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What is it that makes works of fiction fictional?
Hi all,
Here's an interesting question: what is it that makes works of fiction fictional?
A natural first thought is that it would have something to do with untruth. But we can imagine an author writing a novel that turns out (unbeknownst to him) to contain only true statements - say he wrote about an inhabitant of New Zealand and there happened to be an inhabitant of NZ who fulfilled all his assertions. We'd still want to call this fiction, I suspect. Similarly books like War & Peace might create conundrums for those wishing to identify fiction with untruth.
So the thought forwarded by Searle in "The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse" is that the important component in fiction is not untruth, but pretence. A work is fictional it's made up of pretended speech acts such as questions, assertions, warnings. We don't hold the author to the normal rules for usage that questions, assertions and warnings would be subject to. This explains the NZ case because the author was only pretending to make these assertions - so it's irrelevant that they turned out to be true.
There are plenty of objections to this idea - some people want to say that fiction isn't pretended speech acts but is a different kind of speech act altogether - but one I'm interested in is forwarded by Walton. He says that pretence isn't (as Searle has claimed) a necessary condition for fictionality, because not all fictions are literary. Paintings and sculptures are often thought of as fictional, but it seems absurd to say that they contain pretended speech acts.
All of which creates quite a quandary for Searle. He can't deny the fictionality of non-literary fictions without presupposing the very notion he's trying to prove. He could get out of it by saying that the domain of his theory is only literary fictions - but this looks like a cheap victory, and might lead to more questions than answers.
So what do you think? Is Searle onto something with the notion of 'pretence' in fiction? How can he account for non-literary fictions? Is there something essentially and importantly different about non-literary and literary fictions? Puzzles galore await us.
Carl
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