ten theses against fictionality

Narrative, Vol 23, No. 1 (January 2015)Copyright 2015 by The Ohio State University

Paul Dawson

Ten Theses against Fictionality

It is well known that classical narratology derived its categories from narratives of prose fiction. And it is largely accepted that to fully address the phenomenon of nar-rative, narratology needs also to account not only for narrative fiction across media, but for non-fictional narratives, from conversational storytelling to political rheto-ric. A consequence of this transmedial, interdisciplinary expansion of the field is the realization that narratologists have tended to take fiction itself for granted and thus need to engage with the concept of fictionality as much as the concept of narrativ-ity. On the one hand, we have calls for a fiction-specific approach to narrative, which Dorrit Cohn once suggested could be called fictionology (“Signposts” 110).1 On the other hand, we have calls for a general approach to fictionality across all narratives, fictional and non-fictional. At stake here is the broader question of the theoretical relation between fictionality and narrativity in the wake of the narrative turn across the humanities and social sciences.

Fictionality as a nominal field of study emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with-in philosophy of language and logic rather than literary theory, and was explicitly

Paul Dawson is the author of two monographs, The return of the Omniscient Narrator: authorship and authority in twenty-First Century Fiction (2013) and Creative Writing and the New Humanities (2005), as well as a collection of poems, imagining Winter (2006). He is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. He can be reached at [email protected].

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framed as a debate between semantics and pragmatics.2 The former often drew on modal logic to discuss the propositional value of fictional statements; and the latter was inspired by speech act theory to discuss how fiction works as a form of commu-nication which does not rely on literal truth statements. These debates were particu-larly concerned with the referentiality of proper names and focused on the study of individual sentences rather than the genre of fiction.

Dorrit Cohn’s well known 1990 article, “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narra to-lo gical Perspective,” was an attempt to correct the overwhelming pragmatic bias of these early debates. However, Cohn’s main concern was to counteract the postmod-ern conflation of narrative and fiction, which she defined as “nonreferential narra-tive.” Her method, which connects her work to earlier linguistic approaches to litera-ture offered by Käte Hamburger and Ann Banfield, was to distinguish fiction from nonfiction by identifying textual elements that signal its status as fiction (including the presentation of characters’ thought and the duplicate vocal origin of author/nar-rator), and, in doing so, caution against the straightforward application of narratolog-ical categories to a discipline such as historiography.

The question of signposts and the broader philosophical question of fictionality gained momentum in the ensuing decades and continue to be debated, but the lat-est incarnation has been given impetus by the challenge to narratology proposed by the inimitable Richard Walsh, who asserts, in The rhetoric of Fictionality (2007), that his “book is symptomatic of a growing sense of paradigm shift” (3) enabling him to “re-examine fundamental questions in narrative theory through the prism of a new conception of the rhetorical nature of fictionality” (7).3

Walsh argues from a pragmatic perspective that there are no necessary or suf-ficient textual indicators that determine the generic status of fiction, and that we rec-ognize fiction only by its context, that is, by the fact that a work is presented and received as fiction. His point is that fictionality is not a quality of the genre of fic-tion, but “a feature of communicative rhetoric” which can be found across a range of discourses from history to biography. These claims have been made before. For in-stance, in 1980, Siegfried Schmidt wrote, “Fictionality is not a quality of TEXTE but a quality attributed to KOMMUNIKATE” (“Fictionality” 539). And in the same year, Wildekamp, Van Montfoort, and Van Ruiswijk argue that “fictional utterances occur not only in ‘literary’ texts but constitute a general social phenomenon in all sorts of communication situations” (565). Walsh’s specific aim, however, is to redirect narra-tology away from ontological questions when addressing narrative fiction.

Walsh dispenses quickly with existing philosophical theories of fictionality by ar-guing that they “can be collectively understood as gestures of disavowal” (14) because they frame fictionality as a problem of truth yet seek to resolve it “by detaching the fictive act from the domain of truth, that is, language” (15). In particular he argues against the pretense model of speech act theory—that fiction is the product of authors pretending to perform illocutionary acts (first applied to literary theory by Mary Lou-ise Pratt)—and against possible worlds theory, which claims that literary works refer to an independent fictional world. According to Walsh, these theories disarm the rhetorical force of fiction as serious discourse with a distinct cultural force. Instead he proposes to address fictionality as the use of language in a communicative framework

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and approach it as a question of relevance rather than a problem of truth: that is, the cognitive benefit that readers derive from the assumption of fictionality does not rely on determining the truth status of a statement, but on what significance the work has for them.4

Walsh explicitly links narratology to this problem of fictionality by arguing that to posit a narrator (rather than the author) as the source of a fictional narrative partic-ipates in the same gesture of disavowal offered by speech act theory, possible worlds theory, and Kendall Walton’s theory of fiction as a prop in a game of make-believe. While the distinction between an author and narrator has long been posited as a de-fining feature of fiction, Walsh rejects the narrator on the grounds that it actually can-cels out the fictionality of a work because it invites us to read the narrative as some-thing reported, rather than something invented. Of course Walsh would admit that a character can narrate a story, but he argues that characters cannot be assigned the status of a narrator because they do not exist outside the frame of representation. And he differentiates himself from proponents of the no-narrator thesis (the empty deictic center) by arguing simply that third-person narratives are narrated by the author.5

While Walsh points to the implication of fictionality in broader questions of communication, cognition, and the faculty of the imagination, his book is largely concerned with elaborating a pragmatic approach to narrative fiction, as the subtitle Narrative Theory and the idea of Fiction attests. However, The rhetoric of Fictionality has served as the point of departure for a more ambitious project by the indefatigable Henrik Skov Nielsen. The seeds of this project can be found in his 2010 essay, “Nat-ural Authors, Unnatural Narration,” where Skov Nielsen argues that distinguishing between fiction and fictionality, and dispensing with the idea of a reporting narrator, will help us understand how authors employ “techniques of fictionalization” (276) across the fiction/nonfiction divide without resorting to the “naturalizing” tendencies of the narrative communication model. While this work stems from Skov Nielsen’s involvement in the movement of unnatural narratology, his subsequent research em-phasizes that if fictionality, as the product of a basic human ability to imagine, is not restricted to the defining constitutive feature of the genre of fiction, it can be investi-gated as a kind of floating signifier of invention in all forms of communication from advertising to political campaigns.6

Walsh and Skov Nielsen have since joined with the indispensable James Phelan to produce the manifesto published in this issue of Narrative entitled “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” This collaboration brings together Walsh’s radical pragmatic ap-proach to the idea of fiction, Skov Nielsen’s attempt to expand the purview of the field by investigating fictionality in nonfictional discourse, and Phelan’s abiding interest in the rhetoric and ethics of narration, largely in narrative fiction, but also, more recently, in narrative nonfiction. The influence of Phelan’s well-known rhetorical ap-proach to narrative as “somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” can be found in this article’s description of its guiding questions as: “When, where, why, and how does someone use fictional-ity in order to achieve what purpose(s) in relation to what audience(s)?” (63).

The joint authors of “Ten Theses about Fictionality” prosecute a case for a com-prehensive approach to fictionality informed by three moves designed to reconcep-


tualize the object of study and reorient the field: distinguishing between the genre of fiction and the quality of fictionality; emphasizing the use of fictionality as a com-municative strategy in the context of the actual world rather than a turning away from the world; and asserting the pervasiveness of fictionality deriving from a “fun-damental cognitive skill” that informs human interaction. These three moves lay the foundation for what the authors propose is their “ultimate goal,” which is “to develop a unified theory of fictionality that will offer a viable account of its manifestations across diverse genres and discourses (from literary fictions to political campaigns, from legal arguments to philosophers’ thought experiments) without erasing the dif-ferences among them”7 (71n1).

