Journal of Narrative Theory

Over the last ten years, a small cadre of narrative theorists has proposed the concept “unnatural narration” as an antidote to the prescriptive realism they encountered in many structuralist, rhetorical, and cognitive models. Authors, these theorists argue, have a far wider palette of potential techniques than has been acknowledged, and in fact some of the most esoteric methods undergird even apparently “natural” narratives. To date, scholarly work on unnatural narration has focused primarily on prose, but given its emphasis on the differences between “prototypical” conversational narrative and “literary” narrative, the concept seems ripe for application to other media forms.

In this essay, I use the “unnatural narrative” concept to reassess the functionalist theories of narration in comics proposed in landmark studies by Scott McCloud and Thierry Groensteen (among others). This reassessment refines the theoretical models for both unnatural and graphic narration by using them to illuminate the unusual narrative capacities of the as-yet underappreciated Dave McKean / Neil Gaiman collaboration, Signal To Noise (1990-2006).¹ I conclude, first, that the effects produced by experimental “unnatural” narratives such as Signal To Noise align closely with recent re-formulations of a “cognitive sublime,” by Thomas Weiskel and Porter Abbot. Such formulations envision a cognitive rather than mystical event: a mind in a habitual state meets an overwhelming array of possible [End Page 18] textual meanings, overcomes the momentary shock by interpreting the multiplicity itself, and thereby re-interprets the mind’s own relation to the text, experiencing a further shock of self-consciousness. This kind of maneuver allows readers to gain global insight into texts such as Signal To Noise, without reducing their unnatural properties to one “realistic” story, or sapping their affective power. Secondly, I conclude that there is always already something “unnatural” about the hybrid visual-verbal comics form, and about mediated narrative (that is, narrative other than real-time or face-to-face communication) as such. Many of the factors employed to identify individual narratives as “unnatural” result more from the way we abstract mediated narrative from a conversational context, than from any one text’s conceptual distance from a “prototypical” form. Mediated narratives, in other words, are more different from any prototypical conversational narrative than they are from one another, confirming that the “unnatural” domain is a broad one indeed.

“Unnatural narration” encompasses three primary categories. The first, as described by Alber, Iverson, Nielsen, and Richardson, includes “unnatural storyworlds,” which “contain physically or logically impossible scenarios and events” (124). This category focuses on what Thomas Pavel would call the “salient ontology” (Pavel 42, 57)—the story-world elements that depart most markedly from the “real” world—and therefore overlaps significantly with broader studies in speculative fiction.² But because this sense of the label “unnatural” or “speculative” focuses on story-world contents, it would suit prose narratives like Riddley Walker (1980) or On the Beach (1957) just as well as it would suit Signal To Noise. In order to inquire directly into the unnatural capacities of the graphic medium, then, I will focus on the other two general fields of unnatural narratology: unnatural minds and unnatural acts of narration. Unnatural minds occur when textual details challenge the process by which readers are “typically cued to evoke a mind” (Alber, et al. 120), and might include the fractured consciousness in Shelley Jackson’s Half Life (2007), or the strange chronologies in Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006). The third type of unnatural narrativity concerns unnatural acts of narration. This category includes the familiar “omniscient” narrator who knows more than should be humanly possible, as well as strange creatures such as Nielsen’s and Heinze’s omniscient first-person narrators (Nielsen 299; Heinze 284–6). Richardson’s formulation also includes in this category self-contradictory [End Page 19] acts of narration, or “denarration,” and texts composed of contradictory narratives by different characters that seem to concern the same events, but ultimately do not allow the reader to create a coherent story-world—such as Robbe-Grillet’s famous In the Labyrinth (1959).

Graphic narratives might simply adapt such strategies from prose, but is there an unnatural...