1). In the time of such classical narratologists as Roland Barthes, A. J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov, emotion had scarcely been considered; while in the time of postclassical narratology, emotion has not been given adequate attention either. Consider rhetorical theory of narrative as an example. According to James Phelan, narrative designates “the act of somebody telling somebody else on a particular occasion for some purpose that something happened” (Phelan 2005: 217). In laying out his rhetorical theory of narrative, Phelan places particular stress on audiences’ responses, each of which is related to a particular component of the narrative: mimetic, thematic, or synthetic. Specifically, responses to the mimetic component involve audiences’ interest in seeing characters as possible people and in the narrative world as like their own; responses to the thematic component involve an interest “in the ideational function of the characters and in the cultural, ideological, philosophical, or ethical issues being addressed by the narrative”; and responses to the synthetic component involve audiences’ interest in and attention to “the characters and to the larger narrative as artificial constructs” (Phelan 2007: 5–6). Given what Phelan elaborates here, we can see that emotional responses have not received the attention they deserve. When Phelan developed

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his conceptual system of narrative judgments, he classified them in three broad types: interpretive judgments, ethical judgments, and aesthetic judgments (Phelan 2007: 7–15). Regrettably, emotion has not been assigned a proper role to play in Phelan’s conceptual system of rhetorical narratology. Against the general backdrop of “the narrative turn” (Kreiswirth 2005: 377– 382) coupled with “the affective turn” (Clough and Halley 2007), narratology is becoming one of the areas “most closely connected with cognitive science” (Hogan 2011: 1), which accounts for why a number of scholars have explored emotion in literary narratives from a cognitive perspective. For instance, David S. Miall (1989) outlined an affect-based model of literary narrative, which mainly involves three aspects of affect: affect is seen as a vehicle for predictions; readers’ interpretive strategies demonstrate features similar to what we know about interpreting real characters and social episodes; and affect is central to reader responses. Miall further developed his argument in a number of his works (Miall 1989, 2006, 2007, 2008), which has been significantly continued by Els Andringa (1996), Tammy Bourg (1996), Richard Walsh (1997), Susan L. Feagin (1996), Nicholas Dames (2004, 2007), Patrick Colm Hogan (2003, 2007, 2011, 2013a), Suzanne Keen (2006, 2007, 2011), Howard Sklar (2009), and Jenefer Robinson (2005, 2010). Undoubtedly, these are extremely valuable works that treat emotions in literary narrative, among which are Hogan’s significant contributions. Like other cognitive narratologists, Hogan claims that “the basic principle of cognitive science of literature and the arts is that the human brain operates using the same structures and processes regardless of whether it is addressing literature or life” (Hogan 2013a: 3). As far as emotional experience is concerned, Hogan lists four basic elements: eliciting conditions, expressive outcomes, actional response, and phenomenological tone (Hogan 2011: 2–3). In literary works in particular, he sees “the emotional engagement of the simulation” as an end in itself (Hogan 2013a: 3). With these basic premises in his mind, Hogan intends to reveal how authors’ minds create stories by resorting to the principle of simulation. Largely drawing on the findings of neuroscience and narrative studies, he examines the functions and mechanisms of narrative imagination and relates his analysis to narrative universals. It is true that “stories in every culture both depict and inspire emotion” (Hogan 2003: 1). Hogan mainly examines emotions or a sort of emotional geography, which “develops out of fundamental human propensities toward organizing the world along two fundamental axes: normalcy and attachment” (Hogan 2011: 31). It should be noted that not every literary narrative generates emotion systems along these two axes. Seeing universalism versus particularism as “a false dichotomy” (Hogan 2003: 16), Hogan and other cognitive narratologists attempt to uncover narrative universals and recurring story patterns. In Hogan’s opinion, “the stories we admire and preserve, stories about these aspirations and emotions, are most often mere variations on a handful of shared patterns” (Hogan 2003: 16). Regrettably, Hogan and his colleagues have mainly looked at realistic and mimetic narrative texts, leaving anti-mimetic or unnatural narrative texts

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unexamined. When responding to David Herman’s cognitive narrative theory, Brian Richardson argues that Herman’s narratological system is the most resolutely mimetic of the accounts in this volume. But it is also, perhaps necessarily, a very general poetics; by focusing on the features shared by or readily extended from nonfiction to fiction, Herman runs the risk of appearing to yield to overgeneralization, reductionism, and even missing altogether that which many of us value most in narrative fiction. Herman often seems to be looking at a distant planet through a powerful telescope, one that is unable to discern the unusual, dark topographies invisible from earth. As useful as Herman’s macrocosmic study may be, it is not always clear how it might be extended to cover more unusual narratives. (Richardson 2012c: 237) In a similar vein, I must admit that I very much admire the impressive work done by Hogan and other cognitive narratologists in the area of narrative emotions. However, to me, their work is somehow mimetic biased and too ambitious for developing a general poetics. At issue is how to read those unnatural emotions, which are physically, logically, and humanly impossible in anti-mimetic narratives.

