2 - Narratological Approaches to the Unforeseeable

Summary

There is narrative theory that concerns itself with the unforeseeable, but not in what might be thought of as the mainstream of contemporary narratology. Questions of surprise, of the unexpected, the reversal of fortune, of chance and contingency are present in the philosophical traditions of writing about narrative and nearly absent from the new, ‘postclassical’ narratologies and cognitive narratologies that have dominated the systematic and theoretical study of narrative since the mid-1990s. There is a larger issue here, about the absence of a more general kind of any systematic analysis of narrative temporality in postclassical narratology, and within this, a more specific avoidance of questions about the future, not only in terms of the expectations generated in the experience of reading, but of narrative as a mode of expectation, anticipation, or as the basis on which we conceptualise, plan, act upon, control and understand, predict, expect, fear or hope in relation to what is to come. The theory of narrative is inclined to view narrative as recollection, as the indicative representation of things that have happened, without regard to the questions of what will happen, or what will have happened, in the future. The general absence of these questions, particularly of questions about surprise, in narratology is surprising itself, for two reasons. In the first place, in the light of what we have been saying here about the already-there-ness of the future in narrative, we might want to lay claim to the apparent fatalism of narrative as the key feature of narrative temporality as distinct from the temporality of life, and therefore to see the future as the temporal orientation that most gives narrative its distinct temporal properties.