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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 resists 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, ction 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 gendering 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 important 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): 111. Copyright 2011 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.

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 narrative 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 misrecognition, the complex connections between private experience and larger social forces, and the cooperative construction of meaning. The radical formalism identied with nonnarrrative is thus not a mere formalism 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 strategies that reshaped, redistributed, undermined, or abandoned narrative. The journal editors called for theoretical and creative essays that would, together, complicate debates about narrative or indicate the status of narrative in participating authors work. In their introduction to the forthcoming 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 compelling givens for postmodernist avant-garde writers and artists:
Narrative was suspectit was the horizon of ofcial meaning and interpretation, the real prison house to which we have been conned by history. An open eld of meaning offered a way out of the connements of narrative and closure, and nonnarrative writing strategies became vehicles of choice.

In their special issue, the editors chose to resist creating a simple binary between narrative and non/narrative practice, representing a spectrum of positions by new narrativists, poets, and artists. Implicated in the tricky

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slash between the prex non and narrative are several questions a narrative theory would ask of the nonnarrative practice. Does nonnarrative writing depend on a (underlying, suppressed, denied) framework of narrative? and What of the social and historical narratives the writer is in when s/he writes nonnarrative work? The well established but seldom remarked 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 seriously. The early Non/Narrative issue was rst an effort to encourage artists and writers to further examine questions of narrative in their work, but it also aimed to encourage critical study of non/narrative in scholarly contexts 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 question of non/narrative at a very different historical momentas will be evident in our opening essay, Dimitri Anastasopouloss Present Without Memory. Working between literary text and public language, Anastasopoulos 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 Maldoror 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 theory of narrative that questions whether stories are predicated on the relationship between an author, the narrative, and a reader at all. This is the question most central to Anastasopoulos as he navigates between narratives of political speech and the experimental text, seeking to explain why transparently biased political narratives continue to be so very difcult to pick apart, i.e. how sheer ction can be presented as fact in political discourse. The problem of narration in this case concerns the nonexistence of uranium tubes claimed as evidence of Iraqs nuclear ambitions in George Bushs 2003 State of the Union address. Anastasopoulos reads Bushs performance of omniscience in his delivery of this notorious ction as a component of a total narrative system that can easily cause an omniscient nar-

rator to disappear in the next event of a narrative. He posits that such a decentered, distributed authorship is a feature of a narrative system in which standard narrative terms that cleanly separate author, narrative, and reader do not lead us to an understanding of the way narrative operates to enforce nonnarratable political agendas. After Derrida and Blanchot, Anastasopoulos critiques structuralist theories of narrative (Grard Genette and Seymour Chatman) that rely on a taxonomy of narrative functions, inferring 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 specic examples of the aporias and disavowals performed by political actors, in press interviews and journalistic analysis after Bushs State of the Union address. He turns to Maldoror to demonstrate how Lautramonts tacticswhich shift from nonnarration to a super-abundance of narrationperform a theory of narrative as they undermine the notion of the stable narrative voice in the total narrative system. Joshua Clovers 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 different 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 necessarily narrative in nature. Casting a wintery eye on autumnal literature, Clover turns to recent postmodernist texts to consider how these may help us 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 nancial 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 literary theory and late postmodernist writing through a sequence of re-readings of Marxs general formula of capital. Clovers combining of Marxist theory and postmodernist literature yields a poetics that seeks a new way

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to think within the unfolding relations of the global system. His method is a response to Fredric Jamesons autumnal invocation of cognitive mapping as a yet unrealized, potential construction of a political form of postmodernism that would provide a perspective on the incomprehensively vast spacial scale of late capitalism. (54) Clovers discussion of literature focuses on three works published in the last decade, each of which is posed on the edge of the systems autumn and winter: Thomas Pynchons novel Against the Day (2000) and two collections of poetry, John Ashberys Planisphere (2010) and Kevin Daviess The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (2009). Clover describes the form of Pynchons elusive novel as a paradigm for a post-Fordist landscape, one that is barely cohesive enough to count as narrative in the rst 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 directional motion, in stasis or death, the rail system occupies space in a system 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 rational directionality. Clover reads Pynchons 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 difculty, offers a palpable expression of the forms of late capitalism. Clovers discussion of Ashberys recent collection of poetry focuses to some extent on the problem of the individual, or citizen, abandoned by the narrative of nance capital. The falsity of the nancial markets narrative of lending and debt, as it is played out in our emerging nancial winter, leaves consumers of this narrative in the space of their own lives where there is no nancial story to live by. The individual is thus thrown back on the nonnarratable situation of his/her existence, living in America but its all over. The contours of capitalisms failure begin then to appear in the nonnarratable occurrences that take place between false reasoning and expectation. These occurrences mark a lived experience that transpires 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 Ashberys all over. The theme of a spatial everywhere and nowhere resonates with

