1. Tell us a bit about the essay you wrote for JNT:
My essay addresses the multilinear structure of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life¸ exploring the novel in conjunction with Brian Richardson’s work on the phenomenon that he terms denarration and Robyn Warhol’s extension of Gerald Prince’s category of disnarration to the narrative techniques that she associates with what she calls the unnarratable. The essay argues that Richardson’s formal analysis of Life after Life an unnatural narrative can be complemented by a contextualist feminist narratology, and I explore how the antimimetic aspects of Life After Life’s complicated unnatural temporality offer a commentary on the mimetic, real-world dilemmas that women face–both at the time the novel is set in the early-mid twentieth century and at the moment of its publication in 2013—regarding sexual assault and reproductive rights. The essay thus builds on Richardson’s claim that a multilinear narrative is both antimimetic and mimetic, and it makes a case for the importance of contextual feminist narrative theory in the twenty-first century.
2. What inspired you to research this topic?
From the moment I first read Life After Life and recognized it as a novel that taps into my interests in unnatural narratives and feminist narratives, I knew I wanted to write about it. I was fascinated by the repetitions of the “Snow” chapters and the forking paths of main character Ursula Todd’s many lives after her multiple deaths. I was also fascinated by Brian Richardson’s work denarration, but I had the sense that Atkinson’s novel didn’t quite conform to the models of denarration that Richardson was writing about in his poetics of unnatural narratives, even though it definitely had structural features in common with denarrated novels. So it became an intellectual puzzle to see how the novel mapped onto the technique of denarration but also departed from some of Richardson’s conclusions. I was also familiar with Robyn Warhol’s essay on neo-narrative techniques, and I was interested in seeing how her work on disnarration and unnarration could be productively combined with theories of denarration to illuminate Atkinson’s complex plot. Ultimately, I wanted to see if I could build a feminist account of the multilinear technique that was more narratological than other critics’ accounts of the novel’s feminist tropes and that explored the ways that feminist and unnatural narratologies complement one another.
3. What was the most exciting thing about this project for you?
Any scholar who writes about this novel of course has had to address the forking path structure. But as I mapped out the plot structure in minute detail, it was exciting to see that Atkinson’s work is more complicated than various accounts of it have recognized, and that it exceeded as well general accounts of forking path narratives such as the one articulated in David Bordwell’s essay “Film Futures.” Making the realization that the novel seemed to use the technique of denarration to denarrate its own initial ameliorative pattern in Ursula’s lives was a key discovery. I saw the novel’s overall structure in a new way at that point. It was also exciting for me to think about Life’s experimental structure in relation to the seemingly much less experimental companion novel, as Atkinson calls it, A God in Ruins. I was writing about God for a different publication, and working on the two pieces in tandem helped me refine my thinking about the implications of each one’s experimentation.
4. What’s next for you?
Working on Atkinson’s fiction– both for this special issue of JNT and for a book project recently published in Ohio State University Press’s Theory and Interpretation of Narrative series– has sparked an interest in further research into narratives that present multiple incompatible events, that employ surprise endings, involve delayed disclosure, or in some other fashion complicate events presented as given. I’m interested in exploring how these techniques overlap with or differ from one another in twenty-first century fiction.
