Hilary P.

Dannenberg

Gerald Prince and the Fascination

of What Doesn’t Happen

The focus on the concept of narrativity in Gerald Prince’s work demonstrates a keen
interest in uncovering the ways by which a narrative can interest or fascinate the
reader. Studying narrativity involves the investigation of the relative effectiveness or
tellability of particular narratives, or what Prince has also called “narratability” (“Nar-
rativehood” 23). In the minimal narratives he developed to explore and compare in-
dividual narratives, he is like a narrative engineer: testing different models, looking at
the complex mechanisms of narrative and inquiring how—and how well—they work,
and thereby pinpointing their mechanisms more sharply. One of my favorites among
these groups of minimal narratives, which never fails to provoke smiles and laughter
of recognition and insight when used in the classroom, is the contrast between the
mechanical “the cat sat on the mat” and the potentially explosive “the cat sat on the
dog’s mat” (Narratology 147). This example never fails to alert students’ minds to two
core aspects of narrativity and tellability: first, that conflict is central to interesting
narrative, and second, that anticipation of future events fuels readerly interest.
One of the remarkable and beneficial strengths of Gerald Prince’s gift to narrative
studies is his ability to provoke thought on narrative in ways that open up possible

Hilary P. Dannenberg is Professor of English Literature at the University of Trier, Germany. Her book
Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (Univ. of Nebraska Press,
“Frontiers of Narrative,” 2008) won the George and Barbara Perkins award for the most significant contri-
bution to the study of narrative in 2010. She can be reached at dannen@uni-trier.de.

Narrative, Vol 22, No. 3 (October 2014)

Copyright 2014 by The Ohio State University
 Gerald Prince and Disnarration   305

new lines of exploration. His academic writing is characterized by great versatility

and originality, both in its theoretical substance and its rhetorical form. The wry or
enigmatic titles of some articles (e.g., “Recipes,” “The Long and the Short of It,” or
“How New is New?”) denote a mind that would, even with the title of an essay, like to
get the reader thinking—or guessing—even about the overall content of the essay to
come, thus creating suspense at a meta-discourse level.
In this provocative and thought-stimulating style, an excellent case in point is
Prince’s “Forty-One Questions on the Nature of Narrative,” which consists of two pag-
es of short questions. These questions not only raise key issues about narrative and
narrativity but they also constitute a deliberate departure from the standard mode of
the essay. Eschewing analysis and argument, Prince turns from a discursive mode to
one of continuous questioning, a move that conveys his indirect argument that narra-
tive theorists still have much to decide about the nature of narrative. At the same time,
Prince’s provocative questions represent a new level of achievement in his already
admirably succinct essay style. In two pages he manages to articulate whole ranges of
narratological concern.
Prince begins with questions that invite the reader to review fundamental aspects
and patterns of discourse, as in question one: “What is the difference, if any, between
narrative, nonnarrative, and antinarrative?” (317). Note the mischievous “if any” at
the center of the question, in which Prince for a moment pretends a complete lack of
knowledge and feigns innocence in the face of his own question—either to encourage
debate or to provoke response. I have always had a tremendous appreciation for this
kind of rhetorical strategy—one that instead of parading knowledge and the authority
of knowledge, actually backgrounds it in order to move others to think and formulate
ideas. On another level, this “if any” is characteristic of the little humorous winks that
Prince gives the reader in much of his writing and which provide the relatively rare
pleasure of humor within the reading of academic discourse.
From these and other key questions, the reader of “Forty-One Questions on the
Nature of Narrative” moves on down the list to find more elusive and searching ques-
tions—for example number 11, “Is a memory (a) narrative?” and number 12, “Is a
dream (a) narrative?” (317). These are questions which move the focus away from
general inquiry and suggest far more complex subjects and realms of narrative analy-
sis. By the time the reader reaches question 25, she or he encounters a rather different
field of inquiry—that of the different modalities and virtualities of narrative: “Is the
representation of future change (a) narrative?” Questions 26 and 27 then ask, “Is the
representation of hypothetical change (a) narrative?” and “Is a prophecy, a horoscope,
a set of instructions (a) narrative?” (318). These questions are all relevant to the in-
vestigation of a phenomenon which Gerald Prince has designated the disnarrated—a
concept that has been wonderfully generative for other narrative theorists and that I
will focus on for the remainder of this essay.
The disnarrated involves a range of narrative phenomena outside what we would
technically consider to belong to the level of the narrative’s story, i.e., what “really”
happens in the story world—and yet this type of event is repeatedly and consistently
encountered in a variety of forms in both simple and complex narratives. The fol-
lowing is Prince’s description of the many different forms of the disnarrated, written
306   Hilary P. Dannenberg

