ABSTRACT
‘My God, said the Duchess. I am pregnant. Who done it?’ Marie-Laure Ryan cites this mock-formula of French bestsellers in her entry on ‘tellability’ in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative (Ryan, 2005, p. 590). What makes a narrative worth telling, it suggests tongue-in-cheek, are religion, aristocracy, sex and mystery. The formula illustrates how tellability depends on the subject matter of the narrative. Ryan points out that such salience can be, on the one hand, grounded in universally relevant topics (such as sex and death) and, on the other hand, be related to cultural contexts (for example the interest in the exploits of aristocrats seems to be tied more particularly to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western literature). Narratology presents ‘tellability’ as a concept for what allows us to judge the story: Can it ward off the question ‘so what?’ However, the strategies with which the narrative prevents readers from asking this particular question move beyond pregnant duchesses. It can also depend on the rhetorical skill of the narrator in capturing the attention of the reader, the unexpectedness of events and their logical complexity (in the plot), as well as the general fascination with particular topics or particular settings and characters (see Baroni, 2014).
