Showing papers in "Style in 2016"

The Limits of Narration: Lists and Literary History

Abstract: This article argues that it is possible to write a literary history of lists. Literary history told through the feature of the list promises to be highly relevant because it necessarily combines form and function, content and context, as well as genre and meaning. Lists provide a means of pushing the boundaries of narration, of negotiating meaning, of exploring the roles of the narrator, and of playing with the audience’s expectations. These functions can all be aligned more generally with questions of literariness. This article argues that lists can actively promote literariness in the trajectory of experientiality, as is demonstrated by the example of epic poetry and the epic catalogue, which looms large in the tradition of all list-writing in literature. The examples range from the Iliad to Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune.

Arden of Faversham and Shakespeare's Early Collaborations: The Evidence of Meter

Abstract: Most recent specialists in the attribution of authorship agree that the three Henry VI plays and Titus Andronicus , of the Shakespeare First Folio (1623) are collaborative, and that Shakespeare was also a coauthor of the anonymously published Edward III (1596). There is also growing support for the view that the middle scenes, 4–9, of the anonymous domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham (1592) were largely, if not wholly, Shakespeare’s. The evidence for all these conclusions has come mainly from computational analyses of lexical words and rates of use of high-frequency function words, from database searches of rare phrases and collocations, and from the detection of stylistic and sub-stylistic patterns of usage. Marina Tarlinskaja’s newly published investigation of the versification of English drama of the period 1561–1642 enables the allocations of shares in what are held to be Shakespeare’s early collaborations to be tested against her carefully compiled metrical data. Tarlinskaja is aware of the divisions of authorship proposed by modern attributionists and presents her counts of various verse features accordingly. Statistical analysis of the figures in her tables for the above-mentioned plays provides broad support for the latest findings. In particular, scenes 4–9 of Arden of Faversham , unlike the rest of the play, are significantly more akin metrically to the putatively Shakespearean portions of the four Folio plays and Edward III than to the putatively non-Shakespearean portions.

Unnatural Narrative Theory

Abstract: Unnatural narrative theory is the theory of fictional narratives that defy the conventions of nonfictional narratives and of fiction that closely resembles nonfiction. It theorizes fiction that displays its own fictionality, and focuses on works that break (or only partly enter into) the mimetic illusion. Paradigmatic examples of unnatural narratives include Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable and many of his later texts, Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie (and other works that employ this kind of construction), Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Anna Kavan's Ice, Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. For a pithy example of the unnatural in a single phrase, one may go to Christine Brooke-Rose's line in Thru: "Whoever you invented invented you too" (53). Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan comments on that line--and the narrative as a whole--in the following terms: "The novel repeatedly reverses the hierarchy [of narrative levels], transforming a narrated object into a narrating agent and vice versa. The very distinction between outside and inside, container and contained, narrating subject and narrated object, higher and lower level collapses" (94). For an example centered on events, we may adduce the following passage from Mark Leyner in My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist: "He's got a car bomb. He puts the keys in the ignition and turns it--the car blows up. He gets out. He opens the hood and makes a cursory inspection. He closes the hood and gets back in. He turns the key in the ignition. The car blows up. He gets out and slams the door shut disgustedly" (59). Here, an impossible sequence of events is depicted. Unnatural fiction is different not only from mimetic fiction but also from what I call nonmimetic or nonnatural fiction. Nonmimetic narratives include conventional fairy tales, animal fables, ghost stories, and other kinds of fiction that invoke magical or supernatural elements. Such narratives employ consistent storyworlds and obey established generic conventions or, in some cases, merely add a single supernatural component to an otherwise naturalistic world. By contrast, unnatural texts do not attempt to extend the boundaries of the mimetic, but rather play with the very conventions of mimesis. (1) EXIGENCY In most models of narrative theory, both ancient and modern, there has been little consideration of or space for highly imaginative, experimental, antirealistic, impossible, or parodic figures and events. Instead, we generally find a pronounced inclination or even a strong bias in favor of mimetic or realistic concepts; often, fictional characters, events, and settings are analyzed in the same terms or perspectives that are normally used for actual persons, events, and settings. (2) In many types of narrative theory, the model or default type of narrative was and still is a more or less mimetic one. (3) This is even largely true of structuralist narratology, despite its scientific posture and desire to transcend humanism, as Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck have thoroughly established (41-101, esp. 63-65, 69-70, 82-86, 101). To be sure, there have been a number of exceptional theorists who have attempted to go well beyond the parameters of the mimetic, including Viktor Shklovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Ricardou, Christine Brooke-Rose, David Hayman, Leonard Orr, Brian McHale, J. Hillis Miller, and Werner Wolf (see Richardson, Unnatural Narrative 23-27). The fact remains, however, that most current narratological accounts continue to employ substantially or exclusively mimetic models. Thus, on the subject of narrative time, nearly all general works of narrative theory or narratological handbooks employ and limit themselves to Genette's categories of order, duration, and frequency. The category of order contrasts the sequence of events presented in the text (recit, sjuzet) with the sequence of events we can derive from the text and place into a chronological order (histoire, fabula). …

Periodizing Samuel Beckett's Works: A Stylochronometric Approach

Abstract: We report the first analysis of Samuel Beckett’s prose writings using stylometry, or the quantitative study of writing style, focusing on grammatical function words, a linguistic category that has seldom been studied before in Beckett studies. To these function words, we apply methods from computational stylometry and model the stylistic evolution in Beckett’s oeuvre. Our analyses reveal a number of discoveries that shed new light on existing periodizations in the secondary literature, which commonly distinguish an “early,” “middle,” and “late” period in Beckett’s oeuvre. We analyze Beckett’s prose writings in both English and French, demonstrating notable symmetries and asymmetries between both languages. The analyses nuance the traditional three-part periodization as they show the possibility of stylistic relapses (disturbing the linearity of most periodizations) as well as different turning points depending on the language of the corpus, suggesting that Beckett’s English oeuvre is not identical to his French oeuvre in terms of patterns of stylistic development.