In what follows I will situate this work in relation to existing debates about fic-tionality, with a focus on how these debates have informed contemporary narrative theory. In particular, I will address the rhetorical approach in relation to: 1) its claims to break decisively from previous scholarship on fictionality; 2) the ramifications for the study of narrative fiction; and 3) its relationship to postmodernism and the nar-rative turn. While my essay takes the form of a polemic, my aim is not to dismiss the value or significance of fictionality as a field of study, but to locate its development in a disciplinary context and clarify the contributions it stands to make to narrative theory. So, in the spirit of collegiality, here are ten theses against fictionality.

1) Semantics versus pragmatics is borrowed and boring.

Skov Nielsen et al. adopt a pragmatic approach to fictionality, particularly in their assertion that “[a] rhetorical conception of fictionality makes it a cultural variable rather than a logical or ontological absolute; fictionality is therefore relative to com-municative contexts rather than intrinsic to the discourse itself ” (66). This builds on Walsh’s claim, in The rhetoric of Fictionality, that “[w]e need to think in terms of the pragmatics rather than the semantics of fictionality” (32), offering his relevance-based approach in opposition to fictional worlds theory.

Walsh here is referring to a tradition in the field of narratology of borrowing the distinction between semantics and pragmatics from linguistics and semiotics when characterizing debates about the study of narrative fiction. For instance, in a 2014 ar-ticle on the “fictionality debate,” Toon Staes sets up an opposition between narrative semantics, which holds that “text-immanent features” enable a work to be identified as fiction, and narrative pragmatics, which argues that fictionality depends on autho-rial intention or the “rhetorical strategies” that an author employs. What we have here, I think, is a debate between formalist and contextualist approaches to narrative fiction that can’t adequately be described as an opposition between semantics and pragmatics.

For a start, it miscontrues and delimits the field by conflating the textual study of signposts with possible worlds theory under the banner of semantics. Yet the two are methodologically distinct. As Ruth Ronen noted in Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (1994), “Fictionality as understood by literary theorists is a property of texts

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and not of propositions” (85; emphasis original). Ronen herself sought to address this by adapting semantics to literary theory in her study of fictional worlds, and in the process argues that “[d]efining fictionality as immanently textual is methodologi-cally cumbersome and conceptually unsatisfactory” (79), opposing this “textual-tax-onomic” model to “logico-semantic” and “non-taxonomic” ones. Her claim is that the search for textual signs of fictionality suffers from a conflation of fictionality with lit-erariness as part of a desire by literary theorists to demonstrate how literary language works differently from other uses of language.

It is likely that the classification of textual signposts under the category of se-mantics is a reaction to Searle’s endlessly quoted assertion that “[t]here is no textual property, syntactical or semantic, that will identify a text as a work of fiction” (325). However, Gregory Currie, in The Nature of Fiction (1990), argues, “If fictionality does not reside in the text itself, it must be a relational property: something possessed in virtue of the text’s relations to other things. Among a text’s relational properties will be its semantic properties, such as reference and truth” (4). Continuing the meta-phorical transfer from linguistics and semiotics to narratology would thus involve making a distinction between pragmatics, semantics, and syntactics, first elaborated by Charles Morris. Jean-Marie Schaeffer is the only narratological scholar I am aware of who deploys this terminology, listing the work of Hamburger and Banfield under the category of syntactics in his entry on “Fictional vs. Factual Narration” in The Liv-ing Handbook of Narratology. Others have made similar distinctions. For instance, in his 2005 account of theories of fiction for the routledge encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, David Gorman is careful to distinguish between “approaches through prag-matics,” “approaches through semantics,” and “signposts of fictionality.”

Secondly, within linguistics, semantics and pragmatics are different branches of study, but they are not mutually exclusive. Debates tend to be concerned with the extent to which pragmatics can complement the semantic analysis of individual sen-tences. When the distinction is transferred to the study of fiction, however, it seems to be characterized as an either-or debate about the very essence of fiction and we are left either to take a side or compete for the best “synthesis” of approaches. For instance, in a 2011 article on Nabokov and the “nature of fictionality,” Brian Richard-son addresses the way Nabokov’s work “problematizes” the separation of author and narrator, and in doing so seeks to prove the validity of “one of the current theories of fictionality” and the limitations of its “main rival” (76). The first, he claims, is the pragmatic approach derived from Searle in which a work presents itself as fiction by performing a speech act. “On the other hand,” Richardson claims, “approaches based on semantics affirm instead that there are distinctive aspects of language and content that demarcate a work’s fictional status, such as the presence of free indirect speech or an omniscient narrator” (76).

As I have pointed out, many approaches based on semantics do not make this claim. And as far as I can tell, only the work of Ann Banfield represents a wholly tex-tual (that is, grammatical) approach. Even Hamburger founds her approach on a the-ory of fiction as an “as” structure (as opposed to the typical “as-if ”), and commences her study of grammatical features by pointing out that these features are recognized


when readers know they are reading a novel. So the distinction strikes me as a false debate which sets up “semantics” as a straw-man target, when really the distinction is a question of methodological emphasis rather than competing theories. I would not necessarily include the authors of “Ten Theses about Fictionality” as participants in this false debate, although the argument against fictionality as an ontological absolute which they offer in thesis six is actually an argument against exclusive textual proper-ties, and their claim that fictionality is a quality characterized by its reference to non-actual affairs does offer an ontological basis for their pragmatic approach.

2) How many degrees of fictionality does it take to change a genre?

The first theoretical move, and key intervention, that Skov Nielsen et al. make is to argue that existing theories have been constrained by the assumption that fic-tionality is a quality of fiction alone, and that “apart from the work by literary crit-ics on generic fiction, fictionality is almost completely unstudied and often unac-knowledged” (62). If this is true, one can hardly blame literary critics for equating fictionality with fiction. But it is not true because fictionality has been an object of much study outside the field of literary criticism. And while it is true that fiction has generally been the testing ground for the study of fictionality, philosophical inquiry has seldom been interested in fiction itself. In The Philosophy of Literature (2009), Peter Lamarque points out that “[p]hilosophers have an interest in fictionality that extends beyond any interest they have in literature. . . . Logical inquiry is indiffer-ent to literary value, and the simple examples used by logicians—Pickwick, Sherlock Holmes, Pegasus—are seldom related back to their originating texts” (175). In one sense, then, the call for a study of local features of fictionality across generic divides is in fact a call to return to earlier approaches concerned with statements or individual sentences. The difference is that rather than the logic of propositions the emphasis is on the rhetorical use of fictionality. The aim of “Ten Theses about Fictionality” is thus to demonstrate the value of applying the term fictionality to rhetorical devices in natural language that are not strictly concerned with the transmission of informa-tion, including tropes and figures of speech such as irony, metaphor, and hyperbole, as well as other “fictions” including hypotheses, counterfactuals, and speculation.