What is unnatural emotion, and why does it matter? Very much like the fate of other narrative elements, emotions have been mimetically treated in the arena of traditional narrative theory. Emotions in literary works are generally considered as human universals, and we are touched by emotions contained in literary works because they are so true to life. Even the definition of emotion is mimetic biased. For instance, Oatley argues that emotions are most typically caused by evaluations of “events in relation to what is important to us: our goals, our concerns, our aspirations” (Oatley 2004: 3). What about those emotions contrary to our normal goals, concerns, and aspirations? In my opinion, this should be one of the central concerns of unnatural narratology. Alber and Heinze list three basic definitions of unnatural narrative: (1) narratives that have a defamiliarizing effect because they are experimental, extreme, transgressive, unconventional, nonconformist, or out of the ordinary; (2) antimimetic texts that move beyond the conventions of natural narratives; and (3) physically impossible scenarios and events that are impossible by the known laws governing the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones that are impossible by accepted principles of logic (Alber and Heinze 2011a: 2–5). Compared with such often-analyzed unnatural elements as unnatural narrator (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2010: 113–136; Bernaerts, Caracciolo, Herman, and Vervaeck 2014: 68–93), unnatural time (Alber 2012: 183–184; Ryan 2012: 373–374), unnatural space (Ryan 2012: 372–373), unnatural metalepsis (Bell and Alber, 2012: 166–192), and unnatural mind (Iversen 2011: 89–103, 2013: 94–112), unnatural emotion has been inadequately treated.

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It is true that emotions contribute to the progression of narratives, or in Hogan’s words “emotions make stories” (Hogan 2011: 1). Most of the time, “emotions are a response to changes in what is routine, habitual, expected” (Hogan 2011: 1), which is generally considered to be normal. However, not all stories are created by the normal and usual emotions. Particularly in those avant-garde and anti-mimetic narratives, the emotions of the narrator and characters have become physically, logically, or humanly impossible. This is what I call unnatural emotion. The usage of the term is to counter the normalcy of human or human-like natural emotions. For the sake of clarity, let me briefly examine the following three types of unnatural emotions pervasive in contemporary avant-garde narrative fiction. First, physically impossible emotions, referring to those emotions that have little to do with the real world around us, transgress the boundaries between the real world and the fictional world. According to Oatley, “emotions include love, anger, affection, shame, fear, contempt” (Oatley 2004: 12), and love is “an emotion that has a history in the evolution of human beings, in each individual, and in the development of Western culture. It is an emotion that helps to define who we human beings are” (Oately 2004: 2). With reference to Oatley’s conception of love, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga is a typical example of unnatural emotion. It is mainly about an impossible love occurring between a teenage girl, Bella, and a more than 100-year-old vampire, Edward Cullen. Unbelievably, even after Edward’s identity as a vampire has been revealed, Bella cannot stop loving him. On the one hand, it is rather doubtful whether vampires exist in this world; while on the other, it is impossible for a vampire and a human being to fall in love, owing to the fact that vampires are addicted to drinking human blood and are considered to be human beings’ enemy. In a similar vein, physically impossible emotion also appears in Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, which is about Chen Zhen’s complicated emotions toward Mongolian grassland wolves. In his first several encounters with the wolves, Chen feels afraid and terrorized. However, he gradually becomes fascinated by this fearful species, which is usually regarded as the enemy by herdsmen. It is an undeniable fact that, as a peculiar species of wild animal, the wolf not only attacks flocks and herds but also herdsmen. Chen, regardless of the potential danger, secretly raises a wolf, caring for and feeding it. There is a particular scene that tells of Chen’s complicated emotions involving the wolf. Watching the three-month-old wolf cub digging a hole, Chen has a mixture of feelings both fearful and admiring. As the narrator reports, “Chen’s hair stood on end. A three-month-old wolf cub had solved a problem that threatened his survival without having been taught by anyone. Chen got down on his hands and knees to watch more closely, feeling not so much that he was raising a pet as fascinating the growth of a young teacher who commanded his respect and admiration” (Jiang 2008: 335). It is natural and normal for a man to be afraid of a wolf; while it is unusual and unnatural for him to be fascinated with this fearful species. Second, there are logically impossible emotions, referring to those emotions that go against principles or rules governing the real world. For instance, in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, the narrator is a corpse whose head has been smashed

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with a stone and broken into pieces. Despite the fact that he is dead, he tells the stories of both his life and after his death, conveying to us what he knows and feels after his departure from this world. Against this logical impossibility, the narrator tells us what he felt at the moment of his physical death: “When in the course of this agony I knew I would die, an incredible feeling of relief filled me. I felt this relief during the moment of departure; my arrival to this side was soothing, like the dream of seeing oneself asleep” (Pamuk 2002: 5). Given the lines quoted here, we cannot help but wonder how it is possible for a corpse to narrate what he feels in the process of his death. More unbelievably, the corpse could even feel the inner conflict between his soul and his body. The narrator recalls that, “Though I cannot feel my crushed skull or my decomposing body covered in wounds, full of broken bones and partially submerged in ice-cold water, I do feel the deep torment of my soul struggling desperately to escape its mortal coil. It’s as if the whole world, along with my body, were contracting into a bolus of anguish” (Pamuk 2002: 4). It is not only illogical for a corpse to tell how he feels but also unimaginable for him to inform us of how his soul desperately tries to flee his body after death. Logically impossible emotions can also be found in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, in which the narrator is a man named Tony Webster. When Tony was still in high school, one day he and his playmates were informed that a boy named Robson, a student of the Science Sixth, committed suicide. In the real world, if someone around us died at an early age, we would show our sympathy and feel rather sorry for him. On the contrary, in the novel, Tony and his friends feel offended and are rather infuriated by his early death. The narrator puts their anger bluntly: “Now he had offended us by making a name for himself with an early death” (Barnes 2012: 14). What is the logic behind this? It is rather unreasonable that people would be mad with someone simply because the news of his death reaches their ears. Later on, the narrator offers a genuine reason why they are so unhappy about Robson’s death. That is, Robson made his girlfriend pregnant, and it is due to the consequential pressure that he chose to commit suicide. The narrator expresses his feelings of anger and jealousy in these lines: “Robson was our age, he was in our terms unexceptional, and yet he had not only conspired to find a girlfriend but also, incontestably, to have sex with her. Fucking bastard! Why him and not us? Why had none of us even had experience of failing to get a girlfriend?” (Barnes 2012: 15–16, italics in original). The unacceptable fact, in their opinion, is not only that Robson by his early death had made himself more famous than they were, but also that he had a girlfriend and had sex with her; while they were all virgins. Apparently, it is against the usual logic and rules in our normal and ethical reasoning. Third, there are humanly impossible emotions, referring to those emotions that are mainly produced by those nonanthropological entities in narrative works. Quite a few scholars have paid attention to unnatural narratives that confront us with nonhuman narrators (Alber 2011a: 49; Bernaerts, Caracciolo, Herman, and Vervaeck 2014: 68–93). For instance, those “it-narratives” told by animals (such as fleas, cats, horses, lice, mice, flies, and jackdaws), or narrated by inanimate