Absurd Catalogues: The Functions of Lists in Postmodernist Fiction

Abstract: Lists proliferate in postmodernist narratives, that is, the self-reflexive kind of fiction that reached its heyday in the second half of the twentieth century. This article seeks to determine the functions of these catalogues. First, they serve a metafictional or self-reflexive function. The lists in postmodernist fiction involve stylistic peculiarities through which the text reflects upon and thus foregrounds its status as fiction. Second, they highlight the limits of our compulsive need to impose order on chaos: postmodernist narratives present us with disorganized catalogues to ridicule our pattern-seeking minds, that is, our human attempts to create order and meaning. Third, they convey a certain attitude to life: the catalogues in postmodernist narratives celebrate variety and plurality by illustrating that individual entities cannot (or should not) be forced into a rigid system of order; the lists in postmodernist fiction thus invite us to adopt a playful attitude which closely correlates with the capacity of “letting things be” advocated by Zen masters.

Enacting hallucinatory experience in fiction : metalepsis, agency, and the phenomenology of reading in Muriel Spark's The Comforters.

Abstract: This article examines Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, in the light of her autobiographical account of the hallucinations she experienced prior to writing the novel. In particular, it focuses on how Spark represents hallucinatory experience through the use of experimental metafictional devices, such as the metaleptic intrusion of the narrative voice into the storyworld. These devices, it is argued, can be viewed as carrying out two distinct yet integrated functions, on the one hand conveying aspects of the phenomenology of auditory verbal hallucinations by eliciting a certain type of readerly response, while on the other serving to represent the destabilization of the protagonist’s senses of self and agency which is attendant upon her hallucinatory experiences.

The World Is Not Enough: Lists as Encounters with the "Real" in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Abstract: The list plays a key role in the development of the eighteenth-century novel as a self-consciously innovative form. In this essay I examine the function of enumerations in two key texts, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, where they not only produce a heightened sense of credibility and plausibility, but also import contemporary systems of thought and stage interiority and negotiate the status of the novel in relation to other types of text. The form of the list, I argue, is to be seen as an instrument in a larger project of novelistic self-assertion.

Descriptive Lists and List Descriptions

Abstract: Lists are a recurrent feature of discourse. They not only occur in the text type "list" (the shopping list, the to-do list, the order of business), but are a standard feature of arguments (first, second, third), of instructional prose (Put the milk into the mixer, add the sugar and the strawberries, then turn on the blender, blend for five minutes, then add the vanilla ice cream and blend for another three minutes, then pour into glasses), of narrative (He checked the arsenal, appointed guards, manned the portcullis, and closed the gates of the castle), and of description (The dining room sported a large table, ten chairs, a sideboard, several lamps, a chandelier over the table, a big red carpet, and several mirrors and paintings on the walls). The list therefore is a structural schema of enumeration in which particular items (e.g., attributes, objects or people, processes, actions) are arranged in a series. The order of items can be determined temporally (first to last), spatially (from top to bottom, left to right), in reference to importance (most important to least important), to salience (from the object/feature that stands out to less remarkable items), to logical parameters (from the general to the specific, e.g., first give the layout of a house, then list the individual rooms), or can follow cultural codes (start describing women from the face downward; describe apartments by listing rooms in the order in which you walk through them). There are also unordered lists in which one has jotted down items as they have occurred to one (the shopping list) or lists where the order is determined by accidental external circumstances (the agenda of a meeting, where topics may have been arranged to meet the schedules of various parties who have to leave early or who are coming late from other engagements). Lists thus display a great variety of forms and are utilized in many different contexts. When one considers lists in literature (fiction and poetry--I exclude drama from consideration), there are four dominant forms to be observed: (1) the narrative list which lists actions in fiction or narrative poetry; (2) the descriptive list, that is, a descriptive passage in the form of a list; (3) the argumentative list, which can occur in the discourse of the narrator persona or in the dialogue (or monologue) of characters, and in the disquisitions of the speaker of a poem; (4) the list as insert, for instance as the quotation of a shopping list or agenda; but also in embedded texts such as the quoted business letter or minutes, the letter enumerating things to do or events of the previous week. Whereas (1) to (3) are inherently part of narrative, in the case of (4) the list form belongs to the text type or genre of the embedded text. Argumentative lists have received ample treatment in Deborah Schiffrin's Approaches to Discourse. She notes that much conversational language is structured in the format of lists. For instance, she quotes an interview in which the interviewee answers the question "Racing's big around here, isn't it?" by listing the places for racing ("Jersey," "Monmouth," "Garden State," "Atlantic City," "Liberty Bell," "Neshaminy," "Delaware," "New York," "Aquaduct," "Saratoga," "Belmont") and then establishes the order of the list as follows: Racing around here Racing in New Jersey Race tracks in New Jersey Racing here [in Pennsylvania] Race tracks in Pennsylvania Racing in Delaware/race track in Delaware Racing in New York Race tracks in New York (Adapted from Schiffrin 295) Schifffin goes on to contrast narrative and descriptive lists, noting how in some conversations the two tend to be combined or merge into one another. For instance, in a narrative of where "people would go on dates" (304), this list is interrupted by a descriptive enumeration concerning the ice cream parlor, but nevertheless continues the list of locations by adding a bakery (304). …

Adjacency Pairs and Interactive Consciousness in Virginia Woolf's Novels

Abstract: This article responds to an important development in the study of the presentation of social minds by investigating Virginia Woolf’s portrayal of consciousness in the light of a key conversational pattern: adjacency pairs. Woolf employs frequent shifts in point of view in her texts, the result of which is that different characters’ streams of consciousness are interwoven together. This narrative design allows the text to probe into the relationship between different minds. Drawing on findings in discourse analysis, this article demonstrates that the way in which characters’ viewpoints are juxtaposed resembles paired actions in conversation and that the intersubjectivity underlying the format of adjacency pairs is also mapped on the juxtaposition of different minds. It thereby argues that this sequencing format functions as an effective linguistic mechanism for rendering the social interactive quality of consciousness in Woolf’s narrative.

Modern Fiction, the Poetics of Lists, and the Boundaries of Narrative

Abstract: Lists, though regularly considered to be nonnarrative, exist just beyond the boundary of narrative proper. Modern authors frequently attempt to transgress this border in various ways, and occasionally to exaggerate it. Lists can also in certain cases transcend the literary/nonliterary boundary. An analysis of lists of proper names reveals a kind of narrative compulsion that often overwhelms the list proper. Beginning with a look at lists in Paradise Lost, this article traces out the shifting functions of lists in the work of Joyce, Tzara, Borges, Nabokov, Cabrera Infante, Perec, and Calvino and continues with an account of the power of lists on the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s story, “How to Be an Other Woman.” The article concludes with some theoretical reflections of the status of lists as proto-narratives.