One of the key claims of the pragmatic position adopted by Skov Nielsen et al. is that the presence of fictionality in a work of nonfiction, from a technique of fiction such as the narration of characters’ thoughts, to the reference failure of an invented fact, does not alter the global generic status of that work. Not only does this prove that there are no signposts of fictionality exclusive to fiction, it enables them to show how fictive discourse operates across both fiction and nonfiction. As part of this move, it is also important to show that fictive discourse has no necessary connection with fiction. In their introductory analysis of President Obama’s speech at the 2013 corre-spondents’ dinner, Skov Nielsen et al. write, “More generally, Obama’s performance depends on the ease with which he and his audience can move between the two kinds of discourse, and this ease in turn depends on their extensive experience with fictive

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discourse outside the boundaries of generic fictions such as the short story, the novel, and the fiction film” (62).

It should be pointed out that the impact of Obama’s speech depends upon the audience’s experience with the generic fiction film when he refers to “a new movie by Spielberg called Obama.” This does not invalidate their claim, of course, because they are referring to the rhetorical performance of Obama’s “jest” rather than its sub-ject matter, but it does draw attention to two things: how far can we stretch the term fictionality to satisfactorily accommodate such a range of discourses; and how do we address the ongoing cultural association of fictionality with the genre of fiction? The answer to the first is a question of degrees:

This point also means that, from our perspective, it is wiser to talk about degrees of fictionality rather than the distinction of fiction. While fictional-ity resides in context rather than text, some flights of fancy have higher and longer orbits than others. Obama’s riff on Spielberg’s new movie has a greater degree of fictionality than his charge that his rival in 2012 suffers from Rom-nesia. (67)

Presumably the quality of fictionality does not admit of degree, so Obama’s riff cannot itself possess degrees of fictionality, but must rather represent a degree of fic-tionality within the global nonfictional frame of a campaign speech. Obama’s joke that Mitt Romney must be suffering from Romnesia would therefore represent an even lesser degree of fictionality within the frame of a presidential debate. We might then ask: What degree of fictionality does a work of fiction possess? And depending on the answer, would that be enough to distinguish fiction by degree, if not kind? The amount of theoretical work required to include Obama’s joke as an example of fiction-ality alongside fiction suggests to me one may as well coin a different term. In other words, “extricating” fictionality from fiction requires a scale of degrees of fictionality with generic fiction at one end and a single joke in a presidential debate at the other, but unless the two can inform each other, the theoretical problem of degrees of fic-tionality becomes replicated at the disciplinary level in any attempt to forge a “unified theory of fictionality” (71n1).

Regarding the question of genre, Skov Nielsen et al. argue that genre is a con-vention that provides a global framework for a work’s reception. It seems important, though, to also address how local features of fictionality carry generic assumptions with them. In many cases features of fictionality can be identified in the genre of non-fiction precisely because they invoke the genre of fiction, and typically because they have been borrowed from fiction, such as dialogue and representation of thought. This could invite us to consider more closely how fictionality relates to genre not as a textual phenomenon but as a mode of cultural capital. As Patrick O’Neill points out, in Fictions of Discourse (1994), “narratives, whether received as fictional or non-fictional, may also be received as literary or non-literary” (15). When techniques of fiction are deployed rhetorically within nonfictional discourse, this may prove that these techniques are not exclusive to fiction, but it does not erase their generic asso-


ciation. In fact their presence will typically influence the reception of the global genre as a cultural category.

So, for instance, Thomas Keneally prefaces Schindler’s ark with the claim that he has employed “the textures and devices of a novel to tell a true story” (9) but at-tempted to “avoid all fiction . . . since fiction would debase the record” (10). Of course, Schindler’s ark won the Booker Prize for fiction, and indeed “creative nonfiction” is now taught in American writing programs as the fourth genre of creative writing, alongside fiction, poetry, and drama. (The banner for the journal Creative Nonfiction is “True stories, well told.”) The point I am making here is that if the presence of fictive discourse in nonfiction can alter the cultural reception of the global generic frame, the study of fictionality could profit from a pragmatic approach to genre as a type of literary value as well as a designation of fictional or nonfictional status.

3) Fictionality is a signifier without a referent.

In their 1949 book, Theory of Literature, René Wellek and Austin Warren use the term fictionality synonymously with “invention” and “imagination” to point out that it has typically been seen as “a distinguishing trait of literature,” while arguing this is not in itself a sufficient definition of literature (16). At one point we may have had some rough consensus that fictionality is a quality that fiction possesses—or that it is most visible in and productively analyzed in fiction—although without any consen-sus on how it should be defined. Here are two definitions from separate disciplinary traditions:

I propose the following explication of “fictionality”: a person S1 holds an as-sertion or description to be fictional if his WMo does not contain an extra-linguistic referent for it, but S1 is nevertheless capable to imagine such a ref-erent or to assign a coherent intensional interpretation to Z using contents and mechanisms of WMo. (535)

Siegfried Schmidt (1980)

By fiction I mean something better though more awkwardly captured by the substantive “fictionality,” which is to say the peculiar yet for us intuitive way that novels refer to the world: via invented characters and plots, they purport to tell us how people and institutions and abstractions like money or power work. (ix)

Nicholas Paige (2011)

As the above indicates, while some definitions are concerned with fictional state-ments and others with the genre of fiction, and while some emphasize intentional-ity and some focus on individual reception or social context, fictionality is typically construed as a question of referentiality: how to understand a statement or discursive artefact that makes no truth claims while still not being a lie.

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In The rhetoric of Fictionality, Walsh seeks to bypass the logical questions of reference and the philosophical issue of truth by focusing on the use of fictional-ity, but in doing so does not proffer a clear sense of what it actually is. According to Walsh, fictionality ought to be seen as both “a rhetorical resource” and a “contextual assumption” rather than an “ontological category” (36). But he also argues that “it is the quality of fictionality rather than the genre of fiction” that provides for the “theo-retical integrity” of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. So fictionality is a resource, an assumption, and a quality. And if it is a “rhetorical quality” as well as a “feature of communication,” then it seems that fictionality is being defined as a qual-ity of fictionality.

The problem here stems from asking the word fictionality to perform too many different functions. A related terminological issue arises with the use of the word fic-tionalization. Typically, “to fictionalize,” as the transitive verb of fictional, has been used to mean “converted into fiction,” in Ruth Ronen’s words (76).8 However, this becomes difficult to reconcile with the “extrication” of fictionality from fiction. For instance, in “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration,” Skov Nielsen discusses how “tell-tale signposts of fictionality” can be understood as “techniques of fictionaliza-tion that can also be used in nonfictional texts” (281; emphasis original). But he can’t mean that these techniques turn the text into fiction, since he is arguing the opposite. Here it seems that a signpost of fictionality does not necessarily signal fiction, but produces fictionality via the act of fictionalization.9 By comparison, “to narrativize,” in Hayden White’s terms, means to impose sense on experience, and, in Monika Flud-ernik’s terms, to read something as narrative. Of course, both these scholars make little distinction between narrativity and fictionality, so we are left to wonder about the relationship between the quality of fictionality, the act of fictionalization, and the status of signposts of fictionality.10

The terminological haziness of these earlier works is something “Ten Theses about Fictionality” seeks to rectify by recuperating the importance of (non)referenti-ality (the nonactual) and adapting Phelan’s rhetorical approach to narrative to argue that fictive discourse “neither refers to actual states of affairs nor tries to deceive its audience about such states. Instead it overtly invents or imagines states of affairs in order to accomplish some purpose(s) within its particular context” (62).