in his compactly incisive and expressive style: “I am thus referring to alethic expres-
sions of impossibility or unrealized possibility, deontic expressions of observed pro-
hibition, epistemic expressions of ignorance, ontologic expressions of nonexistence,
purely imagined worlds, desired worlds, or intended worlds, unfulfilled expectations,
unwarranted beliefs, failed attempts, crushed hopes, suppositions and false calcula-
tions, errors and lies, and so forth” (“The Disnarrated” 3). Prince here evokes in a few
sentences the broad range of what the disnarrated can involve—from the thought
experiments and hypothetical worlds of philosophers (or narrators posing as philoso-
phers), through to the myriad private mental worlds of characters evoked by focaliza-
tion, implication, or thought report.
Prince’s  discussion of this phenomenon (or rather group of phenomena)  de-
veloped some small seeds of previous ideas in narrative theory, and in cultivating
those seeds, he also provided the discursive terrain on which the work of other nar-
rative theorists could grow. This is because Prince’s discussion of the disnarrated, like
his other work, provided excellent material with which to engage, on at least three
levels: in the form of productive typological categories, provocative questions and
analytical assertions, and numerous textual examples with which to test those as-
sertions. Prior to Prince’s formulation of the disnarrated, some basic ideas regarding
non-actual events in narrative had been formulated—particularly in a range of works
from the 1970s. For example, in his investigation of urban oral narratives and tellabil-
ity, William Labov identified a particular type of “comparator” (386) which evoked
what might otherwise have happened in oral narratives about dangerous situations;
Claude Bremond proposed that plot should be understood not as a set of events, but
as a network of possibilities, involving events which are desired and strived for by
characters, but which may or may not actually be realized (“The Logic”).
Looking back to that point in time in the 1980s and early ’90s when Gerald
Prince was developing the concept of the disnarrated (his ideas were published first
in a 1988 essay for Style, elaborated on in a 1989 essay in French [“L’Alternarré”], and
subsequently appeared as a chapter in his book Narrative as Theme in 1992), it be-
comes clear that the overall cultural climate was ripe for the concept: both the popular
narrative imagination and narrative theory were intensifying their fascination with
many different forms of the disnarrated, which have been referred to, variously, by
the terms “counterfactuals,” “virtual worlds,” and “the unreal.” In the latter part of the
nineteenth century, texts in the genre of alternate history had already blossomed in
the creative narrative imagination at the same time as the rise of the science-fiction
genre of future history. Subsequently, the 1930s and ’40s in particular had seen a pro-
liferation of narratives of multiple competing worlds—in the form of science fiction
(e.g., Jack Williamson’s 1932 The Legion of Time), metafiction (e.g., Borges’s renowned
1941 short story “The Garden of Forking Paths”), and also fantasy: in Capra’s 1946
film It’s a Wonderful Life the character George Bailey had, with mounting horror,
visited Pottersville—a world created by disnarrating his own existence and counter-
factually undoing the event of his birth. It took a little longer for these phenomena to
fully blossom and become sustained narratives in the popular imagination, but the
1980s was the decade the disnarrated really came to Hollywood: for example, 1980’s
The Final Countdown evoked an alternate possible world in which the Japanese are
 Gerald Prince and Disnarration   307

