Weird Narratology in Literature
Already the old epics used "weird" narratology. For example, the Iliad and the Odyssey use analepses, a literary technique that involves interruption of the chronological sequence of events by the interjection of events or scenes of earlier occurrence. So, it is nothing new nor avant-garde. Nevertheless, some stories make more use of it than others.
I will be examining five short stories by four different writers.
Nabokov gets two stories because he is Nabokov, and one can never read too much Nabokov. The other three writers are Franz Kafka, who may have heard of him; Guy de Maupassant, a 19th-century French author; and Robert Coover, an American novelist and short story writer.
Unnatural narratology breaks the rules of what is generally expected from storytelling as a mimesis of the world in general. The other concept or theory is cognitive narratology, which merges literary theory with the philosophy of the mind and cognitive science to explain how we understand a narrative story in a cognitive sense.
A Report to an Academy is a short story by Franz Kafka, written and published in 1917 (original German title: Ein Bericht für eine Akademie). It was first published by Martin Buber in the German magazine Der Jude, along with another of Kafka's stories, Jackals and Arabs (Schakale und Araber). And, well, it is about a chimpanzee named Red Peter.
Peter is not an ordinary ape; he is a genius ape who has learned how to behave like a human, not only in speaking but also drinking alcohol and smoking a pipe. The penultimate feat was the hardest for him to master. Being such an anomaly, he is of great interest to the academic world and is invited to a scientific conference to give a speech on how he affected his transformation. That is the framework of the story.
Esteemed Gentlemen of the Academy! You show me the honor of calling upon me to submit a report to the Academy concerning my previous life as an ape.
Red Peter was shot and captured in his home jungles of West Africa and put in a cage to be shipped to Europe. Onboard the ship, he imitates the crew and learns human behavior as a scheme to be released from captivity.
After arriving in Europe, he is faced with the choice between "the Zoological Garden or the Music Hall." He chooses to devote himself to becoming a performer, which he accomplishes with the help of multiple teachers.
In his speech before the academy, he concludes that he can no longer appropriately describe his emotions and experiences as an ape yet expresses satisfaction with the situation.
On the whole, at any rate, I have achieved what I wished to achieve. You shouldn’t say it wasn’t worth the effort. In any case, I don’t want any man’s judgement. I only want to expand knowledge. I simply report. Even to you, esteemed gentlemen of the academy, I have only made a report.
The story begins with a simple analepsis as Red Peter tells the story about his life as an ape and how he behaviorally became a human. Otherwise, the story is relatively straightforward compared to the others studied in this essay. The most interesting aspect is probably that the narrator happens to be a chimpanzee, which is somewhat uncommon, a form of unnatural narratology. That is bizarre, but otherwise, there is not much else to say about the story in the narratological sense.
If one were to do a general analysis, on the other hand, there would be much more to say about it. Imagine how much we can learn from this ape that understands us better than we understand ourselves.
The Horla is a short horror story by French writer Guy de Maupassant written in 1887 (original French title: Le Horla). The word "horla" is not French but a neologism and (according to the translator Charlotte Mandell) a portmanteau of the French words hors (outside) and là (there). Mandell also suggests that le Horla can be transliterally interpreted as "the, what's out there."
The Horla has the form of a journal and is one of de Maupassant's most widely known short stories. A shorter version was published in 1886 in the newspaper Gil Blas. The story is sometimes cited as an inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu, which features similar themes. Lovecraft praises the story's narrative in his 28,000-word essay/survey "Supernatural Horror in Literature."
Relating the advent in France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extraterrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm humankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without peer in its particular department.
The journal is written by an unmarried upper-class man complaining about his troubles and anguish. This all began when he saw a "superb three-mast" Brazilian ship and waved to it. In doing so, he unknowingly invited home a supernatural being from aboard the ship.
The being, which he names the Horla, begins to haunt his house, and the narrator comes down with "an atrocious fever" combined with trouble sleeping caused by nightmares waking him up multiple times every night. He feels someone is watching him and "kneeling" on his chest as he sleeps.