Clovers concluding discussion of Kevin Daviess The Golden Age of Paraphernalia. Here Clover cites a poetic structure that offers a quite literal 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 potentially 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 complicity and antagonism of Daviess poetics renders yet another potential contour of our view onto the nonnarrative of our nancial winter, a postmodernist poetics that grasps the incoherence of global capitalisms expansion. In reading Pynchons ction with the poetry of Davies and Ashbery, he aligns the radical postmodernist novel with the radical nonnaratives of contemporary poetry, intervening in the market categories that separate them. Ruth Jennisons Scrambling Narrative offers a feminist materialist reading of Lorine Niedecker, now seen as one of the four major Objectivist 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 languageand make the reader newly aware of the obscured relations of production under capital. Objectivism works against the mystication of given narratives, bringing into appearance objects that not only affect the mind but structure mental life more generally. For Jennison, the Objectivists held in common a commitment to radical democracy that provides the basis for their critique of national narratives. The critique of democracy that emerges in Niedeckers work stems from, but is in no sense conned to, the rural Wisconsin where she lived 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. Niedeckers work initiates a consideration of the relationship between the introspective individual consciousness 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 surrealism and Objectivism. While the male Objectivist poets think with the

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things as they exist, Niedeckers often interior gaze focuses on the substance of mental life as inextricably connected to the exterior existence of things. In her reading Jennison demonstrates how the binding of the concrete exterior and the unxed, uid objects of mental space are brought to bear on Niedeckers 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 Niedeckers long poem Progression, 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 Progressions opening survey of exterior knowledge and American history as a chiaroscuro revealing transitions from light to dark that are generally made smooth in narrations by male gures of philosophy, poetry, and statecraft. Jennison then traces the movement of the poem through Niedeckers 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 Niedeckers 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 Halperns Realism and Utopia interleaves contexts of the literary scene and gay politics of 1970s San Francisco in a chronicling of the emergence of New Narrative writing. Halpern produces a capacious account of an increasingly recognized literary moment, focusing on three works by poet, prose writer, and theorist Bruce Boone. He places Boones texts in dialogue with critical writings by Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson, and Jacques Rancire, 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 lowfrom the eventful scenes of gossip, scandal, and pornography to a theorized activist poetics that relies on Frankfurt School, poststructuralist,

and postwar critiques of capital and commodityas a galvanizing event of gay cultural formation that connects the community to a broad, heterogeneous, politics of resistance. Placing New Narrative within a wide frame of postwar poetics that includes the divers projects of Language writing, Feminist writing, Black Arts, Post-Beat, and New American Poetics along with the ctions 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 marginalized communities. He notes that Robert Glck, another early theorist and practioner, uses Althussers theory of ideology to provide a critical model for thinking about narrative, with narrative as the event of the imaginary 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 imaginary. To understand how narrative can structure variation in the political imaginary, Halpern attends carefully to New Narratives use of the devices of artice that point to the construction of storytelling. New Narrative radically deploys a text/metatext . . . operation whereby a story keeps a running commentary on itself, always opening, probing, and deepening the faults within its own construction. This device, however, goes beyond what metaction otherwise prepares us for, as the storyteller itself is understood to be a text, performatively emerging as a composite of stories, whose many faults and ssures draw attention to the constructed dimensions of our social world. The concluding essay, Barrett Wattens Presentism and Periodization, furthers the discussion of how nonnarration creates instability within narrative forms while serving to keep them viable. Wattens approach to narrative follows Hayden Whites account of the narrativity of history in The Content of the Form. To Whites triad of annal, chronology, and fully formed historical narrative he adds the historical nonnarrative form of the date. Wattens account of narrative history takes place not only in relation to historiography 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 dominant form of art historical narrative that frames radical nonnarrative works in terms of their emergence and dispersion.

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The essay takes up three contrastive movements of contemporary art that involves languageLanguage writing, conceptual art, and the emerging movement of conceptual writingin terms of how each formally and historically 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 reexive 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 rst contrastive example, The Grand Piano, a multi-authored, ten-volume, collective writing project composed by ten Language writers whose works emerged in the San Francisco 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 several 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 practices. One such example offers an uncanny set of coordinates: the Grand Pianist nds himself in the present writing while looking down on a eld 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 middle of the eld, 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 eld from a distant window and the psychic materials of writing that invoke a white haired gure of a frozen moment or an eternal past. In the second contrastive movement, Watten finds a similar alternation between past and present in conceptual artist On Kawaras atemporal and one-dimensional date paintings. The paintings, on first en-

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counter, appear as a purely nonnarrative series: nothing other than a sequence of recorded dates which seem to go on without end, but as Watten performatively reads the paintings, they are interjected into historical narratives that become available through the multiple temporal and spatial forms of their exhibition and reception. The viewers 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 repeated events of their appearance convey a material thickness of inscription. At the same time, On Kawaras 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 same date, 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 Kawaras 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 see themselves as developing a nonnarrative, anti-aesthetic poetics in the context of emerging internet culture, while they rely on an array of avantgarde practices, from sound poetry to conceptual art to the radical nonnarrative 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 strategies in their work, while putting pressure on the groups declaration of the new. In this nal section Watten takes the opportunity to test a currently emerging poetics against the (always fading) presentisms and periodizing features of The Grand Piano project and On Kawaras conceptual paintings. 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 emergence of genre and visual styles. At the same time, he offers engaging readings of new conceptualism writing projects, suggesting that the specic 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.