The Realism of the Narrational Situation

By Henrik Skov Nielsen

Only a cursory glance through the trend-setting periodicals of literary theory of recent years is sufficient to ascertain that the literature of witness, and of trauma, together with the relationship between literature and ethics are among today’s hottest research topics.
In the following, I shall be arguing that questions about trauma, witness and ethics are, on the one hand, mutually interrelated, and, on the other hand, are revitalising discussions about Realism through 1) a transfer of focus from the narrated to the narrating; and through 2) a further shift from the watchword of the ‘80s and ‘90s about „narrating oneself“ to narrating „for somebody else“, in various ways.
With reference to the first point, Per Stounbjerg argues for a wider – but more clearly defined – concept of realism in his article, „Tilforladelighed og underliggørelse“ („Plausibility and the Creation of Strangeness“). He writes, among other things, that such a definition would prescribe a „starting point within credible, non-idealised reality“ and further, with reference to plausibility, that „realism gains credibility precisely through its reference to a socially accepted reality“. Both of these characteristics referring, of course, to the narrated, to what is told. In contrast to the above, the interest in books like Erling Jepsen’s Kunsten at græde i kor („The Art of Crying in Chorus“), and Kristian Ditlev Jensen’s Det bliver sagt („Tell on you“), may be ascribed to an interest in the realism of the narrational situation. A realistic narrational situation can actually easily be defined with a terminological transplant from Stounbjerg: here it is the narrator who positions himself within – and who refers to – a credible and socially accepted reality.
With reference to the second point, a conception of the basic situation of narrating founded on a communication model approach would normally, as is apparent from the following examples, involve a tripartite division: a) „somebody narrates“ b) „something“ c) „for somebody else“. Earlier, I summarily claimed that one can observe a shift in Realism from the narrated to the narrator, ie. from b) to a). Yet, apparenty almost inevitably, this also seems to go hand in hand with an often ethically invested concern for an addressee, for a „somebody else“, which thus entails an interest in the third term; in what it means to tell something „for someone else“.
We can divide the various potential meanings of the expression „to tell something for somebody else“ into narratives „for somebody else’s sake“ - paradigmatic examples would be confessions, or witnesses’ testimonies; narratives „on somebody else’s behalf“ - a paradigmatic example would be to bear witness for someone; and narratives „about somebody else“ – paradigmatic examples would be parents talking to children about their childhood („when you were little, then ...“), or one lover talking to another („what I love about you is ...“).
In all the examples mentioned, the realism of the telling is important, insofar as it makes the narrative of use to some other person.

What happened when the lights went out?
Stories about trauma and jealousy are, each in their own way, stories about a relationship to another person which is out of balance. If, as Harold Bloom suggests, jealousy is when two people are together and you yourself should have been one of them, then one might say about traumas that they arise when two people are together and you yourself should not have been one of them. In the first instance, you have been too little involved to be able to complete the desired narrative about what has taken place; in the second instance you have been too much involved to be able to describe what happened. The interesting thing is not the inversion of the parallelism in itself, but the opposite point: that the fixed term which cannot be removed is the reality and the realism of the narrational situation, which precludes the possibility of establishing any causal relationship in what is told, although causal relationships are normally the very life-blood of (particularly realistic) narratives (cf. Workman’s fine article, „Obscured Beginnings in Personal Narratives of Sexual Jealousy and Trauma“, in Narrative, 12.3.2004).
This realisation can give rise to the following generalisations: on the one hand, innumerable texts which belong to an imaginary canon of realism make use of deeply unrealistic (in the sense that they cannot occur in reality) narrative situations (with free access to the thoughts of many different characters, the arbitrary selection and deliberate stylisation of the presentation of thoughts, and speech, etc.), while, on the other hand, an insistence on realism in the narrative situation not infrequently entails both a form and a content which one would not normally associate with realism (the lack of beginnings, and the lack of access to important knowledge, lacunary presentations, passages of apparently pure fantasy, etc.).
To put it bluntly: the realism of the narrative situation not infrequently tends to produce a „narrated“ which, in relation to traditional Realism, is quite differently organised and structured, while the realism of the narrated often seems to be better served by non-realistic narrative techniques and situations.

In others’ words
In Kunsten at græde i kor, which contains a large measure of biographical and autobiographical referentiality, the first-person narrator tells a grim story, in his ignorance, which indeed only can be told because he does not understand what is happening to the other person, his sister. The conclusion of the narrator at the end is typical:
She never really felt at home in our family, and she didn’t sleep well on the sofa even though Daddy lay down beside her; she started shaking all over. (212)
The title of Ditlev Jensen’s Det bliver sagt means, in literal translation, „it will be told“ or „the story will come out“, which, besides being a straightforward and realistic use of a familiar Danish phrase used by children who are threatening to „tell“ on each other, is also a promise in the future, a threat in the present, and an impersonal performative. At some stage in the future, voice will be given to the story. At the very beginning of the book, it says:
Now it’s happening again. I’m starting to cry. Perfectly soundlessly [...] Nobody must be able to hear me [...] All at once I understand why nobody knows anything of the paedophiles’ victims [...] All at once I understand how paedophiles can pretend that what they do to children doesn’t harm a living soul. Who should speak out against them? (8)
The victim qua victim can’t speak, and therefore can’t speak out; this is a recurrent theme throughout the book. The narrator, Kristian Ditlev Jensen, narrates „for somebody else“ in the sense of „on somebody else’s behalf“. He narrates for the person he was, and in a broader sense for all the speechless victims and for those who have no voice. Therefore, he demonstrates a continual interest in such phenomena as the accumulation of silence in the middle of the Danish word which contains the longest row of consonants: angstskrig („scream of anxiety“). The narrator’s words have to be capable of containing and sustaining silence.
In his Foreword, the issues of trauma, realism, ethics, and narrating for somebody else are linked together:
It is my hope that [the book] can help others who have been the victims of sexual assaults from paedophiles, because they may be able to recognize themselves within the overall framework of the story, or in some of its details.
[... and that it may help those closest to the victims, therapists, politicians and others, to gain a better insight into the victims’ reality].
The book, then, is clearly conceived in ethical rather than in aesthetic terms. The point is that it has got to be true rather than beautiful. The book is a truthful autobiographical account of what it feels like to be the injured party [...] (8f).
The desire for realism is inextricably bound up with an ethical project – and the other way round: the book is ethical, inasmuch as it can help other people, and it can help other people only insofar as the narrator’s realism cannot be challenged – not with regard to any detail in what is narrated, but with regard to „how it is experienced“. The book is an attempt to narrate truthfully, ethically, and realistically for somebody else how it feels, or felt, not being able to narrate anything for oneself.

Henrik Skov Nielsen, lecturer at the Nordic Institute, Aarhus University, and editor of a series of publications about Modern Literary Theory

Translated by Philip Edmonds