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akemi_666's review
4.0
Pretty powerful repurposing of Russian formalism's distinction between fabula (story) and syuzhet (discourse) towards an understanding of realism, high modernism, and unnatural narrative (postmodernism), as literary modes that have been utilised from Ancient Greek plays to 20th century postmodernism. Explicit critique of historicisms that reduce these literary modes into singular moments in a linear trajectory (such as Fredric Jameson's coupling of realism, modernism, and postmodernism to Ernst Mandel's market capitalism, imperialist capitalism, and consumer capitalism). Richardson argues that these modes repeat, over and again, in different places, for different purposes. He also critiques cognitive narratologists who impose a humanist understanding of fictions as mirrors of reality (they cannot account for non-human characters, impossible worlds, unnatural encounters).
We may understand fabula as the fictional world, and syuzhet as its presentation (how the world is relayed through text). Realism attempts mimesis at the level of both fabula (world) and syuzhet (text) — presenting a world self-consistent or consistent with our own world, through a conventional and self-effacing narrative-style. The narrator is taken-for-granted, invisible, and trustworthy. High modernism rejects mimesis at the level of syuzhet (text) — the world is consistent, but its presentation is broken-up, garbled, opaque. The text frustrates the reader's capacity to make sense of what is, otherwise, a sensible world. Unnatural narrative (postmodernism) rejects mimesis at the level of fabula (world) — the world itself is inconsistent, breaks apart, unfurls into multiplicities of space and time. It's not simply that sense-making is hard, it's that the world itself lacks sense (at least, in relation to our own world). This differentiation between epistemological and ontological uncertainty mirrors that of Brian McHale's distinction between modernism and postmodernism (but without assigning dates to such phenomena).
Richardson argues that unnatural narratives / impossible worlds have been too often ignored or denigrated by narratologists who are fixated on mimesis. He calls this the mimetic fallacy — the belief that a fiction's success is predicated on mirroring reality (its physical laws, logical principles, and human limits, as put by Jan Alber). Inconsistencies in a fiction's world or characters are often explained away as authorial failures (the author was sloppy), or as psychic aberrations (the character is schizophrenic). These critiques, however, fail to understand fiction's essential anti-realism — that it stands against reality, and should not be judged by reality's standards. Unlike science, which works through falsification, that which takes place in fiction cannot be falsified because it has never taken place. Fiction is performative, its statements make a world, while science is descriptive. To reduce fiction to science is to lose the distinctions that make fiction such a joy to behold.
We may understand fabula as the fictional world, and syuzhet as its presentation (how the world is relayed through text). Realism attempts mimesis at the level of both fabula (world) and syuzhet (text) — presenting a world self-consistent or consistent with our own world, through a conventional and self-effacing narrative-style. The narrator is taken-for-granted, invisible, and trustworthy. High modernism rejects mimesis at the level of syuzhet (text) — the world is consistent, but its presentation is broken-up, garbled, opaque. The text frustrates the reader's capacity to make sense of what is, otherwise, a sensible world. Unnatural narrative (postmodernism) rejects mimesis at the level of fabula (world) — the world itself is inconsistent, breaks apart, unfurls into multiplicities of space and time. It's not simply that sense-making is hard, it's that the world itself lacks sense (at least, in relation to our own world). This differentiation between epistemological and ontological uncertainty mirrors that of Brian McHale's distinction between modernism and postmodernism (but without assigning dates to such phenomena).
Richardson argues that unnatural narratives / impossible worlds have been too often ignored or denigrated by narratologists who are fixated on mimesis. He calls this the mimetic fallacy — the belief that a fiction's success is predicated on mirroring reality (its physical laws, logical principles, and human limits, as put by Jan Alber). Inconsistencies in a fiction's world or characters are often explained away as authorial failures (the author was sloppy), or as psychic aberrations (the character is schizophrenic). These critiques, however, fail to understand fiction's essential anti-realism — that it stands against reality, and should not be judged by reality's standards. Unlike science, which works through falsification, that which takes place in fiction cannot be falsified because it has never taken place. Fiction is performative, its statements make a world, while science is descriptive. To reduce fiction to science is to lose the distinctions that make fiction such a joy to behold.
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