Intermental Thought and Mutual Focalization: Narrative Sympathy in North and South

Abstract: A fierce debate took place within the nineteenth-century novel in particular on the nature of social minds. It had two sides. One was epistemological: To what extent is it possible to have knowledge of the workings of other minds? The other side of the debate was ethical: To what purposes should our knowledge of other minds be put? (Alan Palmer, "Social Minds in Fiction" 197-98) An ethical dilemma that the Victorians faced was the desire and yet impossibility of knowing the mind of another. The inability, or impossibility, for characters to read other characters' minds and actually know their thoughts is a situation that the realist novel explores as access to the mind of another was access to their identity. The use of different techniques to portray fictional minds links to the ethical deliberation that such access offers. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South explores the instabilities created by this impossibility for characters to know each other's minds, and yet through a combination of focalization and consciousness representation attempts to overcome this impossibility. North and South makes the claim that focalization and knowledge are connected, or at least should be connected. Both techniques of fictional minds and focalization are crucial for understanding the ethical claims of the realist novel, which Mary-Catherine Harrison explores as including the possibility of creating "empathy across difference" ("How Narrative" 283) and the translation of the reader's emotional response into real-life action ("The Paradox" 259). These ethical claims are central to the social problem novel and specifically in North and South are grounded in shared thought. Ultimately, this article follows Alan Palmer's recognition of "the need for a rhetorical and ethical perspective on analyses of social minds" ("Social Minds in Fiction" 234). The Victorians' desire for sympathy between characters, and between authors and readers, is ultimately a desire for what Palmer has defined as "intermental" or shared, thought. Thus, situations of intermental thought become a crossover for narrative theory and ethics. In North and South, Margaret Hale and Mr. Thornton experience frequent misunderstandings and differences of thought. Their interpretations of each other are frequently incorrect or misleading, or one character's mind is privileged over another. These instabilities and tensions arise when extensive inside views of Mr. Thornton are revealed through psychonarration and free indirect discourse while Margaret's thoughts remain strangely silent in response. This gap in exposure to their fictional minds is combined with an inequality of focalization. Their inability to achieve intermental thought is reflected by their misperception and misinterpretation of each other. The perception through focalization that the narrator of North and South prizes is more than just accurate looking; it is unity between seeing and knowing, or knowing because one sees. Thus, the narrator's attention to the gaze of one character upon another reveals an emphasis on the knowledge that can be gained from the body, and the possibility of accurate knowledge and mutual understanding. Palmer states, "Part of the work of decoding action statements involves readers following the attempts of characters to read other characters' minds" ("Social Minds in the Novel" 137). This mediated mind-reading makes use of a character's actions and dispositions with the understanding that the mind is embodied, and therefore can be known through observing a character's body and physicality. In North and South, characters look at each other to read their bodies, and have their own bodies read. Significantly, face watching and face reading, with their link to focalization, are the key ways in which perception and thought are linked in the novel. Comments about seeing, watching, and observing create a platform for character-character communication that relies on how one character's bodily reaction demonstrates his or her interior thoughts, and how that message is read through another character's focalization. …

A Reading in Temporal Poetics: Elizabeth Bishop's "The Map"

Abstract: Poetry is formal. It selects and patterns forms that are analogically related. Form is closely related to rhythm. Rhythm is componential. Form is paradigmatic. The qualities of the rhythmic components are the source of formal paradigms. Rhythm creates (subjective) time. Therefore, a poetics based on rhythm is a temporal poetics. This essay reads Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Map” from the viewpoint of just such a temporal poetics.

Permanent Defamiliarization as Rhetorical Device; or, How to Let Puppymonkeybaby into Unnatural Narratology

Abstract: Brian Richardson's work on the unnatural, spanning more than ten years, presents and refines two insights that continue to strike me as original and important. The first is the observation that what Richardson calls "anti-mimetic tendencies" are an integral part of (not only modern) literary narratives. The second is the idea that most of the dominant unified theories of narrative have been hindered in dealing adequately with these tendencies, due to their implicit or explicit reliance on models of storytelling derived from the way in which nonfictional narratives typically function. The following suggestions should be situated in the context of this broad appreciation of the general thrust behind Richardson's contribution to narrative theory. What I want to suggest is that rather than talking about the unnatural narrative as a certain type of fictional narrative, an autonomous innovative or experimental text, we might consider talking pragmatically about the unnatural as a rhetorical device, defined in relation to existing processes of sense-making, rather than in relation to existing texts or poetics. While inspired by, and in most instances compatible with, Richardson's position, the approach suggested is motivated by an attempt to address a concern raised by the observation that the idea of the unnatural as antimimetic is based on what I find to be a debatable distinction between fiction and nonfiction. A pragmatic, rhetorical approach might be considered better designed for addressing not only the different functions of unnatural devices but also the many cases where such devices appear locally in otherwise traditional types of narratives, or appear outside of generic fiction, be it in poetry, in everyday communication, or in rhetorical discourse, such as advertisements. An example of the last is the advertisement featuring "Puppymonkeybaby," a video spot aired in 2016 to promote the soft drink Mountain Dew Kickstart. The main protagonist of the short narrative is a CGI-generated, photorealistic, and fully animated hybrid creature with the head of a dog, the torso of a monkey, and the legs of a human baby. I establish my thesis through a short discussion of one of the main premises underlying Richardson's definition of unnatural narratives, followed by a rereading of one of the most canonical, systematic attempts to address strangeness in semiosis, the concept of defamiliarization (1) as presented by Shklovsky in "Art as Device." (2) Richardson defines unnatural narratives as those that "defy the conventions of nonfiction narratives and of fiction that closely resembles nonfiction" ("Unnatural" 1). This definition is "based on a significant distinction between fiction and nonfiction" (13). The idea of the antimimetic as that which defies the mimetic or nonfictive makes sense only when one relies on a fundamental "affirmation of the fiction/nonfiction boundary" (13). Under what logic does this boundary function? According to Richardson, the boundary between fiction and nonfiction is policed with reference to what he calls "the pragmatic theory of fictionality" (13) and "the standard conception of fictionality" (13). However, what this standard, pragmatic conception might entail remains a bit vague. Two understandings of the difference between fiction and nonfiction to which Richardson does not subscribe are clearly presented: he does not believe that fiction is recognizable through "distinctive syntactic components" (13), and he does not subscribe to the "more recent [theory of fictionality] offered by Nielsen, Walsh, and Phelan" (13n7). One may see these as two ends of a spectrum of ideas concerning how to distinguish imaginary from non-imaginary discourse. At the one end, we find what Herman would call an exceptionalist position, (3) which states that fiction is ontologically and/or formally distinct from nonfiction, and essentially operates with two mega-genres, one where everything is fictional and another where nothing is fictional. …

