carola harryman - introduction non narrative

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Introduction: Non/Narrative

Carla Harryman

This special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory represents a window

onto a pressing, longstanding, and to me familiar conversation among

writers and artists on the question of non/narrative. As a writer who has

been engaged for several decades with the question of language that re-

sists narration in relation to the presumed centrality of narrative in literary

texts, the media, the social imagination, and the political sphere, I wanted

to gauge the extent of current critical thinking on the subject of non/

narrative. Given the indeterminacy of what we might call non/narrative,

and the dearth of previous critical writing on the subject, the essays of

poet-theorists, fiction writers, and literary critics presented here take up

markedly diverse approaches to the problem of non/narrative. Even so

readers will recognize common theoretical strands among the essays: the

narrative of late capitalism, the history of the avant-garde, and the gender-

ing of narrative.

Non/Narrative is an intervention into theories of narrative insofar as

these tend to diminish or ignore the function of nonnarrative language in

literary works. When taken together, the essays illuminate why it is impor-tant to study innovative texts that resist narrative, reinvent the structures of

narration, and/or perform theoretical evaluations of systems of narration

within the created world of their own design. The essayists in this volume

engage their literary objects as themselves theoretical works that variously

employ, illuminate, and intervene in discourses related to cognitive and

JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 41.1 (Spring 2011): 1–11. Copyright © 2011 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.



2 J N T

narratological theories of authorship, periodization, the master narrative of

late capitalism, the gendered subject and formal innovation, and the role

of literary narrative in politically marginal communities.The theoretical work of the socially engaged non/narrative text stems

from its production of a crisis of understanding. Works that shift between

genres disturb categorical frames, foregrounding language such that narra-

tive seems to disappear. They radically break rules of story-telling to stage

a necessary disruption of asymmetrical power relations, the limits of

knowledge, psychological and social operations of recognition and mis-

recognition, the complex connections between private experience and

larger social forces, and the cooperative construction of meaning. The rad-ical formalism identified with nonnarrrative is thus not a “mere formal-

ism” within the sphere of the politically and aesthetically radical work. It

is a strategy of intervention.

The rubric non/narrative, and particularly the slash between non and

narrative, arose not out of narrative theories but in discussions among

writers and artists in the mid 1980s. First used in a special issue of Poetics

Journal (no. 5, 1985), the term addressed innovative postmodernist strate-

gies that reshaped, redistributed, undermined, or abandoned narrative. The journal editors called for theoretical and creative essays that would, to-

gether, complicate debates about narrative or indicate the “status” of nar-

rative in participating authors’ work. In their introduction to the forthcom-

ing print/digital anthology and archive of Poetics Journal (Wesleyan

University Press), Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten return to the language

of the period, describing narrative in terms of the most negatively com-

pelling “givens” for postmodernist avant-garde writers and artists:

Narrative was suspect—it was the horizon of official mean-

ing and interpretation, the real prison house to which we

have been confined by history. An open field of meaning

offered a way out of the confinements of narrative and clo-

sure, and nonnarrative writing strategies became vehicles

of choice.

In their special issue, the editors chose to resist creating a simple bi-

nary between narrative and non/narrative practice, representing a spectrumof positions by new narrativists, poets, and artists. Implicated in the tricky



slash between the prefix non and narrative are several questions a narra-

tive theory would ask of the nonnarrative practice. “Does nonnarrative

writing depend on a (underlying, suppressed, denied) framework of narra-tive?” and “What of the social and historical narratives the writer is in

when s/he writes nonnarrative work?” The well established but seldom re-

marked narrative of the avant-garde writer breaking with tradition does

not account for the specific interventions of radical form. What was

needed was a less conventional and assumed view of artistic intervention

that would invite readers to take narrative and nonnarrative equally seri-

ously. The early Non/Narrative issue was first an effort to encourage artists

and writers to further examine questions of narrative in their work, but italso aimed to encourage critical study of non/narrative in scholarly con-

texts that could in turn enable the development of a narratology that took

seriously the non.