prevented from attacking Pearl Harbor in 1941, while in 1985 and 1989 Back to the
Future and Back to the Future II explored the forking-paths idea of time, notably also
using counterfactual character versions.
Thus, the idea of alternate possible worlds was now in the air, and Gerald Prince
was the first to rigorously theorize the concept of what doesn’t happen in narrative.
In outlining the possible forms of the disnarrated, he shows how such hypothetical
speculations can take many different forms in realist narrative: in the evocation of
the private worlds of characters and in a range of forms in narratorial commentary—
from realistic speculation about how characters might be different (citing George
Eliot’s Silas Marner) to metafictional flaunting of the author’s ultimate power to de-
termine the events of a narrative (citing Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste). Prince also
debates the relevance of the disnarrated for the concept of narrativity, and in his
evaluation presents both sides of the argument. He first argues that the disnarrated
“is clearly not essential to narrative” (“The Disnarrated” 4; emphasis original), but
a little later concludes: “Yet the insistence with which the disnarrated reappears in
so-called natural narratives . . . and, above all, in fiction (not to mention many histo-
ries) implies its narrative significance” (4). He therefore directs our attention to the
issue of how vital the hypothetical in fact is in its dynamic and contrastive interac-
tion with events which are deemed to “really happen” in a narrative world, and he
shows that such questions are not only ontologically complex but rhetorically sig-
nificant in a variety of ways. Furthermore, in quoting a passage (in translation) from
Maupassant’s Bel-Ami he shows how, importantly, the disnarrated is so often crucial
to the representation of character minds: “He imagined a magnificent adventure of
love which brought him, all at once, to the fulfilment of his hopes. He married the
daughter of a banker or a great lord, met in the street and conquered at first sight”
(6). Here, crucially, the character focalizer does not simply “see” the world as it is—
deep character depiction also allows us to see the character seeing all the things that
might/should/could/were supposed to happen from a character’s perspective. Thus
character representation using the disnarrated allows the depiction of characters as
living in an uncertain world of possible events—a world more like the one we inhabit
and in which we, like the character here, construct unrealized personal narratives of
the imagination.
Thus Prince’s work on the disnarrated came at a significant time, and also stimu-
lated and interacted with further work in the field. Already in his discussion of the
disnarrated in the 1988 Style essay quoted above, it is clear that a fruitful interac-
tion is taking place with the work of Marie-Laure Ryan. A section of her 1991 book,
Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory—which focuses, amongst
many aspects, on virtual character worlds and their role in the creation of narra-
tive conflict and tellability—represents an interesting dialogue with Prince’s work,
in which she defines her own concepts by demarcating them with reference to the
disnarrated (166–69). Subsequent developments in the theorizing of the virtual and
the counterfactual in narrative and its investigation in works of fiction are deeply in-
debted to Gerald Prince and his exploration of the disnarrated in a range of narrative
forms. For my part, his work helped me to focus on one form of the disnarrated—
the counterfactual­—and explore the historical trajectory of its many forms in narra-
308   Hilary P. Dannenberg

tive fiction over several centuries. Other theoretical work has explored and expanded
various elements of the disnarrated. Robyn Warhol has examined a particular cluster
of phenomena within the disnarrated—that which Prince refers to as “unnarratable,”
“nonnarratable,” or “unnarrated” and which she explores extensively across a wide
range of texts as “narrative refusals”; these occur when narrators either explicitly de-
cline to narrate something, or when a narrator narrates what did not happen rather
than what did. Another narrative device which is defined by demarcating its relation
to the disnarrated is Susan Lanser’s concept of negative plotting, in which the mean-
ing of one set of events is created and complemented by an antithetical shadow plot.
Beyond these theoretical explorations, many different contributions to the study
of narrative as a whole have used the concept of the disnarrated as an analytical tool
to explore a broad range of texts and text types, for example Anglophone Indian Fic-
tion (Karttunen, “A Sociolinguistic Perspective”), texts by Montaigne, Eriugena, and
Dante (Nichols, “Example Versus Historia”), Cervantes (Parr, “On Narration and
Theory”), and the nineteenth-century Quebec novel (Purdy, A Certain Difficulty of
Being). The extent of the impact and enduring interest of the disnarrated is also indi-
cated by the fact that a two-day conference entitled “Disnarration: The Road not Tak-
en,” with twenty papers on the topic, was held at the Indian Institute of Technology
Bombay, Mumbai, in March 2013; a conference volume is currently in preparation.
Notwithstanding the range of existent work on and around the concept of the
disnarrated, there is still substantial work to be done in investigative fields aligned
with the disnarrated in narrative studies—both within the study of narrative fiction
and in fields such as the study of life narrative and in the psychological and cognitive
sciences. The cognitive significance of the disnarrated is borne out by other findings
in narrative studies and beyond, and these provide avenues for further investigation.
The hypothetical mode which is central to the imaginative power of the human mind
and is also crucial to the concept of the disnarrated has been studied in various other
manifestations. A key case in point is the study of counterfactuals, which developed
across the disciplines and in due course gained focus in the psychological sciences,
so that empirically based work could conclude that “Counterfactual thinking is an
essential feature of human consciousness” (Roese and Olson 46).1 The experience of
reading fiction also involves related phenomena; this has been explored by Richard
Gerrig, who proposed the concept of replotting, formulated in his 1993 book Experi-
encing Narrative Worlds, to refer to the alternative event scenarios that readers con-
struct in particular in response to tragic storylines, which they mentally undo to pro-
vide a more felicitous ending. Another allied phenomenon is liminal plotting—the
process which plays out in a reader’s mind while she or he is in the grips of suspense,
and consists of multiple half-fashioned images constructed on the edge of the reader’s
consciousness which are negative and positive extrapolations of the suspenseful sce-
nario in the narrative present (Dannenberg 36–39). In the wider field of cognitive
studies, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s The Way We Think focuses on language
phenomena which reveal the special ability of the human mind to construct “the Un-
real” (sections of their study also build on their previous work on counterfactuals).
In its study of conceptual blending in language, The Way We Think does not focus
specifically on narrative; however, a whole range of new work in this field has recently
 Gerald Prince and Disnarration   309