The narrator slowly loses his sanity during the story as the Horla dominates his thoughts. After failing to rid himself of the Horla by burning down his house with it locked inside, he concludes that suicide is the only option.
Dead? Perhaps? His body? Was not his body, which was transparent, indestructible by such means as would kill ours? […] No — no — there is no doubt about it — He is not dead. Then — then — I suppose I must kill myself!
The first thing one asks themselves is if the Horla is an autonomous entity or a figment of the man's imagination. Perhaps it came with that ship from Brazil, and his salute to said ship invited the Horla to possess him. Another possibility is that his insomnia created the Horla and not vice versa. What if the man has fallen into sleep-deprived psychosis and believes an entity from the other side of the world possesses him?
Or, there is a third possibility: all that happens does so in perhaps one night as he battles the fever, as he has fever dreams. Lastly, how did the journal survive the fire? It would seem weird to write a story in the form of a journal and not make it so that the journal could exist in the real world.
The Babysitter is a postmodern, often anthologized, short story by Robert Coover. It was first published in 1969 under Pricksongs & Descants: Fiction. Its claim to fame is its play with objective truths, as the characters' subjective versions don't merge into a coherent, truthful narrative.
Coover never makes clear which character's stories are true and which are false, or perhaps, if there even is such a thing as true or false. There are no distinctions between objective narrative and daydreams, which make for a steamy story as the characters' perverse fantasies about the babysitter are presented before the reader.
Buckle up, for this will get messy: The story occurs between 7:40 and 10:30 PM, perhaps in a suburb near you. Multiple subjective perspectives are intertwined and sometimes conflict with each other. Some are necessarily false as they otherwise would have played out simultaneously in the same place despite diverging.
It all stems from the couple Harry and Dolly Tucker's plans of going to a cocktail party and leaving their children, Jimmy, Bitsy, and an unnamed baby, under the protection of a babysitter.
Already here begins the sexual perversions as Harry (on the way to the party) fantasizes about the babysitter, thinking she had stretched herself "seductively" before him. Not long after that, Jimmy fantasizes about the babysitter giving him a spanking. I assume you see where this is going.
Sitting at the end of the kitchen table there with his children, she had seemed to be self-consciously arching her back, jutting her pert breasts, twitching her thighs: and for whom if not for him?
Like father, like son.
Her tummy. Under her arms. And her feet. Those are the best places. She’ll spank him, she says sometimes. Let her.
Meanwhile, the babysitter's boyfriend (Jack) and his buddy (Mark) are at the arcade discussing dropping by the Tuckers to surprise her. Jack fantasizes about helping Mark seduce her and rape her. Meanwhile, the babysitter laughs at Jimmy's penis as she baths him.
Jack and Mark arrive, and Jack fantasizes about saving his girlfriend from Mark's attempt at raping her, but his fantasy quickly changes to them all having a threesome, or are they having a threesome? Who knows. All while she (in her narration) is washing the dishes. Mr. Tucker has been creeping at them through the window before interrupting the threesome.
The Tuckers' baby starts crying, and the babysitter decides to bathe him, but Jimmy needs to use the toilet all while the telephone rings. When she comes back, the baby has drowned.
Maybe you better get in the tub, too. I think something’s wrong with the baby […] It’s down in the water and it’s not swimming or anything.
Finally, at 10:00, the dishes are done, and the kids are in bed. The babysitter turns on the TV and dozes off. She then wakes as Mr. Tucker stands over her and offers her a ride home. Meanwhile, Mrs. Tucker is pleasantly surprised to find that the dishes are done.
There have also been two parallel narratives that I have more or less ignored as they do not meaningfully intermingle with the others that much. Those are that of the TV and that of the cocktail party.
At the end of the story, the host of the cocktail party tells Mrs. Tucker that she is sorry she had to come home to find her children murdered, a dead body in the bathtub, and her husband missing. Nevertheless, what's on the TV?