The present issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory takes up the ques-

tion of non/narrative at a very different historical moment—as will be ev-

ident in our opening essay, Dimitri Anastasopoulos’s “Present Without

Memory.” Working between literary text and public language, Anasta-

sopoulos queries how obliterating a stable narrator and conventional story

in a nineteenth-century experimental text, Les Chants de Maldoror , can

inform our reading of nonliterary forms of narrative. For Anastasopoulos,

the way both narrator and story are suspended in the hybrid text of Mal-

doror can help us come to terms with problems of authorial intention and

narrative coherence in public discourse. Maldoror was the foundational

text from which Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot constructed a the-

ory of narrative that questions whether stories are “predicated on the rela-

tionship between an author, the narrative, and a reader at all.” This is the

question most central to Anastasopoulos as he navigates between narra-tives of political speech and the experimental text, seeking to explain

“why transparently biased political narratives continue to be so very diffi-

cult to pick apart,” i.e. how sheer fiction can be presented as fact in politi-

cal discourse.

The problem of narration in this case concerns the nonexistence of ura-

nium tubes claimed as evidence of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions in George

Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. Anastasopoulos reads Bush’s per-

formance of omniscience in his delivery of this notorious fiction as a com-ponent of a total narrative system that can easily cause an omniscient nar-

Introduction: Non/Narrative 3



rator to disappear in the next event of a narrative. He posits that such a de-

centered, distributed authorship is a feature of a narrative system in which

standard narrative terms that cleanly separate author, narrative, and readerdo not lead us to an understanding of the way narrative operates to enforce

nonnarratable political agendas. After Derrida and Blanchot, Anastaso-

poulos critiques structuralist theories of narrative (Gérard Genette and

Seymour Chatman) that rely on a taxonomy of narrative functions, infer-

ring that political agents who mediate narratives of power to the public

very well understand that these stabilizing terms can be used as foils for

manipulating political language. Anastasopoulos offers us a number of spe-

cific examples of the aporias and disavowals performed by political actors,in press interviews and journalistic analysis after Bush’s State of the

Union address. He turns to Maldoror to demonstrate how Lautréamont’s

tactics—which shift from nonnarration to “a super-abundance of narra-

tion”—perform a theory of narrative as they undermine the notion of the

stable narrative voice in the total narrative system.

Joshua Clover’s “Autumn of the System” begins by posing a problem

in the master narrative of late capitalism, a narrative profoundly agitated

by a global economic collapse that signals the arrival of the “winter” of

the system. He likens the present global moment to the end of other cycles

such as “the end of the British empire,” “the United Provinces,” and “the

Italian city-states,” while underscoring that such endings are “always dif-

ferent in their particulars.” Thus, it would be impossible to imagine, and

therefore narrate, a next cycle. Clover shifts from his opening assumption

in which “narrative is the problem of our historical moment,” to question

whether the most basic “problematic of the historical moment is necessar-

ily narrative in nature.” Casting a wintery eye on “autumnal literature,”

Clover turns to recent postmodernist texts to consider how these may helpus read American economic failure within the global system and, further,

determine the degree to which late capitalism is narrative in nature. At the

same time, he implicitly questions the financial and critical relations that,

between the literary marketplace and literary criticism, have formed a

strong preference for the novel.

As his discussion evolves, Clover puts the “systems” of Marxist liter-

ary theory and late postmodernist writing through a sequence of re-read-

ings of Marx’s general formula of capital. Clover’s combining of Marxisttheory and postmodernist literature yields a poetics that seeks a new way

4 J N T



to think within the unfolding relations of the global system. His method is

a response to Fredric Jameson’s “autumnal” invocation of “cognitive map-

ping” as a yet unrealized, potential construction of a political form of post-modernism that would provide a perspective on the incomprehensively

vast spacial scale of late capitalism. (54)

Clover’s discussion of literature focuses on three works published in

the last decade, each of which is posed on the edge of the system’s autumn

and winter: Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2000) and two col-

lections of poetry, John Ashbery’s Planisphere (2010) and Kevin Davies’s

The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (2009). Clover describes the form of

Pynchon’s elusive novel as a paradigm for a post-Fordist landscape, onethat is “barely cohesive enough to count as narrative in the first place.”