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objects (such as coins, banknotes, slippers, shoes, umbrellas, coats, pincushions, hackney coaches, watches, sofas, corkscrews, and even atoms). In fact, the unnatural emotions produced by those nonhuman narrators deserve more scholarly attention. For instance, in Ian McEwan’s “Reflections of a Kept Ape”, the narrator is an ape who was once the lover of a woman writer, Sally Klee, who now ignores him. In the story, the ape vividly narrates all his emotions of excitement about being promoted from pet to lover to husband, and his disappointment, unhappiness, and anger when she later ignores him. The typical unnatural scenario of the story is the part where the ape feels sexually aroused by his female owner: “It has been described as a reptilian, or as a repulsive inorganic stench, or again, as a sharp, womanly odor . . . exciting. Certainly it suggests sexual activity of some kind between exotic creatures, perhaps from a distant land, another planet” (McEwan 1978: 31). In other places, the ape expresses his disappointment and anger about being ignored by his owner: “Now I linger at my toilet washing my hands, climbing on to the sink to regard my face in the mirror, yawning. Do I deserve to be ignored?” (McEwan 1978: 31–32). Or, “I feel the warmth of her skull beneath her hair and it touches me, so alive, so sad” (McEwan 1978: 32). The question is how it is possible for an ape to be in love with a human being, to be sexually aroused by a human being, and to have human-like emotions. Similar unnatural emotions exist in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. In the first chapter of the novel, the narrator is a worm, which focalizes the world through its eyes when it secretly gets aboard Noah’s Ark. On the one hand, the worm pours out its contempt for Noah’s family and other species of animals; while on the other, it earnestly expresses its pride for its own species. When revealing the truth about God’s decision to wipe out almost all species on the earth, the worm shows its contempt for human beings in an ironic tone: “So the word went out; but characteristically they didn’t tell the truth. Did you imagine that in the vicinity of Noah’s palace (oh, he wasn’t poor, that Noah) there dwelt a convenient example of every species on earth? Come, Come. No, they were obliged to advertise, and then select the best pair that presented itself” (Barnes 1990: 6). When other species secretly hiding in the ark are found and put to death, the worm shows its sympathy and praises the wisdom of its own species. It first laments the fate of other species: “there were some pathetic sights: a young elk strung from the rail of Shem’s ark; birds dive-bombing the protective netting; and so on” (Barnes 1990: 9). In contrast to this, it speaks proudly of the wisdom and foresight of its own species: “Our species, I am proud to report, got on board without either bribery or violence; but then we are not as detectable as a young elk. How did we manage it? We had a parent with foresight” (Barnes 1990: 9). Howard Sklar argues that “The emotions that readers feel in response to fictional characters and situations present one of the most intriguing areas of investigation into our engagement with fictional literature” (Sklar 2009: 561). From the perspective of cognitive science, Sklar’s statement about readers’ emotions is unarguably true. When one attends to the emotions that make up stories, unnatural emotions are equally intriguing and worthy of our investigation. In “Unnatural

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Narratology: Core Issues and Critical Debates” (2015), I summarize five major functions of studying unnatural narratives, which are also true of investigating unnatural emotions: (1) it enriches contemporary narrative theory and reveals the unnatural nature of many narratives; (2) it reveals the fictional nature of literature; (3) it has heuristic values for the rewriting of literary history; (4) it is rather useful for realizing some ideological purposes; and (5) it has positive effects on human cognition. Most important of all, through presenting those emotions that are contrary to our expectations, unnatural narratives further foreground the fictionality of unnatural narratives and generate defamiliarizing effects.

How to deal with unnatural emotions? A proposal for a synthetic approach About the treatments of unnatural narrative, apart from a rhetorical approach (Phelan (2013: 167–184) and a hybrid approach (Pirlet 2011: 104–126), there are currently two major contrastive reading strategies: (1) naturalizing reading strategies or the cognitive approach proposed by Monika Fludernik (2010b), Marie Laure-Ryan (2012), and Jan Alber (2009, 2013); and (2) unnaturalizing reading strategies proposed by Henrik Skov Nielsen (2014) and Maria Mäkelä (2013). As I pointed out earlier, both naturalizing reading strategies and unnaturalizing reading strategies try to help readers understand the unnatural, yet their means of concretizing this shared aim are rather different. Alber employs naturalizing reading strategies (the cognitive approach) by resorting to or developing communicational models based on real-life storytelling situations; while Nielsen uses unnaturalizing reading strategies (the fictional approach) by resorting to literary references. In other words, the essence of naturalizing reading is to eliminate the unnaturalness of unnatural narratives by resorting to cognitive frameworks of real-world knowledge so as to make them more readable; while the purpose of unnaturalizing reading is to preserve the unnaturalness of unnatural narratives and to read them from the perspective of fictionality and artifice. About these two competing approaches and the methodological debate within unnatural narratology, Jan Alber and Per Krogh Hansen observe that those who favor unnaturalizing reading strategies “fear that the use of cognitive categories might potentially lead to the normalization or domestication of unnatural scenarios and events, whereas cognitive theorists are careful not to monumentalize the unnatural by leaving it outside the bounds of the comprehensible” (Alber and Hansen 2014: 3). In my opinion, naturalizing reading strategies and unnaturalizing reading strategies are not “either-or” alternatives. Instead, they are a “both-and” option. That said, at issue is how we can make unnatural narratives readable without losing their unnaturalness. To this question, I propose a synthetic approach, which attempts to combine these two contrastive reading alternatives. In the following, I shall use my analysis of unnatural emotions in Ian McEwan’s “Dead as They Come” as an example to illustrate this proposed synthetic approach, revealing the complementary relations between naturalizing reading strategies and unnaturalizing reading strategies.