Skov Nielsen et al. open by arguing that Obama and his audience at the corre-spondents’ dinner share an understanding of the “distinction between fictionality and nonfictionality, or what we’ll call fictive and nonfictive discourse” (62). So when they establish that their first move is to distinguish between “fiction as a set of conven-tional genres” (62) and “fictionality as a quality or fictive discourse as a mode” (62), we are clearly to take fictionality and fictive discourse as synonymous, and hence to consider fictionality as both a quality and a mode. Hence the word fictionality is supplemented by introducing the phrase “fictive discourse,” but this phrase is then collapsed back into fictionality. The authors elaborate that “fictionality/fictive dis-course,” like irony, can be either global or local. This seems to suggest that a text can be globally fictive, but considering they also argue that “genre designation provides a global framework for understanding a text as a whole” (62), this would then make the global quality of fictionality potentially consonant with the global framework of


the conventional genre of fiction. Consider this: “We can analyze the interplay of fic-tion and nonfiction in such cases by distinguishing between global and local fiction-ality. Global fictions can contain passages of nonfictionality, and global nonfictions can contain passages of fictionality. Thus, nonfictionality can be subordinate to fictive purposes, and fictionality can be subordinate to nonfictive purposes” (67).

It seems here that fictionality can be a local passage of fictive discourse, a global quality, and a global genre framework. “The crucial point,” the authors argue, “is that fictionality attaches to the communicative act, not the object of representation” (65) and this act involves the intent to speak fictively or nonfictively, which is “more sig-nificant than any a priori divide between fiction and nonfiction based solely on tex-tual features” (64) (the straw-man target rears its head here). So while there can be no distinction of fiction on textual or ontological grounds, there is a distinction between fictionality and nonfictionality based on the intent to speak fictively. A clearer dis-tinction between generic framework, quality, and mode would help. I suggest that the genres of fiction or nonfiction can employ the modes of fictive or nonfictive discourse which refer respectively to the quality of fictionality or nonfictionality, and that the relation of these modes to various techniques and their relation to genre stand to be elaborated.

4) The new approach to fictionality is an old approach to fiction.

The theoretical separation of fictionality and fiction may help us understand non-fictional narratives, and fictionality as a general feature of communication, but the question remains whether it sheds new light on the genre of fiction itself. “In this essay,” Skov Nielsen et al. write, “we aim to reconsider the nature and scope of fic-tionality as part of a call to re-orient the study of fiction and its functions in culture” (62). Their argument that “fictive discourse is not ultimately a means of constructing scenarios that are cut off from the actual world but rather a means for negotiating an engagement with that world” (63) leads to the assertion that this offers a fresh per-spective on the cultural function of fiction. Such an observation would certainly not be unfamiliar to literary critics, especially to those who practice political criticism, from feminism to postcolonialism. To prove their point the authors provide a brief account of The Hunger Games trilogy before concluding that it is “a contemporary version of the classic to Kill a Mockingbird, only here fiction does not primarily ad-dress racial inequality, but more broadly a fight against inequality and oppression and for justice and equality” (71). It seems relevant here to quote Eric Heyne’s review of Barbara Foley’s account of fictionality in her book telling the truth: these “‘broad claims’ mostly add up to a common-sense assertion that authors of fiction do make claims about the world (as crusty traditional thematists have always told us)” (114; emphasis original). Given the unremarkable nature of the claim that fiction engages with the actual world, we are left to consider two tenets of the new fictionality stud-ies: degrees of fictionality rather than the distinction of fiction; and fictionality as a double exposure of the imagined and real.

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As I have pointed out, arguing that fictionality is not an exclusive property of fic-tion leaves us with a scalar logic of “more or less” fictionality in any given work. This really doesn’t help us understand fiction unless we want to start identifying signposts of factuality. As Gregory Currie writes:

Is a work fictional if even one of its statements is fictional in this sense? Must the greater proportion of the whole be fiction? These are bad questions. One might as well ask how many grains of sand make a heap. If we wanted to, we could define a numerical degree of fictionality, but it would be artificial and unilluminating. What is illuminating is a precise account of the fictionality of statements. For in some perhaps irremediably vague way, the fictional-ity of works is going to depend upon the fictionality of the statements they contain. (49)

Furthermore, the paradoxical quality of fictionality which Skov Nielsen et al. draw attention to—the doubled nature of a discourse that flags its own invention even as it seeks to alter opinion in the actual world—is the standard paradox of fic-tional truth. For instance, Michael Riffaterre opens Fictional truth (1990) with this statement: “All literary genres are artifacts, but none more blatantly so than fiction. Its very name declares its artificiality, and yet it must somehow be true to hold the interest of its readers, to tell them about experiences at once imaginary and relevant to their own lives. This paradox of truth in fiction is the problem for which I seek to propose a solution” (xii).

The characterization of fictionality as a double exposure of the imagined and real is also similar to Didier Coste’s argument in Narrative as Communication (1989): “Fictionality is the result of fictional reference (one of its possible results). . . . The signified is referred not to a single ‘object’ but to at least two different objects belong-ing to worlds ruled by different laws of truth, value, and relevance” (108). Coste goes on to claim that “[i]n our contemporary Western cultures, one of the basic worlds of reference is posited as IMAGINARY and another as REAL” (108). There are also many similarities with Wolfgang Iser’s approach to fictionality from the perspective of literary anthropology. Although Iser is concerned with literary fiction, he none-theless argues that fictionality is a basic human activity founded in creativity; that it is not only restricted to fiction, although it is a basic constituent of it; that it can only be understood in terms of its functions; and that it involves a doubling of meaning. In Prospecting: From reader response to Literary anthropology (1989), Iser argues that “[t]he doubling effect as the hallmark of literary fictionality comes about be-cause the mutually exclusive realms that are bracketed together nevertheless retain their difference. If they did not, that which appears as doubled would instead merge into one” (241).

In other words, while Skov Nielsen et al. seek to separate the quality of fiction-ality from the genre of fiction in order to demonstrate how pervasive it is, they are not supplementing this with a new theory of fictionality so much as applying literary theories outside the sphere of literature. This means that when the theory is turned back to fiction, it has nothing new to offer.


5) Signposts are signposts.

Narratology is founded on a formalist study of the conventions of fiction. Some of these conventions have been identified as signposts of fictionality, and the starting point for this scholarship is whether any of them can be considered “necessary or suf-ficient” textual indicators of the generic status of fiction. The most popular contenders are the non-identity of author and narrator (although it should be pointed out that this can only be indicated by the paratextual frame) and internal focalization (under which narratorial omniscience, free indirect discourse, and the epic preterite would be included). However, if we generally agree that none is actually exclusive to fiction, what is the point of studying them as signposts? We end up privileging some conven-tions at the expense of others. As I have suggested, the main benefit is in fact studying how these signposts operate in nonfiction.

On the other hand, a pragmatic approach which claims in principle that there are no exclusive signposts of fictionality finds itself perpetuating by its opposition the separation of a text from its frame. A pragmatic approach would recognize that a signpost is a signpost if it is taken by readers as a signpost, regardless of whether it is necessary or sufficient and whether it is “in” the text or not. Here Genette provides a useful taxonomy, in “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative” (1993), that includes paratextual indices, plus three textual indices, which he breaks down into the narrato-logical (order, pace, frequency, mode, voice), thematic, and stylistic:

The “indexes” of fiction are not all narratological in nature, first because they are not all textual in nature. Most often, and perhaps more and more often, a fictional text declares itself to be such by paratextual marks that protect the reader from any misunderstanding; the generic indication “a novel” on a title page or cover is one example among others. Then, because certain of fiction’s textual indexes are, for example, thematic in nature (an implausible utterance such as “one day the oak tree said to the reed . . .” can only be fic-tional), or stylistic: free indirect discourse, which I am counting as a narra-tive feature, is often considered to be an effect of style. (79)

Alexander Bareis, in “The Role of Fictionality in Narrative Theory” (2008), also seeks to resolve the impasse by distinguishing between signs and markers of fiction-ality: “To the first type belongs obvious fictitiousness, such as talking animals or a setting in a distant future to name but a few of all potential candidates, while definite markers are such notions that are both necessary and sufficient according to a theory of fiction” (157). He concludes by arguing that metafiction is “the only entirely fiction-ality-specific modus of novel” (66; emphasis original).

