On Narrative Modes: Or What Happens When Fictional Pain Cuts Too Deep

Abstract

Writers must concern themselves with the degree in which dramatic illusion can manage the right proportion between the reader’s co-participation and affective involvement in, and torturous exploitation by the textual mechanisms of the fictional ontology. They believe in the necessity of poetic faith as much as they believe in the necessity of emotional safety/stability for the reader—whose stance is perceived as being that of an ally-into-emotion rather than that of a guinea-pig or scapegoat who takes onto them the ordeal of emotion poured through the text’s texture. The major claim, which I exemplify and discuss, relates to the solution some writers come up with when they feel that the fictional pain their writing produces can cut
unbearably deep. Bringing forth four differing examples, I suggest that when writers begin to panic as to the possibility of inflicting irreversible mental, or even physical, pain upon their readers, they appeal to several textual face-saving devices: glosses (as in the case of S. T. Coleridge’s Rime); genesis explanation (as in the case of E. A. Poe’s Philosophy of Composition); forewords (as in the case of V. Nabokov’s “Introduction” to Bend Sinister); revisitations (as in the case of S. Dunn’s re-reading of The Guardian Angel). The four writers’ paratextual solutions to the problem of fictional pain management may also bring some illumination to the present day philosophical and psychological debate on narrative/counter-narrative vs. paradigmatic discourse, in terms of fictional aesthetics and human life too.