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“Dead as They Come” is a short story in Ian McEwan’s collection In Between the Sheets (1978). It is about a millionaire of around 40 falling in love with a store mannequin. He brings it home and makes love to it. Later, he becomes suspicious of an affair between the mannequin and his chauffeur. As a consequence, he rapes and destroys the mannequin. Since its publication, the story has attracted much scholarly attention. Jack Slay sees it as “the extreme result of acting out the roles of domination and subordination that are often dictated by patriarchal society” (Slay 1995: 5). Ansgar Nünning sees it as a typical example of unreliability. He argues that, in this short story, the narrator’s expressive statements – comments, evaluations, and general remarks – are “completely at odds with the view of the events and characters that is projected by such narrative modes as description, report and scenic presentation” (Nünning 1997: 96). Jeannette Baxter considers “Dead as They Come” to be “a snapshot of sadistic and fetishistic desire which derails the circumlocutory direction of postmodernism in order to take art in another direction altogether” (Baxter 2009: 22–23). Generally speaking, critics accept Kiernan Ryan’s labeling of the story: “the art of unease, the art of playing havoc with the preconceived” (K. Ryan 1994: 5). If viewed from the perspective of unnatural narratology, the story can be considered as a full play of an insane character’s unnatural emotions for a store mannequin, beginning with his fascination for and intoxication by it, and ending with his jealousy of and anger at it. To a large extent, the progression of the story is composed of the protagonist’s emotional responses, which are logically and physically impossible. At the very beginning, the man confesses that he does not care for any posturing woman, but he is attracted to this mannequin and considers her to be “a beautiful woman” (McEwan 1978: 73), despite the fact that he knows she is “artificial”. As his fascination develops, he is no longer satisfied with looking at her through the window when he passes by the shop. Instead, he intends to buy her and bring her home. The upsurge of his emotions is best represented in his own words: Imperceptibly seeing her and not seeing her became a factor in my life, and then before I knew it, it passed from factor to structure. Would I see her today? Would all my hours and minutes be redeemed? Would she look at me? Did she remember me from one time to another? Was there a future for us together . . . would I ever have the courage to approach her? Courage! What did all my millions mean now, what now of my wisdom matured by the ravages of three marriages? I loved her . . . I wished to possess her. And to possess her it seemed I would have to buy her. (McEwan 1978: 74–75) Under normal circumstances, it is rather unnatural for a man to fall in love with a mannequin. However, in this short story, the man not only falls in love with a mannequin but decides to buy it and bring it home in order to possess it and to have a future together. We could not help wondering how to read the man’s unnatural passion for the mannequin.

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By resorting to naturalizing strategies, we might approach the story in the following ways (here, I am imagining the possible readings done by Jan Alber). (1) Blending new frames, or transcending our real-world knowledge to recognize the possibility of this unnatural emotion. That is, in our existing mental scripts and frames, it is unlikely for a man to fall in love with a mannequin. However, if we encounter this unnatural emotion in a fictional work and change our existing frames, we might well accept it as a possibility. (2) Generification, or seeing the story as a fantasy. That is, the man’s unnatural emotion for the mannequin is not true but is derived from his fantasy. (3) Reading as internal states, or considering the story about his emotions to be his hallucination. In particular, he later complains that the mannequin is no longer happy with him and becomes very quiet. Thus, he suspects that the mannequin and his chauffeur might be having an affair. Not only is the man’s twisted love for the mannequin impossible but so is an affair between the mannequin and some other man. Yet, in his hallucination, it is possible. (4) Foregrounding the thematic, or viewing the story from a thematic perspective. This brings us back to the thematic issues already explored by many other critics, including the complicated relations between men and women, sex and love, and art and reality. (5) Reading allegorically, or reading the story as an abstract allegory of human beings. In this short story, the man’s unnatural emotions for the mannequin can be seen as an allegory of human beings’ abnormal psychology in the contemporary commercialized world. (6) Satirization and parody, or ridiculing the psychological predispositions of human beings. In this short story in particular, even though the man is a millionaire – there were probably at most ten men richer than him in London – he is psychologically abnormal, which somehow devalues his material wealth. Or, as Alber argues, a reader can also choose to “do it yourself” or to choose “the Zen way of reading”, which means that the reader “repudiates the above mentioned explanations, and accepts both the strangeness of unnatural scenarios and the feelings of discomfort, fear, worry, and panic that they might evoke in her or him” (Alber 2013: 454). In the conceptual system of Henrik Skov Nielsen’s unnatural narrative theory, conducting an unnaturalizing reading, more or less, means asking “what assumptions can be added in an unnatural framework, and, recursively which assumptions we don’t necessarily have to apply if we don’t impose real world restrictions” (Nielsen 2014: 244). In what follows, I will focus on reading “Dead as They Come” from an arts perspective, paying particular attention to the boundaries and correlations between art and reality, and life and death. Given the identity of the character, most critics focus their attention on him as a businessman while neglecting his identity as an art collector. Or, to some extent, he might also be a connoisseur of arts. Buying the mannequin and adding it to the list of art collections, the man might have done nothing unusual. By falling in love with the mannequin and making love to it, the man becomes irrational and transgresses the boundary between the world of the real and the world of art. When explaining