For Skov Nielsen et al., “No technique is found in all fiction and/or only in fic-tion, even though within certain cultural and historical contexts certain textual fea-tures can become strong conventional indices of a fictive communicative intent (e.g., zero focalization in the era of the realist novel)” (emphasis original). This observation suggests that recognizing the difference between the quality of fictionality and the

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genre of fiction could provide a useful way to reconsider the history of the genre. For if signposts are contingent and historically variable, as the authors suggest, we could most profit from asking what concept of fiction they are actually signalling. Here Klaus Hempfer provides a useful distinction between signals and characteristics, the latter being the historically specific understanding of fiction which certain formal elements point towards. Hempfer’s article “Some Problems Concerning a Theory of Fiction(ality)” (2004) provides the methodological spur for Simona Zetterberg Gjer-levsen, who seeks to move beyond purely theoretical debates in order to conduct an historical investigation of when and how accepted features of the novel, such as self-reflexive authorial intrusions and free indirect discourse, came to be understood as signposts of fictionality (“Fictionality and the Novel”).

Skov Nielsen et al. also argue that their approach to fictionality “leads to the un-derstanding that the rich cultural history of such forms” as the novel and the fiction film “was made possible by a formal demarcation and elaboration of the rhetorical re-sources of a fictionality already pervasive within primarily nonfictive discourse” (63). I take this to mean either that scholarly histories of the novel have been made possible by a deliberate demarcation of novelistic fictionality from other modes, or that the history of the novel itself is a history of writers adapting existing nonfictive discourses to their own generic ends. Either way, it points to the claim that novel studies could profit from recognizing that fictionality is not exclusive to the genre.

Such an enterprise has already been undertaken, beginning with Lennard Da-vis’s Factual Fictions: The Origins of the english Novel (1983), which argues that “the distinction we now make between fact and fiction was not the same distinction made before the eighteenth century” because “genres were not defined by their allegiance to truth-telling or invention” (67), and Barbara Foley’s telling the truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (1986). In this book, Foley argues, “Any given element in a narrative . . . must be scanned and interpreted as either factual or fictive in order to be read and understood. There is no specifically linguistic essence of fic-tionality that is immediately perceptible in the particulars of a text” (40).

Most of this scholarship on fictionality is concerned with the development of the novel in the eighteenth century, centring on a distinction between pseudofactual works, such as robinson Crusoe, which modeled themselves on nonfictional narra-tives, and realist novels that made no pretense of their fictional status. In “The Rise of Fictionality” (2006), Catherine Gallagher proposes to address novelistic history in terms of its fictionality rather than its realism, claiming that “fictionality as a spe-cific feature of the genre certainly needs recovery” from narratologists, philosophers, and postmodernists (336). Gallagher’s argument is that when the novel emerged as a genre in the eighteenth century, it sought to distinguish itself from both the incred-ibility of the romance and the referentiality of factual discourse. Hence the rise of the novel must be seen less as the addition of realism to existing modes of fiction, than as the construction of a whole new discourse of fictionality because the impossible events associated with the romance were no longer a sufficient operator of fictionality. The paradoxical result, she claims, is that the eighteenth-century novel both liberated itself from the pseudofactual by openly proclaiming its fictional status and tried “to hide its fictionality behind verisimilitude or realism” (337).11 When it comes to offer-


ing a new perspective on the study of fiction, the test of the rhetorical approach to fictionality could lie in its capacity to contribute to this scholarship on the emergence of the novel out of a conflation of factual and fictive discourse.

6) Fictionality both inherits and undermines the unnatural.

In their seventh thesis about fictionality, the authors point to the importance of read-ing with the assumption that a story is fictive rather than nonfictive. “As Henrik has argued elsewhere,” they state, “this difference allows for un-naturalizing reading strat-egies when reading certain fictive narratives because readers do not need to limit the narrative possibilities to what is credible in stories about non-invented, actual states of affairs” (67). We can see in this passage the legacy of Skov Nielsen’s earlier work on unnatural narratology, and it is worth discussing here the relationship between the rhetorical approach to fictionality and unnatural narratology, itself founded on a theory of fictionality.

In a footnote to a 2011 article, “Fictional Voices? Strange Voices? Unnatural Voic-es?,” Skov Nielsen writes,

After the ISSN Conference on Narrative in Washington in 2007, a small group incidentally gathered in the lobby. The group included Brian Rich-ardson, Jan Alber, Maria Mäkelä, and me. We realized that the conference in Washington seemed to have yielded a rather strong resistance to otherwise predominant naturalizing paradigms. Consequently, we invited everyone interested to join a group on what we tentatively called “unnatural narratol-ogy.” (55)

And so a movement was born, although I would have been more impressed if the small group had gathered in the bar.12 The unnaturalists resist the claim that nar-rative fiction can always be naturalized according to the cognitive parameters of con-versational storytelling and instead focus on what they consider to be specific to fic-tion, such as impossible events, time schemes, and narrating voices. These unnatural features of fiction can thus be seen as signposts of fictionality. In “What is Unnatural Narrative Theory?” (2011), Brian Richardson argues that “unnatural narratives are works that flaunt their own fictionality” (36).

According to Richardson, one reason for the ostensible neglect of unnatural nar-ratives in narratology is a desire for narratologists “to have a single, all-embracing theory” that “seamlessly covers all narratives” (29). He argues that “such an approach in principle cannot begin to do justice to the distinctive qualities of fiction, whose defining feature is its difference from the actual world” (29). So here we can see that the argument for unnatural narratology is also an argument for fictionology and a response to the narrative turn. But rather than developing a general theory of fiction, unnatural narratology is concerned with particular types of antimimetic and experi-mental work that exemplify fiction.

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Richardson is clear in defining unnatural narratives in opposition to “fictional modes like realism that model themselves on nonfictional narratives” (34). He also distinguishes unnatural texts from fairy tales by arguing that “the anti-mimetic points out its own constructedness, the artificiality of many of its techniques, and its inher-ent fictionality” (31). So here we have the equation of unnatural, antimimetic, and overt fictionality. By contrast, realism becomes somehow positioned as a replication of the real. And yet one of the key conventions of realism is omniscient narration, long considered a signpost of fictionality. Omniscience may be “unnatural” but it is certainly not anti-mimetic, for a convincing rendition of a character’s interior is cru-cial for psychological realism. This is what Dorrit Cohn, in transparent Minds, calls the paradox of narrative realism.

At the same time, there has been a pragmatic approach to fictionality within un-natural narratology. In his 2011 essay on Nabokov, Richardson argues both for such an approach and for the importance of the fiction/nonfiction distinction, although we have to wait until the last line of his essay before this is linked to the unnatural: “Together, these phenomena indicate the rare and unusual ways in which the author of a book can unnaturally merge with the narrator of a work of fiction” (89). Describ-ing this merger as “unnatural” seems to expand its scope beyond his own defini-tion of “antimimetic.” I have already pointed out that in “Natural Authors, Unnatu-ral Narration” Skov Nielsen argues that real authors transcend the communication model when they employ “techniques of fictionalization” that cannot be understood as emanating from a narrator. These techniques are to be considered “unnatural” re-gardless of whether they appear in fiction or nonfiction: “I will call that part of nar-ration that is not communication ‘unnatural narration’ because it deviates from the paradigm of natural, i.e., oral narratives” (279).

