Interpreting Timbuktu : An Unnatural Narrative, an Emotional Reading Experience, and a Cognitive Explanation

Interpreting Timbuktu:An Unnatural Narrative, an Emotional Reading Experience, and a Cognitive Explanation Mengni Kang (bio) and Jan Alber (bio) Paul Auster's novella Timbuktu (1998) tells a tear-jerking story through the eyes of a dog, Mr. Bones, who struggles with the fact that his human master Willy G. Christmas is dying. The work, like many literary endeavors in the field of animal consciousness, does not attract much critical attention (Ittner 181). One reviewer criticizes Auster's proclivity for "the utterly bewildering nature of human experience" and calls the work too dark for a children's book and too whimsical and slim for an adult narrative (Taylor 22). Stefania Ciocia argues that the novella has been neglected by critics due to its "heavy-handed sentimentality and fable-like moralism" (647). The reception of Timbuktu reflects the disdain of literary critics for adult fiction about animals and the tendency to dismiss it as trivial (Ittner 181–2). However, a closer reading of Timbuktu reveals that the narrative does not follow the conventions of animal stories, and it should not at all be dismissed as a trivial enterprise. Reading the narrative through the lens of unnatural narratology enables us to examine textual phenomena that violate the constraints of mimetic probability and also to determine how they interact with contextual factors to bring about certain effects on readers. The term 'unnatural' was first used by Brian Richardson (Unnatural Voices) and popularized through his collaborations with other narratologists such as Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, and Henrik Skov Nielsen (see, for example, [End Page 195] Alber et al., "Unnatural Narratives" 114). In narratology, 'unnatural' denotes "physically, logically, or humanly impossible scenarios and events" (Alber 25). Furthermore, unnatural narratives "contravene the presuppositions of nonfictional narratives, violate mimetic expectations and the practices of realism, and defy the conventions of existing, established genres" (Richardson, Unnatural Narrative 3).1 In terms of reading effects, unnatural works often give rise to disconcerting, confusing, or unnerving feelings or emotions (Alber 42; Richardson, Unnatural Narrative 18). Alber argues that when readers are confronted with the unnatural, they tend to oscillate between speechless fascination (to accept that something impossible and unexplainable is happening) and the urge to somehow explain or make sense of it (56). For Iversen, the unnatural creates a specific kind of defamiliarization that presents readers with unsolvable riddles with perpetual unrecognizability, constantly resisting recognition (460). But these hypothesized responses need to be put into perspective. Many scholars (such as Wolf, Bernaerts et al., Anderson and Iversen, Punday, and Kilgore) have demonstrated that unnatural narratives do not exclude emotional resonance. In particular, Werner Wolf discusses conditions that permit a certain degree of compatibility between the unnatural and immersion, contending that there are "filter factors" (125) that influence the recipient's reaction to the unnatural. Taking metalepsis as an example, he argues that despite its theoretically defamiliarizing effect, an unnatural device can produce different reactions under different circumstances, and one must consider specific conditions which neutralize its hypothesized anti-immersive potential. The unnaturalness of Timbuktu first concerns the fact that in the real world, we do not have access to the thought processes of dogs, and we cannot even know whether they follow mental operations at all. Thomas Nagel has famously claimed that it is beyond the human's ability to conceive the subjective character of other living creatures' experiences. For him, human imagination is limited in representing the conscious experience of nonhuman characters, because "no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism" (436; original emphasis). In a similar vein, Bernaerts et al. stress that literature cannot by itself "move from an imaginary to an objective phenomenology" (76), and literary explorations of animal worlds create only the illusion that we experience [End Page 196] the world from the perspective of a nonhuman animal (76–7). Scientifically, it is impossible to get access to the mental worlds of nonhuman characters, but when we read animal stories like Timbuktu, we learn what the represented animal characters think about (or concern themselves with). Auster's narrative is humanly impossible as it violates...