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the reason for taking the mannequin home, the man is rather eager to express his uncontrollable love for it: For a long time I was content to look at her through the glass, happy to be within a few feet of her. In my madness I wrote her letters, yes, I even did that and I still have them. I called her Helen (“Dear Helen, give me a sign. I know you know” etc.). But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted her in my arms and in my bed, I longed that she should open her legs to me. I could not rest till I was between her pale thighs, till my tongue had prised those lips. (McEwan 1978: 76) Looking at the mannequin through the window, the man still maintains his rationality and knows that it is nothing but a piece of artistic work. But in his madness, he inescapably loves it and deliberately names it Helen, a rare beauty in Greek mythology. When doing business, the man knows quite well how to keep calm and make his fortune. Engrossed in the world of arts and artistic works, he is about to lose his reason and let himself be manipulated by his insanity. Blurring the distinction between the world of the real and the world of the arts, the man sleeps with the mannequin and makes love to it; while on the other hand, he is rather suspicious of the mannequin’s feelings for his chauffeur, Brian. As he recalls, “She was awake when I returned. I had my chauffeur carry the parcels into the dining room and then I dismissed him. I myself carried the parcels from the dining from to the bedroom. Helen was delighted. Her eyes gleamed and she was breathless for joy” (McEwan 1978: 82). Undoubtedly, it is humanly impossible for a mannequin to feel delighted and joyful. In the world of his madness, the man at first thinks that Helen has been delighted because of his return. But, as his suspicion grows, he thinks that it is not him but his chauffeur who has made Helen delighted and joyful. It is very interesting to observe that he is in a constant struggle between his reason and his passion, of which he is fully aware. For instance, when he decides to bring the mannequin home, he knows that he needs to carefully measure his eagerness and impatience to buy it and his fear that his desperation would betray him and reveal his secret. In particular, at the end of the story, he goes over and over the possibility of Helen’s affair with Brian. On the one hand, he thinks that her silence is “deadly confirmation”; while on the other, he thinks that there is “a slender possibility”. As he says, “On and on into the night I turned the matter over in my mind. Perhaps she had never even seen Brian. Could the entire matter be of my own imagining?” (McEwan 1978: 89). Choosing not to believe her, the man rapes Helen before he tears her to pieces. Paradoxically, the death of Helen means pleasure for her and sadness for him. As he says, “I came as she died. That much I can say with pride. I know her death was a moment of intense pleasure to her” (McEwan 1978: 92). It is certainly impossible and unnatural for a mannequin to die and to feel pleasure in dying. The possibility and complexity of the unnatural emotion lie in the paradoxical metalepsis: the man intends to bring the mannequin to life in the real world to live

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with him, and once the mannequin acquires her life in the real world, she will be able to feel pleasure; while the man tries so hard to enter the unreal world of art in order to stay with her and to have a future with her. Tearing the mannequin apart enables the man to realize the clear-cut distinction between what is real and what is artificial: he cannot bring such an artifact as a mannequin to life in the real world, nor can he enter into the unreal world of the artifact. In other words, he has to accept the fact that Helen is merely an artifact, which is like his other artistic collections that can be “trampled, mangled, kicked, spat and urinated on” (McEwan 1978: 93). Out of his sadness and anger, he destroys all his art collections by Maurice Utrillo, Auguste Rodin, Johannes Vermeer, William Blake, Richard Dadd, and Paul Nash. As analyzed earlier, the unnatural reading can further disclose the impossibility and fictionality of the short story, which in turn fits with such issues as thematic concern, allegory, satire, parody, genre, and characters’ internal states raised by naturalizing readings. It is at the intersection of the naturalizing reading and the unnaturalizing reading that I see their complementarity. In particular, the naturalizing readings solve the challenges brought by the unnatural narrative to our cognition and make it readable; while the unnaturalizing readings maintain its unnaturalness and sustain its attraction.

Conclusion Unarguably, unnatural narratology is now becoming “an emergent strand of work in narrative theory” (Herman 2013: ix). Within the field of unnatural narratology, unnatural emotions have been insufficiently explored. If unnatural narratology is to realize its aim to further supplement existing narrative theory (Richardson 2015: 5), it should definitely embrace more unnatural aspects of narrative, including unnatural emotions. To continue working in this strand, I would like to suggest four directions for future studies on this fascinating issue: (1) unnatural emotions in other literary genres than fiction; (2) the diachronic development and history of unnatural emotions in literary narratives; (3) the question of translating unnatural narrative from the source language to the target language while maintaining its unnatural emotions; and (4) unnatural emotions in popular cultures (I am thinking of the movie Ghost [1990] and the Korean TV play Love from the Star [2013]). In Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (2016), Alber argues that “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” (Alber 2016: 3). In my opinion, to a large degree, the “nonactualizable elements” constitute the unnaturalness of the unnatural narrative. When Alber and his colleagues claim that “the unnatural is everywhere” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2010: 131), it might well suggest that unnatural emotion is everywhere too. Thus, it is high time that we embrace and explore this typical antimimetic feature of narrative.

