Doing without the Narrator in Artifactual Fiction

I. What is "artifactual" fiction?

In most narrative fiction, there is only one teller, who relates the tale to the reader in a manner not fundamentally different from that of a parent reading a bedtime story: this happened, then that happened, and here is what it all means, dear child.

This holds true not only for fiction with an omniscient narrator, but also for stories that utilize subjective narrators in the first or third person, and even for works that sport the infamous "unreliable" narrator, one whose version of events needs to be taken with a grain or more of salt. The operant word here is narratOR -- the single voice "speaking" to us as we read, from which we deduce the univalent consciousness perceiving and interpreting the events it recounts.

In artifactual fiction, this narrator has been removed: more exactly, such fiction deliberately replaces the single-voice narrator with many narrators, who often compete with and contradict each other.

By "artifactual" I mean fiction made up not of simple narration but of objects, each of which has a story (it could be a document, but could as well be a photograph, a map, a song). The object may tell its story itself (as would happen with, say, a journal entry), or the object may have to be "read" -- analyzed, dissected, contemplated, then related to other artifacts in the vicinity -- before its significance can become clear, its story understood.

Artifactual fiction, where the "content" is shown rather than narrated, presents the reader with a kind of research project: generally, although the materials of the work are arranged with care in a logical design, they are not processed by the author into a tale tellable by one voice, but rather are presented as it were undigested, and the reader must assemble in his own mind a coherent "story" for the whole. The effort required to assemble this coherent story may be, as Espen Aarseth would say, nontrivial, and there is also a good chance that no single interpretation or reading of these various narratives will explain everything.

II. What good is a Narrator?

III. Doing without

IV. Metaphor, Modal Appropriateness, Hypertext

V. Conclusion: A New Compact