Building on their claim for the importance of recognizing the difference between reading a story as fictive or nonfictive, the authors of “Ten Theses about Fictionality” write,

More specifically, some fictive narratives may have temporalities, story-worlds, mind representations, or acts of narration that audiences would con-strue as physically, logically, mnemonically, or psychologically impossible or implausible in real-world storytelling situations. Yet in line with thesis six even such implausibilities or impossibilities can be used as parts of a globally nonfictive discourse. (67)

Here the language of the unnatural has been absorbed into the broader study of fictionality. However, to talk of “un-naturalizing reading strategies” seems only to inherit the problems. For instance, the introduction to Strange voices, a collection of work by Nordic scholars co-edited by Skov Nielsen, points out that the contributors “share a marked skepticism towards the idea of using ‘natural’ narratives as some kind of genetic model for understanding and interpreting all kinds of narratives, and for all of them the distinction of fiction is important” (1–2). Unnatural narratology began as a local skirmish with movements within narrative theory, and its approach was to draw attention to the non-naturalizable features that distinguish literary fiction from


natural language, hence to study these “unnatural” features in natural language works against its very premise. And to carry the unnatural into a study of fictive discourse founded on a challenge to the distinction of fiction seems to be more trouble than it is worth.

7) Narrativity is always already fictionality, except when it’s not.

Once narratology decides that its proper object of study is narrative across both fic-tion and nonfiction, the methodological question becomes whether or not it ought to distinguish between the two, but this depends on the theoretical relationship be-tween narrativity and fictionality. If the tendency to conflate narrative with fiction was the result of a terminological slippage produced by the bias of literary theorists, the conflation of narrativity and fictionality is symptomatic of a broad postmodern challenge to knowledge both within narratology and in the broader narrative turn. So when Hayden White famously argued that historians narrativize events by em-plotting history in the same way writers of fiction construct plots, his claims proved controversial because they seem to equate narrativization with fictionalization. And where narrative analysis has been used to mount constructivist challenges to positiv-ist knowledge in the social sciences, conservative challenges have equated it with the fictive. Martin Kreiswirth points out that for “many in the human sciences, whatever else it is, by its very nature story is at bottom false, fictive—‘literary,’ imaginative, not scientific” (312).

Literary theorists, of course, have had no problem with this idea of narrative, and in fact see it as one of the lessons we can learn from fiction. As Brian McHale com-ments in Postmodern Fiction (1987), “The postmodernists fictionalize history, but by doing so they imply that history itself may be a form of fiction” (96). And in Fictions of Discourse, Patrick O’Neill argues that “[a]ll narrative, of course, purely as narrative, purely as a discursive system of presentation, is in principle fictional to begin with” (14–15; emphasis original). Walsh offers a very similar perspective in The rhetoric of Fictionality, but argues that it is important to separate fictionality from its synonymity with narrativity. He suggests that while all narrative is a form of artifice, fictional nar-ratives nonetheless possess a cultural specificity which needs to be recognized: “That is to say, I want to grant full force to the claim that all narrative is artifice, and in that very restricted sense fictive, but I maintain nonetheless that fictional narrative has a coherently distinct cultural role, and that a distinct concept of fictionality is required to account for this role” (15).

What we can learn from this is that constructivist approaches to narrative in the social sciences are at least partly influenced by the linguistic turn and sometimes di-rectly influenced by literary theory. We can also learn that literary narratologists are happy enough to see fictionality conflated with narrativity except when it challenges the specificity of their own object of study.

Skov Nielsen et al. do not engage with the question of narrative in their mani-festo, although they do claim that, given their emphasis on communicative intent,

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it makes sense “to examine narratives and other communicative acts in the prag-matic context of the intent of their producers (however inferred), including the in-tent to invoke a fictive rhetoric” (64f). We can derive from this the reasonable as-sumption that fictionality can also be deployed in non-narrative modes of discourse. We can also assume that if narrative is fictive in the limited sense that it involves artifice, fictive discourse is fictive in the broader sense of involving invention. Fur-thermore, if, as Fludernik claims, the distinction between narrative and nonnarrative must be the foundation of narratology, then the distinction between fiction(ality) and nonfiction(ality) must be the foundation of fictionality studies. The question remains, how does the quality of narrativity (variously characterized as sequentiality, mediacy, experientiality, or world-making) relate to the quality of fictionality?

8) Fictionality wants to have its postmodern cake and eat it too.

Theories of fictionality gained traction in literary theory as a way to engage with the postmodern proliferation of metafiction and hybrid genres of writing, such as the nonfiction novel. For instance, in Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1980), Linda Hutcheon draws upon philosophical theories of reference to argue that the overt fictionality of metafiction draws attention to the nonreferential nature of all fiction, including realism. For Marie-Laure Ryan, in “Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality” (1997), hybrid postmodern texts may problematize fic-tionality, but the theoretical erasure of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction (influenced notably by Saussurean linguistics and the historiographic concept of em-plotment) should not go uncontested:

If culture were made by its theorists, it would be headed toward a single huge category that subsumes every utterance: a category variously called “texts,” “discourse,” or “representations.” Since the crisis of the dichotomy is due to the expansion of fiction at the expense of nonfiction, I will call it the doc-trine of panfictionality. (165)

According to Ryan, the postmodern critique of fictionality has its greatest force when rejecting naive concepts of representation, but this should provide an opportu-nity to sharpen theories of fictionality and “establish the legitimacy of nonfiction in the face of anti-realist and relativist arguments” (166). Ryan’s solution is to replace the notion of objective truth as correspondence with “the intensional concept of claim-ing truth” (166). She proceeds to argue for three categories on a scale of fictionality: nonfiction, classical fiction, and postmodern metafiction.

While the doctrine of panfictionality may operate as a foil for theories of fic-tionality, the approach offered by “Ten Theses about Fictionality” in fact has much in common with the related poststructuralist approach to literariness. If Jakobson defined literariness as “that which makes a given work a literary work,” the project of poststructuralist theory was to show that literature is not a privileged discourse sepa-


rate from everyday language, leading paradoxically to the claim that all language is in a sense literary. This is the logic of deconstruction in its American variety, articulated by Paul de Man’s definition of literariness, in “The Resistance to Theory” (1982), as neither an aesthetic nor a mimetic quality of literature but “the use of language that foregrounds the rhetorical over the grammatical and the logical function” (14), char-acterized by a “freedom from referential restraint” (10). The resistance to theory, de Man argues, is a resistance precisely to this rhetorical or tropological dimension of language, “a dimension which is perhaps more explicitly in the foreground in litera-ture (broadly conceived) than in other verbal manifestations or—to be somewhat less vague—which can be revealed in any verbal event when it is read textually” (15).

The insistence by Skov Nielsen et al. on the discursive and generic mobility of fictionality partakes in the same critique of literature as a privileged form of discourse by addressing the rhetorical and tropological function of language in nonliterary dis-course, but it resists the panfictional impulse of postmodern theory by arguing that a work of nonfiction retains its generic status as a truth statement even when it has local elements of fictionality. So while postmodernism presents an epistemological challenge that collapses the distance between fiction and factual discourses, fictional-ity studies extracts fictionality from fiction only to shore up the generic distinction in pragmatic terms.