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Forward thinking Future prospects for unnatural narratology

In their groundbreaking essay “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models” (2010), unnatural narratologists point out three new perspectives and open questions of their unnatural approach, namely: (1) the relationship between narrative and fiction, (2) the relation between unnatural narratives and temporality as it is reflected in questions regarding changing conventions in literary history, and (3) questions of context, of readers and authors, and of intentions (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2010: 129–131). Most recently, in his contribution to Handbook of Narratology (2014), Alber raises the following four issues for future investigation: (1) the role of impossibilities in poetry, film, painting, religious texts, computer games, and so forth, as well as (2) the functions of the unnatural in literatures written in other languages than English. (3) The fusion of the study of the unnatural with feminist, queer, and/or postcolonial approaches appears to be a promising endeavor and, more generally, the ideological underpinnings and/or political implications of represented impossibilities. (4) The unnatural should be investigated from the perspective of the rhetorical approach to narrative, and the place of implied authors behind representations of impossibilities and the question of what is to be understood by the authorial audience should be determined. (Alber 2014: 893) To these issues, and by way of conclusion to this chapter, I would like to mention four further relations worthy of consideration. First, the relation between unnatural narratology and classical narratology. It is true that classical narratology mainly used to deal with natural or mimetic narratives, which makes it difficult to interpret anti-mimetic or unnatural narratives by resorting to the approaches initiated by such structuralist narratologists as Roland Barthes, A. J. Greimas, and Tzetan Todorov. However, it does not mean that classical narratology is outdated or of no use for the development of unnatural narratology. On the contrary, the toolkits and concepts (such as focalization, narrator, implied author, unreliable narration, etc.) of classical narratology are of certain heuristic value for developing unnatural narratology into a branch of poetics.

Forward thinking 95 Second, the relation between unnatural narrative and postmodern narrative. When talking about unnatural narratives, almost all unnatural narratologists take postmodern narratives as an example, which leads us to arrive at a conception that unnatural narrative equals postmodern narrative, and accordingly unnatural narratology amounts to postmodern narratology. In one of his articles on unnatural narratology, Richardson directly entitles it “postmodern narrative theory” (Richardson 2010: 24–31), and thus draws a direct line between unnatural narratology and postmodern narrative theory. In my opinion, postmodern narrative is only a subcategory of unnatural narrative, which needs to be more inclusive: the unnaturalness of early (premodern) narratives seems to have received less attention by unnatural narratologists. Third, the relation between unnaturalness and narrativity. Narrative texts may show different degrees of narrativity and unnaturalness at the same time, but do these interact and, if so, how? My impression is that unnatural narratives will possess a comparatively weak narrativity. In an unnatural narrative text, narrativity and unnaturalness pull in opposite directions: the higher its unnaturalness, the lower its narrativity, and vice versa. In other words, if these tendencies were always true, we would need both terms (unnaturalness, narrativity), since one property would be a reflex of the high/low presence of the other. Fourth and lastly, the radicalness and weakness of unnatural narratology. Very similar to the argument that “narrative is everywhere”, unnatural narratologists also believe that “the unnatural is everywhere” (Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2010: 131). At issue is whether unnatural narrative contains the elements of natural narrative, and on what conditions a text can be seen as unnatural narrative or natural narrative. How do we draw a distinction between natural narrative and unnatural narrative in the same text? Is it a partially unnatural narrative, or a partially natural narrative? These are the very issues that need to be addressed in the future.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in bold indicate a table or chart on the corresponding page. abstract allegories 14 affect-based model of literary narrative 84 affective narratology 83 affective turn 82–85 Alber, Jan: definition of unnatural narrative 4–5, 31; reading strategies 14; and unnatural temporality 9 allegory 91 ancient Chinese literature, unnatural narrative tradition in 54 Anglo-American narrative theory 19, 23 animals 7, 63, 78, 87–88; in Zhiguai tales 58–60 anti-mimetic texts 3–4 anti-mimetic: literary example 4; meaning of 55 Aristotelian mimesis 4 ascending metalepsis 10 audial narratology 30 binary structure 29 Blasim, Hassan 67; boundary-crossing 70; cannibalism 76–77; depiction of post-war Iraq 67–68; ideological purposes 70; impossible storyworlds 68; impossibility and unnaturalness 68–69; metaphor 77; ontological metalepsis 70; short narrative fiction 20, 78; terror caused by violence 70–71; terror exhibition and corporeal impairments 70–77 blending of frames 14 blending scripts 48 blending theory 13 boundary-crossing 32, 33–34; in Hassan Blasim’s short stories 70; and ethics of the telling 65; in Zhiguai tales 62–63

character 31; defined 58; unnaturalness of 9 character-narrators 43; ability to predict and foretell 44 Chinese ghost stories/tales 27, 31, 34, 35, 56 Chinese narrative theory/theories 28, 29; traditional 28; traditions and innovations 28–31; and Western academia 28 Chinese narrative, emergence and development of 30 Chinese narratology: defined 29; five aspects of 28 Chinese time travel fiction 20, 38; as part of world literature 53; twenty-first century examples 39 Chinese time travel writing, history of 38–39 Chinese unnatural narrative 31; history of 56–57 cinematic narratives 25 classical and postclassical narratology: correlation between 23; distinction between 22 classical Chinese literature 30 classical narratology: and postclassical narratology 22, 23; and unnatural narratology 94 classical structural narratology 17 cognitive approach 13–14, 89 cognitive narratologists 84–85 cognitive narratology 14, 16, 17, 25–26, 52 cognitive science 84, 88 commentary/commentaries 29, 34 comparative analysis of literature 24 comparative literature 24, 26, 36; narrative approach as new model for 27 comparative narratology 24–27, 35; defined 24; future development of 35–36; heuristic values 27