been published in Ralf Schneider and Marcus Hartner’s 2012 co-edited volume of es-
says, Blending and the Study of Narrative.
In exploring the whole cluster of narrative phenomena surrounding the over-
lapping concepts of the disnarrated, the unreal, the virtual, and the counterfactual,
narrative studies continues to engage in dialogue with and learn from psychology
and related approaches which deal with natural human narratives. To illustrate how
this dialogue works, I would like to return to Gerald Prince’s “Forty-One Questions
on the Nature of Narrative” and propose a new answer to question number 11, “Is a
memory (a) narrative?”
In the field of trauma therapy, new insights into the nature of human memory
have emerged regarding the imprints traumatic events leave in the memory and the
long-term effects of those imprints on body and mind. A new process known as Ma-
trix Reimprinting is particularly significant for narrative studies and the understand-
ing of traumatic memory. Here the traumatic memory is construed as belonging to an
earlier character version of the self (referred to as the Echo), who, during therapy, is
encouraged to imaginatively reconfigure the traumatic event into a positive outcome,
thereby rewriting the version of events stored in the memory and effectively disnar-
rating the version that truly occurred and caused the trauma (Dawson and Allenby
41–43, 75–78). The widespread success of this technique in trauma therapy and the
individual case histories in which many trauma victims have been able to rewrite their
own traumatic memories indicate that the negative associations with a real past event
can be released by imagining a fully fictional alternative scenario, notwithstanding
the ultimate knowledge of this fictionality by the individual concerned. The success
of this form of therapy indicates that for the Echo in the unconscious mind (i.e., the
character version of the self who experienced the trauma), this ontological distinction
is apparently meaningless, and on this level the happier alternative version of events
permanently remains as the “real” memory even though the conscious self objectively
knows that this is not the case.
This technique is significant for narrative studies in at least two ways: it demon-
strates that memory is narrative; memory consists of event sequences experienced by
a character who is a past version of the self (the Echo), and these event sequences can
be deleted as “actual” events and replaced by others in the life narrative stored in the
unconscious mind. Furthermore, it highlights the extreme power of the unreal in the
human mind, to the extent that what might only be thought of as a happier hypotheti-
cal scenario, an “unrealized possibility or “purely imagined worlds” (Prince, “The
Disnarrated” 3) can, although it has not been objectively experienced, nevertheless
be narrated in the mind and replace the narrative based on actual experience stored
in memory.
Thus in a field far beyond that of the reading or study of narrative fiction, Matrix
Reimprinting corroborates the conclusions drawn by the substantial body of research
cited on and around the disnarrated in this paper: it again confirms the significatory
power unrealized events can exert on the human mind. In originally proposing the
concept of the disnarrated, Gerald Prince already demonstrated how important it
was to focus on the worlds which float, often almost unseen, beyond the actual events
depicted in fiction, and to scrutinize them much more closely. Just as fiction operates
310   Hilary P. Dannenberg

beyond the realm of the “real” in our lives, so does the disnarrated in turn operate be-
yond the level of the “real” within fiction—but for the human mind it is nevertheless
a powerful and suggestive realm of narrative.

Endnote
1. For an interdisciplinary overview of research and approaches to counterfactuals, see Dannenberg
109–32.

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