George Eliot's Feminism: "The Right to Rebellion." by June Skye Szirotny (review)

Abstract: June Skye Szirotny, George Eliot's Feminism: "The Right to Rebellion." Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 284 pp. $90. June Skye Szirotny's George Eliot's Feminism: "The Right to Rebellion" is clearly informed by her lifelong study of George Eliot's life and writing as well as her historically grounded analysis of Victorian feminism. From the first page, she demonstrates her familiarity with Eliot's and Lewes' novels, essays, and published correspondence. Drawing from these materials, she offers a fresh perspective on the tensions that shaped Eliot's responses to Victorian feminism. Defying the recent trend for more casual documentation, Szirotny provides meticulous parenthetical references throughout, citing frequently from Gordon Haight's edition of Eliot's letters, William Baker's three-volume set of George Henry Lewes' letters (1995-99), and Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston's edition of Eliot's journal (1998), as well as from Victorian sources and more than a century of scholarship on Eliot and her writing. Szirotny's overarching argument is that although Eliot was "ambivalent" about the political activism of some of her feminist friends, she nonetheless had a "strong belief in the necessity of reform" (26) and "accepted most of the ideals of contemporary feminists" (32) by the time she began to write her novels. Eliot's critics frequently characterize her as "conservative," but most have not traced the development of her attitudes as carefully as Szirotny does here. George Levine, for example, in his magisterial introduction to The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (2001) identifies Eliot's political stance as "conservative" (12), and J. Hillis Miller makes similar claims in "A Conclusion in Which Almost Nothing is Concluded" (151) in Karen Chase's Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century (2006); Szirotny could have expanded her audience by citing these and other recent examples. Countering the arguments of many of Eliot's best-known critics who identify her simply as conservative, and second-wave feminist critics like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who demonstrate, for example, Eliot's "feminine anti-feminism" in several of her novels (Madwoman 466), Szirotny asserts that Eliot was "more feminist than usually thought" (32) and presents close-readings of all of her novels and The Spanish Gypsy to show her support for many of the causes advocated by Victorian feminists. One of the most original insights of Szirotny's study is her argument that Eliot, as a child, suffered from what Alice Miller, in The Drama of the Gifted Child, calls "narcissistic disturbances," and that her ambivalence and apparent conservativism can be better understood as an expression of the psychological defenses related to them. Mary Ann Evans did not have a strong, supportive bond with her mother, and fifteen months after she was born, her mother delivered twins who died soon after their birth. As a result, Mary Ann was sent to boarding school when she was only five years old. Szirotny identifies Christian evangelicalism as a second factor that shaped Eliot's early "conservativism" and describes her initial enthusiastic response to the faith professed by her teacher, Maria Lewis. She shows that Eliot's Christian evangelicalism was "most responsible for her 'conservativism'" as a young adult, but documents how her political attitudes changed after she renounced Christianity at the age of twenty-two. Szirotny shows that after Eliot moved to London in 1851 and assumed her role as the "subeditor" of the Westminster Review, she developed a strong belief in "the necessity of reform" (26). In 1854 when she decided to travel to Germany, unmarried and unchaperoned, with George Henry Lewes and elected to live openly with him after their return, she suffered from her family's rejection and from social ostracism. Szirotny acknowledges that Eliot became less politically radical after 1854, but she cites widely from her letters and essays to show that she was not "weak" but psychologically "sick," and that "the love and success she enjoyed in later years, as well as the influence of the sanguine Lewes" eventually helped counteract "her negativism" (8). …

Rejoinders to the Respondents

Abstract: I wish to begin by thanking my colleagues for their careful examination of my work. It has benefitted me and provided the occasion to clarify, reformulate, and extend my conceptions. I wish I had had additional space to engage with more of the issues raised; within the given limits I have tried to address what seem to be the most pressing concerns. I will start by taking up some general points. WHAT IS AN UNNATURAL NARRATIVE? The unnatural is, in my definition, the antimimetic. In a narrative, it may appear in the story, in the discourse, or in the presentation of a narrative. That means that the narration may be entirely conventional but the storyworld may be impossible or contradictory, or the storyworld may be entirely mimetic while the narration or presentation of the text may be unnatural. It is a mistake to expect a perfect homology in these three areas; in fact, the unnatural is more prominent and its effects more pronounced when it is juxtaposed with mimetic aspects of a text. There are very few entirely unnatural texts, while there are tens (or hundreds?) of thousands that are partly unnatural. METHODOLOGY, COVERAGE, AND EXEMPLIFICATION I would like to articulate my sense of the relationship among narrative theory, examples of specific texts, and critical accounts of specific texts, points variously taken up by a number of the respondents, including Abbott, Nunning and Bekhta, Phelan, Rabinowitz, Ryan, and Sommer. Some have suggested that we do not need any new theoretical apparatus, since existing criticism is already able to deal with a number of the authors I mention. Porter Abbott asks: "Have critics of Pynchon or Perec been hampered by the lack of a set of concepts belonging to the class 'unnatural?" (434). My central point is not that literary criticism needs unnatural concepts in order to do its job--though I certainly hope such concepts do open up more conceptual possibilities for criticism and reduce the amount of misguided and reductive readings. Instead, I want narrative theory to actually theorize the results of the existing criticism. How do we need to transform existing conceptions of fabula, narrative time, and narration to incorporate the findings in the excellent critical studies of Brian McHale, Ursula Heise, and Abbott himself? Abbott suggests that my account of the unnatural features of Ulysses "brings to bear no tools and distinctions but the ones we already have at hand--mimesis, diegesis, narration, description, first person, third person, heterodiegetic, homodegetic, and the list goes on and on" (435). I would respond that my point is very different, that these concepts are themselves inadequate and need to be supplemented by others such as the antimimetic, denarration, contradictory chronology, dis-framed narration, verbal generators, descriptions that become events, and so on. I use these concepts to theorize my criticism. Furthermore, just because the new terms develop out of older ones does not mean they are not equally necessary. No one makes such claims in other fields. Marx's concepts grow out of Hegel's, Gauss's out of Euclid's, Einstein's out of Newton's: that doesn't make the later ones somehow dispensable. Similarly, no one scorns the written epic because it came after and developed out of the oral epic, and no one finds irony to be unimportant simply because it depends upon the notion of literal meaning, which it presupposes and inverts. Concerning coverage, we may observe two phases in research into unnatural narratives: first, the identification of a general "mimetic bias" in narratology (not in the concept of mimesis itself, as one contributor mistakenly avers) and its consequent neglect of a large number of postmodern narratives that violate conventional mimetic practices. We are now in the middle of a second period of such research that is extending analysis of unnatural elements to different genres, periods, and media. …

What Are Unnatural Narratives? What Are Unnatural Elements?