Index comparative studies: between narrative and its sub-genres 24; between narratives and non-narratives 24 comparative turn, in narrative studies 1, 66 comparativist turn 24, 26; in current narrative studies 19; to narrative theory 56 comparativity 35 contemporary Chinese time travel fiction 38, 39, 40; character-narrators 43; cultural and ideological connotation 47–48; ethical dilemmas 49–52; female protagonists 47–48; and fictional nature of literature 46–47; metalepsis in 42; self-contradictory narration in 44–45; unnaturalness of discourse 44; unnaturalness on the story level 42; value of 46–48 contemporary narrative fiction, unnatural emotions in 21 contemporary narrative scholarship, survey of 23–24 contemporary narrative theory, focus on mimetic tradition 4 contradictions, narrational 44–46 conventional paranoia mind 78–79 conventionalization and naturalization, distinction 17 corpse 32, 69, 72, 87; exhibition of 73–75; 76 cultural narratology 52 “Dead as They Come”: art and reality 91–93; unnatural emotions in 89–93 dead narrators 68–69 defamiliarizing effects 8, 21, 44, 70 degree of unnaturalness 6 demon 32, 35 descending metalepsis 10 diachronic turn in narrative studies 56 discourse 8, 41; as means of expressing story 8; in mimetic narratives 7; in natural narratives; in unnatural narratives 7 discourse level 2, 14; unnaturalness on 7–8, 43 do it yourself 14, 91 Dream of the Qing Dynasty, A 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44–45, 46–47, 49 emotion/emotions 82–85; concept of in literary criticism 82–83; humanly impossible 87–88; in literary works 85; logically impossible 86–87; physically

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impossible 86; questions regarding 82; synthetic approach 89–93; unnatural in contemporary narrative fiction 82–93 emotional experience, basic elements of 84 ethical dilemmas 41, 49–52 ethical interpretive option 34, 64–66 ethical narratology 49–52, 64–66 ethical questions in literary fiction 51–52 ethical turn 25 events 31, 69; impossible 32–33, unnatural 69; unnaturalness of 10 experientiality 17 experimental narratives, China and Iraq 19 extreme narration 7, 44 fairy/fairies, in Zhiguai tales 58, 63 familiarization 14 female protagonists 47–48 feminist narratology 16, 17, 23; and unnatural narratology 16, 52 fictional representation: anti-mimetic form 4; mimetic form 4 fictionality 52 figural interpretation 13 Fludernik, Monika 2; and blending theory 13; critique of unnatural narratology 17; definition of naturalization processes 14; and narrative 8, 41–42 foregrounding the thematic 14, 48 fox-fairy 32, 33–34 frame enrichment 48 Friedman, Susan Stanford 25–26, 35–36 Fu, Xiuyan 29–30 generification 14, 91 ghost 32, 34; in Zhiguai tales 58, 59, 63 ghost tales 31, 35, 56; moral values conveyed by 34 Grishakova, Marina, comparative narratology 27 Herman, David, distinction between classical and postclassical narratology 22 heuristic value of unnatural narratives 11–12 historiographical turn 48 horizontal metalepsis 10 human-like characters 58 humanly impossible emotions 87–88 ideological purposes 12 “implied story” 26 impossibility within unnatural narrative 5

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Index

impossible events 4–5, 32–33 impossible mind 77–78 impossible scenarios 4–5, 18, 31, 40, 55, 68, 85 impossible space 33, 60 impossible storyworlds 5, 8, 10, 20, 32, 42; and unnaturalness at the local level 57–61; and unnatural ways of worldmaking 68–70 interdisciplinary turn 25 interpretive/interpretational strategies 5, 12 interpretive options, for unnatural narratives 12–16 Iraqi literature and arts, contemporary 67 Iversen, Stefan 55: definition of unnatural narrative 5–6; and the impossible mind 77–78 Jost, François, comparative narratology 24–25 Klauk, Tobias 17–18 Kӧppe, Tilmann 17–18 life and art, relation between 15 literary history 11 literary narrative, fictional nature of 15 literature: fictional nature of 11; primary purpose of 66 logically impossible: emotions 86–87, 90; events 3, 32; scenarios 4–5, 40; space 60 many-worlds 13 material objects, in Zhiguai tales 58 mentalism 13 metalepsis 10, 41; defined 42; in contemporary Chinese time travel fiction 42; in a fictional world 10; in Western experimental novels 42; see also ontological metalepsis metamorphosed mind 78 metamorphosis 70 Miall, David S.: works of 84 mimetic art 4 mimetic bias 11 mimetic narratives 8 mimetic, literary example 4 mind representations 5 mind: impossible 77–78; metamorphosed 78; paranoia 20, 68, 78, 79; unnatural 5–6; 77–80; unreadable 77 moral values 64, in Chinese ghost tales 34 more radical paranoia mind 78, 79–80 multiperson narration 44; types of multiperson narrative texts 46

narrative: basic elements of 8; definition of 3; diversification of new approaches to 22; meaning in Chinese language and literary history 29; ubiquity of 24 narration 7, 13, 44–46 narrative acts 7 narrative industry, paradigm shifts in 22–27 narrative strategies, new 12 narrative studies: affective turn in 82–85; classification of developments and approaches 1; from a transnational perspective 35–36 narrative theories 1: Anglo-American 23; critique of existing theory 18; engaged by Chinese narratologists 28; of marginalized areas 27, 56; traditional 2–3, 7 narrative turn 84 narrativity, and unnaturalness 95 narrativization 14 narratological patterns 3 narratology 26; and cognitive science 84; new approaches 18 narrators 7–8; dead 68–69 naturalization processes, defined 14 naturalizing reading 13, 15, 93 naturalizing strategies 2, 13, 91; reading 48, 64, 89 naturalizing the unnatural, interpretive options 48–52 naturalizing vs. unnaturalizing 12–16 natural narrative 2 Nielsen, Henrik Skov: definition of unnatural narrative 5; distinctions between narrative types 6; unnaturalizing reading strategies 14–15; unnatural narrative theory 91 nonactualizable elements 57, 93 nonhuman characters 31–32; in Zhiguai tales 57–60 nonhuman narrators, and emotions 87–88 nonhuman-like narrators 7 nonhuman storytelling 7 non-linear time 9 non-mimetic, literary example 4 omniscient narration 13 ontological consistency 8 ontological impossibility 42 ontological metalepsis 8, 10, 31–32, 33, 68, 70 paradigm shifts in narrative industry 22–27 paradoxical metalepsis 92–93