What can I say, Dolly? […] Your children are murdered, your husband gone, a corpse in your bathtub, and your house is wrecked. I’m sorry. But what can I say? […] Hell, I don’t know. Let’s see what’s on the late movie.
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov is a collection of every short story written by the aforementioned author—all but for The Enchanter. As initially published, the collection had 65 stories. Those not originally written in English were translated by Vladimir's son Dimitri.
Three additional stories were found after the publication of the first collection and were incorporated in later printings. In the context of weird narratology, one of the stories is especially interesting: The Recruiting, for its daring play with narrative norms as in chronology and voice.
He was old, he was ill, and nobody in the world needed him. In the matter of poverty Vasily Ivanovich had reached the point where a man no longer asks himself on what he will live tomorrow, but merely wonders what he had lived on the day before.
The story concerns Vasily Ivanovich, a lonely old Russian émigré without money. He visits his dead sister's grave while at the burial of another émigré, Professor D. Then comes a man with a newspaper and sits beside Vasily on a bench. The man becomes the narrator, revealing that what we know about Vasily is his speculation and, thus, not necessarily true.
Furthermore, we learn that Vasily's sister is an amalgam made from details of others. Vasily and his sister are material to fill the space of a novel the narrator has been working on. Another narrator takes over and refers to the former as "my representative, the man with the Russian newspaper." And thus reveals another narrative layer. In other words, three in total.
Terra Incognita is also a short story written by daddy Nabokov, originally in Russian. It was first published in the émigré journal Posledniya Novosti in Paris in 1931. After being translated into English by Vladimir and his son, Dimitri, it was republished in 1963 in the New Yorker and later added to A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, a collection of thirteen short stories written by Nabokov the older.
The story is centered around three men attempting to escape the fictional country of Zonraki: the narrator, Vallière, and Gregson and Cook. The latter is reminiscent of a Shakespearean clown, but that is neither here nor there. In doing so (escaping), they must cross unknown terrain to reach the Guano Hills, where the fragrance of Vallieria Mirifica meets that of Carapichea ipecacuanha.
Never mind: the journey proves dangerous as Vallière becomes sick and feverish, and Cook takes off with a gang of Badonian porters bringing/stealing their supplies and collections with him. Later the, two others stumble over Cook again as his newfound friends left him behind.
While all this, the narrator, Vallière, experiences hallucinations brought on by his sickness, perhaps malaria. Gregson and Cook quarrel and kill each other, leaving the narrator alone in his weakened state. That is about it.
I realized that reality was here, here beneath that wonderful, frightening tropical sky, among those gleaming swordlike reeds, in that vapor hanging over them, and in the thick-lipped flowers clinging to the flat islet, where, beside me, lay two clinched corpses.
Terra Incognita is interesting from the perspective of an unreliable narrator. Vallière becomes sick at the story's beginning, progressively worsens, and perhaps succumbs at the end.
At times, the reality of the story seems to break, and the Vallière experiences what seems like a room somewhere that is not the tropical surroundings the story happens within; the scenery of a man in a sickbed somewhere far from this "terra incognita" which begs the question: is Vallière hallucinating the room with the person in the sickbed or is the person in the sickbed hallucinating Vallière and the story?
Is the tropical episode the fantasy of a feverish mind, or has it happened? Or perhaps they are both valid as the person in the sickbed (Vallière) tells the story of how he ended up there.
I realized that the obtrusive room was fictitious, since everything beyond death is, at best, fictitious: an imitation life hastily knocked together, the furnished rooms of nonexistence.
This essay can be seen as weird narratology in a nutshell. One could write a much more comprehensive and complex essay if one wanted to. I may do that sometime in the future when I have less on my table.
Because of the restrictions of the format, I had to choose short stories, and to cover more ground, I had to select multiple them. As such, I could not dive too deep into each one. It would have been interesting to study them line for line, with commentary, but I need more space or time for that now. I hope it all was clear.
Thank you for reading.