Abstract: The research on unnatural narrative theory as represented by Brian Richardson's work over the past two or three decades has greatly expanded the scope of narrative studies, covering various phenomena neglected in previous investigations of narrative poetics. The works by Richardson and other scholars have devoted much space to explaining and defining what is unnatural. However, the picture is still not that clear. This article tries to help clarify the issue by revealing the difference between the unnatural in Shakespeare/realist fiction and postmodernist fiction and by classifying different kinds of unnatural elements that break mimetic conventions without breaking the mimetic illusion. SHAKESPEARE, REALISM VERSUS POSTMODERNISM In Unnatural Narrative (henceforth UN), Richardson observes that "the key criterion [for the unnatural] will always be the breaking of the mimetic illusion, in whatever form that may take" (93). Since different theorists have come up with different definitions of the unnatural, Richardson says in the Target Essay (henceforth TE): "In our practice, we often find it most useful to point to paradigmatic instances of the unnatural" (394). Here are two such cases offered in the TE: (1) "Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining" (387); (2) "He's got a car bomb. He puts the keys in the ignition and turns it--the car blows up. He gets out. He opens the hood and makes a cursory inspection. He closes the hood and gets back in. He turns the key in the ignition. The car blows up. He gets out and slams the door shut disgustedly" (Leyner 59). Significantly, the works by writers in the realist tradition, like Cervantes through Fielding and on through Austen and Trollope, preclude such impossible fictional events, which totally violate our understanding of the world. Such events can only appear in avant-garde, experimental fiction, like postmodernism, with essentially different conventions and licenses. In discussing unreliable narration, Tamar Yacobi observes that "the genetic mechanism relegates fictive oddities and inconsistencies to the production of the text; above all, where unresolved otherwise, they are blamed on the (e.g., wavering, negligent, or ideologically fanatic) author. [...] Just consider 'one inconsistency [that] seems like a slip on Tolstoy's part: in chap. 14, Pozdnysheva is said to have borne six children, while elsewhere it is five' [Isenberg 167n29]" (111). Such mismatched narration is likely to be taken as a purposefully "unnatural" technique in postmodernist fiction, but tends to be regarded as a careless "slip" when found in a realist text. (1) Similarly, no matter whether it is Fielding or Austen or Trollope, had he or she penned "Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining," we would not be in a position to take it as the unnatural technique of "denarration," but have to treat it as a puzzling slip in an essentially realist narrative. Realist fiction does enjoy certain licenses to break the mimetic illusion occasionally, such as a dramatized hetero-extradiegetic narrator's entering the storyworld or such a narrator's referring to his/her own narrating power. But usually these occasional elements are not significant enough to subvert the mimetic nature of the whole narrative. Then how about Shakespeare? In UN, Richardson defines Shakespeare as "one of the greatest fabricators of unnatural places, events, and sequences in the history of literature before postmodernism" (102). But we would not expect to find instances like "Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining" in Shakespeare. In the first place, it is impossible to enact such denarration on the stage (if the two sentences concerned are enacted, they would be taken as being sequential: it first rains, then the rain stops). Secondly and more importantly, Shakespeare's drama still aims at maintaining the mimetic illusion. One example of the unnatural chosen by Richardson is "the play with time" in Hamlet (UN 103-4). …

"Unnatural" or "Fictional"? A Partial Critique of Unnatural Narrative Theory and Its Discontents

Abstract: Acknowledging that there is no unifying conception of what may constitute an "unnatural" fictional text, element, or technique, Brian Richardson does not present an exhaustive discussion of all the developments in the field of unnatural narratology but rather exemplifies his own understanding of the category of the "unnatural," refined by a typological model of mimetic, non-mimetic, and anti-mimetic fiction and supplemented by an extensive list of "unnatural" narratives. Although unnatural narratology provides a welcome corrective to classical narratological models and corpora, challenging the applicability of existing models and expanding the horizons of postclassical narratologies, it remains a highly contested approach that arguably suffers from a lack of terminological precision, conceptual clarity, and theoretical rigor. Since limitations of space preclude the possibility of revisiting all debates and issues here, we would like to direct readers to the detailed critique by Klauk and Koppe, which the unnaturalists' response, "What Really Is Unnatural Narratology?" in Alber et al., does not actually refute, as well as to the stimulating exchange between Fludernik ("How Natural"), whose sophisticated arguments we endorse, and Alber et al. ("What Is Unnatural?"). Our response offers a partial critique of unnatural narrative theory as outlined in the Target Essay both in the sense that it is anything but comprehensive and in the sense that we have a general liking for any attempt to enrich narrative theory but are not fully convinced that unnatural narratology achieves this aim. We shall concentrate on three problematic points: the definition of the term itself; the term "anti-mimetic," employed as an alternative to "unnatural"; and the relationship between unnatural narratology and classical narratology. The term "unnatural" is used to cover so much ground that it arguably fails to function as an analytical concept. In his attempt to delimit "unnatural," Richardson pits it against nonfictional narratives, realist fictional narratives, and what he calls mimetic narratives, but the distinction between the three is unclear and often seems to collapse: "mimetic" comes to mean "realist," which in turn means modeled on nonfictional narratives (401). Let us consider the various definitions in the Target Essay: unnatural narrative theory, according to Richardson, "is the theory of fictional narratives that defy the conventions of nonfictional narrative and fiction that closely resembles nonfiction" as well as "fiction that displays its own fictionality" (385). Moreover, so-called unnatural texts are said to "play with the very conventions of mimesis" (386) and to "transcend the conventions of existing, established genres" (389). These definitions rely on two key qualities: experimentation with form and fictionality. This begs the question of whether the umbrella term "unnatural" is meant to designate all avant-garde, or experimental, fiction, or even literary innovation in general, or a more clearly delimited corpus of narratives. Furthermore, neither the wide range of adjectives that are more or less used synonymously with the central term "unnatural," such as "unnatural or postmodern" (392), "highly imaginative, experimental, anti-realistic, impossible, or parodic" (386), and "innovative, impossible, parodic, or contradictory" (387), nor the equally wide range of fictional narratives that are adduced as typical examples of "unnatural narratives" (cf. e.g., 1-2, 15-16) serves to enhance the unbiased reader's confidence in the terminological precision or conceptual clarity of the approach. The inflationary use of the term also leads to unfortunate formulations such as "unnatural narratologists" (393) and "unnatural authors" (396). A way of streamlining "unnatural" as a term could lie in limiting it to one type of narrative text or technique, separating discussions of innovative forms from "unnatural" content and positioning it against the notion of "natural narratives. …