9) Fictionality has become the bastard child of the narrative turn.

To reinforce their claim that fictionality has been unstudied and often unacknowl-edged, Skov Nielsen et al. argue, “Even the widely-heralded ‘narrative turn’ toward the importance of storytelling in different disciplines has not led to a focus on the pervasiveness and significance of fictionality” (62). The narrative turn may not have led to the widespread study of fictionality as a distinct rhetorical resource, but it did prompt the very debate about the relationship between narrativity and fictionality which enabled the observation about this pervasiveness to be made. Furthermore, it has provided the model for the “unified theory of fictionality” proposed here.

In The Literary in Theory (2007), Jonathan Culler argues that literary modes of reading have influenced disciplines outside literary studies:

Literature may have lost its centrality as a specific object of study, but its modes have conquered: in the humanities and the humanistic social scienc-es everything is literary. Indeed, if literature is, as we used to say, that mode of discourse which knows its own fictionality, then . . . the effect of theory has been to inform disciplines of both the fictionality and the performative efficacy of their constructions. (41)

Thinking along these lines, the theoretical relationship between fictionality and narrativity ultimately might best be understood in disciplinary and rhetorical terms. In a forthcoming article, I discuss what I call the interdisciplinary rhetoric of the nar-

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rative turn. This rhetoric relies upon three mutually reinforcing claims: 1) narrative is not only a feature of literary fiction, but of all forms of discourse because stories are everywhere; 2) narrative is a fundamental cognitive faculty for meaning-making and essential to our sense of self, so its study is of vital importance; 3) because so many different disciplines are studying narrative, it is only by collaborating and sharing knowledge that we will come to fully understand the phenomenon of narrative.

Occurrences of this rhetoric abound in books and articles across the disciplines as a way to justify the importance of narrative analysis and inform the rationale of research centers on narrative that have emerged in the new millennium. While I don’t have space to elaborate here, my claim is that the interdisciplinary rhetoric of the nar-rative turn is a product not only of an impulse in narrative studies, but of the demands of the modern corporate university and its competitive drive for research excellence. As an example, here is a blurb from the website for the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative at St. Thomas University:

Human beings have been storytelling creatures since the very beginning, and the narrative impulse permeates countless facets of our world. Narrative is pivotal not just to literature, in other words, but to cognition and emotion, memory and community, politics and religion, culture and identity, coun-selling and learning. In the same way that any story deals with a number of subjects at once, so the study of story is the province of no one field. As a result, research on the storied complexity of human life draws from, and has an impact on, a wide range of disciplines—from psychology to sociology, history to healthcare, and ethics to education.

One of the results of the expansion of the term fictionality is that the transmedial, interdisciplinary rhetoric of the narrative turn has now been adopted by fictionality studies. This is how the rhetoric of the fictionality turn goes: 1) fictionality is not a quality of the genre of fiction, but a general communicative resource; 2) fictional-ity is a basic human ability and ubiquitous in our society and thus vitally important to understand; 3) because fictionality is everywhere, we need an interdisciplinary approach.

The best way to foster interdisciplinarity, of course, is to set up a research center. This has happened at the University of York, with the Fictionality network within the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies, and at Aarhus University, where the Centre for Fictionality Studies has been established alongside the Narrative Research Lab. Perhaps Project Fictionality will follow at The Ohio State University. Here are a few passages from the webpage for the Centre for Fictionality Studies exhibiting this rhetoric:

“Fictionality” is a term typically associated with novels, short stories and movies. With very few exceptions, research on fictionality has examined it in these generic terms. In the centre of Fictionality Studies we investigate fictionality as a basic human ability and as a rhetorical and communicative


strategy in various media and discursive contexts in a way that extricates it from fiction in the generic sense.

Examining why and how persons and media use fictionality as a means to achieve specific ends is crucial to understand our contemporary, mediatized society. Since fictionality is a communicational strategy that crosses tradi-tional genres, media and research areas, an interdisciplinary approach to fic-tionality as quality is more useful than uni-disciplinary approaches to fiction as generic category.

And here is the claim for ubiquity, and hence the justification for a unified theory, in “Ten Theses about Fictionality”:

Fictionality in the form of the intentional use of invented stories and sce-narios (not just spoofs like Obama’s, but also what-if projections, if-only re-grets, thought experiments and hypotheses of all kinds) is ubiquitous in our culture. Fictionality is employed in politics, business, medicine, sports, and throughout the disciplines of the academy; indeed, it is difficult to think of a cultural sphere from which fictive discourse is absent. . . . (62)

So while the concept of fictionality once promised to rescue fiction from the nar-rative turn by showing what was unique to fictional narratives—or, in Dorrit Cohn’s words, “a qualified fictional narratology might help to counteract the current ten-dency to identify all narrative as fiction” (“Signposts” 110; emphasis original)—it has since turned into another version of the narrative turn by seeking to identify fictional-ity in all narratives, and beyond.13

10) Who cares why we read fiction(ality)?

I have pointed out that the search for textual signposts of fictionality in narrative fic-tion, and the characterization of these signposts as “unnatural,” are both discipline-bound reactions against the transdisciplinary appeals of the narrative turn. There is a separate offshoot of literary studies, however, that seeks to distinguish fiction by drawing upon the expansionary rhetoric of the narrative turn, and it does so by ask-ing why we read fiction. I refer here to that loose collocation of Literary Darwinism and cognitive narratology which David Herman classifies, in Storytelling and the Sci-ences of the Mind (2013), under the category of: “recruiting from the sciences of mind to study narrative viewed as a resource for sense making” (4).

One of the scholars Herman mentions is Brian Boyd, who argues for a biocul-tural approach to literature in On the Origin of Stories: evolution, Cognition, Fiction (2009), asserting that “[f]iction aids our rapid understanding of real-life social situa-tions, activating and maintaining this capacity at high intensity and low cost” (193). The utilitarian language of science, however, soon shifts into the more recognizable

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language of the traditional humanities when he claims, “Another feature of fiction—but not of fact—also encourages the development of a moral sense” (197). This feature is the shifting of perspectives between characters, and by emphasizing the fact that “fiction lets us hear characters’ speech and even access their thoughts as we cannot do in life” (197), Boyd promotes this key signpost of fictionality as the source of the prime moral value of fiction: its capacity to develop the sympathetic imagination.14

Another scholar Herman mentions is Lisa Zunshine, author of Why We read Fiction (2006). Zunshine offers an even more baldly practical reason for the value of fiction in a 2013 article for The Chronicle of Higher education, “Why Fiction Does It Better.” Here she points to research that proves children with rich vocabularies per-form better in school and then draws upon cognitive science to argue that fiction affords the best means of achieving these results: “If you want nonstop high-level sociocognitive complexity, simultaneous with nonstop active reorganization of per-ceptions and inferences, only fiction delivers” (B5). Zunshine explicitly states that the metacognitive complexity of fiction operates at a higher level than nonfiction, and it is clear from her definition of fiction as “prose fiction, drama and narrative poetry” that she is talking about narrative fiction. These attempts to explain why we read fic-tion use narrative research to perpetuate a long-standing evangelical fervor about the social importance of fiction which seems rooted in the perennial anxiety over the role of literary studies in the academy.