This noncohesion is represented in images of the spatial forms of two

emerging technologies in the early twentieth century, the assembly line

and the rail system. Whereas the assembly line terminates narration, a di-

rectional motion, in stasis or death, the rail system occupies space in a sys-

tem of ever-expanding spatialized nonlinearity. The formal topography of

the novel becomes a site of conversion from (temporal) story to (spatial)

“sprawl,” operating as a non/narrative system outside of the terms of “ra-

tional directionality.” Clover reads Pynchon’s work as a theoretical text

that simultaneously narrates overviews of the nonnarrative machinations

of capitalist expansion and constructs a non/narrative form that, in its dif-

ficulty, offers a palpable expression of the forms of late capitalism.

Clover’s discussion of Ashbery’s recent collection of poetry focuses to

some extent on the problem of the individual, or citizen, abandoned by the

narrative of finance capital. The falsity of the financial market’s narrative

of lending and debt, as it is played out in our emerging financial winter,

leaves consumers of this narrative in the space of their own lives wherethere is no “financial story” to live by. The individual is thus thrown back

on the nonnarratable situation of his/her existence, “living in America but

it’s all over.” The contours of capitalism’s failure begin then to appear in

the nonnarratable occurrences that take place between “false reasoning”

and “expectation.” These occurrences mark a lived experience that tran-

spires within a world-space, America, which is both everywhere (therefore

impossible to situate) and no longer here, the circumstances that comprise

the double entendre of Ashbery’s “all over.”The theme of a spatial “everywhere” and “nowhere” resonates with




Clover’s concluding discussion of Kevin Davies’s The Golden Age of

Paraphernalia. Here Clover cites a poetic structure that offers a quite lit-

eral experience of spatialized nonnarrative, one in which our experience of reading the poem ceases to be sequential. He compares the projection of

the work to a GPS tracking system, with every feature of the poetry poten-

tially linked to every other feature. “The political form” or poetics of this

vision, according to Clover, both conspires to reproduce the system and to

structure an antagonistic relationship to it. The synchronic form of com-

plicity and antagonism of Davies’s poetics renders yet another potential

contour of our view onto the nonnarrative of our financial winter, a post-

modernist poetics that grasps the incoherence of global capitalism’sexpansion. In reading Pynchon’s fiction with the poetry of Davies and

Ashbery, he aligns the radical postmodernist novel with the radical non-

naratives of contemporary poetry, intervening in the market categories that

separate them.

Ruth Jennison’s “Scrambling Narrative” offers a feminist materialist

reading of Lorine Niedecker, now seen as one of the four major Objec-

tivist poets. Objectivism in poetry is a radical tendency of mid-century

American modernism noted for its foregrounding of language; spare, clear

style; and sense of the poem as an object. For Jennison, Objectivism

“seeks to materialize in language—and make the reader newly aware of—

the obscured relations of production under capital.” Objectivism works

“against the mystification of given narratives,” bringing into appearance

objects that “not only ‘affect the mind’ but structure mental life more gen-

erally.” For Jennison, the Objectivists held in common a commitment to

radical democracy that provides the basis for their critique of national nar-

ratives. The critique of democracy that emerges in Niedecker’s work

stems from, but is in no sense confined to, the rural Wisconsin where shelived and worked in relative isolation. Jennison reads the American and

psychic interior from which Niedecker writes as a “periphery . . . stitched

into and pitched against a world-system” that relies on the countryside to

reproduce its social and spatial logics. Niedecker’s work initiates a consid-

eration of the relationship between the introspective individual conscious-

ness and the socially peripheral interior of rural America.

Through an extended reading of two early, longer works, Jennison

casts a feminist light on the interpenetration of the dual poetics of surreal-ism and Objectivism. While the male Objectivist poets “think with the

