Table Of Content“The Storyworld Accord is ultimately a work of postcolonial literary study, and it very effectively grounds
postcolonial work in an econarratology that reads stories and their worlds as opportunities to foster
communication and understanding across diverse populations with differing social and environmental
experiences.”
—Eric Otto, author of Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism
The Storyworld Accord
Frontiers of Narrative
Series Editors
Jesse E. Matz Kenyon College
David Herman Ohio State University
The Storyworld Accord
Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives
Erin James
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London
© 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
A version of chapter 3 appears as “Immersed in the Storyworld: Rotten English and Orality in Ken Saro-
Wiwa’s Sozaboy,” Journal of Narrative Theory 45.2 (Spring 2015).
All rights reserved.
Cover image © iStockphoto.com/Andrea Gingerich
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data James, Erin, author.
The storyworld accord: econarratology and postcolonial narratives / Erin James.
pages cm.—(Frontiers of narrative)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8032-4398-9 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8032-8076-2 (epub) ISBN 978-0-8032-8077-9
(mobi) ISBN 978-0-8032-8078-6 (pdf) 1. Caribbean literature (English)—History and criticism. 2. African
literature (English)—History and criticism. 3. Postcolonialism in literature. 4. Ecocriticism. 5. Selvon,
Samuel—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 1941–1995—Criticism and interpretation. 7.
Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932– —Criticism and interpretation. 8. Okri, Ben—Criticism and
interpretation. I. Title. II. Series: Frontiers of narrative.
PR9080.J36 2015
820.9'9729—dc23
2015003603
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-
party websites or their content.
To Ben, my favorite
Contents
Preface: “Another Place Entirely”
Acknowledgments
1. Toward Econarratology
2. Space and Counterpersonal Narration in Sam Selvon’s A Brighter Sun and
The Lonely Londoners
3. Rotten English and Orality in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy
4. Sight and Bodies in V. S. Naipaul’s Indian Travelogues
5. National Myths and Ontological Boundaries in Ben Okri’s The Famished
Road Trilogy
6. Toward Storyworld Accords
Notes
Glossary
Works Cited
Index
Preface
“Another Place Entirely”
Thursday Next has lost herself in a good book, literally. The heroine of Jasper
Fforde’s 2001 novel The Eyre Affair, Next has an odd experience at the
Charlotte Brontë Museum when she is a young girl. As she listens to a fellow
museum visitor read from the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, she finds herself
transported to Jane’s world:
I closed my eyes and a thin chill suddenly filled the air around me. The
tourist’s voice was clear now, as though speaking in the open air, and when I
opened my eyes, the museum had gone. In its place was a country lane of
another place entirely. It was a fine winter’s evening and the sun was just
dipping below the horizon. The air was perfectly still, the color washed from
the scene. Apart from a few birds that stirred occasionally in the hedge, no
movement punctuated the starkly beautiful landscape. I shivered as I saw my
own breath in the crisp air, zipped up my jacket and regretted that I had left
my hat and mittens on the peg downstairs. As I looked about I could see that I
was not alone. Barely ten feet away a young woman, dressed in a cloak and
bonnet, was sitting on a stile watching the moon that had just risen behind us.
(66)
Interpreting the words of Brontë’s narrative as she hears them, Next finds herself
inhabiting Jane and Rochester’s world. She marvels at Jane’s stoic posture and
plain yet beautiful face before spotting Rochester’s dog, Pilot, and witnessing
the future lovers’ first meeting near the country lane stile. As she hears a distant
voice calling her name, the sky darkens, the air warms, the lane evaporates, and
Next finds herself back in the museum. She dutifully abides by her aunt Polly’s
warning to keep up with the museum tour and laments the end of the book’s
magic.
The world of Fforde’s novel clearly is fantastic. Surrounded by domesticated
dodo birds and time travelers, Next inhabits an alternative 1985 Britain in which
the Crimean War has lasted for over a century and Wales is an independent
socialist republic. Next is also a fantastic character. She is a detective who
specializes in crimes related to literature—the most serious of crimes committed
in Fforde’s book-loving alternative world—and at the climax of the novel
transports herself into Brontë’s text for a second time to capture archvillain
Acheron Hades, who himself enters Brontë’s text to kidnap Jane Eyre and hold
her ransom. She does this with the aid of a Prose Portal, a machine that permits
readers to leap into the worlds of the texts they read.
Yet as fantastic as they are, Thursday Next’s experiences in Jane Eyre feel
somewhat familiar. Viewing reading as a type of escapism is a common-sense
idea—immersing yourself in a story is part of the enjoyment of reading, after all.
But recent studies in cognitive science and narrative theory suggest that Next’s
ability to inhabit the fictional world that contains Thornfield Hall is not magical
at all, but necessary to the process of reading that every interpreter of a narrative
must undergo to achieve narrative comprehension. We all, it seems, lose
ourselves in books when we read. And we do not require a Prose Portal to do so.
In The Storyworld Accord I am interested in mapping and understanding the
very process Next describes when she feels the air cool and sees the sun dip
below the horizon. I take my central premise from the work of cognitive
narrative theorists, who see reading as a process of immersion or transportation.1
Such scholars define a storyworld as a mental model of context and environment
within which a narrative’s characters function. Like the similar terms story and
fabula, storyworld is a term narrative theorists use to discuss what happens in a
narrative. But more so than other terms, the storyworld highlights the world-
making power of narrative texts. Storyworld scholars argue that narrative
comprehension relies upon readers interpreting textual cues to make mental
models of a text’s world and inhabiting those models emotionally. To understand
a narrative, such scholars suggest, we must lose ourselves in the same
environment and experiences as a narrative’s characters.
As David Herman explains, the storyworld captures the “ecology” of narrative
interpretation in three key ways (Story Logic 13–14).2 First, it draws attention to
readers’ attempts to reconstruct not only the events in a narrative but also the
environment embedding the characters that inhabit a text’s world. In this way, it
offers a corrective to narratological readings that have tended to pay greater
attention to time or sequence than space. Second, the storyworld points to the
idea that comprehending a narrative is an inherently comparative process, in
Description:“Storyworlds,” mental models of context and environment within which characters function, is a concept used to describe what happens in narrative. Narratologists agree that the concept of storyworlds best captures the ecology of narrative interpretation by allowing a fuller appreciation of the o