In a 2012 article entitled “Why Fiction is Good for You,” Jonathan Gottschall claims that the central question is: “Why are humans storytelling animals at all? Why are we—as a species—so hopelessly addicted to narratives about the fake struggles of pretend people?” He goes on to assert that “[f]iction is often treated like a mere frill in human life, if not something worse. But the emerging science of story suggests that fiction is good for more than kicks. By enhancing empathy, fiction reduces social friction. At the same time, story exerts a kind of magnetic force, drawing us together around common values.” While Literary Darwinism frames the question of fiction in evolutionary terms, the new fictionality studies proceeds from a similar question (what is the purpose of our basic human ability to invent or imagine?) and reaches largely similar conclusions, although avoiding the language of morality in favor of a more sober assessment of ethos. The difference is that it argues for the value of fiction from the outside in. The conclusion of Gottschall, based on psychological research on empathy and responses to a questionnaire about nineteenth-century British novels: “But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse.” The conclusion of Skov Nielsen et al., based on a method-ological decision to approach fictionality as a rhetorical strategy of communication: “For better and for worse, fictionality changes the world and the ways we perceive it” (71).

I have pointed out that the theoretical separation of fictionality from fiction de-signed to enable the study of fictionality across media and nonfictional discourse is supplemented by a claim that this will also provide a fresh perspective on the genre of narrative fiction. This perspective is the familiar claim that fiction is neither escap-ist nor a nonreferential discourse ontologically quarantined from the actual world, but serious discourse that has the capacity to change received opinion in the world.


Rather than offering a new philosophical perspective on fiction, or a new mode of textual analysis, the rhetoric of the fictionality turn offers a way to understand the use-value of fiction. Like the narrative turn, it simultaneously seeks to expand the significance of fiction while undermining its specificity.

Endnotes

Thanks to Henrik Skov Nielsen for his intellectual generosity and good humor. I would also like to thank Simona Zetterberg Gjerlevsen for her contribution to this essay. Her comments on draft versions, and our ongoing debates about the problem of fictionality, have proved vital in helping me formulate and clarify my ideas.

1. Alexander Bareis frames the debate in this way: “[I]f there are any fictionality-specific narrato-logical categories, then there is reason to discuss whether we need a special kind of narratology, a ‘fictionology’” (154). He points out that Lars-Åke Skalin uses the term in “Fact and Fiction in the Novel: A Narratological Approach.”

2. Especially in the pages of Poetics. See Gale; Schmidt; Gabriel; Fricke; Swiggart; Wildekamp, Van Montfoort, and Van Ruiswijk. The antecedents for this field of study lie in Frege’s “On Sense and Reference” (1892) and Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of ‘as if ’ (1911), which he applies to all forms of knowledge, from science to religion. Strawson’s “On Referring” (1950) and David Lewis’s “Truth in Fiction” (1978) are also often cited as important works.

3. For a discussion of signposts see Genette, “Fictional Narrative”; Riffaterre; Gorman; and Bareis. Some important philosophical works include Currie; Walton, Mimesis; and Lamarque. For pos-sible worlds approaches see Pavel; Doležel; Ronen; and Ryan, Possible Worlds. There is also much important untranslated work in the German tradition such as that by Weinrich and by Zipfel (Fiktion).

4. Simona Zetterberg Gjerlevsen (“The Relevance of Truth”) argues that Walsh’s appeal to the rel-evance theory of Sperber and Wilson as the basis for a pragmatic theory of fiction does not ulti-mately escape the question of truth in referential or communicative terms, and demonstrates how Grice’s maxims of quality and relation are both necessary for an adequate definition of fictionality as a suspension of truth.

5. Including the concept of a narrator alongside these approaches to fictionality strikes me as a category error because the narratological distinction between inventing author and reporting narrator is not predicated upon the problem of truth. Walsh’s rejection of the narrator rests in particular on a compelling critique of voice in Genette’s Narrative Discourse. However, in his preface to the French translation of Hamburger’s The Logic of Literature, Genette points out that the assumption of a narrator is a methodological decision designed to take seriously the rhetorical feint of narrative fiction—that a story is being told—and analyze its narrative strategies. This does not disavow the fictionality of a narrative, for it requires an awareness of it in order to be opera-tive.

Walsh claims that rejecting the narrator “allows a conception of the experience of fiction—for all readers, however sophisticated or naïve, provided that they are not simply credulous—in which there is no conflict between engaging with authorial fictive discourse and engaging with the story” (70). Yet this is precisely the experience that rhetorical narratology seeks to explain by investigating how readers can simultaneously enter both the narrative audience (in which they are addressed by a narrator) and the authorial audience (in which they are addressed by the author). If it is true that narrative fiction employs fictionality as a rhetorical resource, there should be no problem with positing a narrator as one of those resources. In other words, rather than

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quarantining the question of truth or reference, the concept of a narrator arises from a contextual assumption that allows us to read fiction as a mode of authorial discourse distinct from other public authorial statements.

6. These ideas are advanced in two recent conference papers: “Ten Theses about Fictionality” (Eu-ropean Narratology Network, Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, 2013) and “Fictionality as Double Exposure of Imagined and Real” (International Society for the Study of Narrative, MIT 2014).

7. In his preface to the revised version of Scholes and Kellogg’s The Nature of Narrative, Phelan describes the difficulties present in surveying the diverse field of narrative theory, suggesting the need to be wary of presenting a Grand Unified Field Theory of Narrative (GUFTON). Similarly, I will avoid presenting a GUFTOF while addressing the authors’ desire for an eventual UTOF.

8. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the term “fictionize” (to turn into fiction) to 1831, and the term “fictionalize” (the transitive verb of fictional) to 1925. It currently has no entry for “fictional-ity.”

9. An unacknowledged antecedent here is Wolfgang Iser, who, in Prospecting, writes, “Fictionality is not to be identified with the literary text, although it is a basic constituent of it. For this reason I refrain from using the word ‘fiction’ whenever I can and speak instead of fictionalizing acts. These do not refer to an ontologically given, but to an operation, and therefore cannot be identical to what they produce” (236–37).

10. In towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, Fludernik argues that the fundamental dichotomy for nar-ratologists ought to be that between narrative and nonnarrative and thus seeks to diminish the significance of questions of fictionality and the attendant confusion of the fictional, the hypo-thetical, and the fictive: “Fictionality and narrativity largely overlap, but only if the fictional is not completely reduced to the traditional sense of the non-historical and a-referential” (42).

11. In Before Fiction Nicholas Paige builds on Gallagher’s work by proposing three distinct historical regimes of the novel, which he dubs the Aristotlean, the Pseudofactual, and the Fictional, arguing that the latter regime only comes into being with the realist novel. For a comprehensive critique of the conflation of fictionality, fiction, and the novel in both Gallagher and Paige, see Zetterberg Gjerlevsen, “Fictionality and the Novel.”

12. The passage is repeated, but this time promoted from a footnote to a paragraph in the main text of an essay called “Unnatural Narratology, Impersonal Voices” in another 2011 anthology, Un-natural Narratives–Unnatural Narratology, so it was obviously a very important gathering.

13. At the same time, recent collections on narrative have included at least one contribution which applies the same focus to the concept of fictionality. For instance, Storyworlds across Media: to-ward a Media-Conscious Narratology (2014) includes an article by Frank Zipfel entitled “Fiction Across Media: Toward a Transmedial Concept of Fictionality.” And the recent special issue of Narrative devoted to “narrative in poetic form” leads with an essay by Peter Hühn entitled “The Problem of Fictionality and Factuality in Lyric Poetry.”

14. Cohn writes that “the minds of imaginary figures can be known in ways that those of real persons cannot” (“Signposts” 118), and that this is “the distinctive modal feature of fictional discourse” (119; emphasis original).

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