Index paranoia 78 paranoia mind 20, 68, 78–80; conventional 78–79; more radical 78; radical 78, 79 parody 14, 91 physical traveling 39 physically impossible: emotions 86, 90; scenarios 4, 40 physically nonexistent space 60 Platonic mimesis 4 plot and character intertwined 40 possible world theory 13, 14 postclassical and classical narratology: correlation between 23; distinction between 22 postclassical approaches, intersection of 23 postclassical narratology 16, 23; substrands 16, 17; strands of 49, 52 postmodernism 56 postmodernist fiction 16 postmodernist turn 48 postmodern narrative 56; and unnatural narrative 95 premodern narratives, the unnatural in 56 pre-Qin narratives 30 principle of minimal departure 13 prolepsis 44 radical paranoia mind 78, 79 reading allegorically 14, 48, 91 reading as internal states 48 reading strategies 14; naturalizing 14, 15, 34, 48, 64, 89; proposed by Alber 48; of unnatural narrative 6; of unnatural narratology 17; unnaturalizing 14–15, 21, 34, 64, 89 realist novels, antimimetic practices in 16 rhetorical narratology 16, 17, 65; and narrative judgements 84; and unnatural narratology 16, 48–49 rhetorical theory of narrative 28: audience’s responses 83; and emotion 83 Richardson, Brian: definition of unnatural narrative 3; and metalepsis 10; mimetic and anti-mimetic 4, 10; types of multiperson narrative texts 46; value of unnatural narratives 11 Ryan, Marie-Laure 8, 13, 14; naturalizing interpretive strategies 48 satirization 14, 91 second-person narration 13 self-contradictory narration 44–45 solar myth 30 space 31; with exceeding capacity 60–61; impossible 33, 60; physically

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nonexistent 60; unnatural 57, 60–61; unnaturalness in 10 spiritual traveling 39 Step by Startling Step 47–48, 49, 50–51 Step into the Past, A 40–41, 42, 49 story/discourse distinction 41 story level 2, 14; unnaturalness on 8–11 storytelling 3 storyworlds 8, 57, 68; aspects of unnaturalness 8; impossibility of in Zhiguai tales 62–63; mimetic 10; see also impossible storyworlds Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio 31–34, 35, 64; boundary-crossing 33–34, 62; impossible events 32–33; impossible space 33; nonhuman characters 32; ontological metalepsis 33–34 strange voices 41, 43–44 subjectification 14 sympathy, lack of 75–76 temporality, unnatural 9 temporal paradox 61 temporal setting 39 time: principles of narrative time 61; unnatural 57, 61; unnaturalness in relation to 9 time machine 39 time travel 38 time travel fiction 38, 52; see also Chinese time travel fiction; contemporary Chinese time travel fiction traditional Chinese narrative works 30–31 traditional Chinese unnatural narrative, history of 31 traditional narrative theory 2–3, 7 transcendental realm 14 transgeneric narratives 30 translation, of Chinese narrative and narrative theories 36 transmedial narratives 30 transnational narrative theory 25 transnational turn 25, 26; in narrative studies 66 traveling: patterns and means of 39, 40; physical 39; spiritual 39 universalism 25, 84 unnatural characters 9, 57; categories of 58 unnatural elements 2, 6, 55; in Zhiguai tales 63; and degree of unnaturalness 6 unnatural emotion/emotions 85–89; directions for future studies 93; functions of studying 89; synthetic approach 89–93

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Index

unnatural minds 5–6, 20, 68, 77–80; defined 77 unnatural narrative: anti-mimetic nature of 3–4, 5; approaches to 13; definitions of 2–6, 85; diachronic and transnational perspectives 55–57; diversity of definitions 3, 6, 18, 55; effects on human cognition 12; functions of studying 89; history of 56; ideological purposes 12; interest in 54; interpretive options for 12–16; and postmodern narrative 95; reasons for studying 11–12; recent publications 1; rewriting of literary history 11; three basic definitions 3; value of 11, 46 unnatural narrative theory 27 unnatural narratologists, commonalities of approaches 6 unnatural narratology 1–2, 31; and classical narratology 94; controversy 2; core issues of 2; critical debates 16–21; critique of 17–18; major task of 13; problems concerning 18; radicalness and weakness of 95; relationship to fictionality and mimesis 17; rise of 54; and Zhiguai tales 54–66 unnatural storytelling frames 13 unnaturalizing reading 13, 93; strategies 14–15, 21, 34, 64, 89

unnaturalness: degree of 6; at the global level 62–63; at the local level 57–61; manifestations of 2; and narrativity 95 unreadable minds 77 value of unnatural narratives 46–48 vice being punished 35, 64–65 virtualization 13 virtue being rewarded 34, 64 Western narrative 24 Western narrative theory 19, 27, 66; Chinese counterpart of 27; revision of 28 Western narratological toolkits 28 Western narratology 28 Western unnatural narratologists 31, 34 worldbuilding 8 worldmaking: practices 42, 57, 68; unnatural ways of 68–70 Yang, Yi 28–29 Yang: conceptual system 29; investigation of Chinese commentary 29 Zen way of reading 14, 91 Zhiguai 54 Zhiguai tales 20, 54–56; boundary crossing 62–63; ethical interpretive option 64–66; impossible storyworlds 57–61