Response to Brian Richardson's Target Essay "Unnatural Narrative Theory"

Abstract: Never afraid of self-promotion, the founding fathers of unnatural narratology (Alber et al., "Unnatural Narratives") wrote in a 2010 manifesto: "In recent years the study of unnatural narratology has developed into one of the most exciting new paradigms in narrative theory" (113). What exactly should one understand by paradigm? Is unnatural narratology (henceforth UN) a field of investigation--a field constituted by the most experimental, innovative narrative forms--or is it a thorough rethinking of narrative theory? From Richardson's article, one can conclude that it has ambitions to be both; the question then becomes: why do experimental forms of narrative call for a revision of narratology, and more precisely, what is it about them that, as Richardson claims, cannot be accounted for by standard narratology? If UN is simply a field of investigation, it could be justified by a scalar conception of narrativity. As I suggested in "Toward a Definition of Narrative," the set of all narratives can be conceived as a fuzzy set that encompasses both prototypical forms, in which the conditions of narrativity are fully realized, and marginal forms, in which some of these conditions are not fulfilled, or where the telling of a story is subordinated to another purpose rather than constituting a focus of attention. UN could then be conceived as the study of the marginal forms, though I doubt that its advocates would subscribe to this view: Richardson makes it clear that for him experimental forms, such as Beckett's novels, are just as narrative as the genre that UN regards as the embodiment of naturalness in narrative, and that serves, consequently, as an implicit standard. Rather than relying on a scalar conception of narrativity, UN rests on a dichotomy between natural and unnatural narratives, (1) and it designates the unnatural as its territory. But in contrast to Monika Fludernik, who has given deep thought to what it means to call a type of narrative natural, and who associates this type with spontaneous, conversational narratives (Towards), UN proponents do not take the time to define, much less to scrutinize, their implicit standard. References to linguistic/discourse analytical approaches to conversational narrative are glaringly absent from their work. Through a process of inference from what our authors label unnatural, I construct this standard as "x telling y that p happened in the real world, in the hope that y will believe that p." This excludes, a priori, all forms of fiction from the domain of the natural, even though the creation of fictional worlds and stories is a universally attested and cognitively fundamental human activity. I infer, furthermore, that in order to optimize believability, the telling of p should be governed by H. Paul Grice's famous maxims of conversation: maxims such as quality (do not say what you do not believe to be true), quantity (avoid prolixity), relevance (your contribution should be related to the current topic of the conversation), and manner (make your contribution orderly). These maxims not only fail to account for literary texts, but they are also often deliberately flouted (as Grice recognizes) in conversational storytelling. Tellability often gets in the way of believability, and it is to the extent that they play freely with the maxims that conversational narrators manage to capture the interest of their audience. If there is a form of narrative that strictly follows Grice's maxims, it would be courtroom testimony, or maybe history writing, but these genres are hardly a natural, spontaneous form of narration. If UN advocates took the time to study the forms of storytelling that they regard as natural, they would discover that these forms are much richer and more sophisticated in their narrative techniques than merely informing an audience that something happened. One could admittedly argue that written forms of narrative, compared to oral ones, present medium-specific narrative devices, while fictional narratives, compared to factual ones, present genre-specific devices. …

How Unnatural Does It Get

Abstract: * Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 20x5.197 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1279-0. * Alber, Jan. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2016. 294 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8032-7868-4. Unnatural narratology has become one of the most prominent recent developments in narrative theory. It started around the year 2000 with the work of Brian Richardson, who collected his explorations of unnatural narratives in his 2006 study Unnatural Voices. The approach quickly attracted a group of young scholars, focusing on unusual fictional texts and questioning the usual narratological concepts. Among them were Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Maria Makela, and Henrik Skov Nielsen. The term "unnatural" obviously alluded to Monika Fludernik's "natural narratology" (1996). Fludernik was inspired by Jonathan Culler's idea of "naturalization," stressing the ways in which readers try to turn alienating texts into something they can understand. Richardson, on the other hand, took his cue from postmodernist fiction and poststructuralist theories, stressing the irreducibility of the alien and the exceptional. Culler's "naturalization" is a strategy that turns the peculiar and the unknown into the known. It depends upon "cultural and literary models" supposedly present in readers' heads (138). These models range from general cultural patterns of signification, such as intentionality, to specific literary knowledge of periods and genres. The application of the models normalizes the abnormal: "'Naturalization' emphasizes the fact that the strange or deviant is brought within a discursive order and thus made to seem natural" (137). Fludernik elaborates on and updates Culler's study of these models via cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis. From William Labov she borrows the term "natural narrative"--oral, everyday stories people tell each other. Fludernik develops Culler's concept of models into her concept of frames; she uses the term "experientiality" to describe the central process of normalization (as soon as a reader recognizes a center of experience in a narrative, he or she can come to grips with the text); and she replaces the term "naturalization" with "narrativation." Although Fludernik's basic idea is that people tend to normalize the abnormal, she does realize that some texts cannot be fully normalized. Narratives such as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake remain "unreadable" (Towards 293). They result in collapse: When narrativization breaks down, whether incipiently or in full measure, it does so where the consciousness factor can no longer be utilized to tide over radical inconsistency, and this happens first and foremost where overall textual coherence or micro-level linguistic coherence (and cohesion) are at risk. (317) The preference for consistency and narrativization that seems to underlie formulations like these is precisely what Richardson's unnatural narratology rejects. Simply put, he sees the process of naturalization as a form of reductionism, which smooths over the problematic aspects of narrative texts and which reformulates the new into something old. In this way, the complex, literary, and disruptive nature of the narrative is disregarded. Unnatural narratology, on the other hand, holds this complex nature in high regard and wants to respect it in its interpretation. The fundamental differences between the two narratological views were formulated clearly in a joint 2010 essay by Alber et al. They claimed that natural and classical narratology are guilty of "mimetic reductionism" ("Unnatural Narratives" 115) as they reduce the sophistication of literary narrative to everyday storytelling. The theorists point to three levels of literary "unnaturalness" (116): unnatural storyworlds (in which impossible things happen), unnatural minds (e.g., a character that knows he is being narrated by someone else, or an omniscient character), and unnatural acts of narration (e. …

