Narratives beyond Binaries

Lee, Yoon Sun; Lee, Yoon Sun

Does narrative as a form still rely on binary structures in a world that has moved beyond them? We tend to assume that binaries such as male/female, nature/culture, and public/private have been largely superseded, if not dismantled, in theory and in lived experience. But is this true? What has succeeded post-structuralism’s critique? How have fiction and theory sought alternatives to binary ways of thinking? Have designations such as the “post-human” moved us beyond the binary, or have they retained it in muted or deferred form? While an obvious place to look might be in literary representations of embodied identities and social definitions, this panel suggests that innovations have occurred in other ways as well. Surprisingly, we can now see ways beyond binary thinking in how narratives engage processes, operations, values, and rhythms. In contemporary narratives and in eighteenth-century novels, we can see other kinds of processes such as schismogenesis and mathematical operations at work. This impetus to move beyond binary thinking also inspires new critiques of how the study of narrative has been conducted and categorized even as narrative theory looks toward the future.

The genre of the novel has always performed its own unique kind of schismogenesis. Amit Yahav builds on recent critiques of Enlightenment conjectural history to draw attention to this process. As David Graeber and David Wengrow have shown, human social orders incorporate complex, varied rhythms within themselves and in their relations to each other. They can develop by inventively imagining themselves in contrast to multiple neighbors and predecessors. The eighteenth-century novel, Yahav argues, likewise seeks ways to tell more complex stories about the emergence of individuals. They especially resist typologies of humans based on utility as a preeminent value. Novels develop their own forms and tools in order to “open up intellectual spaces between reason and unreason, reason and feeling, wakefulness and sleep, productivity and idling. These intellectual spaces feature varieties of attitudes and logics, thus developing a conception of “human” that pushes against rigid differentiations and binary judgments of worthiness, and instead underscores the myriad ways in which persons creatively produce identities and communities.”

In the hands of Valeria Luiselli, the novel is redefined in strikingly non-binary ways, as Alexandra Kingston-Reese explores. Luiselli conceives of the novel in terms of a formula based on multiple operations. Luiselli’s notations such as “Dickens + MP3 ÷ Cervantes – Wikipedia = 21st-century novel” playfully connect literary style to history and form through mathematical operations. In her narratives, Luiselli more seriously relies on and calls attention to operations as processes through which values are transformed according to a grammar. Listing, accumulating, and taking away are examples of such transformative operations. In her 2015 novel, The Story of My Teeth, Kingston-Reese argues, Luiselli “brings together a grounding in mathematics—expressed formally as multi-operationality, as well as narratively through the theory of eccentricity—and socio-political intervention ... to set out a challenge to critics and literary institutions, asking them to speculate, in turn, about new ways of understanding the relationship between aesthetic form, context, and function.”

Narrative theory has tried to move beyond binaries. However, Marco Caracciolo charts the way that it continues to be haunted by the idea of nature, even after its post-structuralist or post-classical turn. The subfield of “unnatural narratology,” for example, which devotes itself to non-mimetic or experimental narratives, represents one of the more significant branches of post-classical narratology. Yet in its self-definition, we can at times glimpse the presence of binary thinking. More recently, econarratology, the intersection of eco-criticism and narratology, appears to move beyond the nature-human opposition. However, Caracciolo argues that further thinking is needed, and offers several pathways to extend the econarratological project and secure its future. He points out that narrative theory too often takes as its corpus “a small subset of Western narratives that work with a limited, binary understanding of the natural world.” Narratives from other traditions and in other media are needed, as well as new conceptual vocabularies. Most intriguingly, he argues for the need to consider narrative as a practice “on a continuum with the experience and semiotic capabilities of nonhuman animals.” Moving beyond binaries in the study of narrative is an on-going and exciting project.

Each speaker will speak for fifteen minutes, leaving ample time for reflection and discussion with the audience.

307 Narratives beyond Binaries: Calls for Papers