6 J N T



things as they exist,” Niedecker’s often interior gaze focuses on the sub-

stance of mental life as inextricably connected to the exterior existence of

things. In her reading Jennison demonstrates how the binding of the con-crete exterior and the unfixed, fluid objects of mental space are brought to

bear on Niedecker’s tactics of “scrambling narrative,” which yields a new

form of articulation of social relations that are typically concealed within

conventional modes of narration. In reading Niedecker’s long poem Pro-

gression, Jennison tracks a sequence of gendered relations, including the

“ideological alignment of masculinity with the capacity for abstraction

and femininity with the ‘world’ of base particulars.” Jennison describes

Progression’s opening survey of “exterior knowledge” and American his-tory as a chiaroscuro revealing transitions from light to dark that are gen-

erally made smooth in narrations by “male figures of philosophy, poetry,

and statecraft.” Jennison then traces the movement of the poem through

Niedecker’s “adaptation of Objectivist . . . principles to the surreal nature

of the horizon contoured by capital and its uneven stippling of national,

and personal, interiors.” Jennison is interested in the movements of

Niedecker’s thought that distort or torque the connection between interior

and exterior spaces, relating these to the asymmetries of vast economic

and political forces that affect all consciousnesses and localities, and most

particularly those perceived to be remote from locations of power.

The next essay takes us from the site of radical American modernism

to an activist poetics of postmodernist storytelling. Rob Halpern’s “Real-

ism and Utopia” interleaves contexts of the literary scene and gay politics

of 1970s San Francisco in a chronicling of the emergence of New Narra-

tive writing. Halpern produces a capacious account of an increasingly rec-

ognized literary moment, focusing on three works by poet, prose writer,

and theorist Bruce Boone. He places Boone’s texts in dialogue with criti-cal writings by Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson, and

Jacques Rancière, advancing the emerging scholarship of New Narrative

by offering an alternative to a reception that focuses on the story, or lore,

of community formation. Halpern discursively broadens the reach of the

politics of aesthetics and community while stressing the complexities on

which such a politics might develop.

Halpern sees the New Narrativists’ proclivities to switch from high to

low—from the eventful scenes of gossip, scandal, and pornography to atheorized activist poetics that relies on Frankfurt School, poststructuralist,




and postwar critiques of capital and commodity—as a galvanizing event

of gay cultural formation that connects the community to a broad, hetero-

geneous, politics of resistance. Placing New Narrative within a wide frameof postwar poetics that includes the divers projects of “Language writing,

Feminist writing, Black Arts, Post-Beat, and New American Poetics”

along with the fictions of radical postmodernists such as Kathy Acker and

Dennis Cooper, Halpern shows how New Narrative is committed to a

praxis which constructs a utopian vision for political struggles within mar-

ginalized communities. He notes that Robert Glück, another early theorist

and practioner, uses Althusser’s theory of ideology to provide a critical

model for thinking about narrative, with narrative as the event of “theimaginary resolution of real contradictions.” The new political story

would destabilize, and sometimes denarrativize, conventional narratives in

order to open the pathways of narrative to variations in the political imag-

inary.

To understand how narrative can structure variation in the political

imaginary, Halpern attends carefully to New Narrative’s use of the devices

of artifice that point to the construction of storytelling. New Narrative rad-

ically deploys a “text/metatext . . . operation whereby a story keeps a run-

ning commentary on itself, always opening, probing, and deepening the

faults within its own construction.” This device, however, “goes beyond

what metafiction otherwise prepares us for,” as the storyteller itself is un-

derstood to be a text, performatively “emerging as a composite of stories,

whose many faults and fissures draw attention to the constructed dimen-

sions of our social world.”

The concluding essay, Barrett Watten’s “Presentism and Periodization,”

furthers the discussion of how nonnarration creates instability within narra-

tive forms while serving to keep them viable. Watten’s approach to narrativefollows Hayden White’s account of the narrativity of history in The Content

of the Form. To White’s triad of annal, chronology, and fully formed histor-

ical narrative he adds the historical nonnarrative form of the “date.” Wat-

ten’s account of narrative history takes place not only in relation to histori-

ography but also art historical accounts of periodization; for instance,

avant-gardes are seen as emerging at a point of rupture from the historical

period that precedes them. He therefore deploys “periodization” as a domi-

nant form of art historical narrative that frames radical nonnarrative worksin terms of their emergence and dispersion.