Narratology and Taxonomy: A Response to Brian Richardson

Abstract: Unnatural foregroundings of textuality and artistic motivation have never been automatized and never will be. Unnaturalness, for me, is the cognitive flip side of the "natural" reading process, the counterforce that makes us appreciate and restore the distorted and mediated nature of fictional and textual representation. This stance associates my work--more or less loosely--with the unnaturalists. As a young doctoral student, I was impressed and inspired by Richardson's radically antimimetic take in Unnatural Voices, and I continue to admire the fervor with which he is establishing this new paradigm, continually drawing in new texts and new people. Yet I have major reservations concerning some of the very fundamentals of Richardson's approach, as well as with the narrative--theoretical methodology that follows from such a groundwork. Here I take up three such reservations that, in the end, all boil down to this question: what role does taxonomy play in contemporary narrative theory (and should it even play any role)? UNNATURAL NARRATIVES OR UNNATURAL NARRATOLOGY? When we first engaged in the business of the unnatural during the 2007 Narrative Conference in Washington, what we had in mind was a critical, even provocative movement that would contest the homogenizing side effects of contemporary narratology--the very same "mimetic bias" to which Richardson rightly draws our attention in his Target Essay. But what I particularly had in mind was a critique of the notions of reading and interpretation promoted by cognitive narratology: the perception of literature primarily through conversational story schemata; the analogies between real-life experiences and literary mediation that seemed too easy; and the tendency to construct the reader as a sense-maker who always opts for the primary, the plausible, the coherent, and the unambiguous. So for me, unnatural narratology was never about strange narratives but about the distortion of human experience that even the most realist literary narrative can create by its overly verbalized, overly structured, and overly intentional design. By "overly" I mean in relation to both conversational storytelling and our cognitive take on the real world. Furthermore, I thought that, when understood in this manner, unnaturalness would be the perfect new touchstone for the dominant cognitive paradigm. I thought that the term "unnatural" was a provocation, not a category for certain genres, texts, or narrative devices. And, behold, in recent years the narratological community has witnessed the ferreting out of ever more bizarre, nonconventional, noncommunicative, or self-eradicating texts. The theoretical provocation has turned into a taxonomic project that resembles an entomological expedition in the Amazon (see Tammi). Who will find the most exotic, unprecedented species? For this, I must blame Richardson and his passion for extensive, overwhelming lists of "unnatural narratives" and their categorization; he is the indisputable winner of this entomological contest. To be sure, new test cases for narratological analyses are welcome--I'm glad that someone moves the Austens, Jameses, and Hemingways aside for a while. Yet if we genuinely wish to contest the cognitive paradigm, we should not focus on classifying literary texts as more or less unnatural, but instead try to revolutionize our all-too-naturalized assumptions about the frames and dynamics of reading. In other words, we should do unnatural narratology instead of hunting for unnatural narratives. If we confront natural narratology merely with a new corpus, we fail to address the very fundamentals of the cognitive approach--the universalist claims about meaning-making and the overarching principle of economy, for example. In Monika Fludernik's groundbreaking natural narratology (the original inspiration for the unnaturalist movement), there is no place for such a thing as a "natural novel." As I have repeatedly argued elsewhere, placing the realist novel at the same end of the natural-unnatural axis with the naturally occurring conversational narrative misses Fludernik's original point, which relates to the anchoring of readerly frames in the real-life experiential schemata shared by the teller and the reader. …

Enlisting the Poet: The List and the Late Medieval Dream Vision

Abstract: This article begins with the Eddic poem known as Dvergatal, proposing that it is an instance of poetry as almost pure list. With alliteration, rhyme, and assonance featuring prominently, this list certainly constitutes a poem. At the same time, there is little narrative and as we lack much external reference for the poem, it remains largely mysterious. It is a list, and not much more than that. As Stephen Barney has written, dream visions seem to encourage the list and the point extends, as Dvergatal suggests, to the prophetic mode of poetry. The links between dream and prophecy are strong, as the Old Testament demonstrates: both dream and prophecy engage in a suspensive mode of writing—they are about things that have not quite happened. In both forms, the list arguably acts as a kind of conceptual anchor. Barney’s comment was made with particular reference to Chaucer; in this essay, while beginning with Chaucerian moments such as the “mixed forest” lists of The Knight’s Tale and Parliament of Foules, I am chiefly interested in the fate of the list in the later medieval, post-Chaucerian dream vision. John Skelton shows himself to be an inheritor of the list tradition and (in this as in so much else he inherits from Chaucer) an amplifier of it. His early poem Bowge of Court is structured around a straightforward list of characters, while the late Garland or Chaplet of Laurell is a riot of different kinds of list. Both poems can in addition be said to be about the status of being enlisted, or the desire to be on a certain kind of list (indicating status or fame)—a concern which is never far away in Skelton’s writing. In Stephen Hawes’s Comfort of Lovers (c.1515) there is the same concern with status that is witnessed in Skelton’s writing. But in contrast with Skelton’s verse, in Hawes the trope of the list seems to have been forgotten or avoided, suggesting the conclusion that the end of the list in the dream vision is also the end of the dream vision as a genre.

