Fiction and Narrative Theory: A Conference Panel

The annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) will next take place in Newcastle from Wednesday 17 April until Friday 19 April 2024. In anticipation, the ICNS is hosting a panel of papers submitted to the conference by York research students. The papers are:

“Rooms Within Rooms”: Banality and Narrative Empathy in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) by Katrina Wong

This paper adopts a rhetorical understanding of narrative unreliability to explore how authors elicit readers’ empathic engagement with character narrators like Klara in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). James Phelan identified ‘naïve defamiliarization’ as one of his six subtypes of bonding unreliability, taking Huckleberry Finn as his example. Phelan argues that defamiliarization occurs when “the freshness of [Huck’s] perspective” inadvertently “acknowledges and closes the perceptual distance between him and the authorial audience” (229, Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of “Lolita”).

However, as critics Adam Parkes and Clare Connors observe, while Ishiguro’s Klara is presented as a ‘tabula rasa’, her narration is most obviously characterized by ‘banality’ in both form and content. The novel’s pronounced banality raises questions regarding the bonding effects of Klara’s unreliability, given that the freshness of perspective invoked by Phelan seems inapplicable. Is the conspicuous banality of Klara’s naïve perspective, and of the events she narrates, compatible with readers’ empathic alignment?

Focusing on Klara’s simplistic, bland narration, this paper examines how Ishiguro deploys ‘banality’ as a device to present Klara as inhumanly human, creating a tension with the potential for readers’ positive alignment with her naïve unreliability. By considering Klara as a literary representation of both a non-human and a human, I consider how readers can form empathic engagement with non-human characters – through mechanisms of defamiliarization and recognition. I then suggest that readers’ affective alignment with non-human characters in turn variegates the hegemonic understanding of ‘human’. In Klara and the Sun, I suggest, Ishiguro problematises the distinction between the human and non-human in order to confront one of the pressing socio-cultural concerns of the times: the constriction of empathic engagement by a tendency towards unwarranted restrictiveness of categorical identifiers.

Irish Literary Tradition Beyond Unnatural Narrative: Recontextualizing the Fictional Work of Flann O’Brien by Mikelyn Rochford

Narratology has sought to accommodate texts that don’t adhere to realist parameters by appeal to concepts such as the synthetic and the anti-narrative, even leading narratologists to question what they view as narrative theory’s “clear mimetic bias” by appeal to unnatural narrative (Alber, et al, 114). However, these terms further entrench the models and biases they intend to challenge, in that they are predicated on a binary opposition in service to an assumed realist standard (and therefore rendering texts that don’t easily fit within the realist model as peripheral or minor). I argue that an intervention is needed to investigate the ways in which these texts instead participate in cultural traditions of storytelling. For example, certain Irish texts that narratologists have characterized as unnatural are instead part of a literary context sustained and shaped by a distinct lineage of cultural and social traditions.

This paper will focus on Flann O’Brien’s novels The Third Policeman (posthumous publication in 1967) and At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), attending to moments in these narratives that narratologists have misconceived as unnatural, but showing instead their connections to Ireland’s literary traditions and their participation in storytelling cultures. This includes transgressions between story worlds, the concurrence of myth with events unfolding in the narrative, metanarrative, and logical and spatial impossibility. Through this case study, I intend to open a dialogue between Irish literary studies and narrative theory and to situate Irish texts that have been misconstrued by current narratological interpretations within their own ongoing literary tradition, one that has historically evaded easy categorisation and consensus.

Predictive Processing in Literary Characterisation: Case study through Orlando by Ryohei Hashimoto

Arguments are still ongoing regarding approaches to literary characters. In recent years, studies on characters have focused more on the reader’s cognition. A predominant view within the field is that fictional characters are generated as mental representations by the reader, which is generated through the interaction between top-down processing based on the reader’s social, literary, and emotional presuppositions and bottom-up processing based on the input of character-relevant textual information. In this view, mental representations are updated by new input information as the reading progresses.

However, the problem with this influential model is that its emphasis is upon the notional product of this cognitive process, the character as fictional being, rather than the cognitive dynamism of the process of characterisation in reading. My main argument is that the trajectory of the reader’s cognitive processes continually forms characters. In exploring how this process of interpretative characterisation, I will refer to the framework of predictive processing, which has become increasingly influential in cognitive science and neuroscience.

Simply put, predictive processing is a framework based on the principle that human brains are predicting machines, which continuously work in the direction of minimising the errors that arise through contact with the world. Using this framework, I will demonstrate how the cognitive processes of the reader’s prediction, prediction error, and modification work in the process of character formation. As a case study, I will read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) to test the validity of my argument. This research will not only provide a foundation for a character theory that better reflects the nature of the reader’s cognitive dynamism, but will also advance the debate on cognition and fictional beings, which is a relatively unexamined premise of the dialogue between narrative theory and cognitive science.