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The essay takes up three contrastive movements of contemporary art

that involves language—Language writing, conceptual art, and the emerg-

ing movement of conceptual writing—“in terms of how each formally andhistorically encodes concepts of presentism and periodization.” In order to

show how presentism poses a problem of contemporary aesthetic claims to

a radical present, Watten performs a reflexive account of the history of the

text he is writing as he also discusses the periodizing concerns of the

works he writes about. He introduces his first contrastive example, The

Grand Piano, a multi-authored, ten-volume, collective writing project

composed by ten Language writers whose works emerged in the San Fran-

cisco Bay area in the 1970s and 1980s in the following manner:

Today is Saturday, December 18, 2010. As I begin work

on the revised version of my article, it is now 10:10 AM .

. . . I began my account of The Grand Piano in 2009, with

its periodizing frame still open-ended . . . but am revising it

in 2010, now that it is done, to be published in 2011, when

I will look back on it. All literature is split between present

and period in this way.

Following this performative illustration, Watten offers an analysis of sev-

eral instances that further exhibit the authors’ persistent engagement with

the split between “present and period” as they account for “writing in the

present” and construct a narrative frame for “textual nonnarrative” prac-

tices. One such example offers an uncanny set of coordinates: the Grand

Pianist finds himself in the present writing while “looking down on a field

that was once a stretch of the Berlin Wall” but is “now restored to native

grasses.” He then “sees someone just waking up who had slept in the mid-dle of the field, under a white blanket.” His narrative then slips into a

revery in the next sentence: “his or her hair always appears to be white.”

In this account the “site” of writing itself becomes a nonnarrative space, or

nonsite, lying between the narrator who observes the field from a distant

window and the psychic materials of writing that invoke a “white haired”

figure of a frozen moment or an eternal past.

In the second contrastive movement, Watten finds a similar alterna-

tion between past and present in conceptual artist On Kawara’s “atempo-ral and one-dimensional date paintings.” The paintings, on first en-




counter, appear as a purely nonnarrative series: nothing other than a se-

quence of recorded dates which seem to go on without end, but as Wat-

ten performatively reads the paintings, they are interjected into historicalnarratives that “become available through the multiple temporal and spa-

tial forms of their exhibition and reception.” The viewer’s experience of

the date paintings is contingent on the exhibitions in which they make

their appearance, while the extensive project of the works and the re-

peated events of their appearance “convey a material thickness of in-

scription.” At the same time, On Kawara’s date paintings depend on a

moment of rupture from the past. When the paintings are stored, they are

returned to boxes lined with a clipping from newspapers of the samedate, which Watten reads as history “under erasure.” If conceptual art is

a form of radical nonnarrative that depends on a periodizing moment of

rupture, it will be one more specific than the conventional narratives of

art history. The narrative inscriptions shadowing On Kawara’s dates,

such as the Hiroshima bombing “(dated August 20, 1945),” suggest an

activation of trauma in the reiteration of dates.

The third contrastive movement involves the periodizing strategies of

the emerging school of new conceptual writing. Conceptual writers seethemselves as developing a nonnarrative, anti-aesthetic poetics in the con-

text of emerging internet culture, while they rely on an array of avant-

garde practices, from sound poetry to conceptual art to the radical nonnar-

rative practices of Language writing, to arrive at “a new way of writing.”

Watten discusses several examples of conceptual writing by Kenneth

Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, and Rob Fitterman, showing a range of strate-

gies in their work, while putting pressure on the group’s declaration of the

“new.” In this final section Watten takes the opportunity to test a currentlyemerging poetics against the (always fading) presentisms and periodizing

features of The Grand Piano project and On Kawara’s conceptual paint-

ings. In his reading of new conceptual writing, Watten challenges new

conceptual writers’ self-periodizing claims to the “New,” which inserts

their works into an “old” art-historical narrative of “pedigree,” the emer-

gence of genre and visual styles. At the same time, he offers engaging

readings of new conceptualism writing projects, suggesting that the “spe-

cific values” of the emerging project “beyond the declaration of the New”enables a “claim to a periodizing frame” in the future.

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It appears that conceptual writing will live in history, as will the many

forms of nonnarrative taken up in our project.

Works Cited

Hejinian, Lyn and Watten, Barrett. Poetics Journal 5 (1985).

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1987.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:

Duke UP, 1991.


carola harryman - introduction non narrative

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