Gaping before Monumental Unnatural Inscriptions?: The Necessity of a Cognitive Approach

Abstract: I would like to begin by thanking Brian Richardson, whose ideas I value very much, for inviting me to respond to his Target Essay. I believe that Richardson has done groundbreaking narratological work by showing that unnatural narratives are an important subset of fictional narratives and also by demonstrating that we need new categories or concepts to adequately deal with them. From my perspective, his best work includes his article on unnatural temporalities ("Beyond") and his book on unnatural narrators (Unnatural Voices). Even though I also see overlaps between our research agendas, I want to zoom in on differences that concern (1) the definition of the term unnatural and (2) issues of methodology, that is, what one actually does with unnatural narratives. (1) In contrast to Richardson, I believe that a cognitive approach (see Herman, "Cognitive") does not only help us define the unnatural; it also helps us explain what the unnatural does to recipients and how we can try to make sense of it. My own interest in the unnatural begins with the following observation: I find it striking that so many fictional narratives represent physical, logical, or human impossibilities that contradict our real-world knowledge. Some of them have already been conventionalized, that is, transformed into cognitive frames we are now familiar with (such as that of the speaking animal in the beast fable or time travel in science fiction), while others are currently being conventionalized (such as the impossibilities in postmodernist narratives). I am primarily interested in the question of what the human mind does to come to terms with phenomena that transcend real-world possibilities. (2) In addition, I want to know how the impossibilities in postmodernist narratives, which constitute forms of anti-illusionism (Wolf) or metafiction (Waugh 1-11), and the conventionalized impossibilities in earlier narratives, which have become parts of familiar generic conventions, are connected. DEFINING THE UNNATURAL For Richardson, unnatural narratives "defy the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, the practices of realism or other poetics that model themselves on nonfictional narratives," and they "transcend the conventions of existing, established genres." He also distinguishes between the antimimetic (the properly unnatural) and the nonmimetic (in, say, "animal fables, fantasy, or supernatural fiction"), which, for him, is not unnatural. Richardson explains that the difference between the antimimetic and the nonmimetic has to do with "the degree of unexpectedness that the text produces, whether surprise, shock, or the wry smile that acknowledges that a different, playful kind of representation is at work" (Unnatural Narrative 5, my italics). In his Target Essay, Richardson also mentions narratives that are "constructed to be processed in surprising or unexpected ways" (391). It thus seems to be fair to say that for him, the unnatural is identical with the unconventional. But what exactly is the foil against which Richardson measures the unnatural? To my mind, he puts too much emphasis on the potential effects of the unnatural on the reader. Arguably, effects differ from recipient to recipient, so it is difficult to base the definition of a concept such as the unnatural on them. I also wonder how long these effects can be upheld. Personally, I do not believe in the existence of the eternally unconventional. Even the unnatural games of postmodernism will sooner or later seem outmoded. What happens when somebody like Jonathan Franzen (259-63), for instance, dismisses what Richardson calls "fiction that displays its own fictionality" as a boring, ludicrous, and self-important convention? Do such narratives cease to be unnatural because there is no longer a degree of unexpectedness to them? With regard to this question, Richardson argues that "it takes a lot of repetition--and widespread knowledge of that repetition--to fully conventionalize the antimimetic" (Unnatural Narrative 18). …

Pinter's Poetry: A Diachronic Analysis

Abstract: A playwright, poet, actor, director, political activist, and the winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, Harold Pinter has become a focus of global criticism. Although Pinter was regarded as "one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century" (Pendarvis 189), his drama has been greatly discussed around the world; his poetry, on the other hand, has failed to gain enough attention. Up to now, most scholars (1) have discussed Pinter's poetry in passing when their foci are on his plays or life. They have observed with acumen some characteristics of Pinter's poetry. Like his best plays, Pinter's best poems can "force mundane reality to assume the deepest overtones" (Baker and Tabachnick 18). However, little attention has been given to the evolution of Pinter's poetry as a whole. In a period of 60 years or so, Pinter as a poet had written a great number of poems, among which "at least 90" are published (Balter, Harold Pinter 134). A diachronic study of these published pieces will manifest an overall tendency toward a gradual compression: "Words, lines, verses all become briefer as time passes" (www.haroldpinter.org), which is confirmed by Baker when he observes that Pinter's "poems become shorter, increasingly so, with age" (Harold Pinter 19). But brevity is not all. In terms of diction, syntax, image, and other poetic components, Pinter's earlier poems are more elaborate, ornate, irregular, obscure, complicated, while his later ones become clearer, more direct, more unadorned, regular, and easily intelligible. His early poetic style can be called "baroque" while the late one "plain." The early phase covers from the 1950s to the 1960s; his middle phase encompasses the 1980s; the late phase refers to the 1990s and beyond. Such dates are approximate and inevitable features of earlier poetic rhetoric sometimes reoccur in later poetry written later. This paper will investigate the change Pinter's poetry undergoes by analyzing some representative pieces in different periods: and this examination will help us better understand the development of Pinter's poetic career. However, it should be borne in mind that Pinter's poetry, in company with others, has a tendency to resist formulaic generalizations. The changes in his poetry reflect developments in Pinter as a creative writer. His early poetic writing is much influenced by the themes, language, and forms of Jacobean revenge tragedy, an interest encouraged by his English master at Hackney Downs Grammar School Joe Brearley, (2) and the inflated language of contemporary poets such as W. S. Graham and Dylan Thomas. (3) His middle period sees him increasingly influenced by Samuel Beckett (4) and reflects Pinter's paring down of language, simplifying it and remembering personal relationships. In Pinter's later period, his poetry is affected by personal loss such as the death of his father and close friends, personal illness, increasing awareness of his own mortality, and increasing political commitment. Pinter's poetry also depicts the absurdity of the human condition in the post-Second World War world and reflects his effort to convey the pointlessness of existence by exposing its bleakness and by fighting injustice. Pinter's lifelong friend Mick Goldstein recalled that, at an evening gathering after school, Pinter cited "Cardinal Newman to me about creation being a vast aboriginal calamity." Billington, who quotes this remark, adds that "the notion that they need the surface of daily existence lie destination and emptiness permeates [Pinter's] work." (5) But this thematic preoccupation changes from the sense of apocalyptic angst caused by the aftermath of the War to concrete expression of oppression. It partly explains the permeation of death throughout Pinter's canon. The early poetry is shrouded in an enigmatic and doomed atmosphere; in his later poetry, the source of death takes on the shape of human agency in the so-called "democracies," to use a word he repeats four times in his 1996 poem "The Old Days. …