Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable

by H. Porter Abbott

The influential and widely respected narrative theorist, H. Porter Abbott, breaks new ground in Real Narrative and the Unknowable . In it, he revisits the ancient theme of what we cannot know about ourselves and others. But in a sharp departure, he shifts the focus from the representation of this theme to the ways narrative can be manipulated to immerse “the willing reader” in the actual experience of unknowing.

As he shows, this difficult and risky art, which was practiced so inventively by Samuel Beckett, was also practiced by other modern writers. Abbott demonstrates their surprising diversity in texts by Beckett, Gabriel García Márquez, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, J. M. Coetzee, Tim O’Brien, Kathryn Harrison, and Jeanette Winterson, together with supporting roles by J. G. Ballard, Gertrude Stein, Michael Haneke, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.

The demands of this art bear directly on key issues of narrative inquiry, including the nature and limits of reader-resistant texts, the function of permanent narrative gaps, the relation between experiencing a text and its interpretation, the fraught issue of aligning grammatical and narrative syntax, the mixed blessing of our mind-reading capability, and the ethics of reading. Despite its challenges, this book has also been written with an eye to the general reader. In accessible language, Abbott shows how narrative fiction may create spaces in which our ignorance, when it is by its nature absolute, can be not only acknowledged but felt, and why this is important.

Genres: Literary Criticism

184 pages, Hardcover

First published November 26, 2013

Reviews

[Peter Janke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A concise but extremely carefully conceived and presented literary-critical study of the uncertainties and purposefully ambiguous gaps and 'unreadabilities' to be encountered in an intriguing selection of literary and cinematic works that range from Melville, Emily Brontë and Henry James through García Márquez, Beckett, J. G. Ballard, Borges, Gertrude Stein, Michael Haneke, M. Night Shyalaman, Jeanette Winterson and Alain Robbe-Grillet to Alice Munro, Kathryn Harrison, Tim O'Brien and J. M. Coetzee. Abbott's analysis emphasizes what we do not and cannot know about ourselves and others. Along the way we are treated to intelligent forays into a broad and fascinating variety of fields of inquiry, including evolution, linguistics, developmental psychology, cosmology, and many, many more. Underlying all this is an impressively deep review of, and a significant contribution to, the development of narrative theory by a leading scholar in the field. As a layperson I can recommend this book extremely highly to anyone interested in literature and cinema. While considerably specialized in its literary-theoretical discussion, it is wonderfully accessible and will prove exciting and stimulating to the general reader. Like me, (s)he will find him- or herself eager to return to works (s)he has already read or viewed and to investigate those (s)he has not. Fünf Sterne!