DANICA IGRUTINOVIĆ Filozofski fakultet UNS NEGATING NARRATION, CRUSHING COMMUNICATION: THE NONNARRATED AND THE DISNARRATED IN THE LEMON TABLE 1. THE NEGATIVES TO THE NARRATED: THE NONNARRATED AND THE DISNARRATED The main thematic concern of Julian Barnes’ collection of linked stories, The Lemon Table, is old age in its many forms. Apart from this theme, however, blindingly obvious and explicit as it is, an analysis of the narrative techniques employed in Barnes’ collection may help reveal another major theme: interpersonal communication as narration, or, rather, its almost complete absence. In order to approach the collection’s many narrative gaps and distortions, it seems appropriate to employ the theoretical framework put forth by Gerald Prince in his article entitled “The Disnarrated” (1988). He deals here with the narrated and its negatives, the ‘nonnarrated’ and the ‘disnarrated.’ Gerald Prince defines the ‘nonnarrated’ as ‘something [that] is not told (at least for a while).’ This would, according to Harold Mosher, include strategies of implication like not naming or delaying the names of characters or objects, eliding words in dialogue, referring to but not reporting words characters must have said, not identifying antecedents for pronouns, leaving referents vague in characters' thoughts and speech, suppressing the thoughts of characters whose thoughts are otherwise revealed, […] and entirely omitting the narration of acts that must have happened. (1993: 407) The responsibility for the nonnarrated more often than not rests solely with the characters, as it is usually a dramatization of their deceptions, including their self- deceptions. It is to be distinguished from the ‘nonnarratable,’ which is, according to Prince, what ‘cannot be narrated or is not worth narrating’ (Prince 1992: 28). 1